Hunting a demon

One month later, in a small nearby settlement.

"I tell you, the white wolf exists, I saw it with my very own eyes" screamed an old man to the crowd in front of him.

A huge crowd had now gathered around one of the elders in the village who seemed to hold higher authority.

"He is twice as tall as a grown man and his length rivals that of the house behind me," he said while pointing at the small clay house behind him that was about seven meters in length. 

"It is now or never, if we continue to allow him to grow, he will eventually eat all of us, from the youngest children to the defenseless elders." Continued the old man with a strong conviction in his eyes, attempting to convince the rest of the villagers to hunt this beast with him.

"And worst of all he is constantly decimating the sacred land of our ancestors, stealing their life stones". The old man had tears in his eyes as he screamed out to the audience, causing them to be riled up in agreement with the elder.

Recently multiple tribulations have hit their village. Firstly, their hunters found less and less prey in the surrounding area and needed the travel further away to find something, and the ones they found were already on high alert, making them difficult to catch, causing the hunters to often be unsuccessful in their hunts.

In recent months, they had only managed to catch a handful of rabbits and other small game, not nearly enough to feed the entire village, causing the food reserves in the village to constantly shrink.

Usually, the food storage would be full at this time of year to prepare for the coming winter, but since they had used large parts of it during the last month due to the unsuccessful hunts, they probably wouldn't make it through the winter if things continued like this.

The other problem was that the sacred stones that they had carefully crafted in respect for their ancestors were constantly disappearing.

Whenever someone in the village died their closest family and friends would chisel a stone into a perfect oval, and then leave it in the hunting grounds.

They did this to tie their souls to the hunting grounds so that they could guide their descendants and be able to hunt there in abundance for all eternity in the afterlife.

It was the largest disrespect to both the settlement and their ancestors to even touch these stones, much less steal them.

Worst of all, their local deity had been stolen. Their local deity was a ruler of weather, that took the shape of a translucent oval rock and made sure that they would have good weather whenever they hunted.

But just like the ancestral stones, it had suddenly disappeared from the hunting fields.

There had been many theories going around the village about why all of this was happening. The most prominent of them was that a demon had wandered to this land, killing all the life that wandered the mortal plane and plagued the spirits that inhabited the spiritual plane.

Because of the sightings of some of the hunters, the village believed that the demon took the form of a huge bloodthirsty white wolf, and a large portion of the village wanted to hunt it down to return the settlement to its usual state.

However, the settlement was split on whether to do so. Some in the village had heard rumors of a small group of deities that wandered around and had a goal to slaughter all demons and wanted to contact them because killing a demon was too dangerous for mortals.

The other group meant that the demon had disrespected their ancestors and that they needed to fix this problem themselves, any other way would only be disrespectful to their ancestors.

But these two groups were mostly made up of the elders of the village who only sat on their asses and discussed this the entire day, doing nothing.

Most of the village just wanted the problem gone, and with this stalemate having lasted for close to two weeks the problem was only growing larger with the amount of prey decreasing by the day.

Realizing that this stalemate was not going to be resolved any time soon, a small group of young hunters that are hungry for acknowledgment decided to go and hunt this demon themselves.

___

In the cave, Lucien found after he had been wounded by the boar, lay a huge white wolf. The wolf seemed to be close to five meters in length and by its size, it seemed like it would reach at least three meters when it stood up on all four.

After eating close to four prey every day for close to a month he had grown at an incredible pace, reaching more than twice the size of a normal wolf. With his current size, he could even dwarf a tiger if he stood next to one.

During this last month, Lucien had slowly fallen into a rhythm where he would limit his hunting to only four prey a day. His proficiency in hunting allowed him to hunt much more, but four seemed to be the limit of what he could take in during a single day. If he ate more than four then the effect of the energy would be reduced substantially, becoming more of a soft massage.

He also realized that over time his mind was getting clearer and clearer, as if the ice was not able to muddle his mind again as fast as he was able to clear it up, creating a hope that one day his mind would be free.

In one of the corners of the cave was a huge mountain of intricately crafted oval-shaped rocks.

During the last month, Lucien had found the perfect way to kill time. He would go out of his cave and search for these oval rocks that he found everywhere in the territory and bring them back to the cave as a hobby.

Over time the mountain of rocks had grown to the point where the mound was now higher than Lucien when he was standing, truly a testament to his ability to waste time.

The most special one of these rocks is stored on the top of the large mound. It is also an oval like the other rocks, but it isn't grey but a translucent light blue color, truly the gem of his collection.

Lucien felt like he could lie there and look at it for days at the end without a care in the world.

But he was going to hunt soon so he threw it to the bottom of the now dirty pond in the back of the cave. He had washed himself in after every hunt causing it to become muddled with dirt and blood.

Whenever he went out of the cave he hid his precious stone somewhere, he did not know why, but it seemed like second nature for him to hide something that he deemed valuable when he was unable to watch it.

When he arrived outside of the cave, he immediately began smelling after prey again. During the last month, it was not only his physical body that grew, but also his senses were strengthened, and now he could smell other animals from almost six kilometers away.

Over the last month, he had also begun marking his territory. At the moment his territory was approximately five kilometers in each direction, and he had removed all other predators within an even larger area.

There had been instances of other predators intruding on his territory, but their lifespan was cut short when they made that decision.

Because of his hunting, the amount of prey in his territory had been reduced significantly and he had begun to venture outside of his territory to hunt.

While doing so he had found a large group of prey about fifteen kilometers away, but his senses were telling him that going for them was a bad idea, and his senses had yet to fail him, so he decided to hunt in the other directions.

During the last few weeks, he needed to travel further and further away from his cave whenever he wanted to hunt to find large enough prey.

Normally he needed to travel about five kilometers away before he usually found the scent of large prey. But his current hunt, he had gone on for almost six without finding a single scent, it was as if someone had gone around and chased away all of the prey.

It took him almost two hours of searching around to find a single scent about four kilometers away. He would be able to cover that distance in only a few minutes with his top speed having increased to about 150km/h.

But there was something else that also managed to get his attention, a bloody scent. The putrid scent of blood had at this time spread all over the forest, and even though it didn't seem to be large prey, free prey is too good of a deal to give up on.

The source of the blood was about eleven kilometers away. He was able to smell blood from more than double the distance that he could smell other animals due to its strong scent and its ability to remain for a longer time.

Knowing that all other predators had been chased away from the nearby area and that the prey was harmed so it probably couldn't move very well Lucien decided to go slowly and not waste his energy needlessly.

Even with his slow speed, he was able to arrive at the source of the scent within half an hour.

He saw a small, wounded rabbit that was bleeding from a small hole in its side. The hole was too small to have been made by a flaw or a tooth and it reached multiple centimeters into the rabbit, causing it to bleed to death.

Seeing the wounded rabbit made a hunger arise within Lucien as he quickly ate it and continued his hunt.

___

About 13 kilometers away, close to Lucien's cave.

"I told you that the wolf would fall for the wounded rabbit," Said one of the young men traveling through the dense forest.

Using a wounded rabbit as bait when the village was already lacking food was a big gamble, but it seemed to be worth it.

All the young men were drenched in some kind of mud that seemed to mask their scents from any sensitive noses.

These young men had come from the village to hunt the wolf demon that caused all the tribulations to their village.

The group consisted of close to fifteen boys in the age group around 16 – 20 years. Everyone in the group carried a spear on their backs while two a bit older also carried nets on their backs. 

"The wolf's cave shouldn't be far from here, from his recent activity he should live in the crevasse in the mountain right ahead." Said the boy that seemed to be the leader of the group.

Alexis, the leader of the group, had scouted the area the last few weeks and found what he believed was the nest of the demon.

Yesterday he managed to convince a large group of hunters to join him in hunting the demon instead of listening to the elders quarrel about it.

The visibility inside of the cave was very bad due to the small opening, but after getting used to the darkness they saw the large mound of rocks in the corner of the cave.

"The ancestral rocks" exclaimed one of the boys as he pointed to the mound in the corner.

Seeing the mound of rocks Alexis ordered eight of the boys to carry them back to the village while the rest of them stayed to put up the net.

Bringing fifteen hunters was overkill, so he decided to send five of them back to the village with the ancestral stones to show off that his plan worked.

Alexis had never gotten close enough to see the wolf with his own two eyes, but from the tracks and the sound of it walking he assumed it was about 1.4 times the size of a normal wolf, believing his analysis over the elders, and that killing it would be a breeze with ten hunters.

He planned to have two of the boys stand by the entrance of the cave and throw the net over the wolf when he came back. After that, the rest of the hunters would hold the net down and stab him with the spears until it died.

Having prepared everything for his foolproof plan, all he needed to do was wait.