Chp.28: Time to start the plan

Over the next week, the young dragons made many changes in their usual behavior. Instead of spending their time playing, lounging and having fun, their main occupation had now become hunting.

Now that the dangers of the outside world were known to everyone, each of them agreed that they absolutely need to prepare themselves for the time when they would have had to abandon their mother's protection. Since they didn't have much time, they had to use the few weeks left to learn how to hunt flawlessly, hide their tracks and get as much food as possible.

The first two steps were easy to accomplish. As Haku had ascertained several times, dragons learned quickly; within three days all of them had learned the basic techniques of hunting and had become capable of hunting in groups. They were so skilled that after only two more days they could already split into several large groups to attack different prey. Haku was satisfied with that; though his dragon pride was a little hurt because his brothers didn't depend so much on his leadership, he was glad that the dragons could fend for themselves. That way, even if something would happened to him, they could still survive.

The third step, that is find enough food, was more problematic. 7,000 tons wasn't a small amount after all.

The little dragons knew that trying to get so much food was a difficult feat, but unfortunately the plan proposed by Haku was the only one they had. As much as some of them had tried to find further ways forward, they had soon had to give up. Even though some of them existed, Haku's one was still the safest. And anyway, no matter what plan they followed, they would still need a large number of supplies. They couldn't hunt indiscriminately out of the valley, or they would attract the attention of newcomers. They needed a strategy, and Haku's one was the best one to follow.

So, by mutual agreement, the little dragons had chosen to leave the coordination of their future actions to Haku, at least temporarily. Since he had devised the plan, he surely had more time to think about how to obtain and handle large quantities of food.

And Haku indeed had some ideas. To begin with, he and his siblings already had a large amount of meat at their disposal, more than a seventh of the amount they needed: the bodies of the two dragons, their father and the dragon who died in the forest!

Haku estimated that their father's dead body must have a body mass of at least 400 tons. Since dragons wasted nothing and digested everything (skin, bones, organs... every part of the body), they could feed on the whole corpse. And that was just the body of their father, but the body of the other dragon that died in the forest was much larger and more nutritious: even if the head and part of the neck had already been eaten by Neytiri, the rest must still weigh at least 900 tons.

Basically, the little dragons already had 1,300 of the 7,000 tons needed for their journey! Remembering Ethan's calculations, Haku knew that this amount of food was enough to sustain him and his siblings for nearly five years!

The only thing they had to do was preserve the two bodies. Unfortunately, here was when the first problems arose. Haku, of course, wanted to use the dimensional bag to be able to take their food with them; using the refrigerator he could keep the meat fresh and therefore he wouldn't have had to worry about its decomposition. So he went and dug up the bag and showed it to his siblings; after which all of them together had tried to use it. Luckily their mother had cut up their father's body, or they would never have been able to lift it up and put it in the bag. But cut into pieces it was doable.

The dimensional bag was prodigious. It didn't matter how big the dragon's pieces were: once they touched the tip of the bag, they got smaller. The little dragons managed to put both wings and part of the right front leg inside. Unfortunately, however, that turned out to be the maximum that the bag could contain. Even Kalos' individual body parts were vastly larger than anything Haku had ever placed in the bag, including Ethan's dead body; even at their smallest size they took up a lot of space. Making a quick estimate, Haku had determined that the limit that the bag could contain should be about 50 tons.

However, he had expected it and already had a plan to resolve that problem. All they had to do was get more dimensional bags, and luckily thanks to Ethan Haku knew exactly how: they would have gotten them from the ogres.

Thanks to his first conversation with Ethan, Haku had already discovered the location of the valley exit and the geopolitical structure of the forest that lay beyond it; with this information he could already could have gotten many benefits. However, after he had killed Ethan he had gained an even greater amount of knowledge from that human's diary. Haku had read and studied it carefully and thanks to it he had been able to perfectly plan his next moves; after all that was the diary of a spy and those notes would have been destined for war purposes, therefore Haku could obtain from them an infinite number of valuable information regarding his enemies in the immediate future, namely the fairies and the ogres.

For now, the ogres were the ones that interested him, since they were easier to outwit than the faeries. From Ethan's diary he had discovered that they were large humanoid creatures at least three meters tall, with two long curved tusks extending from their lower jaw and three horns on their head; they had red skin that looked almost covered in scales, and bony protrusions emerged from their shoulders. Their muscles were quite evident and their appearance would make anyone run away with their tails between his legs.

However, despite their menacing appearance, they weren't very strong, at least if they were compared to other powerhouses in larger, more civilized nations. Most ogres ranged in strength from level iron to level silver, with a few exceptions of stronger warriors. They also didn't have many mages among them, since they were a real caste and they personally chose their successor to whom they passed on their knowledge, so unless someone found a way to learn magic on their own they had no way of become a mage. That means that ogres lacked of many potions, magical objects, or other things related to magic. However, since both the dimensional bags and the refrigerators were easy to make and were very useful, they were very common among ogres; that was all Haku cared about.

Haku knew he had to put his plan into action as soon as possible, so as to obtain at least the number of dimensional bags necessary to contain the bodies of the two dead dragons and all the possible prey that he and his siblings would have hunted in the future. Since they had to store 7,000 tons of meat, 140 dimensional bags were needed to hold them all. They also would have had to source enough refrigerators to freeze that meat, and since each refrigerator had a maximum life of three years, more than 500 were needed. While sourcing such a quantity of materials wasn't easy, it was possible. And Haku knew exactly how to do it. He would have gotten them and at the same time he would have caused a conflict between the ogres and the fairies, as he had planned long ago, so that both of them wouldn't have noticed him and his siblings when they had to move to their forest in the future.

However, before he could implement his plan he had to make sure his siblings were ready; for this he had subjected all of them to a full week of 'training', to make sure they learned to be stealthy, quick and precise. Since they'd be facing opponents who weren't weak and they couldn't afford to leave witnesses, precision was everything. So for a week the little dragons did nothing but hunt and refine their strategies. Any prey they managed to catch ended up in the dimensional bag, which was again emptied, and stored with the refrigerator; after all, Haku had already ascertained that the bodies of dragons degrade very slowly due to their very hard scales, so they could leave the two gigantic corpses outside the bag for a while longer.

At the end of the week, Haku decided it was time. He couldn't afford to do any more and his siblings had gotten very good at hunt. So it was time to put what they had learned into practice. "Good work. Tomorrow we will start the plan. Get ready; for the first time we will leave the valley" he told them one evening as they were looking at the results of their last hunt.

A murmur spread among his siblings. "Are you sure, brother?" Darbi asked him, doubtful for the first time in a long time.

Haku could understand their feeling. Going out of the valley was something none of his siblings had done yet. In a certain way, even Haku hadn't gotten very far: he hadn't ventured beyond the spot where he killed Ethan, just a little out from the path that led out of the valley. It was a new experience for anyone, and so it frightened his siblings. But they couldn't let fear control their actions, not completely at least. "We have no reason to wait any longer. We don't have infinite time and sooner or later we will have to act. The longer we delay, the more difficult it will be. We have prepared for this and we are ready. Therefore we will act tomorrow"

His siblings were clearly still worried, but none of them objected: after Haku's plan had brought them success the first time, they were hopeful that it could happen again. After all, they had defeated an adult dragon without any preparation; why shouldn't they hold their own against the ogres now that they'd been training for a whole week?

As soon as the next day came and Neytiri dropped them off by the lake again, everyone was ready. Some of Haku's sisters stayed at the lake to distract their mother, who wouldn't have been alarmed if at least one of her children had remained under her gaze; the others however, hidden by the vegetation, headed towards the exit of the valley. Following Haku's directions, they soon reached the path in the mountains and ventured out.

Once they got there, the real hunt, the one they had been preparing for all this time, began. The little dragons were confident they could prevail against the ogres. This was just another prey to follow: it was no different from the others that they normally hunt. It was just a little more dangerous.

Being able to identify them wasn't easy, since they didn't know their smell; but Haku had Ethan's diary with him, and through it he knew the paths that the ogres periodically followed and he knew how to recognize their footprints and the signs of their passage. Using the knowledge he had acquired, Haku guided the others even though he didn't have a smell or a sound to rely on, and his intuitions proved to be correct: after less than half an hour they found what they were looking for, a small group of ogres.

The ogres before him numbered only seven, and they were all males; most of them were adults, but there were a couple of kids as well. Indeed, one of the adult ogres was talking lovingly to one of the young ones; it was probably his father. Haku had learned many things about the culture of other races thanks to Ethan's diary and so he knew that many of them valued the raising of children; ogres in particular considered very important the male children and their education. Ogres were a patriarchal race, or at least those of the Karbraland Great Forest were; therefore for an ogre to have a male child meant guaranteeing the line. It was no coincidence that the raising of sons had become a salient point of their culture, so much so that it was even present in their religion.

The adult ogres looked menacing, but Haku wasn't worried. Thanks to Ethan's diary, he knew those in front of him weren't so dangerous. In fact, ogres were divided into three castes based on their fighting strength.

In first place there were the commanders: these were the strongest ogres of the tribe, who played the role of protectors and spent their time training; in case of war they would have been generals or in any case they would have held high positions. The few mages were also part of this caste. Strongest of all was the chieftain, who commanded all the ogres of his tribe.

In second place were the hunters: they were practically all the other male ogres of the tribe, with the exception of the oldest ones and the children who were too young. They weren't very strong, but they were still handsome. Their role was to hunt and bring food to the tribe. Generally each tribe had several teams of hunters, who could therefore capture a large number of prey. In case of war the hunters would also fight, but they would serve only as simple soldiers under the commanders.

In third place, the lowest caste, were all the ogres who couldn't fight: women, children, and the elderly. Their job was to do all other chores besides fighting and hunting, such as cleaning the city, building new huts, weaving new clothes or washing the old ones, or even cultivating the land; even if the ogres were predominantly carnivores, in fact, they did not disdain vegetables from time to time.

Haku knew all of this from Ethan's diary, and was therefore aware that the commanders almost never left the tribe; therefore those before him could only be hunters. Which meant they were pretty weak, at least by ogre yardsticks.

However, even if they weren't that important in their social structure, they were the equivalent of a gold mine to him: he could clearly see that each of them had a dimensional bag hanging from their waist, which was normal since they were supposed to carry their prey all the way down to their tribe, and as Ethan had said time and time again, those items were easy to create in large numbers.

Haku licked his lips and a strange gleam shone in his eyes thinking of the big booty he would get. "Let's spread out" he ordered to his siblings. "We will attack them from many sides. Remember: those two must stay alive!" he said pointing to the two ogres who were presumably father and son. He didn't care if the others died, but he had an important role for the two of them.