Fang had a very productive evening. Fang had a lot of fun as well. The clearing was absolutely riddled with the burrows of various rodents, from voles to moles, rats to rabbits. There were even small, brown, meerkat-looking rodents that popped out of the ground without any burrow.

The first time Fang had seen one he snuck up and pounced, but the critter dove beneath the earth when he saw Fang mid-leap, leaving nothing above ground by the time the cat landed, not even overturned earth.

The second time Fang saw one of the flighty creatures, he didn't make the same mistake. He snuck around behind the creature, then quickly blinked right next to it (In two steps, as he was still reveling in his new and masterful technique.) and clamped his jaws around its head. A quick jerk of the head and it was yanked from the ground, dangling limply from Fang's jaws. Better yet, as the blood trickled down his throat, Fang felt his sunshine growing brighter, replenishing what he had spent to catch the creature. By the time he finished eating the small rodent, he had fully recovered from jumping down the pillar, and then some.

After a certain threshold, Fang's increasing awareness of his internal sunshine alerted him that it had started growing much slower, but when he was done, his brilliant little kitty brain finally made the connection that eating sunny things while he was already sunny made him even more sunny.

This really did not change Fang's plans in the slightest. He continued hunting everything he could see, just with a little more attention spent on looking out for colorful birds and earthy rodents. He spent the occasional break marking his territory, delineating a perimeter around his sunning dais and scratching up the outsides of the pillars. No little rodents would be dumb enough to stray inside and disturb his napping.

The catch was that most of the creatures in the clearing slept at night. By the time the sun fully set and the sky turned its midnight blue, the only creatures active in the clearing were bats swooping overhead, far out of reach, and the foul-tasting glow bugs that had summoned the blue menace before. The box had made another appearance late in the evening after he hunted another of the sunny-tasting rodents. It was identical to last time, but a swift slash of his claws dispatched it. This time it had come for his kill, but he was not giving up his prey without a fight. He would be ready the next time it came, and he would not be scared. This box was clearly a coward after all. The way it snuck up whenever he made a kill and fled at the first sign of resistance, Fang was starting to think it might be more prey than predator.

The lack of prey was a much bigger problem than the box though. He could simply nap and laze around until dawn, but he had slept all day and was in no mood for another nap without the sun present. He wandered toward the edge of the clearing, and then he abruptly decided he would go find a river. The blood of his prey did a lot to slake his thirst, but he would need some actual water soon. Sunbathing was thirsty work. Plus, the forest was a much more active hunting ground at night than the field. The trees were tall enough to ambush bats, birds slept in the branches, and the scurrying morsels that used darkness as their protection preferred the deep, dappled shadows of the forest.

Fang stalked around the perimeter of the clearing, listening carefully for the sounds of either running water or unsuspecting prey. He caught a small rodent and two sleeping birds in their nest before he heard a faint splashing, almost directly opposite the direction he had exited the clearing. He trotted off towards it, hunting along the way. The closer he got to the water, the more plentiful the prey became, and he had a merry old time slaughtering his way through the forest.

However, once he got really close the vegetation on the ground got too thick for comfort, with thorns snagging his fur, vines tripping him up, and spiderwebs tangling his whiskers. After the first such thicket, Fang decided to climb a tree and travel along the branches. Unlike the pillars, the deciduous trees here had low enough branches for him to climb and leap up to, and were spaced tightly enough together that he had no issue leaping to the lower canopy and continuing from branch to branch.

Soon enough he reached the river and discovered that it was more of a small creek. There was barely a gap in the canopy between the two sides, and the deepest point wasn't more than a foot or two down, but it ran fast and clear, so Fang hopped from branch to branch down to the shore and bent to lap at the stream. Cool, clean, and refreshing. Fang drank his fill, then looked more closely up and down the stream bank. There was a good amount of prey here. Small creatures nipped out of the brush to drink their fill all along the shore. There were a few larger ones as well, like the reddish creature about his own size that came to drink a few dozen feet from him, two white-tipped fluffy tails waving behind it. There were no real fish in the stream, but Fang amused himself by splashing at the tiny minnows and tadpoles flitting about, managing to knock a couple up on the shore to form a tasty snack.

Fang's playtime was interrupted however, by a sudden disturbance across the stream from him. While he was distracted by the flashy fish and babbling brook, a large form had been shouldering through the underbrush of the stream opposite him, and now it pushed out into the open space over the water. It was a large boar. It towered over Fang even as he jumped sideways in surprise and puffed up his fur, arching his back in an attempt to intimidate the immense creature. Its snout alone towered above the tip of Fang's puffed out tail. It completely ignored Fang's warning hiss and lifted paw, and it lowered its head to drink. Fang naturally took this as a sign of aggression. He had seen how easily those tusks tore through the vines and bushes, and he assumed the boar was lowering its head to swing them at him. Thus Fang did the perfectly logical and reasonable thing to do in this situation. He swatted it on the nose.

His claws drew four thin red lines across its snout, which slowly started seeping blood. The boar let out a deafening squeal of pain, rearing back its head and nearly shaving Fang's tail in the process with those monstrous tusks. Fang stood his ground, paw raised and ready to give another swipe. Just like the box, all would flee before his mighty claws. Except the boar didn't turn and run. It turned its head back down toward the small feline, its eyes gleaming with a baleful intellect as the shiny black started to fill with a reddish glow. As its eyes changed, its body did as well, the monstrously large boar swelling to even greater proportions as its muscles bulked out with the cracking of tendons and the creaking of bones. It lifted its head again, this time not for a squeal of pain, but a deafening bellow of rage.

At this point, Fang turned tail and ran. A couple of steps, then a blink onto a low branch, then another blink into the canopy proper. He was not scared of course. Cats are above such pathetic things as fear. He had simply realized that this was a peaceful creature of the forest. He had found it within his magnanimous and merciful soul to forgive the creature for startling him, and he had decided to spare the noble beast. The quivering in his feet and tail were just the aftermath of his surprise. He crouched in the shadows of the tree and watched the creature complete its transformation, ending up nearly twice as large in every dimension and practically steaming with fury. It pawed the ground and let out another earth-shaking bellow, then charged forward, eyes fixed on Fang. Fang was fairly sure this pig couldn't fly, but he prepared himself to blink out of the way anyway.

The boar did not fly. It also did not charge directly under Fang as the cat was expecting. Instead, it charged at the tree Fang was sitting on. The trunk was a solid three feet thick, but splintered as the solid ton of muscle and bone crashed into its bark. Fang dug his claws into the branch as the whole tree shuddered, letting loose a deluge of leaves. Then the boar jerked its head to the side, razor-sharp tusks gouging out a large chunk of wood, and the tree began to tilt. Two beady, malevolent eyes watched Fang as his perch swung toward the ground.

Fang was nearly paralyzed with shock at the sudden change, but before the tree picked up too much momentum he managed to leap off the branch and into a neighboring tree with a short blink. Sleeping birds roused fluttered out of the tree and the surroundings at the disturbance, before the trunk slammed into the ground, the base landing right on top of the monstrous pig. The beast shrugged the trunk off to the side like a large pillow, and before Fang could even get his bearings on his new branch it shuddered beneath him. This new tree began to tilt as the boar charged and turned its trunk to matchsticks as well. Fang leapt from branch to branch as the boar tore through the woods below, leaving a trail of carnage and felled trees behind it.

At first, Fang fled as fast as he could, leaping and blinking from tree to tree, trying to put as much distance between himself and this mindless chaos as possible. The boar was fast on the ground though, and it had little difficulty outpacing Fang enough to smash down whatever tree he was landing on. He was startled out of his desperate flight when the limb he blinked to simply wasn't there. The boar had already hit the tree he was aiming for and the limb had swayed out of his path. Fang managed to catch a lower branch and leap off, but he had to use a longer blink to reach the next tree, depleting his precious sunlight. After that, he regained his balance and eyed the next tree, running out and leaping off just as the boar crashed into the tree.

Fang played it more cautious after that, staying on a tree and catching his breath for the handful of moments before the boar rammed his tree, then jumping to the next, lining up his leaps to minimize his usage of blink. The boar was starting to show signs of damage from the chase. Foam was dripping from the corners of its mouth, twigs and branches had stabbed into its back and face, and each time it had to shrug off a tree trunk it was a bit slower. Fang was tired and depleted from the initial desperate chase, but now he was conserving his energy, staying safe without expending too much energy. Now that his fear concern and respect for the pig had faded, it was almost like playing with a mouse. Instead of running for its hole it was running to kill him, but it was just as easy to crush those aspirations over and over again. From this height, the boar even looked the right size.

Fang baited the beast into crashing into tree after tree. Once he got the routine down, he was hardly spending any sunshine and even managed to taunt the pig a few times by facing the other way and showing his butt, or pretending to sleep on a branch to let his prey think it had a chance. Finally, Fang leapt onto a new tree and bounded to the branch nearest to the next, but the crashing shudder didn't come. Fang looked back and saw the boar under the previous tree. He waited, but there was no movement. It seemed as though the entire forest was still and silent, waiting for the other boot to drop. But it never did. Eventually, the chirping of birds finding their mates and the rustling of critters sneaking through the underbrush gradually resumed. As the first rays of dawn sliced through the canopy, Fang watched the boar. Birds and rodents flitted all around him, seeking new homes after their old ones were toppled, but Fang ignored the lesser prey. One belligerent squirrel popped its head out of the trunk currently propped up on the boar and chittered angrily at the beast. Eventually, Fang was confident the boar wasn't faking and hopped down through the branches to the ground. He advanced slowly on the beast, intentionally making enough noise that the squirrel saw him and skittered back into its hole.

Fang was within a tail's length of the beast before he noticed the slight rise and fall of the boar's chest. It was still alive, though each breath sounded labored and wheezing. With each breath it seemed to shrink, muscles deflating and bones shortening as whatever transformation had changed it ended. Fang edged closer as it shrank, watching with curious eyes. He jumped back in alarm when there was a sudden crunch and the tree lurched downward. The boar's sturdiness had diminished to the point it could no longer support the heavy log on top of it, and the weight had crushed Fang's would-be assailant. It was clearly dead, with its skull crushed and broken ribs sticking out of its sides, but Fang still approached cautiously. He edged up next to it and raised a paw, preparing to scratch it and test if it was really dead.

Level Up!

Cat class has reached level 4!

Stat points automatically assigned:

STR +1.5, DEX +3, INT +0.5, CHA +1

Fang leapt a full meter in the air as the bright blue box appeared in the middle of his vision, and instinctively blinked backwards, losing his balance midair and teetering backwards as the box pursued him. It was uncanny how he only ever saw this thing when it was right in his face. He barely managed to twist around and land on his feet. He glared at the blue box and scared it off with a swipe of his mighty claws.

Returning to the business at hand, he strode up more confidently to the boar, to its face this time. He slashed at its nose again, this time scoring four gashes deep into the flesh. Satisfied at his prey's lack of movement, he licked the blood from his claws. There was a faint hint of sunlight, but not much. Something about the head was calling to him though so Fang nibbled at parts of the boar's face, seeing what the best bits were. He sampled and tasted, trying its snout, its cheek, its throat, its ear, until he finally tried a bit of the grey matter oozing out of the beast's crushed skull. The other bits were all right, but he would get full long before his sunshine refilled eating them. The soft, oozing jelly on the other hand, practically tingled on his tongue as it went down, filling him with a wonderful, radiating warmth. He attacked the stuff with a vengeance, eating everything he could reach. He was already almost full on sunlight again when he ran out of grey matter, but there was still more inside its skull. The tree on top and the boar's own skull were in the way, but after some determined prodding, Fang found a gap large enough for him to stick his paw through and scoop out the delicious brain matter. He kept right on eating until his claws were scraping the bottom of the empty skull and he was feeling so warm inside it was almost painful. Certainly not painful enough to keep him from fishing for those last few scraps though. As he did so, his paw hit something hard inside the skull, sending it rattling around the boar's brainpan.

Fang's ears perked to full attention at the sound and his pupils widened into full circles with the barest hint of green on the edge.

He'd found a marble.

Fang loved marbles.

They were his favorite prey. The sharp, clear sound they made as they fled, the bright colors, the way they would escape anything but the most perfect pounce. They didn't even die or run away like the mice and birds he usually toyed with. If he didn't approach they would just stay there waiting for the hunt to continue.

Alice had left him in her house for two days once, and Fang had found a marble that had snuck into the house. It had led him on a merry chase around the entire house over the course of the two days before he finally chased it into a heating duct where he couldn't follow. It clearly died of exhaustion in there, since he never saw that worthy adversary again. The chase had destroyed just about every fragile object in the house, but when Alice had come home she had been so impressed she had put him outside to hunt straight away. From then on she had put him outside whenever she left for more than a few hours, entrusting him with the defense of her yard from all those birds and bugs and mice. Naturally, Fang had exceeded expectations.

Fang missed her.

...

Fang's paw had stilled as he thought of his well-trained pet, with her soft lap and her nails just the right length to scratch through his fur.

...

Fang returned his attention to the marble, forcefully batting it around the boar's skull in the hopes of flushing it out of its hidey-hole. This marble would be his! He would take this marble, he would show these woods who was boss, and he would find his way back to Alice's yard! Or maybe he would find another pet, a new and… just as good one!

And so Fang put his full determination towards his task, dead set on his path.