(Shortly after the second section of Chapter 12)

All was quiet in the forest, which was a bad thing because if a forest is quiet it means that something is in the forest that is so much of a threat that it is better to stay silent than it is to make any noise. Now, you ask, what could be causing that situation to be the case?

Well, it wasn’t merely Lyrhea’s presence alone that was causing this issue. While she had just killed a second hornbun after a bit of trial and error, she was by no means dangerous enough to cause this shift in the ecosystem.

And while she was now a victor over two hornbuns, Lyrhea was still far from the apex predator of this place. Thankfully for her, she was smart enough to realize the danger that a quiet forest announced, and she climbed a tree and steadied her breathing while trying to both stay silent and also detect whatever was causing the turmoil.

She found the cause faster than she would have liked, or rather, the cause found her. A large cross between a wolf and a black bear approached the tree where Lyrhea had hid herself and just looked up and directly at her before beginning to climb up. It was a slow climb, and one that Lyrhea could outpace, but the fact that it was looking directly at her was what actually got her moving.

She did the smart thing and used her physical abilities to jump to another tree, and then a third, and then a fourth before looking back a the wolf-bear, who she could have sworn now sported a look of annoyance and disappointment in itself. The bear-wolf stopped climbing up the tree and instead went back down, shot Lyrhea a look, and then wandered off, leaving Lyrhea to wonder how intelligent, or possibly how sapient the creature was.

“I’m gonna need to be a bit more careful…” Lyrhea said to herself as the monster moved away. The rest of the forest had sensed its presence, but she had not. Not until she had actually, physically seen it did she know that it existed, and even then, she wasn’t able to gauge its power.

She assumed that, because it was slow and because it was likely smart, that the creature she had just seen was indeed the reason that the forest went silent. To be fair, she didn’t know for sure, but as the noise started back up again as the beast likely went further away, she led herself to believe that it was the case.

She would need to get better at, well, everything. Not merely hunting, but also avoiding being hunted. After all, just like when she was deeper into the massive forest, she was not at the top of the food chain here, and that fact had been seared into her head.

…

When it had sensed that a new force had entered its section of the forest, it had assumed that it was just another of those humans. A weak one, but one of them nonetheless.

However, when it had observed the creature, this belief fell away quickly. It had the shape of a human, certainly, but the features it sported reminded it more of a serpent than a human, and it would have just killed the monster then and there, but in a move that it did not regret, it decided to observe the entity for a while and only attack when it crossed the line.

When the monster saw a human child, its first instinct was to rush and save the human child from it, but the monster did not attack as a normal monster would have, instead merely shadowing the child and his kin and monitoring them from just out of sight. It could not understand this at first; was it merely observing them before striking, or perhaps was it trying something else?

After days of this behavior, the number of human children coming into its domain dropped significantly, and then reached zero. The monster, though, took this time to engage in what it assumed were acts of self-humiliation.

It hunted like a rank amateur, making childish mistake after childish mistake and showing that it could not even take a single strike to the chest from a mere hornbun without needing to call it quits. The creature was fast, but it was frail; a ‘glass cannon’, as some of the humans said.

But it never managed to actually hunt anything properly. Well, it never managed to do so up until the point when it did.

It eventually delivered a single strike to a hornbun’s eye, and that was when alarms were set off in its head. The hornbun did not die due to the strike alone, but due to the chemicals lacing the monster’s nails, and even then, it did not die until after the creature had swallowed it whole and alive.

It was the protector of this place, and guardian of the people that lived nearby, such was the task it had been assigned by a higher power, and now it believed that the monster could very well become a threat if allowed to continue. But, to be safe, it needed to make sure that it was not some mindlessly violent beast.

Perhaps it could be reasoned with? If it could be shown that it was not the top of the pyramid, then perhaps it would avoid causing too much harm and eventually move on?

Yes, it would scare the monster straight, and hope that it did not do anything rash. From there, it would watch and study the newcomer, and if it got out of line it would put it in its place.

And so it made the forest silent and used a show of force and fear to scare the monster. However, the creature was smarter than it initially had thought. It had assumed that it would not be able to figure out that it could just jump away, or that it would be afraid of breaking its bones by jumping to the ground.

Instead, the monster just jumped from one tree to the next, and it felt a bit of disappointment at itself for believing that its new neighbor was dumb enough to be any normal beast. After climbing back down, it decided that it would observe some more. If the creature went too far, though, it would step in.

It just hoped that it would not need to, or that it would not get hit by that chemical. If it could render a hornbun into a limp mess so quickly, then it worried what it could do to itself in high enough doses.