The Kingdom

A half-hour later the bulk of the beast we had been trailing came into view. It had run completely out of the valley and was laying upon the parched sands of the Wastelands.

Creatures of the valley rarely if ever left it, as what value was there in roaming the Wastelands that had little to offer in terms of food. That said, why then had this fallen order beast run so far to reach this desolate spot?

There wasn't even a blood trail anymore, which was perhaps most eerie of all. Something had driven this animal beyond even the limits of its obscene killing abilities to do the impossible.

It was windy outside of the valley and sand tornadoes were kicked up here and there all around us.

I quickly saw that the sand in the air had hidden the real reason for the monster's desire to bring us here. We were completely surrounded by Saber Cats!

I felt a quiver course down my spine at the sight of so many of them. I had thought that Kuri and I had killed them all, but I had been wrong. Very wrong, as we were literally being encircled by hundreds of them.

These must be the leftover pack remnants of all those we'd spent a full year killing. They closed in from all sides; an unbroken wall of unnatural teamwork on full display.

It was normal for these big cats to run in packs of 30 or more, but never so many as this. They were united in purpose to kill me, one of the perpetrators of their demise within the valley beyond, which they had once ruled.

Although they had the appearance of other big cats such as lions they were partly something else. It was not sure what that was. Their unnaturalness also lay in both the size of the packs they kept and their most obvious feature which were the elongated canines that came down from their upper jaw and went a long way into giving them a ferocious appearance.

For all the fear the oversized canines evoked, they were absolutely useless. The canines were so long that the cats couldn't open their mouths wide enough to properly bear down on anything and the teeth themselves were very prone to breaking off, which was the saving grace for many of the creatures.

With canines in place they couldn't get a good bite on anything. Even though they were larger in size, they couldn't win by themselves in an upfront confrontation with a lion of smaller stature because they couldn't use the power of their bite.

Their way of coping with the limitations imposed upon them by their teeth was that they ran in very large packs and would attack en-masse. They had killed all the other big cats and high order predators in the valley over time with their large pack mentality. Only in the higher ranges of the mountains did a few scattered and much smaller numbered packs of lions continue to survive.