“How much farther?” I huffed. Medea chittered its agreement besides me. The poor thing was actually getting hungry now. Apparently as it grew closer to ascending up a tier, its hunger would keep rising. And Medea was just on the cusp of breaking through.

  “We should have found tracks by now. Maybe they were driven deeper by the retchroot invasion?” Biran asked rather than answered and I rolled my eyes. No, not at him, I was rolling my eyes at my own naivete in thinking that I could finish this in three days. It was the second day and we haven't even found a trace of our quarry.

  I agreed and split my attention to look through its eyes. That was faster than Medea reporting to me and then me delaying the information to the hunter I had hired. I watched as Medea slowly rose in the air until I was only a tiny dot in the green, and then, not even that. Medea had the eyes of raptors and as it raked its gaze across the forest, I saw it stretching for uncountable miles ahead. The Great Forests were precisely that, Great. And a forest.

  The forest was recovering, unnaturally quickly even. Already the clearing made by Ulgina’s annihilating arrow (that's just what I called it as I didn't know its real name) was being reclaimed by nature. But that was not our destination. Not even the same direction as that. Our destination was lateral to it. Medea flew lower, still fairly high so as to not get tangled up in the canopy of the absurdly huge trees.

  Eventually I noticed something else. Something that I was sure didn't belong. I frowned.

  “Hey Biran, is there supposed to be an entire fort here?”

  “A fort? Oh yeah, there is one! It was made to garrison Regdren, the Silver Flame’s forces. From there, they planned their attack on Kalist, back when even old Delport was not yet founded.” I had read about that story. How Regdren, the child of a goddess and a dragon, fought Kalist, his draconic father and a tyrant, to the death, leading to the founding of Delport under the aegis of the ancient Catrian Empire.

  “Cool, we can rest there for the night.”

  We devolved back into silence as Medea surveyed from the skies. Now shrunk down, Medea could afford to dip below the dense canopy without getting entangled, and it flitted in wide circles around us. Our target was yet another legless animal. This time, it was an Eartheater worm. Worms the size of a child’s arm, with earth mana that burrowed beneath the earth and formed a rocky segmented exoskeleton as a result of their diet. Thankfully there were signs that could be used to identify their location from above-ground such as patches of dead brown earth, and even holes where the ground collapsed from the digging. Still, none of that was reliable.

  That's where Biran came in. As a hunter and an earth mage, he was uniquely suited to finding them but so far our search had yielded nothing. Sure, he found many empty tunnels but Eartheaters could go very deep if they wanted to, and simply hoping to find one closer to the surface was preferable to digging Quiraion knows how deep.

  Eventually, we came upon the fort. It looked a lot more intact from the distance, but it was still four solid thick walls around us. That was all that one could really hope for in the middle of a magical woods. Towering black stone walls formed a square box with four towers, one at each corner. Machicolated parapets lined the roofs and a dome with a shattered tip rose in the middle of the structure. One of the towers had partially crumbled, leaving behind a pile of rubble at its base. Whatever was supposed to be the door had long been removed, either destroyed by the elements and time, or stolen by enterprising adventurers. A pair of broken statues flanked the entrance. One lacked a head and only half of his sword had survived, and the other didn't even get that.

  “Did they really make something like this as a mere temporary garrison?” The awe in my voice was not even faked. Biran nodded.

  “Yep. It was the stone-shaper Sevaraan who created it in a single hour. He also crafted the great stone spear that first punctured Kalist’s wing and grounded him.” Biran slipped into lecture mode with practised ease and I realized that showing this stuff to tourists was probably a lucrative side-business for the Hunter's Guild. I let him continue the story as we stepped into the fortress.

  The Fort had a couple of Hunter's Guild members stationed there at all times, with full fledged sleeping quarters and a kitchen. Biran shuffled away to catch up with his fellow guildmates while I rested my aching feet on a bunk bed. I had nothing to do until it was time for dinner. Medea was still out, searching, but I didn't expect much now that the sun was setting. This day was looking to be a wash as well. Still, I moved my senses over to Medea's and watched as it flew.

  A dragonfly-like creature flew too close, and Medea touched it. In an instant, its ‘ego’, in so far as it could be described to be possessing one, was obliterated by me. And with that, I had another scout. The dragonfly was nothing special but it was a flier and had almost passable vision.

  Later, I was introduced to the two hunters, two men whose names I immediately forgot. They were just Ginger and Blonde to me.

  “Seen any Eartheaters around lately? Client here needs one, the bigger the better.” Biran asked his guildmates when we were munching on bread and some dried mammal meat. I started, returning my attention to the table. I had drifted away at some point and started manually controlling two dragonflies instead of being aware of things around me. Bad Anya! If someone was out looking to hurt me then they would have found a sitting duck, meekly awaiting her death.

  Ginger shook his head but Blonde had a thoughtful look on his face.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “I don't know if your client is up for the adventure but there is a mana-rich ravine a few miles down south. If you really want to find one then you can go there but that ravine didn’t exist until a few days ago so it is your risk..”

  I looked up sharply.

  “Tell me about it.”

  The ravine stretched as far as the eyes could see, in both directions. I knew that it ended not long beyond my actual eyesight because of serial surveillance. The forest continued in the distance, as if not bisected by a gaping wound upon the earth itself. The ravine was layered like a wedding cake. I could see hundreds, if not thousands of the worms wiggling in and out of the ravine walls. A bit below them, the cliff extended out for several feet and I could see a herd of what looked like oversized mammoths with plates of rock on their body moving across it. As they slowly walked forwards, furrows appeared on the cliff faces above them as if invisible claws were taking it. One of the larger mammoths turned towards us, as if sensing that it was watched. A pressure descended on me, and presumably on Biran as the creature beheld us. His eyes met mine and I saw in them ancient wisdom and intelligence that regarded my very existence as nothing more than that of an insect. He blew some air from his trunk and turned away, unconcerned about us. The pressure lifted.

  I stood there, frozen. My Fauna Archive

  “Wh— what was that?”

  “Old monsters. Old enough to develop intelligence and power beyond humanity. Not quite dragon tier but close. This ravine must have formed by their passage. Just ignore them and they will ignore you.” Biran whispered even though the mammoth that had looked at us was long gone by now. “Honestly, I don't even know what these are called and I have a Bestiary

  *I never heard anything about things like this living so close to the city.”

  “That's because they don't live here. They are migrating. You see those lines?” He pointed at the layers of rock and earth gouged out above the mammoths. I nodded. I would, in fact, have to be blind to see that.

  “That's their earth mana passively shaping the world around them. I am willing to bet that the worms came here to gorge on that pure earth mana.”

  “So how do we get one? Preferably without upsetting the ancient monsters.” I have to be honest and admit that the mere notion of getting my hands on one of the mammoths for Medea to eat made me giddy, but I was not stupid and I was not going to challenge them in any way. I was not going to try to make them fall to their death or be buried alive or anything like that, I was politely going to ignore the herd and take my worm and go home. I was not even going to attempt to look for their deceased herd members, if any, because even normal elephants apparently might remember the place of death, let alone whatever these were. Never let it be said that I didn't know how to temper my greed for power.

  “Depends. Are you willing to pay extra if I get you something much better than a simple Eartheater?” And he was all business now. See, this is how someone who is greedy talks. Not poor old me who just has a crazy trait that might be sentient and promises to hurt me if I stopped trying to go stronger.

  “Yes, but if you piss one of those off and they kill us, I'll transform into a Wrathwraith and haunt everyone you love.” Biran grinned and fished out a chalk and several Aetherite crystals. He drew a ritual circle around him and shaped the crystals into it. And then he repeated the process with a different circle on top of the first one. Three times over, he repeated the action before closing his eyes and sitting cross-legged in the middle of the circle.

  A section of the wall with the writhing worms rippled, a gash caused by the mammoths’ mana deepened and a vertical shot up from it. That isolated the worms. And when the herd crossed that threshold, the worms tried to follow. The wall came alive when the worms wriggled and tried to cross over the new crack but it had widened too much. Several worms extended their bodies several inches beyond the earth before retreating once they couldn't find a new wall to latch on to. Both the vertical and the horizontal gashes kept deepening and widening and Biran stood up with a smile.

  “The thing with Eartheaters is that they go wild for earth mana. If they weren't going crazy with their hunger, they might be able to dig away from the ravine and then circumnavigate around what I did.”

  “But they won't?”

  “Exactly. They can't bear to leave the mana behind but won’t dare to get any closer to the herd. They are dumb like that. If allowed to, they would have followed after those things forever. But now… well you'll see.”

  The worms were getting more and more agitated, the writhing growing increasingly more violent as they tried to devour as much of the earth as they could before their neighbors could. The wall turned into a churning pile of worms as soil fell into the abyss below in clumps. Even then I could see the worms noticeably widening. And yet they kept eating, kept burrowing. Until finally, the dam broke and they started to devour one another for whatever mana they could scrounge up. The macabre display me of how the retchroot swarmed madly, chewing through whatever was before them, be it a fellow retchroot or an energy barrier that was cooking them alive. Droplets of blood rained and worms fell to the chasm below with rivulets of blood glistening on their shells. And yet, many leapt extended their bodies out to grab their dying brethren and eat them. Some were devoured alive, some ended up getting torn asunder as other worms ate at them from both ends. The wall that had come alive started collapsing from the activity of the worms but Biran hissed and they came back together. Somehow, not a single worm was allowed to fall beyond the reach of its kin.

  It didn't take long after that, maybe just ten minutes until only one worm remained. One that was definitely not an Eartheater anymore. It was massive (compared to the Eartheaters, that is. Medea was still larger.) and had craggy segments that looked like weathered volcanic rock all over its length. Its mouth was all jaw, a giant circular hole with rows of spinning teeth lining it that grinded everything they touched into sand. A sound like that of a buzzsaw could be heard even across the ravine. The new worm tried to get across the gap Biran made but it was far too wide even for it now. It wriggled in frustration before burrowing away. It was still on the other side of the chasm though.

  Then, a chunk of the mana rich earth the gap broke away and flew towards us. It landed with a thump right before us.

  “Alright, I can make a bridge and bait it over. But first, be ready to fight.”

  Never let it be said that I'm not a proud mom.

  Splashing venom onto a ball of dirt and stones and soaking it was not the most glamorous way to do things but it worked and that was all I cared about.

  It worked. Worked better than I expected and while the worm was squirming and thrashing after getting poisoned, Medea swooped in and bit its head off with ease. And with that, our hunt was a success. And a notification that I had been waiting on for so long, for many , finally came.

  \\[LESSER HEMOTHEURGIST] is now level 30!

  \\Class mastered [LESSER HEMOTHEURGIST]. +10 VITALITY AND ATTUNEMENT