The Martial Unity

A huge bombshell had exploded in Rui's mind. Suddenly, everything from before was starting to make sense if what Rui was beginning to suspect was true. It was all starting to click.

The lack of footprint trails incoming and exiting the area of the hunt despite the fact that smaller and lighter creatures had footprints incoming and outgoing out of the area. Then the presence of its footprints around the carcasses. It's impressive elusiveness, being able to appear and disappear in and out of an environment far too easily and inscrutably.

All of this could be explained if the creature was primarily subterranean or is primary mode of transport was subterranean fundamentally!

This wasn't an absurd notion. Even on Earth, subterranean fauna was found worldwide and included representatives of many animal groups, mostly arthropods and other invertebrates. However, there was a number of vertebrates, although they were less common.

This paradigm was not necessarily true in the world of Gaea, however. The world of Gaea was filled with many strange and exotic species that were capable of far more than the fauna on Earth was. Although travelling through subterranean means of transport to accomplish what the target of his mission had accomplished and shown to be capable of was not possible by any Earth-based fauna, the same could not be said of fauna of the world of Gaea.

By travelling underground, the target creature would be able to travel to and from locations without ever leaving a trail of footprints. However, it may need to come above ground to actually hunt and eat its prey, which would explain why its footprints were there at the site of the skeleton carcasses.

Everything seemed to fit.

(There's the question of how my Seismic Mapping didn't

as position of objects on the land via sensing and understanding seismic radiation. If the creature was moving underground incredibly fast, wouldn't it generate immense amount of

geodynamic subterranean to such a degree that it could travel through the ground at incredibly high speeds without producing much disturbance

in other modes of transport. Birds could fly through air an incredible speeds without

that zipped through water

the target of his mission was similar in that nature, then Rui could understand why he had difficulty perceiving it, especially when he had never been within a hundred meters of it. Who knows, perhaps he would actually sense

was

another issue.') Rui frowned. ('Was it just dumb luck that it left just a

this revelation, Rui wasn't sure anymore. There were a few

prey or the direction it wants to travel

could see or smell prey underground. Light did not travel underground and neither did odour. There was no air

have a seismic sense similar to Seismic Mapping.') Rui realized. It was a bit of an obvious conclusion once

luck was no longer luck but an outcome of his target's sensing of his approaching. That begged the question, why did run away the moment it sensed him? It was an apex predator with prowess at the Apprentice Realm. It shouldn't necessarily

the second it sensed,