Penn finished drawing the creature without any excitement, he rolled up the drawing and put it back into the tube he had in his pack and slowly moved away, the drawing was helpful in alot of ways, for one the hunters could confirm they were looking at the right creature by looking at the drawing.
Penn was very talented so he could show the size of it and where the armour moved against each other, the hunters really highly valued this information it was often the difference between life and death when there was a physical conflict. The Bones could be restricted from moving in certain ways or restrained with a well placed spear between the armour plates.
Now he had everything he needed, he started to head home. He finished the last of his food when he was still a good two days walk from home but he wasn't too worried, there was a nearby steam with clean water.
Penn often went long times without food even when he was at home, food was expensive and it could be hard to come by these days. Most of the Bones hadn't gone through a second mutation but they were still born with the hard armour plating all around thier body and creatures had been breeding long enough now that gaps in armour like he found on the buck were quite rare.
Nobles who had eaten enough marrow and trained themselves enough that they could punch through the Bones's armour were the only ones who could deal with creatures like that, so most creatures lost thier fear of humans and would graze right outside the walls of the forts and even eat any crops that were grown outside.
Most people couldn't do anything about it, if a rabbit wanted to come in and eat all of the crops in the fields it could.
The humans couldn't even hurt them, the rabbits were all so fast they couldn't be caught, they seemed to be smarter too, they always went around any traps that were placed in the fields. rabbits, rats, and mice bred so quickly and thier natural predators had a hard time killing them now.
Humans were having a hard time even growing crops.
Every field that was grown had to be handled in special enclosed buildings attached to the forts. In this world humans had learned to very efficient with their space in farms but there was only so much space they could keep the Bones out of.
Its been three hundred years since the war. Hamish the third had created a war machine. it was a giant trebuchet that could throw great balls of fire over enormous distances, this thing shocked the world.
Humans had just started to refine iron for use in shields and swords and things of that nature. The world wasn't ready for something like the great trebuchet.
It could hurl flaming rocks over city walls and burn down villages without it ever being close enough for them to defend themselves against it.
When Hamish the third attacked a small village on the side of a mountain one of the supports on the trebuchet slipped. It sent the fireball screaming into a nearby glacier, the glacier melted and released a blue colored fog, it spread and it spread and covered the known world in its ghastly haze for 10 years.
The world was covered in a blanket of blue, and people started to notice the creatures of the world gradually changing, they started to mutate. chickens suddenly were covered in tiny plates of bone, the teeth of mice became hard enough to chew through wooden storage crates, farm animals like cows grew plates of armour around there body, sheep wouldn't grow wool where the armour plates were.
At first the Bone plating wasn't very hard, and it didn't grow everywhere, but as the generations went by the armour got harder and harder, and grew around the bodys more consistently until they were covered in perfect sets of impenetrable bone armour.
At the same time metals were growing weak and getting soft, iron sheilds could be peirced through with a wooden spear, a kitchen knife would get dull after cutting through a peice of meat, bronze banding on war chests would stretch and fall apart even the reinforcements on the great trebuchets fell apart.
Humans were back to using stone and wooden tools and animals were getting to a point they would have been difficult to kill even with the iron tools they had just learned to make use of.