Time resumed, and Alistair quickly tore through the rest of his rations, stepping back over to the others. Jacqueline looked up as he approached, and, seeing his grim expression, narrowed her eyes sharply.

Jacqueline: “What is it?”

Alistair: “Caught the scent of something dead. Could be nothin’… watch Jackie. Be ready to move.”

Jacqueline and Loid both nodded seriously, while Jackie simply cocked their head at Alistair with a blank, curious gaze.

Jackie: “Is it a monster..?”

Alistair: “I’m gonna find out. Wait here, alright, kid?”

Raising their hands to clench their fists in front of their chest, the child nodded resolutely. Alistair forced a smile, ruffling their hair before turning to leave.

He made his way out onto the mud road and to the cracked pillar, carefully sidling through the gap and crouching down at the other end. He entered Recess again, this time “stepping” away from his body. His mind slowly made its way further down the mud road.

Along the straight path, his eyes could see far, allowing him to contain a long stretch of the area ahead within Recess. As long as it was within the field of his body’s vision, his mind could wander over and take a closer look, allowing him to examine distant objects.

Glancing to either side, he saw that the backsides of mounds, trees, and debris became blurry, their colors melting away into empty white voids that stretched beyond them. These voids blanketed everything that stood outside of his body’s vision, and as he “walked” down the road, the increasing number of obstructions made what remained of each subsequent object thinner and thinner, until eventually only the road itself remained, flanked entirely by void on either side.

He continued to “walk”. If there was a corpse, it would most likely be on the road. In no time at all, this deduction proved true.

A quadrepedal skeleton rested on its side in the mud, its bones caked in red, the same color staining the ground around it. It wasn’t the only one, either—a second lay just a few meters further down the road, and he could see half of a third on the edge of the road, the rest of its form lost to the void.

He “knelt” down to examine the skeleton, but the act was futile. At this distance from his body, the world had started to go blurry, and the skeleton itself cast “shadows” of white void over itself, further obscuring it from examination. He would have to approach in resumed time to investigate it properly.

At the very least, he’d confirmed the exact location of his target, and there was no sign of the perpetrator on the road. As he resolved to reenter the flow of time, his vision began to zip backwards until it returned to his eye-sockets. With a deep breath, the world resumed, and Alistair stepped forward.

He made his way to the corpses carefully, taking a few additional breaks in Recess to check for monsters off the road. Once he was satisfied that he truly was alone, he finally arrived at the trio of skeletons, entering Recess a final time so he could take his sweet time with the investigation.

All three skeletons belonged to creatures of the same kind. They were quadrupeds, with a goat’s head and wings extending from their backs—Jiyagi. What was more striking, however, was that the skeletons were just that—nothing but bones. All three of the corpses had been stripped down to the bone, not a speck of flesh left behind—no, on further examination, there were some scraps left lying around in the skeletons’ vicinity, but the fact remained that the bodies themselves were bare.

Despite having been stripped of their flesh, the skeletons were oddly intact. You’d expect whatever killed them to have broken a few bones, but their limbs were in pristine condition. The only parts to have sustained any damage were their skulls, all three of which had been snapped in two, and their ribs, which had been forcefully pried open. From the look of it, these breaks were likely inflicted after the beasts were already dead.

What could have done this? Did the Jiyagi alert the monster they were following?

Doubtful. For one, the rest of the herd would have turned around if that were the case; there were no splits in the path nearby, so the stampede would’ve had to pass by Alistair and co. again. Furthermore, if whatever they were following did detect them and managed to get close enough to kill three of them, he doubted it would have only managed to kill three. A powerful monster also would have almost certainly broken some bones with its attacks.

Finally, there were no signs of a large monster having traveled this road recently. It was hard to say for sure, what with the Jiyagi’s hoofprints blanketing the road, but the monsters they preferred to follow were generally too large for their tracks to be covered by the goats’.

For that matter, he couldn’t find any non-Jiyagi prints at all. Whatever had done this was intelligent enough to cover its own tracks—or small enough not to leave any. As he double-checked the surroundings, he came upon conclusive proof of the former: scraps of cloth, likely torn off in the struggle.

Knowing the danger was intelligent narrowed the possibilities by quite a lot, but that still left him with several options. Could it have been another band of Humans, following the Jiyagi just as they were? Unlikely; Humans would have no reason to butcher the Jiyagi so thoroughly. If anything, they’d harvest the bones themselves before even considering taking some of the less nutritional organs. Judging by the blood and the stray scraps, it seems whatever ate the Jiyagi did it on the spot, besides.

A band of Kritta, then? Also unlikely. While more animalistic than Humans, they were still smart enough to harvest the horns and bones and to take their food with them.

That left him with a single option, one that checked off every box on the list. They were small. They were intelligent. Despite their intelligence, they had rabid dispositions and insatiable appetites. They would gather in large enough numbers that they’d need to eat their prey down to the bone. They had no need for weapons or armor, so they wouldn’t bother to harvest bones.

Krimling.

Of all the monsters that inhabited the wasteland, they were the smallest and weakest, at least individually. What made this species dangerous, however, was their incredible rate of reproduction and growth.

Just two Krimling could produce a litter of offspring in a matter of minutes. A few minutes later, those offspring would reach maturity and could reproduce, as well. Over the course of an hour, two Krimling could rise to an army of thousands, enough to overwhelm all but the absolute worst that the wasteland had to offer.

This was, perhaps, the worst possible conclusion Alistair could have reached.