After hours of scouring the forest, the Wyldwalkers were beginning to have doubts that the Memory Thief was even on this side of the titanwood.

A few times as they went they’d been forced to detour wide around packs of Thimurge, and occasionally other types of creatures that Niko believed were of the monstrous variety. He didn’t know all of their names, but it was clear that, at the least, beasts tended towards what Niko could at least call common anatomical structures.

He of course was a bird and his beast friends tended to be varieties of wolves, bears, and other such creatures that shared enough commonalities with beasts from Earth that he didn’t find them too far fetched. But monsters? Those were a different story altogether. And while Thimurge were strange creatures, some of the other ones they saw were even more so.

Niko and the group of them slowed as a strange, stocky-winged creature moved into position in the trees above, hanging upside down from the branches. On first glance, Niko had filed it into the ‘bat’ type of monster category. Its wings were more like those of a kite, just more flexible. Several clawed limbs protruded from its sides beneath the wings, which ran from its shoulders to the lower body. Instead of a tail, two hooked claws were used to dig into the bark and hold itself upside down from the tree easily. A head that had a passing resemblance to a bat, save for the piranha-like teeth and third eye on its forehead, peered down at anything moving beneath it.

“Do we go around again?” Dachna asked, voice barely a whisper but not at all hiding his annoyance.

Ronald’s expression tightened in thought, and Niko hoped for the answer he wanted even before he said it.

Not to disappoint, Ronald grunted, “No, we’ll take this one out and take a break. There’s a good hollow in the bark there that it’s overlooking. We can at least put our backs to it while we rest.”

The others quietly celebrated at that, Niko’s frilled feathers quivering in joy, “Good, Mithel’s potion was starting to feel weird, anyways.”

“It wasn’t really meant for long term use,” said gnome grimaced while wiping at her arms with her hands, “The body isn’t meant to hold onto all of its essence. It’s like having your pores blocked.”

Ronald cleared his throat at that, “In any case… I’m thinking this thing is an ambush predator. So, Niko, you wanna take this one, or me?”

The Phorus looked back to the bat and considered things, before turning to him and saying, “Rock, paper, scissors?”

With an amused snort, the big man lifted his hand, and said, “On third cast.”

Niko and Ronald’s hands raised and lowered once, twice, and then on the third time they came down, they cast their play.

“Cluck. Why do you always play rock?” Niko grumbled goodnaturedly.

“Why do you always play scissors?” Ronald countered with a chuckle, “I’ll be ready to intercede just in case. It looks like it should be a low tier three at most, but take it slow just in case.”

Niko clucked the affirmative as Skye gave him a pat on the back, then drew three arrows in her fist and knocked them. He prowled forwards, still not using any of his patterns as of yet. Niko knew that, to a very limited extent, everything could detect essence. Generally, it was a vague sense and relied on the senses the being already had. That was why the others were able to tell, at least broadly, what tier something was. It became harder to do so if what they were looking at was concealing themselves from an observer's senses, which Niko supposed was obvious. You couldn’t tell the tier of something you didn’t even know was there, afterall.

His Aether Sight was a major cheat for a lot of things, but he still had to find the source of any essence he might see. If he didn’t actually search for things, he’d be lucky to find anything. At this moment, with the essence concealing potion still in effect, Niko wasn’t using said pattern.

But, he did have something he wanted to try out on the thing.

In a bit of whimsy, Niko decided to ‘carefully’ trot forwards, especially playing up the image of a large bird prowling about looking for something to make a meal of. With smooth motions, but not at all concealed, Niko pretended to be every bit the bold and overly cocky kind of predator that wouldn’t suspect being attacked.

What he didn’t quite expect was how quickly he’d heard Skye’s bow twang as she fired arrows. ‘Welp, that thing didn’t waste any time.’ He thought to himself, but didn’t dare treat the creature flippantly. Even so, this was an opportunity.

Niko flared his Wyldstrider pattern to full power, along with his Sharp Strike pattern. The essence concealing potion that had thus far tightly suppressed essence to his skin like a soap bubble exploded outwards. Even as he felt the wave of essence burst outwards from him, he dodged backwards, pushing hard with his legs. The bat-like creature had crossed half of the distance already, and two arrows protruded from its back. Niko took in the sight in the instant he had, noting that its swoop was unsteady, and that it was – in spite of being a monster – suddenly alarmed at the apparent surge in essence.

‘That’s good to know,’ He nodded to himself, test complete. The ‘bubble’ exploding would make them appear to be much stronger for a moment than they were. To Niko’s Aether Sight, his essence was suddenly expanding outwards like a soda-can being ruptured. The creature’s wings were tilting to flee, but Niko’s lungs had already filled with air with percussive sound.

With a sonic blast from his Carrion Call pattern, the bat was stunned, just enough that it hurtled downwards, its broad wings twitching out of control.

With a cheer at the success of the maneuver, Niko prepared to pounce on the creature.

Only for a blast of wind to buffet the area around the bat, forcing Niko to instead steady his footing to keep from being knocked away. A surge of essence was interwoven into the winds, trailing from the wings of the bat monster. Niko scoffed at that, realizing that even with it being discombobulated, it still somehow managed to blast itself upwards, rather than sending itself careening into the trees at high speed.

It sped upwards, the pattern in its wings deactivating, while Niko begrudgingly accepted that it’d reacted both well and quickly. The creature seemed to be making all due speed in escaping, before it slowed, realizing that it wasn’t under duress any longer. Screeching its outrage, it flew in a tight pattern, eyeing the Phorus from high above with confusion.

Niko could almost guess at its thought process. It couldn’t see any other enemies, but it had very clearly been attacked by something else mid-strike. On top of that, the bird itself had burst forth with immense power, such that its thoughts were less on ‘fighting back’ and more about ‘fleeing from the very strong predator’. Now, it seemed to be searching the area for any sign of the other thing that had hurt it.

What he didn’t know was whether it was the presence, or absence, of any kind of intelligence that had it stick around. Fleeing outright would have been wiser.

Instead, another burst of essence resounded through the trees, and the bat thing shrieked in alarm as it searched for the newest target.

‘Too bad,’ Niko thought as he fired another barrage of his Carrion Call, honing it for distance. The bat thing flinched, just as it noticed an arrow cutting through the air towards it. Essence built in its wings instantly, and wind surged around it, but the empowered shot was already too close to be knocked off course by any wide margin.

The arrow was buried in its chest, but not at a location that Niko marked as imminently fatal.

What was imminently fatal, however, was the scintillating blue potion tied to the shaft of the arrow as it suddenly activated. The temperature plummeted as the bat thing was consumed amidst a shower of frost. Screeching in pain and shock, it flailed in the air, losing air immediately.

Niko pushed his thoughts across the mind-bridge to Skye, “Its wings have wind-patterns, haven’t found any others though.”

He imagined Skye grinned as she sent back, “Understood.”

A second later, the falling bat was pierced again on one wing, an arrow managing to hit the joint where it connected to the rest of the body. Niko winced at that involuntarily – while he hadn’t really gotten to fly, he knew how much wing injuries hurt – and watched as Skye fired another arrow. This one only tore through the fabric of the wing, but given how much of a freefall the thing was in, Niko didn’t imagine that mattered all that much.

It spiraled and slammed into the tree trunk above Niko hard, before it tried, and failed, to grab onto the bark. Niko tensed, preparing to leap at the thing as it got lower. He hesitated as it got into range, though, sensing a new pattern activate, albeit without detail.

A piercing shriek belted out from the bat’s fanged maw, a stream of noise and pressure that actually damaged the bark of the tree near it, and even from farther out, stripped leaves from the short, stocky branches it happened to hit. Niko braced himself, turning into a smaller target, and pushed more energy into his Wyldstrider pattern. Instead of catching the thing in midair, he waited until the moment before it slammed into the tree.

‘Now!’ He struck forth, the bat barely managing to keep screeching even as it hit the bark. It must have kept track of him, at least generally, because it was already trying to pivot its head towards where it knew he was. Unfortunately for the bat, Niko was upon it before it could do so, and with his Sharp Strike pattern, he cut into its neck and damaged the pattern it was using through its flesh.

It snarled, and Niko did his best to keep his sharp beak in the wound, cutting it wider. Broad wings snapped up around him in an embrace, albeit one of them struggled to amount any kind of pressure. That was good, considering its many clawed legs on its front were desperately scrabbling against his feathers in an attempt to cut into him. Niko leveraged his superior weight, controlling his essence to reinforce his feathers as much as he could. Even so, he still felt the claws as they cut into him. Niko then counted himself fortunate that the bat didn’t have a pattern for empowering its limbs.

Instead, a third pattern in its head lit up, along its jaw. Unfortunately, it couldn’t use it to any effect, with Niko altering his bite to keep cutting into its neck. Stubbornly, it refused to die, and Niko reminded himself that the horrific damage he was doing to it wasn’t actually enough to outright kill anything in the third tier of essence. Even with that, though, it eventually stopped thrashing as wildly, and by the time it had managed to cut into Niko’s flank, it was already too weak to do much more.

A wash of essence poured outwards from it, and Niko stood and relished the sensation. Naturally, a portion would go to those around the expired being, and a larger portion would escape into the environment. Niko secured that amount of essence for himself, pulling it into the depths of his pseudo-body and his soul. He was making great progress, but was beginning to think that it would take him a great deal more essence than others in order to progress. Considering just how much he had to fuel, with two blessings and four essence patterns at tier two, he wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

‘Maybe a little put out, I’ll admit, but not surprised.’ Niko chirped to himself and stretched, before turning his attention to the Wyldwalkers who now approached.

“Well, that thing was durable. Tier three, too, but on the low end.” Helpfully, Niko added, “And it tastes pretty good. A little bit like chicken.”

“Lotta drumsticks on that thing, eh Drumstick?” Dachna commented, idly looking over the many sets of clawed legs it had.

Niko cawed at him, “Good thing you’re helping harvest it.”

Dachna sighed with clear dramatic embellishment, “Alas, my work is never done.”

“Nope,” Mithel snorted, before more seriously adding, “We’re going to pick this one clean. I’ll bet those wings have alchemical uses, for sure.”

“They were the source of the wind manipulation,” Skye nodded to Niko, “Any other spots?”

“Yeah, something in its lower jaw and it was using its neck for that sonic attack. Honestly, this thing would be pretty mean if we didn’t get the drop on it.” Niko nudged one of its many claws with his beak, before the adrenaline began wearing off and he started to feel all the cuts more.

“Here, let's get you cleaned up before anything else.” Mithel gestured for Niko to come over, and Skye started with the process of cleaning up his wounds. The gnome pulled out a small clear liquid and put a drop or two in each of the cuts, where they rapidly turned red and melted into the injury.

“No poison or parasites,” Mithel commented, leaving Niko briefly dreading the day when that showed a positive for either option, but especially parasites.

General medical care came after, though that only took the form of a new potion she brewed that rapidly helped the blood coagulate, and dimmed the pain. It felt itchy briefly, too, but that also went away.

“Is that a kind of healing potion?” Skye asked with surprise.

“Kind of, it’s only really good for the external stuff. The Thimurge actually have components that help with sealing injuries and acting as a general melder. These things would be worth a lot more money out in the wider world with alchemists.” Mithel happily supplied the answer, with the group nodding too even as Ronald and Dachna helped to prep the body, taking and fieldstripping it of everything it was worth.

Just the fact that the Thimurge were valuable for healing potions, even if only an external one, would make the titanwood intensely popular for adventurers visiting from Greenleaf. Niko supposed that Riizen wouldn’t have issues with finding enough people to clear out the insects for much longer.

Mithel moved on to the body of the bat-like creature, inspecting it with a combination of her knowledge and a few different solutions that she used to give additional insight. Niko wasn’t certain exactly what the solutions she used were, beyond giving her some kind of color and luminescent feedback depending on what they were reacting to. Given Mithel’s pattern, the diagnostic solutions she used were far quite potent and customizable.

“Huh, it’s got really small eyes.” Mithel commented, “I mean, I guess it’s a bat…”

“That’s a myth, actually,” Skye quipped, “Bats have perfectly good vision. But, this one does have weirdly small eyes.”

He hadn’t really noticed it before, but now that Mithel pointed it out, the thing did have very small eyes. “Huh… so did it not actually even see me?”

The alchemist hummed as she took another dropper of chemical out and carefully flexed her pattern. Unlike with the others, she seemed to be capable of using it without bursting her incognito potion’s effects.

After a few seconds, she shook her head, “Well, this one is near blind. It probably saw movement, but relied on hearing. Guess that’s why it couldn’t really find Skye even after she shot at it.”

Dachna frowned, “Why is something like this up here? Wouldn’t this be better suited to the lower canopies?”

No one had any real answer for that, just guesses. Without knowing more about the creature, they couldn’t really guesstimate with any reasonable accuracy.

“Well, in any case, I’ll get started. There’s a lot of useful stuff on this thing.” Mithel shrugged before happily pulling on long leather gloves and pulling out an ensemble of harvesting tools that still reminded Niko of a horror movie prop set.

“Right, guess that’s our cue.” Ronald stated before moving over with Dachna and pulling on additional sets of gloves. “Make sure to test the meat for undesirables, it’s lunchtime anyways.”