The Rainjaw came out of the treeline at a walk, which told Vell more than any charge would have. Nothing on four legs approaches a lit furnace at a walk unless it has never needed to hurry at anything.
It stood nine feet at the shoulder with plated jaw shelves running back past the ear line. Water ran off those plates in continuous sheets, since the animal carried its own weather across a dry slope.
Ruinwood held four apex signatures on the trial map, and the judges had marked all four as avoidance zones. None of the four had ever come down a slope toward a working party in nine days of recorded hunting.
Analyze reached it at seventy meters and returned a reading Vell had no prepared answer for anywhere.
[Rainjaw Lizard: Grade 4.]
[Core mass exceeds combined team output by factor 2.3.]
