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

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The Primeval Apocalypse by Robert Keene and Alex Raizman

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The queen and alpha Mandrills hadn’t seen me yet. I was still behind cover. But there was no mistaking them for anyone else from here. They were taller and more muscular than anyone else in town, and what was more, I could sense their ornamentation. The clatter of the queen’s fang necklace, and the susurrus sound of the cloth of the alpha’s scarf on his shoulders were unmistakable, considering no one else in town wore nearly anything.

They were arguing, their gesture-laden language making their adornments betray their identities.

What was strange, though, was that I could almost tell what they were saying.

It wasn’t exact. I knew instantly that they were arguing, which wasn’t that strange, but the longer I lay in hiding, listening to their grunts and hoots and sensing the motions of their bodies through the noise, I started to understand.

My new Wild Empathy ability was kicking in. I was able to understand a simplified version of their conversation, even though we didn’t share a language.

The queen was the authority here, and she was angry with the alpha, who was actually something more of an advisor to her rather than a leader, or even a mate. He had directed guard forces here when he’d spotted me, and that was overreaching his role here. Despite her authority over him, and his open acknowledgement that she was right, the alpha was unfazed by her anger, and he was very adamant about refusing to apologize.

He was worried about…something. Perhaps the Aurochs, but his gesture wasn’t towards them. It was towards the building at the far end of the pen.

What was in there? What were they trying to protect?

The alpha seemed to be of a mind to let the queen chew him out. It wasn’t so much that he stopped responding to her to let her vent as much as he stood by his defense of the thing in the building and just let her yell at him. For a certain value of yell, considering how little of their communication was verbal.

Wild Empathy was proving to be surprisingly powerful. It didn’t teach me their language; I didn’t know what was meant by each specific gesture and expression. But it conveyed to me what they meant. Every nuance wasn’t caught, but if pressed, I could hold a rough conversation if I needed to. I assumed the other side of it was going to work the same to let me be understood. When I had to “convince” a beast to become my friend during Charming’s Pacify condition, this would mean that I could just talk to it and it would roughly understand me. I didn’t need to try and communicate with animal sounds and body language.

It might also mean that if I got caught I could make contact. I didn’t think I could negotiate effectively with either the queen or the alpha, considering I’d been a thorn directly in her side for weeks, and I’d just kicked him in the junk a few hours ago. But I might be able to generate a serviceable distraction with a few quick lies and a one-liner before another well-placed kick-and-run.

After a few minutes, the queen grew tired of the alpha’s attitude and stormed off. She gave some vague threat about tattling on him to someone else? Without additional context, it didn’t make much sense to me. They were in charge around here, right? Who was she going to tell?

The alpha leaned against the Aurochs pen wall for a while, staring west at the building there. Whatever was within concerned him. It concerned him so much that he didn’t regret for a second sending guards away from what seemed like more important spots in order to protect it.

Of course, when he finally let out a heavy sigh and headed back to his sculpted mud palace, I had to investigate.

The alpha’s tremendous detection radius made me wait until he left my own range. Getting spotted here would be the end of me, and even though my Stealth skill was much higher than it had been a short time ago, I didn’t want to take a risk that I could easily avoid by waiting.

The Aurochs were utterly unconcerned by my appearance. I was able to clamber over the wall and drop down to the inside of the pen without any of them so much as snorting my way. Without any young among them, they had no reason to fear a tiny hairless man. Obviously, I knew I could disabuse them of the idea if I took it personally, but their calm disregard for me was actually very helpful. No fuss raised meant that all the Mandrills I could sense from here remained either asleep or unaware of my presence.

Dropping low into the close-cropped greenery of the pen’s floor, I was able to stay below the clay brick wall to avoid being seen as I followed the pen’s wall around the north end, hoping that keeping the line of sight between me and the Alpha broken would let me continue to go unnoticed.

Even as I drew closer to the building on the west end of the pen, I couldn’t sense anything within. My Detection was utterly defeated, and it only made me more curious. In fact, it made me worried. What if that was the purpose of the building? What if it was a honeypot trap for humans whose detection grew so strong that the resilience of this little wooden hut drew them inexorably to investigate? Was I going to open it up and be dragged within by some manner of mad monkey scientist, seeking to harvest my brain for whatever Beastmaster hardware the system had installed in me?

It was a silly fear. Absolutely ridiculous.

But just in case it wasn’t, I drew one of my hand axes as I approached the building.

The door was on the west side of the building, with a ramp down to the dirt. The way the ground here had deep hoof tracks—and the way the wooden ramp was bowed despite the reinforcements—pushed the idea that the Aurochs were led into the building periodically for some purpose. The door itself was a large door on a sliding track, which made it all that much stranger that my senses didn’t penetrate it.

Creeping up the ramp, I reached out and slowly opened it.

What came out of that room was a cloud of thin white vapor. That made it all the stranger that I didn’t sense anything. No smell whatsoever, despite the cloud. When it cleared, I finally got a look through the narrow crack I’d opened, to see what was within.

In the middle of the room was a large metal censer. It glowed orange with heat at the base, and that thin white vapor poured out of it in a thick stream. I felt like there should have been a hissing or boiling noise, but there was none. In fact, no noise whatsoever. Even opening the door had been silent, despite the strength of my senses meaning that no amount of grease or oil could dampen the sound of it sliding open enough to defeat me.

It was the censer. The vapor was some kind of… System effect? It was suppressing my detection. Covering scent and sound. Even light, as the interior seemed far darker than it should have been with my new night vision. I started to creep towards it to investigate—and probably try to steal it—when I realized.

Two eyes stared at me out of the darkness.

They were not the beady eyes of a Mandrill, nor were they the giant watery eyes of an aurochs. They were yellow and slit-pupiled, set high up on a reptilian head.

The Mandrills were keeping a monster in here, isolated and hidden.

This was what the Alpha had been protecting.

The creature was about as long from nose to tail as I was tall. Just over six feet. It was low-slung and long, like an alligator, but with longer, almost canine-looking legs. Armored brown scales ran down its body from the back of its neck, where a few tufts of brown-orange feathers were starting to come in, forming a sort of birdlike crest. From the downy growth, I guessed that the creature was young for its kind. Even with its long snout tied closed with a length of rope, long pointed teeth poked out around its notched lips.

The creature was cruelly bound. In addition to the loop around its mouth, other lengths of rope bound its legs, hobbling it so badly that it could not move. All it could do was stare at me and puff out its downy feather crest in what was likely a natural response to try and look threatening.

“Easy,” I whispered, holding out my free hand to calm it. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

It started to twitch and struggle. The creature couldn’t shake its bonds, but its tail was not bound. If it started to thrash and panic, it was going to knock over the censer and either start a fire or interrupt the suppression effect. Either way would have the whole camp coming down on me in seconds.

“You’re supposed to understand me,” I said carefully, quickly stepping into the room. “Unless that means we share a language, in which case you understand me anyway because I’m a stupid monolingual asshole. Please calm down.”

Wild Empathy wasn’t calming the critter down. The only meaning I was sensing from it was panic. The lizard-dog thing was not in a good emotional state like this. It simply could not listen to my efforts to calm it while it was so thoroughly consumed by fear..

The fastest way to calm it down was going to be releasing its bonds. Perhaps loosing it would cause it to make a hasty escape. I might never understand what it was doing here, but I couldn’t just leave the creature here for whatever nefarious purpose the Mandrills no doubt had. And maybe calming it down might let me test out Wild Empathy’s ability to let me have a chat before I tried to use it to befriend an Aurochs.

My skill with axes was high enough that I could take a quick swipe at its bonds and cut them cleanly without harming the creature. Its fear redoubled at the sight of the raised weapon, but it seemed to calm quite a bit when it realized that it could move one of its legs again.

For the first time, the panic that radiated off of the creature resolved into a message. It was finally reaching out.

Free me. Free me. Free me.

“Don’t worry little buddy,” I said, though now that I was inside the room with the censer, my voice felt distant and muffled. “I’m working on it.”

Cutting the bonds on the other legs calmed the creature tremendously. It stopped thrashing and kicking, and that meant that I could kneel down and carefully saw at the rope on its muzzle without harm.

“Isn’t that better?” I asked.

The creature opened its large maw, snapping it closed twice to test it. A feeling of joyous excitement radiated off of it. It wasn’t totally calm, but it seemed like I might be able to manage a conversation.

“What were they doing to you in here?” I asked, looking around. It was hard to tell the purpose of this room, as dark as the censer’s suppressing effect made it. Perhaps a veterinary clinic was the best guess, given the carved wood basins, stone knives, thick leather gloves, and other crude tools. Slightly incongruous with that purpose was a peculiar leather mask hanging on a hook near the door, making it feel a little bit more like some kind of cannibal lair than a clinic.

The creature made a low growling sound deep in its reptilian throat. Its downy crest puffed up again, but this time not as a fear response, but as aggression. Anger.

Obviously, the critter didn’t know for certain what they wanted. But there was a suspicion. They had been starving it since its capture, which told it that they could not have meant for it to survive much longer.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, scratching my head. “If they wanted to kill you, why would they starve you first? They’ll get less meat. Less materials. And why keep you in here with this censer? They’re devoting a lot of resources to keeping you alive. I don’t think they’d want you dead. For some reason they just want you hungry. Why?”

The creature didn’t know. It conveyed that it didn’t understand the Mandrills any more than I did.

Before I could offer any more reassurance or ask any further questions, Its demeanor towards me shifted very suddenly in a new direction. Now that the panic was fading, another emotion was overtaking the crested reptile.

Hunger.