[The Primeval Apocalypse] - Chapter Eight (collaboration with u/hydrael)

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The Primeval Apocalypse by Robert Keene and Alex Raizman

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Beast Hunter’s description had indicated that the ability would increase my detection radius by an additional 100%. That had led me to believe that it would increase my detection radius multiplier by a factor of one, giving me another length of my base detection radius.

A little less than a 50% increase in range would have been enough to sense the nearest of the Mandrills’ farms, where my friends had raided them. I had only wanted to know if they had increased security in case we returned, or if they’d forgone it entirely since we’d cleaned out the spot. If it was an opening in their defense, it might be safest to sneak by them here and creep through to the south. And if their defenses were tightest here, I could safely circle south and approach from that angle.

Instead, my detection radius was increased by 100% raw, doubling the expanded radius.

I could see the whole damned town.

I instantly earned three tiers of an achievement in a single moment. My Sentry II achievement flew up to Sentry V as I detected probably all the Mandrills in town in a single moment.

Sentry V: Succeed on Detection checks against hostile beings 400 times (Lifetime). Increase Detection Radius by 50%.

For a split-second, I couldn’t sense the farms on the far side, where I had made my first approach. I could only see a few yards past the farthest of the wooden structures on that side. But after my new tier of Sentry kicked on and added the 30% difference in radius, doubled, my radius expanded to envelop the farms on the far side. And just as in Jamestown, I could sense every living thing in the area that wasn’t actively hiding, including the Aurochs in their pen at the south end.

The guards were focused around the farms we hadn’t hit, with the farm directly before me being unmanned. But there was something off about the arrangement. There were five to seven around every farm—I could sense how much food was at each one, and their numbers were directly related to the amount of food on the vine there—but at each farm at least half of the guards were sleeping on site, leaning against nearby trees or tucked into the thicker foliage of the farm.

If we had come back in numbers tonight an attack would be a slaughter. Their guards were scattered in such numbers that their centralized defenses would be next to nothing, and their perimeter of guard forces was literally half-asleep.

And there was still no sign of the men who had formed the orbital patrol squads.

Or, at least, there was no sign of them in town.

With my expanded radius, I could sense four small groups of them scattered around the woods. Not only could I sense them, but I could sense their outposts, where they had built sturdy wooden shelters for themselves. At each one, though, the whole group was sleeping, with no sentries standing awake. Curious. If they were supposed to represent a military defense force, shouldn’t they be looking out? Patrolling?

Perhaps the military elements of the Mandrill culture were more complex than we thought.

I could also sense the forest canopy all the way up to the sky now. There was a lot going on up there—a surprising number of larger animals—predator and prey—engaged in a crepuscular way of life in the twilight hours. Of particular note was a six-legged creature the size of two city buses sprinting along the treetops at tremendous speed, flitting in and out of my detection radius every few seconds. It was terrifying that I was only just able to sense it now.

But my attention wasn’t for them right now.

I had to keep my focus on the task at hand.

Being able to tell where the Mandrills were asleep and where they were awake was a huge advantage. I could see that within the giant mud palace there were many Mandrills moving around awake, and there was also a structure in the center of town where many of them were gathered, awake.

There were two more guards stationed near the aurochs pen, but they were on the northern end of it, and the aurochs themselves were huddled together on the east end, the sizable pen giving me plenty of room to work without entering the detection radius of the guards, so long as neither of them was literally the alpha standing there with the farm animals.

I planned a quick route through town that would slip in through the hole left by the unattended farm we’d raided, circle around that central meeting hall, and then cut to the animal pen from the east.

With my plan in mind, I canceled the Beast Hunter active ability to allow myself to move again. It was just as disorienting to have my radius shrink as it was to grow, but it was way easier to adapt to less information than it was to adapt to more.

Moving toward the town was a careful dance. My detection radius was far larger than that of the guards, but I still tensed when I sensed them. In the dense forest here, there was no element of sight to the sensation, just the sound of their impatient shuffling, and the animal musk of their matted fur. My life from before the apocalypse butted in and told me that being able to smell them so strongly meant they had to be only a few feet away, but the system was very clear that that wasn’t the case. My senses were just that much stronger.

I carefully navigated the Mandrill town, staying close to the buildings where they slept, and avoiding the ones where anyone was awake. Likewise, I avoided being in line of sight to the mud palace the whole time I was there. I couldn’t have the alpha raising the alarm again. With the guards encircling the whole town as they were, a coordinated effort to cut off my escape could have produced an impenetrable wall rather than the porous net their usual patrols provided.

More than once, I could feel detection checks bounce off my stealth. With my skill progressing dramatically, though, I wasn’t as afraid. Between the reroll offered by Lost And Found and my skill rising to 18 now, catching up to my class skills cap from level 4, I felt like I was perhaps sneaky enough to slip through the whole town unnoticed.

New confidence filled me.

And then that confidence drained right back out as I approached the east end of the Aurochs pen.

The pen itself was a crude mud brick wall encircling a wide area, topped with a wooden fence to match the height of the beasts within. Like the farms, it had been cleared of trees and was providing greenery to the beasts through the hole in the forest canopy. I could see the moon through that opening for the first time in months—since the time I’d spent the night on the bank of a lake well before finding Jamestown. At the west end of the pen was an enclosed wooden structure. I suspected it was a storehouse for feed, but it might also be a butcher, or even a veterinary area.

Strangely, my detection couldn’t reach within. It was as if the building was somehow… Shielded from detection? Or perhaps the walls were simply too thick and the door too flush, having been built to keep the Aurochs from smelling what was within, either the smell of feed enticing them to break in and feast, or the smell of blood inducing them to panic and bust out of captivity altogether.

Through the wooden slats of the fence, I could see the aurochs. Or at least, that’s what we call them. They were, in silhouette, just absolutely fuckoff huge cows. Seven feet tall at the shoulder, with deadly-looking horns at least four feet from root to tip. They were heavily muscled, herbivores, and were probably the most docile natural creatures in the whole apocalypse. So long as they didn’t have any young with them, they were pretty ambivalent. A person could just walk up to a herd of them without causing a fuss.

This was because, unlike cows, they were too powerful to have any natural predators.

Also unlike cows, a thick leather hide wasn’t their only protection from attack. They were also dotted with heavy chitinous scales that formed something like armor over their backs, flanks, and bellies. The older they were, the thicker and larger the scales became, until they were nearly encased in a shell of tremendously dense armor.

System-wise, their defense rating was so high that doing damage to them in a fair fight was almost entirely futile. They had one vulnerable spot—at their throat—but the strength required to force their head up to strike at it to butcher such a beast was nearly impossible to achieve, if you weren’t an eight-foot tall monster monkey.

The Mandrills didn’t just use them for butchering, though. The Aurochs also provided dairy, though that created an interesting challenge, as their young had almost no scales to defend them, making the parents violently protective. I didn’t know how the Mandrills did it, but a daring heist had gotten us a few wooden casks full of the milk, though it had gone sour before we could use it all, making us abandon the practice.

But if I could tame one, and make it my pet, I could sneak it out of here by sharing my Hide In Plain Sight buff, and carefully direct it to move slowly to allow me to cover our tracks to get it back to town.

That had been the plan, at least, before I saw which two Mandrills were here at the pen. The renewed confidence my infiltration had built up was dashed instantly when I saw them. They weren’t guards.

It was the queen and the alpha.