Chapter 6: We Are All Lions (Patreon)

He’d been expecting it, but the pain to his teeth still took him a bit off-guard. 

‘This is like the worst visit to a dentist ever,’ Dominic groaned to Leo, squeezing his eyes shut as the agony built. It was like he was getting a deep hole filled – without anaesthetic. No, a root canal with over-the-counter paracetamol, he decided with a mental moan. 

Then the pain shifted. It eased in his teeth, but started increasing underneath his tongue. The muscle there started to burn and ache. It felt like something was growing. 

All Dominic could do was wait until the torment was over. When the pain finally started easing, he gave a sigh of relief. Feeling tentatively with his tongue, he felt his teeth; they were all there, intact and sharp. Actually, are they sharper than before? The top ones anyway, he thought.

‘It feels like they are,’ agreed Leo, sounding intrigued. ‘I wonder why the Ability had that effect.’ Dominic sent him a shrug in response. 

At the same time, he could tell that there was something different about his tongue, but couldn’t feel the details. There was something…bulbous underneath it. It didn’t feel wrong, not now, but it did feel a bit weird. Like something had always been there but he’d just never noticed it before. 

Opening his mouth, he tried to curl his tongue under so that it could feel the bulbous growth, but he was apparently destined not to succeed as no angle he tried worked. However, something else happened. With one particular movement, a wad of green liquid shot out of his mouth and hit the earth.

Dominic stared at the little puddle, not much more than a spit wad, that sizzled against the earth. It didn’t actually seem to be eating away at the dirt, but he supposed that wasn’t surprising: an acid that could eat away at flesh couldn’t necessarily dissolve the minerals that soil was composed of. 

‘So…Acid Spit definitely works,’ he commented to Leo. 

‘No kidding,’ Leo responded a little sarcastically, though with a hint of pleasure. ‘Imagine hitting those wretched vermin in the face with this,’ he continued gleefully. 

Dominic couldn’t help wincing at the thought – he knew how painful the feel of the acid eating through him was, but at the same time, he’d taken the Ability. If he didn’t use it, it would be a waste. Besides, if the pain could offer sufficient distraction, he could then end the creature’s life far more quickly. 

Killing the rhinos would have been much faster with this, he mused to himself, imagining standing on top of the rhino and melting his way through to its spinal cord. Though that would be rather tortuous too…but any more than me chewing my way through? 

It wasn’t something that had given him pause before: in battle he used the weapons available to him. Where a quick kill was possible, he did it – more because it meant the least amount of effort or output from him, but it had the side benefit of reducing his target’s suffering. The rhinos hadn’t offered him the opportunity of a quick kill. 

In the end, he shrugged away his moral qualms – they didn’t have a place in his new reality. It was kill or be killed, grow in levels or be destroyed when others surpassed him. And now they were basically in a beast version of an arms race with the hyena matriarch, each seeking to increase the quantity and quality of their army. 

To do that, he would have to use all the tools at his disposal. Painful acid or not. 

About to pull up his status screen, he paused as he noticed movement in the grass. Tensing in case he’d accidentally jinxed them by thinking of the hyena matriarch, he relaxed as the cause of the movement came into view.

‘Looks like you might get your females after all, Leo,’ Dominic said with a little warm humour in his mental voice. Anticipation came back at him from his companion.

‘Perhaps your ability to convince females is better than I thought,’ he gave as a bit of a back-handed compliment. They didn’t move, not wanting to spook the hesitant-looking lions. 

The lead female paused, eyeing the large male lion, the carcass, and the lions already feeding from it. A low growl started coming from Isis as Dominic’s pride noticed that the other lions had returned, but it soon stopped when Dominic sent her a quick mental message. 

In it, he sent a picture of their small group standing against the army of hyenas, dwarfed and outnumbered. Then, he sent another picture: their group with this other group added. Suddenly, it was the hyenas who were disadvantaged: even though they were still outnumbered, it was clear that the larger and more powerful lions had the edge in that conflict. 

With Isis providing the lead for the rest of the pride, the other lionesses of Dominic’s original group didn’t object as the newcomers started to approach the carcass. Neither did they back away. Was that a good thing?

‘It’s better that they don’t,’ Leo interjected pensively. ‘Backing away would be ceding control. Our females are stronger and more intelligent than the new ones; a hierarchy needs to be established, and that starts now.’

‘I thought you guys didn’t need to establish hierarchy?’ Dominic said with a little confusion. Leo scoffed.

‘What gave you that idea? We have a hierarchy in the pride, so of course we have to establish it!’

‘Well…when Sekhmet got stronger, you said that it probably wouldn’t change anything about the hierarchy of the pride. And it hasn’t – Isis is the lowest-level of everyone except for the cubs, but she’s still clearly the leader.’

‘That’s different,’ Leo responded firmly. ‘She’s the mother and probably grandmother or great-aunt of the whole pride. She’s proven her ability to lead and protect. But when the cubs come of age and are able to start taking a role in the hunting, they will jostle and work out who is where in the feasting order. These females are new; none of them know each other. If the two prides are to integrate, they’re going to have to figure out who is where.’

‘And that’s likely to be a more complicated prospect,’ Dominic realised. ‘Because it’s not just cubs who are growing up and are probably all at the bottom of the pecking order anyway, just needing to squabble between themselves as to who is right at the bottom and who is a couple of steps up. In this case, it’s matriarch facing matriarch, hunters facing hunters, strange cubs facing each other.’

‘Precisely,’ Leo sighed. ‘If I am completely honest, I don’t know how it will work out.’ Dominic thought about that, but ultimately shrugged. 

‘I figure that we just encourage the two groups to spend time together, then. Keep feeding the other group, try to help them get stronger just as we’re doing with our pride. Hopefully as their intelligence level rises, they will find it easier to realise that strength is in numbers, and that, ultimately, they are all lions.’

‘We are all lions, you mean,’ Leo corrected, though with a hint of uncertainty in his voice. 

‘Yes,’ Dominic quickly agreed. ‘We are all lions.’ 

There was silence between them for a moment and they watched the slow migration of the new pride to the rhino carcass. Interestingly, the matriarch wasn’t the first; it was the lionesses without cubs who made the first moves. The matriarch just watched, keeping a wary eye on both Dominic and the other pride.

The unattached lions had their attention focussed purely on the carcass and attacked it with sharp teeth and claws. As expected, the rhino’s hide was difficult to get through, especially for these low level lions, but their hunger was a good motivator. With persistence, the skin was pierced and the lions were able to start tugging at bloody flesh.

The mothers followed, their body language much warier than the previous members of their pride. Their cubs kept close to them, alerted by the aggression exhibited by their mothers. Dominic hoped that none of the cubs would venture near members of his pride: he sensed that at the moment, it was a powder keg which could blow at any moment. Perhaps once they had some meat in their bellies they would relax. For now, he just kept his distance, watching the situation as much as the matriarch was. 

Finally, when the last of the lions seemed to have approached the carcass and were feeding like starving wolves, the matriarch left her observation post. She remained wary, not attacking the carcass with the same single-minded focus that most of the other lions were, but sending glances to Dominic and the other lionesses. She’d deliberately placed herself so she was between the two groups. A smart lioness, that one, especially since he was sure that she was still under level 6. 

Casting a glance over the group of frantically feeding lions, Dominic was finally able to get a proper headcount. There were more lions than he’d thought – nineteen adults or almost so, and a load of cubs which he couldn’t get a proper headcount on considering how he still found it difficult to identify one cub from another, and they kept running in and out of the long grass. There were at least ten because he saw that many all in the open together, but were probably more.  

Five of the lionesses were mothers of the cubs, which seemed to fall into two groups: small ones who must have only recently rejoined the pride; and medium-sized ones about the same sort of age as the older cubs in Dominic’s own pride.

Nine of the larger lions were smaller than the others – sub-adults from two different litters, he would guess. Maybe three even. Since they weren’t sticking close to any particular adult lioness, it was hard to tell.

Though, they were not all lionesses – Dominic’s eyes narrowed as he noticed the beginnings of a mane on four of them. They were sub-adults, like Jenkins and Anuke, but clearly male ones. There were five other sub-adults, female ones. 

‘You will drive those out immediately, I hope,’ Leo growled at Dominic. ‘We do not want rivals challenging us.’

‘I don’t want to spook the lionesses, though,’ Dominic pointed out. ‘Attacking them right now would surely do that.’ Leo made an unhappy noise. 

‘Then do it when they are a little more relaxed. But I do not want to be feeding and protecting lions who will turn around and attack me at the first chance they get! Especially since they are not even of my bloodline.’  

Dominic growled quietly under his breath, his mind racing. He understood where Leo was coming from, he did. But at the same time…he couldn’t help but think that having other male lions around might not be such a bad idea.

‘You can’t be thinking about letting them stay?!’ Leo exclaimed. ‘What if they mate with our females?!’

That…actually was a good point. Not because he was as protective of his right to mate as Leo was – would rather not think about it, actually – but because that would lead to inbreeding, which the normal way of doing things actively avoided. 

‘Look, let’s compromise,’ he suggested. ‘If they attack me, or one of our pride, or try to mate with one of the lionesses, then we’ll drive them out. Until then, though, they can stay.’ 

‘They are a danger to our cubs!’ Leo warned. ‘While they’re around, they cannot be left alone with our females or our cubs. And that will prevent us from doing what you want to do with helping the females to become stronger.’

That was another good point. Dominic hadn’t thought about it but…it was true that male lions were notorious for doing their best to kill other males’ cubs. Though, quietly, Dominic found it a bit amusing that Leo had apparently unconsciously adopted the cubs in their original pride as his own, despite wanting to kill them to begin with. What if the same could happen with the new males? What if they could be brought to be protective of all the lions, all the cubs? 

‘Right now, they’re eating. Let’s see how the prides interact once they’re full, and then go from there. In the meantime, shall we see what rewards we’ve gained from the Challenge?’ he suggested.

*****

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Chapter 7: Rewards