บท 136: News

Saya meanwhile was about one piece of bad news away from having a heart attack from the horrible series of events that had taken place recently. First was that the siege on zorah may have failed but it had revealed another elder dragon that gave her a bad feeling. Second was that Alex's adaptation ability came to light meaning even if she wanted to she may in fact not be able to silently assassinate him. Finally was that the rathalos had hatched and much like she feared showed no innate hostility to the people around it and had even subordinated itself to Alex making killing it silently almost as hard as killing Alex himself silently.

In an ironic twist a letter from her village imploring her to do everything she could to kill the rathalos before it hatched arrived but she could only lament at the change in the situation. At this point Saya could only write another letter to her village explaining the new situation she found herself in as unfortunately the village could only pray that the hunter guild doesn't think someone else had figured out this secret and come looking.

Saya's village was very powerful thanks to their long history of raising monsters as companions but when put against the entire hunters guild they stood no chance of victory at all. Besides the entire village severing their roots and relocating to the new world there simply wasn't anywhere they could hide from the guild. The new world itself was only an option if the guild doesn't start sending people and supplies to it en mass. Saya basically made it clear in her letter that it would only be by luck from now on if the village was not exposed. It saddened her to have failed to protect her village from this scenario but she knew that she never really had a chance to begin with.

A fresh passage through the canyon was discovered on the next and final week of the month that lead further inland. Alex knew that this passage lead to the coral highlands and volunteered to go on the expedition with the handler and Zain to scout the area. The little rathalos had been growing like a weed with the nutritious meals and had doubled in size in the past week. Even more interesting was that when it shed it's scales the new ones had thin blue lines along them.

Alex quickly narrowed this down to the thunder element materials he has spiked into it's food since it was born. Clearly the little wyverns body was slowly growing more attuned to the thunder element thanks to it's growth path being influenced but the excess of a different element in it's diet. Alex knew that most elemental subspecies were born in a similar process but over many generations of much less outside influences. Alex had basically took the small increase in elemental corruption that lead to that outcome and cranked it up to eleven in a first generation monster to see what happened.

The analysis of the strange jagras with a different color set finally came back as well with the scholars confirming that the thing was some form of alpha mutation that distinguished it from the rest of it's species. The reason for this designation was due to the strange ability that the monster had shown over the last few weeks were it seemed to cause those who came to study it headaches. They weren't sure how it did this as it wasn't any substance it emitted since they checked for that but rather it was almost like it was attacking their minds directly somehow.

Alex grew excited when he heard this as he had an idea of how this was possible thanks to his knowledge from earth. On earth it had been proven that every so often a mutation would occur in either people or animals that gave what many considered supernatural abilities. One of the more common abilities was telepathy to some degree and if Alex's theory was correct this jagras had a weak version of this ability that let it project it's own mind towards others but it was simply too stupid to realize the greatest benefit of it's ability.

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