Chapter 2: First Hunt
After waiting a few days for their registration to be processed and their pay for the queen Dawnwolf to arrive, Risha and Ziya were finally allowed to take bounties from the notice board. The Tilted Bear was a offense focused hunting guild, majority of the bounties available were from scouts exploring the frontier or areas outside of the defensive line of Rama. Spotting the pair staring at the notice board, Kilan—the receptionist that greeted Ziyan when she first came in— called the sisters over.
"Everything too easy for you girls? A new request just came in from the front, pays well too. Here's the details." Kilan said as he passed over a sheet of paper.
Ziya took the paper and read it, discussing the details with Risha. The species of monster is unknown, however it has totally destroyed the local ecosystem and that the area it lived in had no animals in sight. As the creature was unknown, the only preparation they could make was to prepare multiple methods of taking down a large creature and some live bait. Aside from their standard camping supplies and camouflage kit, Ziya prepared traps of various designs while Risha strung up her largest crossbow available and sharpened her crossbow bolts. Before leaving for the scout's forward camp, the sisters went to the market and bought a few live chickens. Towing everything in their hand cart, they set off.
The journey to the forward camp took 2 days, and nothing special happened during their travels. The camp is located at the base of a forested hilly area. The scouts guided Risha and Ziya to the area where the monster was last spotted.The forest was just as the report said, no traces of animals or even the sounds of birds. After an hour long trek, they reached their destination, a rocky clearing near the top of the second hill from the camp. Immediately Risha and Ziyan noticed something off about the location, there seemed to be a wide path totally devoid of all plant life smaller than a tree, as if someone was clearing the undergrowth for road building.
After finding a suitable hiding spot in a hollow tree, Ziya tied one of the chickens they brought and tied it to a nearby tree root. Then the wait begun, with her crossbow cocked and loaded Risha watched over the chicken from the hollowed tree while Ziya set up a basic warning mechanism consisting of a trip wire and scrap metal to alert them if anything happened to approach their location from behind. Thirty minutes into the wait Risha spots movement and calls for Ziya, and the pair watched the chicken start panicking and pulling against the string for its life, as if trying to escape something.
A long translucent gray tendril creeps its way through the bare forest floor, getting closer to the chicken. Ziya signals Risha to hold fire as they watch the tendril suddenly grow wide and engulf the chicken. Soon, they could see the feathers of the chicken melt into the tendril and within a short while they could only see bones floating in the slime tendril.
"That's the hunting pattern of a slime, however this is much bigger than any known species! Risha, follow it to the main body!" Ziya exclaimed as she got up and ran after the tendril.
As Risha was much taller than Ziya, she was soon ahead of her sister despite lugging a large crossbow along. After chasing the tendril halfway down the mountain it retreated into a white boulder the size of a house. Risha waited for Ziya to catch up and told her what she saw, if their suspicions were right, there would be a huge slime hiding nearby. Going by the assumption the sisters marked the location on the map and went back to camp to prepare.
The second day they set off early in the morning towards the white boulder to set their trap. As the consistency of slimes thicken during the cold night, they needed to be heated under sunlight to be active. Closing in on the boulder to find a possible crevice the slime could have hid in, the pair made a shocking discovery. The white boulder was not a boulder, but in fact made up of bones. The whole boulder moved a little as slimy tendrils started extending outwards towards the chicken tied to Risha's waist. Reacting on instinct, Risha hit it with the torch she was holding and it instantly retracted into the pile of bones, shortly after the entire pile started moving and bone covered tendrils extended from the pile in all directions. This was something undocumented before, a slime that uses the bones of its prey to build up a shell, an armored slime!
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