After becoming Altered, Nick felt the urge to sleep fewer times than he used to.
Now, instead of having to sleep for 8 hours every night, he only needed around 4 hours, or he could skip a night and sleep 8 hours the following night. Either way, he would feel well rested the next morning. This was the reason he chose to enter the Beast Domain after Luna had fallen asleep instead of catching a few hours himself.
Thanks to the speed and risk of encountering the Sabertooth Wolves, few people ventured into Vaylan Forest, which explained why Nick spotted barely anybody on his way over.
In a way, it made sense. The Sabertooth Wolves were too risky for most people of Nick's level to even dare trying to face them alone, while those who did have the strength or ability to do so didn't even bother, as there were better locations nearby.
This created a unique situation for Nick, presenting him with more opportunity but also more danger.
The Sabertooth Wolves were essentially allowed to roam Vaylan Forest freely, only rarely encountering an Altered who felt confident enough to enter or were specifically searching for their Beast Armaments.
Due to this, the price of Sabertooth Wolves were quite high, sometimes reaching as high as 800 credits for an intact corpse. This was nearly unthinkable for a Mundane beast, but it turned out their fur were quite sought after in some circles of the Federation thanks to their softness and rarity.
Other than the fact that obtaining Sabertooth Wolf Beast Armament would be a boon for Nick, this was the main reason he came to this place.
The closer he came to Vaylan forest, the fewer people he saw, and when he eventually reached its periphery, he couldn't see any sign of human activity at all.
'I'm probably the only human within a few kilometres of this place.'
He didn't want to risk going too deep into the forest, as the deeper one went, the stronger the beasts became and Mundane beasts showed up more frequently.
Nick had heard stories that if you went far enough into Vaylan Forest, you'd eventually reach a point where you'd find Radiant beasts…
They were definitely not something he wanted to come across, so he made sure to make note of his location very often.
If he felt like he was traversing too far into the forest, he would turn back and start making his way towards the general direction of War Beast Sanctuary.
In his first few hours of searching, he had nothing to show for his efforts. Vaylan Forest was huge, spanning for hundreds of kilometres, so while Sabertooth Wolves weren't as rare in there as the White Ox were in the Everfrost Forest in the opposite direction, the land their territory covered made it so they weren't that easy to come across.
Summoning Beast Armaments used Mental Energy, and so Nick would only have to consume a small amount of Mental Energy to summon his White Ox dagger, with no upkeep required to keep it summoned.
Thanks to this, he kept it summoned and in his grasp at all times while in Vaylan Forest.
'It's time to take a small break…'
After another hour of zero results, Nick was starting to get tired from all the constant walking and needed to replenish his stamina, so he found a big tree to climb before setting himself down on one of the branches, about 10 metres off the ground.
While he needed less sleep as an Altered, he still needed to consume food to maintain his stamina. In fact, before becoming an Evolver, Altered actually consumed much more food than ordinary humans.
Only after becoming an Evolver would he have less of a need for food, and be able to sustain himself through the latent energy in the surroundings.
Suddenly, while Nick was busy munching down on some beef jerky, his ears picked up the slight rustling of a bush somewhere below him.
Normally, he would ignore such a thing and pin the blame on something like the wind, which picked up quite a lot in this forest.
But something about that sound felt… unnatural.
'But Sabertooth Wolves aren't known to hide in bushes and stalk prey, are they?'
Nick had only learned the basics after coming to War Beast Sanctuary, so there was still a lot he didn't know. Still, if there was a piece of vital information like that, he was likely to have heard about it.
Forced to cut his break short, he slowly put his jerky away in his backpack, trying to keep as quiet as possible, and turned to look in the direction where the sound originated from.
'Nothing.'
His eyes told him that there was nothing there, but his instincts were still flaring up.
At that moment, as if it had figured out that it had been discovered, a figure suddenly darted out of the bush.
The Sabertooth Wolf revealed itself, but only for the short moment it used to shake any excess leaves from its body, as it immediately used its powerful hind legs to propel itself towards the branch below Nick.
'Crap! Those bastards set me up!'
It only took a few moments for Nick to realise that his information had been wrong, or incomplete. He had hoped that because he had asked around for the general information of the beasts surrounding their sanctuary on his first day, before people knew of him and ridiculed him, that the information would be genuine.
But it seemed he was scammed!
Or at least the person who he was eavesdropping on was scammed… Since he gleamed most of the information about the Sabertooth Wolves through listening in on other people's conversations.
He was too poor to pay for the information himself, after all…
Nobody told him that the Sabertooth Wolves used stealth as well as their speed to take down prey… From the information Nick had gleamed, they didn't bother hiding their presence at all.
Obviously, that was a lie.
Nick didn't have time to think any further, as the crafty wolf had already landed on the Branch directly below him, and with its speed, it only needed to kick off once more before it would reach him.
He was cornered, and quite possibly faced with the worst enemy to be cornered by in this type of situation…