Noel slips through the forest's underbrush without a sound.
Her movements are smooth and natural as she slips through the thicket and foliage with an unnatural quietness. Her proficiency in stealth, the class feature [Natural Explorer], and the racial trait [Mask of the Wild] work in flawless synergy to turn her into a skilled huntress at home in the shadows cast by the tall trees.
It doesn't take long for her to come to a halt next to a larger specimen, where she crouches down to brush away some of the fallen leaves, revealing the imprints hidden beneath in the soft earth.
Tilting her head, she scans the tracks and the area around them with a critical eye.
'Boars... two of them, both fully grown. Hm, less than an hour ago.' Standing back up, Noel grins.
"[Natural Explorer] really is pulling its weight right now. While not the most visually impressive or fancy class, rangers sure as hell are fucking solid in terms of survival." She chuckles before following the traces left by the pair of uncooked bacon.
Unimpeded by the natural terrain and with the tracks leading her on, it barely takes her a quarter of an hour to catch up with them.
The two adult boars are resting in the shadow of a large boulder overgrown with moss.
With the dipping of the sun, the thick cover of leaves, and the additional cover provided by the rock, it would have been difficult to make out the two shapes lying curled up in the dark.
At least for normal people, that is.
But with something like darkvision, which allows her to see even in complete darkness, Noel easily takes notice of them and silently manoeuvres into a position from where she can take a clean shot.
'One of these buggers should be enough for a start.' Grabbing her bow and sliding an arrow out of her quiver, she gets ready.
Aiming for the bigger one of the two, Noel narrows her eyes in concentration before releasing the string.
*Twang*
*Thud*
*SQUEEEEEE*
Screaming in pain, the boar shoots up only to stumble and collapse again, while its partner bolts away, squealing in fright.
Quickly hopping out from her cover, she rushes from her hiding spot, goes over to the fatally wounded animal, and draws one of her shortswords from her hip.
"Sorry about that, buddy. I'm gonna make this quick." Doing as she says, Noel uses her sword to put the boar out of its misery with a clean stab.
Once done, she recovers the arrow sticking out of its side and wipes the blade on the moss of the boulder before sheathing it again.
"Now's the question... do I need to drink from the source, or is it okay if I collect it first?" Pulling a grimace while crouching over her kill, she contemplates for a bit before groaning and slinging off her pack.
Opening it, Noel pulls out the mess kit and removes the simple metal cup from it.
With it, she clumsily collects the thick scarlet blood escaping from the boar's wounds.
Squirming the entire time as her nose fills with the coppery tang of the crimson lifeblood, Noel begins to feel incredibly hungry.
She had been ignoring the unsettling sensation since arriving in this world, but now that the object of her desire is right in her grasp, it becomes almost unbearable.
'Great. I really hope this isn't going to fuck me over.' With that thought, she closes her eyes and downs the cup of fresh blood in one go.
The moment it bathes her tongue, her eyes snap open wide as its strange metallic aroma drowns her tastebuds in bliss.
Swallowing without thinking and with eyes aglow, Noel finishes the cup in a few gulps before dropping it as her gaze is drawn to the still-bleeding wounds of the slain beast.
A flicker of hesitation crosses her face as her humanity tries to rear its head and call out the wrongness of the whole situation, but it is quickly pushed back down as her rational mind takes over.
She is a vampire now and will have to deal with it one way or another. Drinking blood is a matter of survival and part of what she is, so rejecting it would only lead to a whole gaggle of issues down the line.
So it comes to pass that she falls over the corpse in ravenous hunger and sinks her fangs—now grown to incredible lengths—into the boar's flesh, greedily draining the blood out of its cooling body.
For a solid five minutes she drinks and drinks before finally pulling back and licking her red-stained lips, while the dagger-like fangs quickly shrink back to their previous size now that they are no longer buried in prey.
"God fucking damn." She gasps while staggering back.
"If all blood tastes like this, I wouldn't mind making it my sole choice of sustenance." She mutters, breathing heavily with a satisfied smile on her lips.
Taking a moment to calm down from the high she got from consuming so much fresh blood, Noel then proceeds to try and butcher the beast.
This reveals that almost all the blood has been drained already, so she can move on to skinning and cutting the meat immediately.
Of course, she has never done something like this before, but that was the case for pretty much everything that happened during this day. So without much hesitation, she empties her mind of all distracting thoughts and goes to work, letting herself be guided by knowledge and skills ingrained in her body more than her mind.
The lack of a proper knife or dagger makes skinning a lot more difficult as she has to resort to using one of her swords, but it comes out decent enough.
She doesn't bother with butchering the entire thing and only takes about 10 pounds' worth of meat. After all, there are already 10 rations stored in her pack that will take care of any craving for food other than blood.
Wrapping the fresh meat in the hide, she puts everything—including the cup she had dropped—back into her pack and, after a second to reorient herself, begins to track westward.
"I wonder when I am. Is Bilbo already on his way to the lonely mountain? Did Frodo already flee the Shire and start on his track to Mordor? Or has none of that happened yet?" Muttering to herself as she flies through the forest with ease.
'Well, for now I try to get a hang of exactly what I can do in this new body and head to the west, which hopefully means away from the more dangerous lands of Middle Earth.' Feeling fresh and full of energy after her delicious meal, Noel keeps her pace till she broke through the last line of trees and comes to a halt at the crest of a sloping hill.