The communication stone slipped from Pa Da's hand, hit the ground, and rolled down the sloping road into a crack in the gutter.
Fear, like some kind of immobilizing spell, pinned Hall's body in place.
Instinctively, he wanted to shrink back, but the spasms in his calf muscles made it difficult to move.
It was a colossal beast, as burly as a mountain of flesh.
Following the massive bear paw embedded in the shattered paving stones upward, he saw thick forelimbs covered in dense grayish-brown feathers, and a gigantic chest rising and falling with low, rumbling growls.
Atop its nearly three-meter-tall body, dark brown down radiated outward in layers from its eyes, drawing together at the edges of its face into a rounded outline—cradling a plump visage as round as a full moon.
Beneath the mingled moonlight and streetlamps, it displayed an absurdity that defied the laws of nature.
An owlbear.
A Demonic Beast that 99 percent of adventurers would avoid when encountering it in the wild.
Its ferocious, belligerent nature meant it generally did not care whether its enemies were stronger. It needed no reason, either—unprovoked, it could attack without warning.
Even some Demonic Beasts above an owlbear's level, which might have had a chance of defeating one, would do their best to avoid meeting it, lest they be dragged into a bafflingly savage brawl.
As an adventurer, if you exhausted the supplies in your pack, chipped the carefully maintained weapon in your hand, and added two teammates lying on the ground to the cost, only to successfully kill an owlbear—
Congratulations. Your reward would be nearly a ton of tough meat as coarse as sun-dried bark, reeking of earth and sour bitterness when chewed, along with a topic of conversation not even worth bragging about in a tavern.