Shortly after James left the pond, the white female—skulked back to the scene. Her initial plan was pathetic but practical: she wanted to scavenge whatever scraps James might have left behind. It had been far too long since her last proper meal, and pride didn't fill an empty stomach.
However, when she arrived, she saw the Giant Beaver still paddling happily in the water.
White Female: ???
"That deadbeat bandit didn't even eat it?"
Starving and desperate, she decided to try her luck again. She slipped into the water, her white fur making her look like a drifting patch of ice as she closed in on the lodge.
WHACK!
But the beaver was on high alert now. A tiny ripple in the current was all it needed to trigger its alarm. With a loud slap of its tail, it dove, vanishing into the murky depths in a blur of brown fur.
"ROAR~~"
The white female watched the empty water, her expression a mix of exhaustion and resentment. The duck had flown right out of her mouth. She blamed the golden-brown bandit. He had ruined her hunt, stolen her dignity, and then didn't even have the decency to finish the job.
Suddenly, her nostrils flared. She caught a strange, concentrated scent nearby. Following the trail, she found herself standing beneath a towering pine tree.
She looked up and saw the rows of dried fish strips swaying in the mountain breeze. They looked... appetizing. But the air around the tree was saturated with the powerful, territorial musk of a prime male Smilodon. The scent was so aggressive that even the local birds had cleared out.
The white female recoiled, her shoulder still throbbing where James had hammered her. She looked at the hanging snacks, then at the invisible boundary of his scent. She wavered, caught between the gnawing pain in her gut and the memory of James's heavy-fisted output.
Miles away, James had moved on from commercial fishing. Catching fish was good for Gene Points, but his main business was big game. He still had caches of beef and wolf meat, but a predator's life is built on constant acquisition. Plus, he needed to keep the system's points flowing.
Hunting alone was a different game than working with the family unit. Now, the burden of tracking, the risk of the strike, and the danger of being ambushed fell solely on his shoulders.
"I kind of miss the family," he thought, surveying the woods. "At least back then, someone was watching the rear while I hunt."
He pushed through a dense thicket where the spring growth was just beginning to peek through the mud—pale greens spreading like a secret under the roots and bushes.
Ahead, in a sun-dappled clearing, a group of Jefferson's Ground Sloths(Megalonyx) were foraging. They were massive, but not as nightmarish as the five-ton giants the humans had hunted. These were roughly a ton—about the size of a modern American Bison.
The sloths used their massive tails to form a tripod stance, allowing them to stand upright and pull down cloud-high branches with their long, curved fore-claws. They used their long, prehensile tongues—similar to an Anteater's—to strip the leaves.
"Ground sloths... these tanks are a better bet than a buffalo herd," James mused, hidden behind a juniper bush. They weren't very social, they were slow, and they were generally docile. Perfect targets for a solo hunt.
He locked onto a smaller female sloth. She was feeding on a spruce tree about fifteen meters away, her back turned to him. She moved with agonizing slowness. James watched her take nearly twenty seconds just to curl her tongue around a single twig.
"Man, move it along. You're giving me a nervous breakdown just watching you."
James didn't rush. He knew the stats of his target.
A ton of muscle and bone was hard to bring down. Underneath that thick fur sat a layer of dermal ossicles—bony nodules that turned the sloth's skin into a biological vest. Their 15cm claws were built for digging and climbing, but they could double as scimitars if the sloth got lucky.
James did a pre-sprint warm-up in his head. He coiled his muscles, his shoulders rising like twin hills of power. His forepaws gripped the soil; his hind legs dug in for traction. His golden eyes never left the sloth's neck.
NOW.
James exploded. He launched from the brush like a triggered trap, his internal monologue replaced by the roaring engine of a predator. He was a blur of tawny fur, closing the distance before the sloth could even register the shift in the wind.
The sloth was still mid-chew, a twig hanging from its mouth, when James hit the air. His long tail acted as a rudder, adjusting his trajectory with millimeter precision.
SLAM
James landed squarely on the sloth's back. His claws tore through the fur, anchoring into the thick hide, securing him to the mountain of flesh.
"Perfect entry. Now let's see how you like this Dracula sucking your blood."
"YURRR~~"
Only then did the sloth realize the world had gone wrong. There was a predator on its back, and the fight for survival had begun.