Penn tried not to breathe. he had been crawling through a bush after his target and stepped on a twig that he didn't see under the grass.
He stopped after he realized his mistake and stayed perfectly still.
Penn is only about five and a half feet tall, so he can squeeze into places like this pretty easily.
Right now he was entirely focused on his target. after a moment he realized it didn't seem to have noticed him, and he started breathing again.
Fortunately it doesn't seem like it can hear as well as some of the creatures he has encountered. Penn wouldn't stand a chance in a fight against this thing.
Penn took a deep breathe, ran his hand through his think, untamed black hair, and pulled out a tube of paper out of his bag.
Paper is expensive so he was very careful as he unrolled a sheet and brought out his pen.
He had been following the beast for three days now and he was exhausted, running out of food and getting further from home than he wanted to be. all he had left in his satchel was a few pieces of hard bread and some soft cheese his sister had brought him from the farm.
Penn got back to drawing the beast, it was a big angry looking buck, he hadn't seen such a well developed mutation before, its horns looked like knives and its entire body was plated in bones the color of fallen leaves.
it was able hide in its environment very well and Penn had almost lost it a few times. It didn't really need it though, Penn had set a trap in a passage near home and dropped a huge rock on it and it barely seemed to notice, it walked through the pass and kept grazing through the nearby forest.
The buck suddenly lifted its head and looked to its right, Penn heard a noise that way past the buck, it was a squirrel chattering at the buck. It didn't seem very happy to see it. Food is hard to come by these days especially outside the forts.
Penn hadn't been sure the first time he saw bit now he was. There was a gap in its armour!
The gap was maybe as big as two of his fingers together and he was only able to see it when the bucks right foot was forward and its neck was turned to the right.
He couldn't believe how lucky that was. not only was! There was a flaw big enough to get something in there but it was in a vital location. this information would sell for a great price at the market!
When the bones went through their second mutation it also bound them to a location, in this case the big buck didn't seem to be able to leave the area around this forest and the nearby valley.
Penn had taken the time to map out the area pretty thoroughly because he might have to sell the information to the nobles, they were the only ones who could pierce through the Bones's thick armour.
Penn didn't really like selling to the nobles if he could help it, the hunters at the fort were his freinds and he brought them alot of business, but big animals like this never had such conveniant weak spots.
The problem was that the hunters probably couldn't afford what he could get from a noble for a creature like this one, it had the durable outer plating that they call hard bones and the scary looking antlers that they call sharp bones.
It's not unheard of for animals like this to develop Sharps in thier second mutation but its a deer and normally creatures need to eat the marrow of another animal in order to go through thier second mutation.
Penn was very confused how this happened, deer are herbivores and without those Sharp's it would never have been able to break the armour of another creature.
Any of the Bones seemed to be hungry for the marrow of other Bones. If they could manage to break the bones of the another creature and eat the marrow inside it could eventually get stronger.
Getting stronger was a process and every creature was born with Hards on its body in recent days but not every creature could break open the Hard and consume the marrow, in fact it was pretty rare. The mutations seemed to be making the Bones's Hard bones harder with every generation.
Humans could eat the marrow of Bones too but it affected them differently. Humans didn't mutate and they never grew the Bones that creatures would, instead humans potential increased.
They could train thier bodys to increase thier strength, speed, toughness, thier eyesight and sense of smell, even thier capacity to learn could be increased by eating marrow. if it wasn't so hard to break Bones the accident that caused this could let humans take over the world.
Instead the only ones who really benefited are the nobles who could afford the information about animals that would be easy to kill, many young people made thier living tracking creatures and selling information to hunting party's in the forts.
Thats what Penn was doing when he found this buck.