"Still no luck?" A mercenary dressed in full leather armour spoke to his friend.
It was currently midnight, and these two mercenaries were supposed to be on watch duty for the next few hours while everyone slept.
However they had been searching in the forest for two weeks by now, and nothing had ever happened at night. It was the most boring job of the lot and every mercenary in their company dreaded their name being picked for night watch duty.
"Yeah, this is getting ridiculous. We've been searching for weeks and still no sign of that blasted beast." The other unlucky nightwatchman spoke.
The first mercenary listened and chipped in again, "Tell me about it. I'm starting to think it's just a ghost story cooked up by the Count to scare off adventurers. After all, anybody who's actually supposedly seen the beast hasn't lived to tell the tale."
Annoyed that his friend would even consider such a thing, the second adventurer angrily chastised him, "Don't be foolish. You've seen the aftermath — the torn bodies, the blood soaked ground. Whatever it is, it's real enough."
From the shrubbery, Alex listened in on this conversation between two mercenaries and scoffed when he heard the same type of ramblings the mercenaries at the tavern had been spewing.
'They must really be desperate for any bit of information about this beast if they're beginning to doubt it even exists.'
Alex couldn't care less what these low rank mercenaries thought though. If the Count was so adamant that something was out here terrorising the adventurers of Evermoor city, then Alex believed so too.
Besides, these low rank mercenaries had only been hired to find and track the thing, not kill it. That was a job for the Count, who had obviously become impatient with their lack of progress, hence his decision to venture out and find it himself.
Alex had only been spying on these mercenaries to see if he could gather some intel on the beast that he may not have already heard from the two men in the tavern, but it seems his efforts were fruitless.
With no reason to stay near the mercenary camp, Alex left in the silence of the night and continued on his own search.
Though the ramblings of the mercenaries had gotten Alex thinking.
What type of beast was it? What rank was it? What about its class?
There were many unknowns of this investigation, but Alex was still dead set on finding and killing this beast himself before the Count did.
If the beast turned out to be something he couldn't handle, then he could just run away and give up on this.
In the grand scheme of things, if even Alex was unsuccessful in finding the beast, then the Count wouldn't have much better luck either, which still afforded Alex some time to search through Evermoor for any suspicious activities related to the Count.
***
The forest was shrouded in darkness as Alex ventured deeper into its depths — utter silence permeated the surroundings as the only sounds were the trotting of Alex's boots and the crunching of the dead leaves underneath them. With each step, he was careful to observe his surroundings using not only his sight, but his spatial perception too. He scanned for anything that might indicate any sign of the unseen beast, his senses heightened to the max.
As he created his own random, winding path through the woods, Alex's keen spatial perception caught sight of something glinting in the moonlight.
At first, he dismissed it as some random puddle when he cast his eyes over there, but in a faint moment of realisation he noticed that the liquid in the puddle was too dark and cloudy to be water.
Upon closer look, Alex realised what it was.
A puddle of blood, followed by a trail of it leading off into the darkness.
With a furrowed brow, Aled knelt down to examine it, his fingers lighting up with a small flame, revealing the crimson stained earth below it.
'This must be one of the blood trails the mercenaries in the tavern mentioned. They might not have gained any more info from this, but who's to say I won't either.'
The trail led Alex deeper into the forest, winding its way through the dense undergrowth and gnarled tree roots. It was clear that whatever had made this trail, wasn't willingly moving its way over here.
It was clearly being dragged by something, and judging by the sheer amount of blood Alex had already seen, it was safe to say that whatever poor soul was being dragged was not alive at the time.
Alex followed with caution, his footsteps silent as he moved through the shadows.
Along the way, he spotted some cloth type material, matching that of the old and medieval style clothing the commoners and weak adventurers in the Primordial Expanse wore.
It was clear now that the corpse being dragged was human.
And he was also 100% sure that whatever was dragging it wasn't.
This was clear from the weathered paw prints faintly pressed into the dirt, and the occasional claw marks and fur left on some dead wood scattered across the ground.
There were also some faint hand prints on the ground and trees here and there, but Alex just chalked that down to the mercenaries being messy in their investigation.
'The Count must be stupid. He hired a bunch of mercenaries who have no investigative skills whatsoever. If he even hired one detective or private investigator to accompany them, they could have spotted these signs in a heartbeat.'
The trail ended near the base of a hugely tall and wide tree.
He suspected that the mercenaries had done the same thing as him, and followed the trail of blood through the forest until they came up to this very same tree.
But Alex made a guess that these mercenaries were very narrow minded and only focused on a single point, the blood.
Since there was no mention of anything other than blood being found from the conversation he overheard in the tavern, Alex guessed that they had been so focused on the blood that they had failed to notice the other clues in their surroundings, hence leading them to a dead end.
But Alex hadn't ignored any of them.
Even if he took his eyes off them and focused on the blood trail, his spatial perception still noticed the irregularities in the general surroundings, telling him that this wasn't a single beast causing havoc for Evermoor city, but a pack of them.