Starhunting.

A forest on the continent adjacent to Henry's Overdream island, 2355 kilometres south-east of his Riverbank Cabin.

In the dead of this Autumn night, a colossal black monster was gliding over the forest. Its six feet, each quadruple the width of a redwood, dangled low enough to almost knock the frost from the treetops. The hermit-crab-like shell with which the monster armoured itself resembled an Aztec pyramid and was about the same size. Onto the softer flesh of its protruding head and tail, Flying Crabs were landing and attempting to peck a meal. These nuisances were driven off not by the giant monster, which was dead, but instead from arrows whizzing past, fired from the ground.

Below, Henry was directing the Hermit Goliath's carcass telekinetically. Riding about on a Tier-6 Bloodmancer skeleton horse, he shot the Flying Crabs lured to himself away from his cargo.

This was the sixth tiring day of escorting the dead beast.

371 kilometres had separated him from its falling place and his nearest laboratory, where the proper facilities existed for dissection and anatomical analysis. The way so far had been slow going due to the telekinetic Carcassworker magic cancelling whenever a Flying Crab landed on the corpse. He'd averaged 41 km per day. To minimise the decay during this long haul, he'd packed ice into the monster's orifices and special incision sites, and he'd travelled during the cold of night. Luckily, at this latitude and season, the nights stretched on for about 14 hours.

Since he'd familiarised himself with these lands through his Floating Leaf scouting, he by-passed major obstacles, terrain and monster alike. To transport a colossus solo always proved a challenge in its own right; a journey of this length would be flat-out impossible without digital-augmentation and secret Methods and Legendaries. Nevertheless, the hunt had been harder.

When the sun's first rays split the sky, Henry made camp.

He excavated a pit with enough depth to fit the entire carcass and filled it partway by diverting a nearby river. Freezing the water, he cast a couple Tier-6 Ice Shaman , then he smashed the ice into powder with other magic.

This crude pit wouldn't stave off the decay entirely due to the advanced actions of Saana's microorganisms. After lowering the carcass into the ice and burying it, Henry stripped down naked and slipped through an orifice using the Cloak of Water and Flame's aqueous transformation. He swam around the carcass's guts, distributing Alchemical tonics to combat bacterial activity. This being his first Hermit Goliath kill, the preservation methods were imperfect, so some organs had already started to emit a putrescent stink.

After that, he covered the ice pit in dirt for extra insulation and washed himself off.

For supper, he ate a simple meal of buttered bread with tea.

The leaf used in the latter was a mild sedative. The most attention-grabbing aspects of big game hunting were the planning and the methods of killing and the beasts themselves, but, as formidable as these were, they were matched by a quieter battle against fatigue. Fighting colossi, which had equally colossal health pools, the solo hunter often needed to stay awake up to a week. Any opportunity to rest therefore had to be snatched up and savoured. Unfortunately, the body was often uncompliant with this fragmented schedule, the adrenaline of the hunt tending to keep one in a state of perpetual alertness until they fainted. Thus, one was sometimes forced to nudge themselves to sleep via herbal assistance.

Henry lay a perimeter of detection traps at the likely paths of approach. They were far enough to buy him a few seconds of warning, enough for him to relax his guard and rest. Then, hearing the call of sleep, he wrapped himself in a blanket of shaggy, translucent hair. The garment hugged close and warm to the skin and was fashioned from the furs of a 'Dream Infiltrator'.

His first encounter with these stalkers of the snow had given him an awful spook.

It'd been way back during one of those mad Floating Leaf winters. Henry'd been in the den of a hibernating Bear Lobster, scraping a sample of the sleeping monster's shell, when a snow-dusted figure entered through the tunnel he'd dug in the ice plugging the den's entrance. Standing erect on two legs, with two arms and two eyes in its head, the size and thinness of a grown adult, the creature'd appeared to Henry to be a person wearing furs. Thus, he'd dismissed it as one of the many hallucinations that his bored brain had been conjuring back then. The Dream Infiltrator, in turn, had summoned a spear of ice and, since the creature'd been a Tier-4, 5,000-man monster, its projectile had converted Henry's upper-half to a cloud of moist crimson that glittered as it froze.

Dream Infiltrators, his later research unveiled, emerged only around the Winter solstice, when the snow was deepest and the storms could strip a tree naked. A kind of apex parasite, they preyed upon hibernating monsters by inserting a needle-shaped proboscis into the slumbering beasts, sedating them further with a neurotoxin, and then slurping up the winter fat. Interestingly, the Dream Infiltrators usually left sufficient fat for their prey to survive to Spring.

They made for a challenging quarry. Their evolutionary niche had bestowed them with an x-ray vision that spoiled any attempts to hide for an ambush or catch one's breath. In snowstorms, they were unbeatable, using their light, fluffy bodies to sail on the winds to leap and evade.

In order to slay the one that'd become Henry's blanket, he'd kited it to a 320-acre tropical area built with heat-emitting statues, the temperature reducing the effectiveness of the monster's ice-based abilities. It'd taken 153 hours to deplete its HP pool. The fatal shot had been a that'd nicked it in a thigh artery. The Dream Infiltrator'd bled out over a couple of minutes, its last spells flung with increasing inaccuracy before it collapsed in a purple puddle of melted snow.

The conclusion of a difficult hunt like that always felt strange to Henry. Joy and satisfaction made an uncomfortable acquaintance with emptiness and sadness and guilt. When life fled the beast, it seemed to also carry off the dignity and grandeur, demoting 'the beast' to 'the body'. The skinning knife drawing its first incision took a bit more, 'the body' being demoted further to 'the carcass'. Finally, after a few more cuts, all remnants of the thing were lost; from whatever it had been was born 'a blanket', 'a shoe', or something else purified of the taint.

The huntsman could try erase his role in this ignoble process, but the truth was there in the heart.

For anyone who'd killed plenty of people, too, there was an extra, disturbing aspect: the two sensations were not fundamentally dissimilar. Henry was still wrestling with the meaning of that.

An hour into his slumber, his traps were triggered by a couple visitors: a pack of seven hundred Scorpion-Wolves. As often happened, they'd followed the scent trail of the carcass spread during his travel. Acidic saliva for external digestion was already spilling from their mandibles.

Swearing, he exchanged his coat for battle attire and into a Cheetah and to evade a splinter-group of Scorpion-Wolves flanking from behind. He relied on tree climbing when his assailants clumped around him, and they gnawed through the trunks while receiving his spells through their brains. The first shots went for the alphas who were coordinating the lower ranks through an imperceptible drone. With Spelltomes, he fired analogues of the Celestial spells favoured by Starhunters for offence, while with agile, quick Fauna forms, he created distance. Practitioners of this style were accustomed to avoiding melee range unless they'd grown sick of their lot and desired to return to The Cycle.

The original Starhunters had been a historic sect of daredevil Earthfriend hermits who'd once made their living by solo-hunting the megafauna of the arid Parani Barrens. Since their chosen prey were intended to be fought by teams or armies, the solitary hunters had to avoid every attack, fighting from a distance for gruelling time spans.

All forms of hunting had their difficulties, but none were as testing as the solo kill. Against big game, one had to individualise the approach, investing weeks or months of research. One had to become an expert not merely on the beast, but on the waterholes from which it drank, the birds that picked lice from its fur, the grass that fermented in its belly. In their own right, the Starhunters had been monsters of the savannah, too. Their claws had been their patience, and the keenness of this weapon had made them terrifying in pursuit.

For Henry, the style wasn't far removed from how he'd always fought, although he'd tended to incorporate more cheat items to reduce time-wastage.

After he finished off the Scorpion-Wolf pack, he dumped their bodies on top of the Hermit Goliath's burial site as a warning to other potential attackers. The stack was twice his height and made for a ghastly sight, but soon it was hidden by a swarm of Feathered Beetle-Rats. Starting from the outside, these scavengers devoured the slain pack exoskeleton and all. The noise of their feasting sounded like wood being sandpapered. Stronger monsters lurked about in the forest, but their intelligence kept them concealed. Like the beasts of Australia and the Americas when prehistoric man had invaded these continents, those of this land were unconditioned to see death in a fragile, hairless ape. Still, they knew to be wary when alien scents mixed with the fresh fragrance of so much gore.

Around sunset, he awoke, exhumed the Hermit Goliath, and continued the march.

Aside from a pesky Crab-Owl attack, the twilight hours that followed were peaceful, giving Henry plenty of time to appreciate the frosty woodlands and the place he'd come to hold in it. He crossed fresh tracks from another colossus and then, as a crimson moon crested the forest canopy, he emerged in a plain without a tree, shrub, or single blade of grass. The ground here was carpeted in turquoise shards and sloped gently towards the bottom of a twenty-kilometre wide crater, where a meteor had once struck, flinging out its herbicidic, geocidic contents. Picking up a shard, one was liable to score a nasty finger gash; the shards had retained the razor edge of their creation day, having withstood millions of years of abuse by the weather. Henry's skeleton steed paid no mind to the cuts.

Approaching the next dawn, he reached a floodplain dotted with ponds and verdant greenery. He had a rare encounter with a Mottled-Skelly Stinker, a member of a Flying Crab family fulfilling a similar niche to real-life waterfowl. Stinkers, eating the rotten detritus at the bottom of ponds, had a disgusting phlegm smell and their vile meat caused the consumer's tongue to swell with pus-filled tumours. Despite that, they had some worth in the form of a throat gland that promoted microorganism growth and enhanced the productivity of the Nature Energy Grass by 0.73%. Fat as the one he found was in its preparation for the southbound migration, it would have been easy pickings, but Henry refrained from shooting it because the species were endangered due to low birth rates.

He terminated that night's travel at a riverbend beneath a familiar landmark, an exoskeleton head three-stories tall, which had once belonged to a Lake-Stealer.

Lake-Stealers were giant insect-eels. A stygofaunic species, they dwelled in underground aquatic environments, slithering around in the black flows of flooded caves and subterranean rivers and lakes. They built these habitats themselves using a drill-like tongue, boring holes beneath surface lakes and diverting the flow into the monsters' underground caverns. Henry'd initially mistaken their creations for sinkholes, but the fish bones littering the rims had soon clued him into the bestial origin.

The specimen whose skull marked this site had been the length of the London bridge, and the tremors of its subterranean swimming could knock a traveller above off their feet. Despite its cumbersome mass, it had been a problematic prey to chase. Henry had yet to unlock aquatic shapeshifting, making him unable to match the creature's speed. Lake-Eaters, to fend off smaller assailants, discharged a toxin that would rupture the organs of anyone below Tier-2 within fifty metres and they spawned schools of rabid insect-eel babies. Most troublingly, at 14% HP, they fled by collapsing their tunnels and swimming down about 3 kilometres. Due to the Vit stat toughening Henry's body, he, hidden inside this individual's bladder, had been able to endure the increased water pressure, but the heat, confinement, and inability to see or breathe at those depths had been taxing on the mind.

He camped at the mouth of a hole bored by this Lake-Stealer that'd dried up, which most local monsters continued to steer clear of. The inside of the hole was infested with a flesh-devouring moss, so he strung a hammock in a grove near its rim, padding out gaps in the canopy overhead with extra leaves to block vision from aerial nuisances. Once he'd re-buried the Hermit Goliath and gotten a cooking fire going, he trekked to a nearby pond to snipe dinner.

There, he scored a plump brace of Geese-Crab. In this season, they were at their tastiest. They'd been engorging themselves upon the wind-blown seeds of a local maple - when the squalls were blustering hardest, their manoeuvres resembled fighter jets engaged in a dogfight. The seeds granted the Geese-Crabs a rich, savoury flavour. After unshelling their pink meat, he marinaded it in a shellfish sauce mixed with herbs collected over the night's journey. Frying it, he added a lump of lard from a Walrus-Python to make the Geese-Crab even juicier. The final taste had a heartiness equal to slow-cooked beef, and, paired alongside a short-glass of Black Spinning Top Berry wine, it was the perfect meal to conclude a march.

This area being relatively safe, he slept well with his belly full of game and the cosmos up above.

On most accounts, it had been a lonely calling for the original Starhunters, those millennia ago. In that era, Saana had been thriving under The Maalundi's global trade network. But while world's corners were being linked together, technology and culture and people proliferating, the Starhunters had remained hidden in the desolate savannah. The beasts they'd chased had been more massive, more ornery; no towns could be sustained in their barrens, nor roads. The Starhunters rarely had even the company of their own sect. In a territory about a sixth the area of the American Great Plains, they'd never numbered more than eighty individuals.

Due to this solitary life, they'd also been accomplished Carcassworkers, fashioning all they'd needed during the hunt from what they'd killed themselves. They'd crafted their tools from bone, from skulls, teeth, tibias, and mandibles; they'd clothed themselves in fur and hair, sewed saddles and pouches from skins and bladders. This skill had been doubly necessary because the megafauna should've been processed by teams; Starhunters'd typically practised gourmet butchering, collecting the choicest glands and donating the rest back to nature.

Battling colossi for days on end across those bygone plains, it'd been a hard life. Most of the Starhunters had perished alone, anonymously digested in the stomachs of their would-be prey. A single successful hunt, though, could furnish one with the riches to retire. There were minor noble families today who, sixteen hundred years after the last Starhunter, still traced their dynastic fortunes back to a spectacular kill.

In Henry's case, his bounties fed the humble soils of his farm and expanded his knowledge. For him, this art was a pleasure. In the wilds, there were the lovely calms between nature's storms, the peopleless quiet, the air that smelt raw and clean, and the freedom to hoard the hours to himself without guilt.

It may not have been a life for all or even most, but it was a life for some.

He and the Starhunters weren't truly alone in their solitude. In every age, digital and real, there were those seduced by the reclusive fringe. They'd explored the land on lonely treks, they'd sailed past horizons on leaky ships, they'd retreated to caves to paint on the walls and scribble religious texts, to gardens to monitor variations of peas.

It may not have been a life for all, but, for a certain breed of man, it was perhaps the only way to live.

That afternoon the clouds broke above, scattering a cold drizzle that crept into his dreams. Henry dug up the Hermit Goliath once more and sailed down the river with it on a wooden barge. The rain running off the carcass's shell formed mini-waterfalls. The lab wasn't much further now; he could almost feel the warmth radiating from its hearth.