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All Characters in the story are 18 years of age and above...
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Chapter Fifty Four: Run...
Take a rhino, give it the size of an elephant, and cover it with a layer of damn near unbreakable obsidian armor that juts out randomly into ridges strong and sharp enough to cut through the bark of a tree. This was the closest approximation of what Greg found himself looking at as he stood frozen like a statue in the middle of the forest. The heart of the mountain. The words fleeted through Greg's mind as they bubbled up from Roka's memories. Everyone in town had been warned of this creature, which was why even Niya had immediately recognized it and, like Greg, also stood frozen in abject terror. Only three of its abilities were known and that was enough for this earth-element beast to become one of the top menaces of the mountain.
The first and most unexpected ability of such a massive beast was its ability to move completely quietly. Whenever this beast either walks or runs, its feet don't fall to the ground like most other beasts. Instead, the ground will rise to meet its feet before leveling out once more, completely canceling out any noise that its footfalls might have otherwise made. Like a ghost, the beast's passage wouldn't even leave behind footprints, instead, the ground would go back to how it was before the beast passed through. Regardless of whether the ground under it was rock or soil, so long as it was earth, then you would never hear this beast moving. This means that if a hunter wasn't paying attention, this beast could easily walk up close till it was right behind them without the hunter ever knowing. The most insidious aspect of this ability was that, once the beast began chasing you, unless you kept looking back at the beast, then you'd have no way of telling where it was based on its footfalls.
The second ability that made this creature such a formidable foe, was its terrifying ability to track. So long as your foot touched the ground anywhere within a certain distance around it, a kilometer in Greg's estimation if his memory could be trusted, then this beast would know exactly where you are with pinpoint accuracy. It can even differentiate between the steps of different members of the same species. This means that if the beast was after you in particular, then even if you ran in a crowd, you would still be singled out. The only known way that a few both lucky and agile individuals managed to use to escape this beast, was to climb a tree and then jump from one to the other until you were far enough away from the beast that coming back down wouldn't immediately give you away. Climbing a single tree and then hoping that you would lose it that way wouldn't work as the beast would attack all the trees in the vicinity of where it last felt your feet come in contact with the ground. If you didn't manage to get far enough away by the time it reached the first tree you climbed, then chances are you'd end up trampled under its feet.
The final ability and the main reason this beast was such a terror was that soft movement wasn't the only thing that it could do. Using the ground like some sort of springboard under its feet, the beast very quickly picks up speed once it begins moving. It is said that if you are close enough to one to see it, then you only have ten breaths of time to get away from it. Past that, it will be moving so fast that no mundane human could hope to match it let alone surpass it, no matter how athletic they were. Even if one was generous and took one breath of time to be five or six seconds, then ten breaths would be around a minute. While it may seem like a decent window of time to make your escape, you have to keep in mind that this beast can sense your footsteps from close to a kilometer away. For you to cover that kind of distance in less than a minute, you'd have to be moving at about sixty kilometers per hour. Worse yet, it's not like the beast would be standing still for that one minute. In short, that one minute was best used to break the line of sight with the creature before quickly scampering up the closest tree that one could find.
Once it's been on the move for more than twenty breaths of time, then it becomes an unstoppable juggernaut of death. Weighing between five to seven tons and moving at anywhere from seventy to a hundred kilometers per hour, the beast obliterates anything in its path, be it man, beast, tree, or boulder. Only extremely large boulders, or the kinds of trees that would require ten men holding hands to encircle, had any hope of stopping this monster's charge. In fact, the aftermath of these charges has been known to create new paths through previously untraversable terrain. It's also how people figured out just how sharp the ridges on its obsidian armor were. The trees that it brushes against during its charge are usually left with deep grooves cutting into the bark, that is if it's not completely stripped off.
The one that they had come across had probably been resting in the shade before they came along. Greg could easily deduce this since it was still on its belly, its massive head turned towards them, its beady eyes fixed on them... no, not on them, but on him! Greg didn't know why, but the beast was looking directly at him with an inordinate amount of intensity. The beast was known for both being easily irritable and highly territorial. The focus with which it was regarding him, however, left Greg with the inexplicable feeling that there was more to this beast's interest in him than simple annoyance at someone intruding on its territory. Given the migration, one might be tempted to argue that this wasn't the beast's territory. Unfortunately for them, the beast isn't that amenable to logic.
"We'll run in different directions," Greg spoke up only loud enough to be heard by Niya. Like any normal person, Greg had been terrified when he stumbled upon the behemoth. Months of dungeon delving and repeatedly putting himself in deadly situations, however, had taught him how to take hold of his fear and push past it when the situation called for it. He was already crouched down and taking off his mundane shoes. "There is only one of it. It can't pursue us both at the same time," Greg quickly whispered the logic behind his recommendation even as he pulled on the shoes of haste from his storage ring and pulled them on. Given the way its eyes hadn't shifted from him since he caught sight of it, Greg got the feeling he would be the one needing the extra speed more than Niya. "Whoever it chases, will have to do their best to guide it as far away from town as possible. Meanwhile, the other one will run as fast as they can towards town," he laid out.
