part0040

AS SOON AS I WAS DONE binding the chimeric megasaurus in its stupor from the toxic lure, Varya stated in no uncertain terms that she had claim on the creature after its taming. Something to do with the fact that I’d promised her a creeping crocodile, but instead gifted the river beast to my furry girlfriend instead — nowadays it was the veich Rider who controlled Katy and was basically her owner. Varya didn’t want to fall out with her friend and take away her pet. And so, apparently, the only way to fix it was for me to give her this new dinosaur instead of a creeping crocodile. Otherwise I was spineless and my word couldn’t be trusted. Or she was willing to take the kitten instead of the monster. That would suit her even better.

I had no plans to give her Whiskers. I was pretty attached to him. He was my pet from the old world, my good-luck charm. As for the chimeric megasaurus, she could have it; I did feel pretty bad that I hadn’t fulfilled my promise to her. And the level seventeen dinosaur didn’t impress me much — it was too low compared to my other pets’ levels. Some might say Sergeant was getting greedy, but for some reason I was sure I could find a better pet. In the end, I didn’t mind.

But I did point out two obstacles to the Scout. Firstly: we were counting our chickens before they hatched. The giant reptile wasn’t trained yet. I hadn’t tamed any megasauruses before. What if I had trouble? What if I couldn’t tame the beast at all? Secondly: how could I give her the pet if we couldn’t make a trade contract because we didn’t have the Trading skill?

“The answer to the first is simple. This female is emaciated. Look, she’s so skinny, you can see her ribs!” The Scout fearlessly approached the imprisoned predator as it lay on its side. True, I could count all the ribs. “Maybe she’s sick with something, or maybe she lost a fight to a strong enemy and has been recuperating. She’s real hungry. I doubt she’d refuse some pieces of meat or fish.

The female dinosaur really did look skinny and starving. Not necessarily sick; there could be plenty of reasons for being so thin. Maybe she’d shed her skin, or something. Or she’d been protecting a nest of eggs… Incidentally, I’d have to follow up on that theory. The beast’s lair wasn’t far away. I had to visit it and take a look.

“But what about handing the pet over?”

The brunette smiled sadly.

“It’s such a shame to see that you can’t see any other options than a sale, Mr. Businessman… You know you can just GIVE a pet away, right? And you don’t need any complicated contracts or Trading skills to do it!”

I blushed. I hadn’t even thought of that option. I promised to give Varya the pet once it was tamed. Only the megasaurus was stunned, practically asleep. She wouldn’t eat it in this state. And I couldn’t wait; I was already swaying with fatigue, and all I could think of was curling up next to a warm fire to stop shivering. That was why I asked Varya to guard the drunken megasaurus and tell me when the beast woke up. As for me, I planned to build myself a bed not far from where Atlas was rolled up into a ball, to make sure he didn’t wander off when he woke up.

After that, the Scout’s mood changed completely, from dour and frowning to sunny and optimistic. Her face lit up with joy and surprise.

“So you tamed it after all! I have to admit, I thought you dropped it and ran when the megasaurus appeared, and that you’d have to start taming the giga-komodo all over again. Sergeant, you know… you’re just amazing!” the Scout said, admiration and excitement inn her voice. For a second it seemed like the girl wanted to kiss me, she seemed so overloaded with emotion. But Varya held off and answered more officially. “My father will be very grateful for your support in the village!”

“Get up, bro! Varya told me to tell you that the chimeric megasaurus is awake and eating her way through chunks of meat. Only the taming process won’t start.”

“I’ll say!” I laughed, yawning and covering my mouth with my hand. “The player has to have the Taming skill for that. And for such a big strong beast, the skill would have to be way above level one. We’ll be lucky if my skill is up to it. And on that subject…”

Opening Sergeant’s skill page, I spent all twenty-two free points on Taming, increasing my most important Beast Catcher skill to level fifty-five. That was a big relief.

I stood up from the bed of luxurious soft grass that I’d made for myself that morning. My fire had long since gone out, and there was no need of it anyway now — the sun was at its peak and scorching hot. The morning had driven away all signs of cold and damp. Atlas, Herd Bull of the giga-komodos, was still asleep, rolled up into a big purple-and-black ball. He must have gotten exhausted after all from racing around that pole for so many hours, if he hadn’t recovered yet.

Katy and Tick-Tock sunbathed on the bank just a few paces from my bed as if nothing was amiss. Where were the creeping crocodiles last night, when I needed them? A mystery. Incidentally, one of the river pets had dragged a huge rainbow carp out of the river and set it down a yard from my bed. It must have weighed around twenty pounds. Apparently, it was a gift for their master. I thanked my pets, grabbed the still slightly twitching fish, stuffed my backpack full of roasted and raw chunks of meat and headed to find Varya.

“Look,” the girl pointed at the massive female megasaurus as she tried to rise.

In the bright daylight, what had looked like a misty fur on the dinosaur looked perfectly normal — fairly sparse spines around sixteen inches long. Dark brown, almost black. But the main thing was that there was no magic left, none of the wreathing fog that had made me want to look away. It seemed that camouflaging magic worked only at night. If so, that meant the chimeric megasaurus was a nocturnal predator.

I approached carefully, fearing that the animal would sweep my feet out from under me with its long tail any second. I walked up to the gigantic beast from behind and twice cast Calming Touch on it, to quiet the beast’s struggles and stop its fruitless attempts to stand up on its wire-bound legs. Then I walked in a semi-circle around the megasaurus, made sure the dangerous creature was watching me, and threw the heavy rainbow carp to it. Wham! Like lightning, the long neck whipped out and the monster’s fearsome jaws snapped shut in the air. One barely noticeable gulp and the fish was gone.

Woah! My heart started thumping in my chest. I realized too late that it wasn’t just the monster’s long tail that I needed to pay attention to. Even lying on its side, the beast had more than enough neck for its tooth-filled jaw to reach me or Varya with the kitten sitting on her shoulder.

We were getting somewhere! Quickly, before the beast realized that it could add some variety to its diet by eating the humans before it, I started throwing it chunks of raw and cooked fish and meat one after another. I didn’t notice that any food was more effective than another — the starving beast greedily gulped it all down the same. It seemed more like the taming bar depended on the size of the piece; the bigger the portion, the more the bar filled up. A two-pound chunk added 1.1-1.5 percent, a three-and-a half-pound chunk around 2-2.3 percent. Even the pieces Varya threw filled up the taming bar. Awesome! That meant one of us would have to go off and look for seconds, since this giant would eat through what we’d brought pretty quickly.

I went myself, grabbing everything left on the river bank from yesterday’s rich catch. I even sent both creeping crocodiles to catch more fish. I was worried we still wouldn’t have enough. At our nighttime camp, Julie and Shelly were cooking fish soup over a campfire. The veich girl had added some roots and herbs taken from the forest. It smelled great, and the girls invite me to try it, but I couldn’t hang around. I hurried back to keep taming the chimeric megasaurus. My Sprinter level went up to twelve from the run there and back.

We had just barely enough food. By the time the taming bar hit a hundred percent, all the cooked food in Varya’s backpack was gone, and I’d spent the last chunks I’d brought. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we did it!

My character didn’t level up, and in any case, the system only awarded miserly experience for taming the level 17 chimeric megasaurus. Without further delay, I tried to gift the new pet to the Engineer’s daughter. It worked without a hitch. A second later, the new beast’s name changed:

We returned to Pan’s Landing at dusk, now a happy and noisy crowd. Shelly and I were on the creeping crocodiles, my sister Julie was on the giga-komodo Atlas, and Varya rode her new pet Irosaurus Regina. The Scout’s chosen name seemed weird to me. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. She said something about the Greek roots of ‘tyrant’ and ‘hero’ that I didn’t quite understand. In any case, the Engineer’s daughter liked this name for the nocturnal reptile, and it was her pet, her choice. The creeping crocodiles swam along the river while the giga-komodo and the megasaurus trampled along on the bank, keeping us within sight at all times. We joked, laughed and made fun of each other, and we were all in high spirits. We had reason.

We’d managed to complete Max Dubovitsky’s difficult mission and brought a strong pack animal back to the village. And what a pack animal! The true pride of the giga-komodos, huge and tireless, a level ninety-three Herd Bull! And it didn’t stop there; we’d also brought a new defender with razor-sharp teeth. She’d come in handy against the night beasts. Varya was already planning on how she could help Grip on the back of her mighty and fast dinosaur pet.

But even that wasn’t all we’d done that day. We’d also collected food for all the villagers at Pan’s Landing. And in addition, I followed the creature’s giant footprints imprinted into the wet ground back to the giant creature’s lair in the woods. Covered in tree trunks torn out by the roots and piles of earth. A huge impassable mass of vegetation. It would have taken inhuman strength to move aside the heavy logs and get in. It took quite some time to find a ‘back door’ in the form of a narrow passageway between the roots. Even that wasn’t easy to squeeze through.

Turned out I was right — the young female was exhausted because she’d been protecting her clutch of eggs day and night. Three large bluish-gray leathery eggs covered in black spots lay in a warm nest of earth and leaves. Each weighed at least forty pounds. At least five more eggs had been eaten by some small and courageous predators that had found their way in, and a long time ago — nothing remained of the eggs but their dried-out skins. As carefully as I could, I took the three whole eggs out of the lair, put them in some durable bags with soft grass as padding and then attached them to the saddle Varya had made for her pet. The razortoothed mother watched us work anxiously, but didn’t prevent us from relocating her nest to a safer place.

Now, with gawping villagers streaming out to meet us, we crossed onto the island. Part of me was afraid of admonishment from Max Dubovitsky regarding the long absence, and especially the fact that I’d taken his wounded daughter with me. It turned out the Engineer had other things to worry about — he greeted me and exchanged a couple of words with Varya, then went back to the common house to talk to some new settlers that had arrived. There were so many of them, fifteen at least. And they weren’t noobs in the usual sense — they were all at least level thirty, even the eighteen-year-old boy that fearlessly circled the beasts we’d brought in. Who were these people? What was happening?

The Philosopher answered me, looking pathetic next to the other villagers at his humble level eleven.

“The Pharaoh gave freedom to the three hundred slaves on the condition that they would resettle beyond the snowy mountains and inhabit the abandoned veich villages. And it wasn’t presented as a choice. Without explaining anything, they drove them out of the fields and mines, loaded them into covered carts and brought them to the snowy pass under guard. Only then did they read out the Pharaoh’s order and declare that they were all free from now on. They took off their slave collars and chase them eastwards with spears and clubs, towards us. Far from all of them wanted to be free under those conditions. Many had left friends and family behind. But those that tried to resist were beaten to death, then met at the nearest respawn point and beaten to death again. They were told they had to go east or face permadeath. And here was the result…

I didn’t even know what to think of it. In the meantime, the Philosopher told me more:

“That isn’t all the news, Sergeant. Once they learned from the new arrivals that the veichs had gone beyond the barrier, many of our people refused to obey Grip and Max. They gathered their things and went off to Orshi-Ur. They declared Rumbler as their new leader.