Felix woke me, and I tried to stand. My legs would not cooperate, and I collapsed to the floor and used my arms to pull myself up. Mateo chuckled at my discomfort. I slowly got my legs working and could feel every raw area of skin from yesterday's ride. Felix offered some advice, "Use the horse salve on your chaff marks. It smells mighty pungent but works just as well on you as your horse."
I started packing up, but Felix stopped me, "No need. We are just going along the range to the south and looking for signs of the griffons. If we are lucky, someone will spot one flying around, and we can trace it to its nest."
I shambled outside and saddled my horse Ginger with some help. Setting the girth straps took some skill. Too tight, and the horse would get chaffed. Too loose, and you were not going to remain in your saddle. Breakfast was a meaty mashed potato porage. Only fifteen men rode out with mage Castille. Mateo explained, "The others will also ride in the other direction looking for signs. This is our second day searching. The griffons were last seen about nine days ago taking a sheep from a farmer."
I wanted to cry when mage Castille took our column to a heavy gallop. My body was being pounded day after day and had not had time to heal. I wished I had a healing spell instead of a stupid dimensional space spell. Thankfully after about six miles, the road ended, and Castille slowed her horse to a walk as we remained parallel with the mountains. Now at a walk, Felix could talk to me again.
"Damn, Eryk. If I didn't know better, I would say an ogre was making you his bitch by the look on your face," he chuckled as a few others heard and laughed at his joke.
I responded in a clear voice, "I'm sorry. I didn't know you were an expert on the subject."
After the men processed, the laughs started raining in, and mage Castille turned around to see what was so funny. It was Adrian who spoke nearby, "The raw recruit just gave Felix the verbal beating of his sad life." She just nodded and focused forward again. It was a good amount of time before things calmed down. We were all looking to the mountains for signs of the griffon.
I got enough of my faculties back to move upwind and asked, "What the hell was that?" I was talking to myself, but the tracker stood and answered me.
I stumbled to my feet. I was alone. Everyone was at least a quarter mile away or more. I turned to face the mound of earth moving toward me. Something that resembled a shark fin emerged in the center. Was this an elemental earth shark? I pulled out my only weapon, a short curved dagger in my belt. All my other weapons were secured to Ginger.
The ground erupted in a shower of earth and stone, and a massive creature was flying through the air and planning to crush me. Time seemed to slow as my death was clearly before me, my muscles paralyazed at the sight. An armored quadruped that looked a mix between a rhinoceros with a massive head of a snapping turtle soon blotted out the sun. I met my fate by opening my ten-foot dimensional cube, waiting as long as I could, and then shifting as much of the bulette's underside into my dimensional space. The earth thudded around me, everything went dark, and I was covered in fluids and knocked to the ground by the force of impact. I was alive and inside the cavity of the beast.
The beast seemed uncertain about what had just happened. Its mass twitched around me, and it tried to move. I had gutted it, though. I was trapped in its hollowed chest cavity, but the beast no longer had essential organs—like a heart. My dimensional storage would not activate as the cost of pulling in so much bulette flesh had drained my aether. The fact that either mass or a creature resisted being forcibly pulled into my storage was good to know—albeit after almost being crushed. After a short time, I started digging in the earth with my dagger to tunnel my way out. Thankfully the fluids softened the earth and made it feasible to quickly gain my freedom before suffocating.
I squeezed out under the hard shell and looked at the armored beast. It was a lot bigger than I remembered. The beast had an armored hide, short stubby legs, and massive black digging claws. It reminded me more of a tank than anything else. I could see why the mage had decided to retreat.
I oriented myself to the mountains and started walking back to Formica. When I had recovered enough aether, I dumped the 10x10x5 section of the bulette on the ground, spreading out like a squelching deflating balloon.
I did not think bulette blood was considered a good topical agent for all my raw and bleeding chaff marks. I came to a wide stream and decided to wash up. I remained vigilant as I stripped naked and began the process of cleaning everything. I focused on my leather armor as I had plenty of clean clothes to charge into. I managed to scrub almost everything out of the material. It appeared our uniform was treated with something that made cleaning blood out of it easy.
This got me thinking about a lot of the clothes I had taken at the fort. They all were well-worn, so I guessed they had come off of dead legionnaires. As long as they were clean now, I could handle the thought of wearing a dead man's clothes. When I finished, I dressed in my damp clothes and armor.
The bulette stomach had occupied the top half of my dimensional storage and had not disturbed all the other things I had placed in my dimensional storage. It was getting close to sundown as I sat on a rock, wet, tired, bruised, abused, and—alive. I took out a ration bar and munched on it, getting prepared to leave when Ginger came trotting up to me and drank unconcerned at the stream next to me. I shook my head, "Oh, now you show up! Well, I am out of apples."