he sun was already halfway into the sky, Dominic decided to take a nap as soon as possible. He didn't feel comfortable doing it too close to the forest given the inhabitants he'd already encountered, but he found a nice stand of shady trees. Not a species either he or Leo recognised, but given how many different places seemed to have been smashed together, that didn't seem like too much of a surprise.
Resting underneath it, he catnapped the heat of the day away, coming back to full awareness when the sun was already halfway on its downward trend. It was amazing how much less sleep he needed since the System had come in – as a human or as a lion.
Dominic the human had needed at least eight hours per night, where Leo the lion had usually slept most of the day away and then gone hunting during the night. These days, he was lucky to get four or five hours in a twenty-four hour period. Usually less. It must be a function of the System. Perhaps stamina replenishes more easily now? he wondered as he stretched and yawned widely.
Shaking out his fur, he quickly checked his status, in particular his stamina.
Stamina Points: 170/170
Good, he thought. My maximum is back up to 170 SP. Proof, if he needed it, that sleep was still necessary.
He scented the wind, wanting to verify which direction he needed to move in. Catching the hint of water, he set off, padding quietly through the shoulder-high grass. The grass was different too, though it was similar in both colour and the way it moved in the wind. Dominic couldn't really put his finger on how he knew it was different, but guessed it was something about the shape which was subtly wrong from what Leo was familiar with.
He was getting used to those kinds of oddities, though. Compared to the forest he'd been walking through recently, these differences were almost unnoticeable. Speaking of the forest, Dominic was surprisingly glad to be out of it: although it had been cooler under the trees, the lack of sightlines and the enclosed feeling of the spaces had made him more nervous than he had thought. It was only now that he was back on the savannah that he realised how tense he had been, now he could relax a bit.
For a while, he saw very little. The animals which he did see – some unfamiliar type of deer which looked more like they should be at home in a European forest than an African savannah – darted away quickly. He didn't bother chasing them: he had better prey in mind.
At some point as he headed into the wind, towards the tempting smell of water, Dominic suddenly felt his hackles rise. He slowed, tensing as he tried to work out what had tripped his – or rather, Leo's – instincts. A careful gaze around revealed nothing, but he had spent too long as the hunter to trust his eyes completely.
He sniffed the wind again, but there were too many unfamiliar scents in it for him to identify if any were a threat. Next, he checked in with his ears, turning them this way and that, but nothing met them except the normal sounds of the breeze rustling the grass.
'Perhaps I'm imagining it?' Dominic said to Leo, though honestly, he didn't believe the words themselves.
'Something is watching us,' Leo responded firmly. 'Though whether that means we are being hunted or measured as to whether we are a threat, I cannot tell.'
'Alright,' Dominic replied. Good to have Leo's confirmation that Dominic wasn't going mad, the recent enhancement to his brain having side-effects of paranoia or something. Or maybe it was, and it was affecting both of them. That seemed less likely than them being under threat, though.
Without having any idea about where the threat might be, or what it might do, or even if there was a threat, Dominic could only see continuing forwards as an option. Though, just in case he was having his first encounter with humans, he did choose to divert around the area just ahead. While he couldn't see any hint of a trap, he'd rather be safe than sorry.
As he headed warily through the grass, he heard a sudden rustle behind him.
Tense muscles suddenly exploding with power, he leapt sideways almost without thinking. His reaction was as quick as it had been in the dungeon when the temple door swung shut, but this time his brain was also working a little faster and could mostly keep up.
By the time he had regained his feet and twisted around to see what he had narrowly avoided, his mind was completely caught up with recent events. When he saw what had attacked him, however, he almost had a double-take.
A tiger?
That was all he had time to think before the creature was leaping at him, claws and teeth bared.
Though Leo's instincts were urging him to meet the big feline with his own claws and teeth, Dominic had a different strategy in mind. Activating Quick Strike, he once more leapt to the side, covering more ground than the tiger would have expected.
Using his momentum, he twisted and leaped back, his teeth and claws striking the tiger just ahead of its hip joint, digging into the hindquarters of the tiger. Blood filled his mouth and Crushing Bite enhanced his attack, his teeth digging deeply into the tiger's flesh. Clearly, its enhancements had been to its size and speed as there didn't seem to be much resistance to his attack.
The tiger roared in pain and tried to strike at Dominic in return. The lion just kept shifting his hindquarters out of the tiger's reach and clung on.
Pre-System, a lone lion against a tiger would have had to have some good luck to win the battle as a tiger was both bigger and heavier than a lion. Plus, as a solitary hunter, it was more used to such battles. A pride of lions, of course, would be a different story.
Post-System, though, it appeared to be mostly based on levels. Dominic had outlevelled every creature he'd come across so far, and he suspected that it remained the case with this tiger. As a result, the tables were turned with the lion being the bigger and heavier in the battle.
If the tiger had succeeded in its ambush and had dealt a fearsome bite to Dominic's back, the battle could have ended then and there. As it was, having failed to catch Dominic unawares, it ended up being the losing party.
The clash ended with less of a bang, more of a whimper, as Dominic clung on and let bloodloss do the work for him. At first the tiger tried frantically to attack him, then it tried just as desperately to pull itself away, and then when that failed, attempted once more to attack him, its efforts no more successful than the first time it had tried.
By that point, its stamina must have been pretty low as it hadn't been long after that it had collapsed to the ground. Only then did Dominic release his grip, though only to shift forwards and bite at the back of its head. Crushing Bite at +40% was enough to snap right through the tiger's spinal cord and the notification soon after announced his hunter's death.
[You have killed Bengal Tiger (Half-step Evolved Beast level 7)]
[You have earned 69 PP]
Almost as much as the scrin, Dominic thought with a little surprise, remembering the battle with the hyena-gorilla hybrid. When he compared the difficulty of the battles, though, there was no contest.
Although he had had the health potion in his inventory, without it or a level up, he might easily have died during the fight with the scrin. Here, one attack and the tiger had been pretty much done.
'That may say less about our opponents than it does about us and our fighting style,' Leo remarked.
'But I've barely enhanced anything about my combat potential in the level-ups since,' Dominic objected.
'You chose to enhance both Strike and Brain. The enhancement to our processing speed may have given us the edge in this fight, allowing you to strike at the enemy before it could react, and the enhancement to Strike added to the damage our bite caused. Not to mention the additional damage of Crushing Bite which we didn't have against the scrin,' Leo pointed out.
'And I suppose that it was a different kind of opponent,' Dominic added onto Leo's thoughts. 'The scrin had a massive health pool and strong defence. This tiger was more like our own style: fast and powerful but with less defence.' He considered it for a moment. 'It would probably have been quite a different story if we'd met it the way you wanted to – tooth to tooth and claw to claw. I bet it has abilities which enhance its attacks the way I do.'
'Yes, well,' Leo growled, sounding a little embarrassed. 'It was a large feline. How else should I meet it?' Dominic didn't dignify that with an answer: his point had been rather well proven by how relatively easy the battle had been. Still, he decided not to josh his companion too much: Leo had far more dirt on him than he had on Leo.
'It's a good demonstration of the weaknesses of our style here. Perhaps we should consider investing more in defence when we level up next.'
'A mane is an excellent defence for our neck and chest area,' Leo pointed out hopefully. Dominic huffed in amusement.
'How did I know you were going to say that?' Turning his attention back to the tiger, he considered the sorry carcass of the magnificent creature. What is a tiger doing here anyway? Aren't they supposed to be in India? Then again, kangaroos were supposed to be in Australia, and resorels, scrins, and kesh were supposed to be wherever they originated from too. Clearly this was a result of the combination of the different planets.
Maybe he'd wandered into a section of savannah which had originally been part of India. Dominic hoped not: if he had, he was less likely to find what he hoped to near the water. He'd still investigate.
Touching the sorry-looking corpse at his feet, he hesitated. Take away the stripes and add in a mane and it could easily have been a lion. Had he been just a little slower, it could have been him lying limp on the savannah earth. He'd been far more at risk with the wolf-things in the forest, but this brought the potential of his death home to him in a way that they hadn't. I need to keep getting stronger, he told himself, unable to prevent feeling a little tired at the thought. I can't let up or this will be me next.
Consume, he instructed and the body dissolved into golden dust.