The herd began relaxing as they settled down, resting as the sun had almost completely dipped under the horizon. Rui observed carefully, waiting and hoping for the target of his mission to show up. As the night grew darker, he couldn't help but wonder how the target of his mission had managed to hunt so voraciously and yet be so elusive.
The Shaia Plains were gigantic, meaning the herbivore population was immense. In order for a single or even a handful of beasts to hunt so excessively that they significantly impacted the herbivore species and be still be so elusive that the Ministry had a hard time learning more about it, he couldn't even imagine how such a thing came to be.
It didn't matter how powerful one was, hunting a huge number of herbivorous animals everyday was not something that could be done very secretively. If it was just one or two animals, it would be one thing, but as many as would be needed to affect the ecosystem?
Was it really possible to do such a thing uncaught?
Rui intended to find out. Out of all the herds he had detected, he had chosen the largest herd. Chances were that the target of his mission would go for larger groups of prey because of the greater amount of food it could eat. Thus, increasing Rui's chances of being able to ambush the predator.
Of course, it was entirely possible that the predator roamed around the Shaia Plains in a much more random fashion, hoping to get lucky enough to stumble into a small heard that he could then completely devour.
If that was the case, perhaps Rui's strategy would not necessarily increase his odds.
('Can't be helped.') He shrugged. The Shaia Plains were enormous, there was a limit to what could be done by him. There was even a chance he would fail this mission and the Martial Union would dispatch a team of Martial Apprentices to aid with the reconnaissance and extermination of the target or targets of the mission.
Or he would get lucky.
He laid in wait the entire night, staying up using a rejuvenation potion to erase his drowsiness. He waited patiently.
And waited some more.
And some more.
And just a little bit more.
And soon he had waited so long that the sun began rising out of its slumber.
"Dammit." Rui cursed. "I knew this would take patience and perseverance. But I may have underestimated the psychological fortitude required for such missions."
Now that dawn had come, he ceased the static surveillance and returned to grid searching.
Using some handy small portable tools that came with the standard gear for reconnaissance hunting missions, he was easily able to divide the Shaia Plains into squares, positioning himself at the center of the squares and began applying Seismic Mapping to scan the area thoroughly.
Trees, shrubs, grass, insects, smaller mammals and even some larger ones entered his senses. He could even sense an ecosystem within the land. Seismic Mapping did have subterranean sensing capabilities to a high extent. The problem was that it became harder to form a clear image of distances deep unground than it was to form on land, because the human mind found it harder to parse information about an environment it did not live in.
The goal of the grid searching was to locate the habitat of the target of the mission via direct surveillance, so he especially kept a look out for any seismic signatures that were either unknown, unusual or could match the estimated appearance of the target of his mission.
It was only a few hours later that he ran into something.
"A six-legged deer corpse." Rui muttered as he approached the corpse. It could barely be called corpse, since almost only the bones had been left behind. Yet the remnant flesh had not rotted much at all, despite this. There were barely any flies circling the corpse either.
('All of this indicates that the corpse is still fresh as far as time since death goes.') Rui thought to himself, he was no forensic expert. But he could be reasonably certain that the deer was hunted very recently.
('Last night.') Rui realized.
This meant that the beast had ran into different herds than the one Rui had been trailing. His luck mst have sucked.
At a distance, several more deer corpses could be seen, all in a very similar condition. This was very odd to Rui for several reasons.
"Why are there these many corpses in such a small geographic area?" He pondered out aloud.
Normally, when a predator hunted an animal from a herd, the herd would evacuate from the area of the predator immediately, getting far away before finally stopping. Meaning, by the time the predator consumed the food he had caught, there would be no more prey anywhere within its range of vision.
Which is why having numerous corpses so close to each other was rather strange. It was almost as if the herd of animals simply stood around patiently watching the predator fill its belly until it was to be there turn.
"Something is off here." He murmured. He was no zoology or ecology scholar, but it didn't take a genius to understand that there was something strange going on here.
"Either the predator consumes its food at extraordinary speeds, such that it has finished consuming its prey before the rest of the herd can escape..." He voiced out on possibility. This was a terrifying possibility. What kind of a beast could instantly the sizeable carcass of a six-legged deer to such a degree that little more than bones were left with such speed?
"...Or the predator simply killed as many deer in rapid succession as it could before proceeding to consume them after rather than before, in order to maximize the amount of food it got from a single hunt."
This possibility was potentially even worse. This implied the beast had a decent degree of awareness, intelligence and self-restraint.
Just the thought of that made the atmosphere heavy.
