For five hours, Ruho watched the feeding.
He couldn't look away. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion horrifying, But impossible to turn away from. He'd moved from the arrow slit in the entrance hall to a second-floor window that gave him a better vantage point of the entire plateau, and he just... watched.
The blood hounds didn't tear at the flesh like he expected. They weren't ripping chunks of meat away or fighting over organs. They were just drinking. Their elongated muzzles would find a spot on the corpse the belly wound Ruho had created, the neck wound from the ballista, any gap in the armored scales—and they would latch on and drink. Their throats would work in rhythmic pulses, their bodies perfectly still except for that swallowing motion.
"They're like giant mosquitoes," Ruho muttered, watching another blood hound find a feeding spot.
"More like vampire bats, actually," Azirel said, slipping into his enthusiastic explanation mode. "That's what I based their feeding mechanism on. You see, their evolution is actually really interesting. About 2.4 million years ago on this world which I know sounds like a long time but remember, the planet is way older than Earth because of how I scaled the timeline there was this massive ice age. The eighth one, technically, though the previous seven were relatively minor. This one was catastrophic. Killed off about sixty percent of all life on the planet."
Ruho grunted, not really listening, his eyes tracking the movement of the blood hounds below.
"So the ancestors of these blood hounds were basically just normal wolves," Azirel continued. "Standard pack hunters, ate meat, typical canine stuff. But during the ice age, a population of them got trapped on one of the archipelago islands when the sea levels dropped and then rose again. And all the prey animals on the island died. Just completely wiped out. The wolves were stuck with nothing but frozen, decomposing carcasses that had been there for months or years."
Another blood hound arrived at the corpse, pushing its way into the feeding mass. Fifty-three total now. Ruho had been counting.
"The meat was inedible," Azirel went on. "Frozen solid, rotted, toxic from decomposition. But the wolves were starving. So some of them the desperate ones, the innovative ones they started gutting the frozen carcasses and drinking whatever blood remained. It was a brutal adaptation. Most of them died trying. Their digestive systems couldn't handle it at first. But the ones that survived, the ones whose mutations allowed them to process blood as a primary food source, they thrived. And over millions of years of evolution and selective pressure, they became what you're seeing now. Pure hemovores."
"Fascinating," Ruho said flatly, his tone making it clear he found it anything but fascinating.
"I thought so!" Azirel said, completely missing the sarcasm. "I based the evolutionary timeline on Earth's vampire bats, but scaled up for the larger ecosystem. The jaw structure is particularly interesting—they have specialized teeth for piercing hide and an anticoagulant in their saliva that keeps the blood flowing. Plus their stomachs can process massive quantities of liquid at once, which is why they can drink for hours without stopping."
Ruho watched another blood hound latch onto the Gigantosuchus's flank, its throat pulsing. The corpse was starting to look... deflated. Like a balloon that was slowly losing air. The once-mighty predator that had terrorized him was being reduced to an empty husk by these pack hunters that didn't even eat its flesh.
Hour three passed. Then hour four. The blood hounds rotated feeding positions, some stepping back to let others take their turn, but the overall mass of them never decreased. They were patient. Methodical. This wasn't frenzied feeding. this was extraction of every drop of blood the Gigantosuchus had to offer.
Hour five. The corpse looked wrong now. The scales that had gleamed in the sunlight were dull and flat against the body. The massive form that had seemed so solid, so permanent, now looked like a deflated rubber suit draped over bones. Ruho could see the ribs clearly through the loose skin, could see how the entire body had compressed as the blood was drained away.
And the blood hounds were still hungry.
He could see it in the way they moved—more agitated now, more aggressive. They'd started snapping at each other more frequently, not just establishing hierarchy but genuine aggression. Snarls filled the air. Two blood hounds lunged at each other near the corpse's tail, teeth bared, before breaking apart and returning to their feeding spots.
"They're running out," Ruho whispered. "The crocodile is almost dry."
"Yep," Azirel confirmed. "Probably another ten, fifteen minutes before it's completely empty. Then things are going to get really ugly."
The first real fight broke out near the head of the corpse. Two blood hounds from different packs—Ruho could tell by the slight variations in their fur patterns went at each other with sudden, explosive violence. One lunged for the other's throat, its jaws snapping closed with a sound like a bear trap. The second one twisted, raking its claws across the first one's side, opening up long gashes that immediately began to bleed.
The smell of fresh blood hit the air.
The other blood hounds stopped feeding. Fifty-three heads turned in unison toward the fighting pair.
And then hell broke loose.
Blood hounds lunged at each other from every direction. Pack turned on pack, sometimes pack members turned on their own. Jaws found throats, ripping through fur and flesh with practiced efficiency. Claws tore at stomachs, spilling intestines onto the stone. Blood sprayed in arterial arcs, painting the plateau in fresh red that steamed in the cooling evening air.
One blood hound had its jugular torn out, the vein ripping free with a wet tearing sound. Blood fountained from the wound, and three other blood hounds immediately converged on it, latching onto the dying creature and drinking even as it thrashed and gurgled.
Another was disemboweled, its stomach opened from ribs to pelvis in one savage swipe. Its intestines spilled out onto the ground, gray-pink coils that the dying animal tripped over as it tried to run. It made it maybe three steps before collapsing, and then the feeding began.
The sounds were the worst part. Not just the snarling and growling—Ruho had expected that. But the wet sounds. The tearing. The gurgling. The high-pitched yelps of dying animals. The crunch of teeth on bone. The slurping as blood hounds drank from their fallen pack mates.
Ruho's stomach heaved.
He turned away from the window, his hand clamped over his mouth, and ran. Down the hallway, down the stairs, his bare feet slapping against stone. The sounds followed him, he could still hear them through the windows, through the walls, echoing across the plateau.
He made it to the kitchen before his stomach finally gave up. He collapsed to his knees in front of the large wooden preparation table and vomited. Nothing came up except bile and stomach acid—he hadn't eaten anything except that one bite of raw venison yesterday—but his body heaved anyway, trying to expel the horror he'd just witnessed.
"Ewww," Azirel's voice cut in, sounding genuinely disgusted. "Dude. That's gross."
"SHUT UP!" Ruho screamed, his voice raw. "JUST SHUT UP! YOU YOU MADE THOSE THINGS! YOU DESIGNED THEM TO DO THAT! YOU DON'T GET TO SAY 'EWWW'!"
He vomited again, or tried to, his body convulsing even though there was nothing left to expel.
Outside, the carnage continued. He could hear it even from the kitchen—the snarls, the screams, the wet sounds of violence. Fifty-three blood hounds tearing each other apart, drinking each other's blood, reducing their own population through brutal, efficient culling.
Ruho crawled away from his puddle of bile and pressed his back against the kitchen counter. His whole body was shaking not from cold, though he was still naked and covered in dried blood, but from shock. From fear. From the absolute certainty that if those things got inside the castle, he was dead.
He pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and just sat there. Waiting. Listening to the sounds of slaughter echoing through his empty castle.
The blood that covered him had dried completely now, cracking and flaking off in places. He looked like he'd been dipped in rust. His hair was matted with it. His face felt tight and crusty. Even his eyelashes were stuck together with dried blood.
And outside, the blood hounds kept fighting. Kept killing. Kept drinking.
Ruho closed his eyes and waited for it to be over.