Wild Gourmet: A Hunt-and-Cook Progression Adventure

Wild Gourmet: Chapter 23

It wasn’t a track in the way he usually thought of them. There were no prints. Instead, there was a wide path of disturbed earth, roughly two feet across, where the soil had been scraped aside as if something heavy had dragged itself through. The grass on either side was flattened and torn. Whatever had passed through here was large, but it wasn’t moving in a way that left individual footprints.

His tracking skill responded immediately, feeding him a sense of slow, steady pressure against his thoughts that said very clearly that whatever had left this mark was not to be trifled with. It was a new kind of message from his tracking, and he took it to heart.

Brand knelt and studied the trail more carefully. The displacement was consistent, the same width and depth for as far as he could see in either direction. He chose the direction that led back toward the town and followed it.

It took him a few minutes of walking before he realized the trail was heading to the creek where he’d fought the ashwolf.

The trail thickened as he got closer, the scraping marks wider and overlapping in a pattern that suggested the creature had circled the area. It had lingered here, moving back and forth over the same ground. It had been drawn by the noise of the fight or the blood, maybe, and had moved on when nothing interesting revealed itself as a result.

Brand spent several minutes reading the mess of marks before he found where the creature had left. The trail picked up again heading away from the town in a direction he hadn’t come from, northeast and into open country. Whatever it was, it had come in, investigated, and moved on. It wasn’t trouble unless he went and found it now.

A snake, he thought. Or something like one. Nothing else moved without legs and left a trail like that. And at that size, he had no idea what to expect from it in a fight. He knelt by the outgoing track and focused his skill on it, trying to squeeze every drop of information he could from the marks. The soil here was soft enough to hold detail, and the edges of the trail were still relatively fresh. A day old, maybe less.

He was still crouched there with one hand on the ground and his mind fully absorbed in the work when the shadow passed over him. It was enormous, blotting out the sun for a moment and casting the ground around him into total shade.

Brand looked up.

What was above him was not the monster he had been tracking. It couldn’t be. It was large enough, certainly, but it had nothing like the elongated, legless body that would account for the trail in the dirt. This was something else entirely.

It was a silvered white, so bright in the full sun that it almost hurt to look at directly. Its scales caught the light and threw it back in sharp flashes as its wings beat against the air. It was huge. Three times his size, at least.

For one moment, Brand was thankful it didn’t see him. Every ounce of his intuition screamed that this was not a fight he could win at the moment. Not at his level, and especially not in the open.

The relief lasted about two seconds. The creature wasn’t heading for him, but there were other directions to go and targets to seek. It was heading somewhere else. It was going to town.

Brand broke into a dead sprint. The thing was faster than him by a wide margin, and every beat of its massive wings carried it further ahead. He ran harder than he ever had, burning through his stamina without a thought for what he’d have left when he arrived. Through the pounding in his chest, one thought surfaced that was almost comforting. Tracking the snake had brought him back close to the town. If he’d been on the far side of his patrol loop, he wouldn’t have seen the creature at all until it was too late.

The gate came into view. He tore through it at full speed and found it empty. Neil was gone. His post was abandoned.

Did he run?

The idea was there and gone in an instant. There was no time for it. He could hear yelling from deeper in the town, voices he recognized raised in fear. He sprinted toward the sound and saw the creature in the air above the rooftops, circling lower as it stalked its prey. It was close enough and moving slowly enough that he could finally get a clear look at it. The system responded.

Juvenile Drake

Drakes are similar to dragons, yet bear some differences. While dragons have four feet and move as quadrupeds, drakes spend much less time on the ground due to a greater specialization towards the air. When they land, they stand upright on their two primary legs, swiping with arm-like forelegs and breathing bolts of pure force at any prey in sight.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

While dragons will often sequester themselves for years, decades, or centuries, drakes are much more aggressive. They will attack any prey in their domain that seems easy enough to hunt, feeding a growth that is in large part limited only by the amount and quality of meat they can capture. They have a particular taste for humans, and this preference has long justified their label as a particular threat to any place where people gather.

This drake is juvenile, and thus weaker than it will be in its adulthood. Lacking the courage of a full-grown example of its kind, it will flee if its prey prove sufficiently difficult to defeat.

Related chapter tags