The hunter hummed to himself as we walked, not afraid of making noise. Noise might scare game away, but it was more likely to attract monsters, which was more profitable.
We had been hunting together for a few days already. Willis reliably woke up early and headed out to hunt pre-dawn. In the morning, he’d head away from town, moving through the forest loudly and trying to bait a monster into attacking. After lunch, he’d switch to silent-mode, creeping back towards town like a specter, bagging some game which he exchanged with a butcher in town for his own preserved supplies and a little spare coin.
He was clearly well-practiced at his work and very competent. We never came back empty handed, though it was usually with game rather than monster cores.
Once I figured out his general plan, my contribution was simple: I would kill a rabbit or two for him to bring back, no work on his part. He was a great archer, but even still, he’d sometimes miss and lose arrows, or an arrow would hit something and break. Arrows costed coin, so in the long term, I was earning my keep by saving him some money.
Not that I cost him much, really. He always offered me some jerky, and I always took it—because why wouldn’t I—but mostly I hunted my own meals. In terms of hunting, our partnership didn’t really help me acquire more mass faster, nor acquire mid-sized profiles in the one to ten kilogram range like I had planned.
The dividends this investment paid out was entirely from the potential for me to get monster skills.
In theory, at least. We hadn’t encountered another burroworm, and I was getting antsy about it.
Willis stopped humming, and I felt the tension in his shoulder as he shifted from bait mode to hunter mode. He crouched, tilting his head and listening to the forest sounds which surrounded us.
A branch cracked.
His head shot up, and he drew and nocked an arrow in the span of a second, his eyes tracking across the trees for whatever it was that had set off his alarm.
There, movement. Between the trees. A flash of green. Just a bush?
Willis’s arrow fired into the gap, surprising me. But what surprised me more was the scream and then angry chatter.
I took off, giving Willis more freedom of movement, and climbed into the air to get a better look at what we were hunting.
Shockingly, I saw a trio of small green men fanning out and trying to surround Willis.
What the hell are those? I thought, as I circled in the air above, peering through the canopy.
Willis’s attention was on the central monster, but from the sky I couldn’t tell if he was aware of the ones that were flanking. I tucked my wings and dove, targeting the one on the left.
The monster glanced up just as I reached him. My talons raked across his eyes, probably blinding him, and he screamed in pain and anger. I heard a the telltale sound of a bowstring, and an arrow thunked into the monster’s chest, crimson blossoming from the wound as it hit the ground.
I shot off in the direction the arrow had come from, zipping past a surprised Willis as I raced towards where the other flanking monster had been. In the seconds I had taken to reach the first one, the other one had moved, and I was almost caught by surprise by a branch swung through the air towards me.
Veering out of the way, I quickly arched upwards and circled back to the monster, who was now running for Willis. I dove again, clawing at the back of his bald skull, which caused him to stumble.
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An arrow pounded into his eye socket, and his stumble turned into a fall which he would not be getting up from.
I flapped ahead, returning to Willis just in time to see him sink an arrow into the monster which had reached him from the front. He twisted as the small green man stumbled past him, avoiding a knife to the gut, and he loosed a second arrow into the creature’s back.
Just like that, it was over. Sadly, since I didn’t make the kills, I didn’t get any experience.
“Fucking goblins,” Willis spat, frowning. He glanced around, head half-cocked as he listened, but after a minute he sighed and relaxed his bow arm.
Goblins, huh. I hopped over to the one by Willis’s feet, examining it.
It looked a lot like a green human child, though it was clearly fully grown. It was a bit knobbly of limb with stringy muscles, it was entirely hairless, and it had over-sized facial features; big ears and large eyes, a huge mouth with small sharp teeth inside. Its nose, on the other hand, was tiny and upturned, giving the face a pinched appearance.
“Three of them, too. Might be a nest nearby,” the hunter murmured to himself.
A small humanoid form could be useful, I thought with displeasure. Even if this thing looks… unappetizing, to say the least.
With a mental sigh, I tore off a piece of the goblin’s flesh and ate it.
“Oh, gross,” Willis said, watching me eat.
Gross is right, I agreed internally. Most of what I ate was gross, but I had got used to a lot of it. The goblin, on the other hand, had a distinct funk to it, and a nasty aftertaste.
Still, a man’s got to eat. The reward will be worth it. Hopefully.
profile 5% complete.
I stopped there, my revulsion reaching its limit. I couldn’t eat much more anyway. They seemed to have less total mass than the burroworms, maybe closer to 20kg in weight to what I estimated as 30kg for the giant forest tapeworm. Willis had extracted the three magic stones while I ate, and had left me to it.
“You done?” Willis asked, looking mildly disgusted.
I gave a halfhearted screech of confirmation.
“We should head back immediately and let the guild know.”
I flew up to his shoulder, looking back at the goblin corpse as he walked away.
I’m going to need a profile with a larger and stronger stomach.
The guild took Willis’s report and put up a quest to find the potential local nest. I left Willis in his room and set back out for the forest in search of something new as the skies grew dark.
My largest profile was, but it wasn’t that much bigger than , and overall wasn’t all that well-suited to binge eating as it was naturally a slow grazer. I needed something with a proper belly that could put back a meal.
I tried not to fly around too much at night. Even as a falcon, an owl could be a huge danger to me. Fortunately, I had [Bio Sonar], which let me “see” in the dark much better than a natural falcon.
Using [Bio Sonar] and my unnatural intelligence, I flew through the forest avoiding predators and in search of a potential profile to meet my needs.
After a couple of hours, I found it.
Perfect.
Now I just had to kill it.
I watched the creature, waiting for my chance, and when it started climbing a tree, I plunged towards it.
My first attack blinded the beast, swiftly retreating to avoid getting caught up in its panicked fall. Then I was on it, using [Venomous Bite] repeatedly to sap away its strength.
When it was weak, my talons sliced open its belly, and it collapsed.
(Level 5) defeated. Reduced experience gained.
Thank you for your sacrifice, raccoon. But I need your stomach.
Wild raccoons were exactly in my strike zone for size. This one was probably around 7kg, which would be a significant size upgrade for me. Plus, it has little hands. That’s… handy.
The issue, of course, was that I now had to eat it. Even with half of the mass going into storage, that meant eating three and a half kilos of dead raccoon.
Luckily I had a plan for that.
Something I had discovered when I changed forms: the contents of my stomach disappeared with my old body, absorbed with the returned mass of the transformation. Now that I had multiple profiles I could eat a reasonable amount with—falcon and rat, predominantly—I could simply switch between them whenever I got full and keep eating, refilling my belly and storing half the mass in my storage.
When my mass storage got full, I just needed to shrink into a smaller profile, and throw away the excess mass I couldn’t store, then switch back to the big profile, which cost around a kilogram. That freed up the space to continue eating and sending half of it to storage instead of all to my belly.
Bit by bit, the raccoon in front of me disappeared, until it was nothing but bones. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the capacity to easily eat those as a smaller animal, unless I wanted to spend hours gnawing as a rat.
No, I’ll just find another and eat a bit of that one to finish off the profile.
Transforming back into a falcon, I took off in search of my prey.