By the time Nolruk was done assessing all the scary features of the first beast, three more had joined it on the ground, each one moving around his father like a loyal guard dog. If his father had looked bad before, now he looked positively haggard. Forget muscle mass, the man looked even thinner than what an average man would look like. His ribs stuck out prominently against his skin making the man look like he'd been starved for days on end. Clearly, it had taken a lot of vitality from the man to call the four creatures around him into being. Still, the man calmly pushed himself up off the floor and turned in Nolruk's direction. On the face of the man, there was no indication of the torture that he'd just been put through. Instead, there was an almost maniacal glee at the four creatures around him. Nolruk could only make vague guesses but had no real way of knowing just how powerful the summoned creatures were. By the pleased look in his father's eyes, however, Nolruk was certain that he wasn't that far off the mark by assuming that the things were really powerful.
When his father looked his way, there was a bit of disdain in his eyes when he noted that his son was crouched down and hugging himself in fear. Nevertheless, he said nothing about it. Instead he uttered three simple words. "Let's go hunting!"
***
Watching the dark crawlers hunt was a nightmarish experience that Nolruk knew would haunt his dreams for years to come. Dark crawler was the name of the creatures he'd summoned, according to his father. When his father had told him that they were going hunting, Nolruk had assumed he meant that they were going after Roka. As it turns out, he'd been wrong, they really were going hunting for wild animals. According to the man, the four dark crawlers, big as they were in Nolruk's opinion, were still juveniles. They'd need a lot of nourishment before they grew to full size. Once that happens, no one in the town should be able to stand up to him. Nolruk had never been happy to be around his father. That was even more the case with the dark crawlers around. He, however, knew that more than ever before he needed to avoid displeasing his father. And so, despite his misgivings, he calmly walked beside the man, not letting any of the fear he felt show.
Given the fact that the three-tusk boar territory was the area in which Roka usually hunted, they avoided it, going around it and deeper into the forest. His dad didn't want to leave any traces that might alert Roka to what they had in store for him. And no wonder, the toxin that dripped off the creatures' pincers and stings caused everything within a meter of where it dripped to wither within minutes. And that was to say nothing of the destruction they wrought as they moved and the many sharp pits left by their legs. In other words, one didn't have to be an expert hunter to pick up on the trails of the damn things. In fact, someone who only had a very rudimentary knowledge of hunting and tracking would have to be blind to miss the tracks of the dark crawlers.
It took them three hours of moving to get to where they'd been going. They were currently standing on a tall cliff, and below them, almost a kilometer from the cliff, there was a herd of red-horned bisons. Unlike the three-tusk boar which was a common hunting target for the town's hunters, no one in the town was brave or crazy enough to go after red-horned bisons. To begin with, unlike the three-tusk boars which usually formed herds of perhaps ten to twenty boars, red-horned bisons usually moved around in herds that numbered in the hundreds, sometimes even more than a thousand bisons could be found in one herd. And if this wasn't enough of a deterrence, there was the fact that, unlike the three-tusk boars which usually abandoned an injured member of the herd that was too badly injured and bleeding, red-horned bisons never left one of their own behind. Forget a living one, even if one of their own was killed, they will hang around the dead bison for more than a week until it was thoroughly rotted. Whether this was out of solidarity with one of their own, or out of spite for the killer, no one had ever been able to puzzle out.
And if you were the attacker and one of the herd members happens to catch either sight or scent of you, then you should just spare yourself the torture and kill yourself. The stubbornness with which they can guard a corpse is the same stubbornness with which they shall pursue you. And big as the bisons are, they are by no means slow. Add that to the fact that they can run at full speed for a day and a night without tiring, and you've got yourself a stampede of nightmarish proportions. And should you think yourself clever and just climb a tree, then you've doomed both yourself and the tree. First, they will surround the tree, and then the heaviest males, which were usually more than a thousand kilos, will make it their business to bring the tree down and you along with it. In other words, the bisons will transform into battering rams that weigh more than a ton with nothing on their mind other than felling the particular tree you are on.
The reason they had stopped more than a kilometer away, was because of how sensitive the senses of the bison are. Given what his father seemed to be planning, they didn't wish to risk having the herd mark them as aggressors. "Go!" The simple command came from his father's lips. Not needing any further prompting, the four dark crawlers charged forward, crawling down the face of the cliff with the same ease that they exhibited when crawling on flat ground. Unexpectedly, when they got to the bottom of the cliff, all four dark crawlers that had so far been moving above ground, immediately dove into the ground. Barely five seconds after their front claws started to dig at the ground, their whole bodies had gone underground. "Come on," His father calmly called out in a placid tone as he turned and walked off. Unable to visually track the dark crawlers while they were underground, Nolruk turned and walked after his father.
After about ten minutes of walking, they came to a stop beside a gently flowing stream. His father raised the staff in his hand as he muttered something under his breath. With a firm 'thud', the staff was brought down on the ground. Rather than a small round indentation from the staff as Nolruk had been expecting, a large concave depression about a meter wide, formed on the ground before them. The surface of the depression that had formed wasn't flat but rather was marked by several strange symbols. Most others wouldn't recognize what they were looking at. Given that he'd been staring at one for the past four days, Nolruk quickly and easily recognized that these were the same symbols that were in the scrying pool back at the cave. With another movement of the staff towards the stream and more incomprehensible words, the water in the stream rose into the air of its own volition, making an arch and starting to fill the temporary scrying pool that his father had just made. When the scrying pool was sufficiently filled, the stream resumed its normal course while his father closed his eyes and started channeling through the scrying pool looking for a suitable target to link to the pool. It didn't take him long. Soon enough, a bird that had been perched on a tree close to the herd of red-horned bisons was chosen, and the pool began to show everything the bird was seeing.
It only took a few minutes of waiting for chaos to break out within the herd. Nolruk didn't know if it was a coincidence, or if his father held a connection to the dark crawlers that allowed him to know, but the bird that they'd linked the scrying pool to was looking at the spot where the first attack went down. A bison was leisurely grazing on a patch of grass when, suddenly, the four dark crawlers shot up from the ground with their pincers opened wide. Nolruk couldn't help wincing when the four sets of pincers closed around the four legs of the bison. Given how sturdy an animal the red-horned bisons are, and how high up on the limbs the four dark crawlers had attacked, Nolruk had expected them to face some resistance. If not from the tough flesh of the bison, then at least from its bones. The four sets of pincers, however, snapped shut like a trap that had been set off. Both flesh and bones were cut through like they were nothing! Before the bison could even register what had happened, it was on the ground and unable to move, and the dark crawlers back underground.
Naturally, Nolruk knew that animals could feel pain. He, however, had never heard such a desperate cry of pain come out of the mouth of a beast as he did from the bison that was now on the ground and unable to move. Nolruk had assumed that the black liquid coming off the pincers of the dark crawlers would be corrosive, given the fact that it sizzled violently any time it came into contact with the ground. However, when looking at the stumps of the bison on the ground, he couldn't see any signs of corrosion, which left him confused and uncertain. All around the fallen bison, the other bisons had started to crowd around it. From the way they kept huffing and pawing at the ground with their hoofs, it was clear that they were worked up and ready to attack at the slightest provocation. Unfortunately for the bisons, their foe was underground. Red-horned bisons were a menace that no one would want to mess with above ground. When it came to digging, however, they were sadly ill-equipped for the task. As such, even though they were worked up and ready for a fight, all they could do was impotently paw at the ground while they bellow in indignation.
