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(Yuma PoV)

We found the warden's office next and got the scoop. Something had been coming out of the woods at night and attacking farmers. They had plenty of photos from the places it had been but they didn't know what it was either. We were going in a little blind.

We checked the first farmhouse it struck. It killed two people here. It just came and dragged them away in the night through broken windows and a crushed back door. It was certainly big. Maybe the size of two busses if we were unlucky. The large reptilian frame gave us nothing.

In the end we called it quits and took up our lodgings. I didn't sleep very well at all that night. I was up thinking about how this thing was out there, maybe ripping people up and I couldn't get any shut eye at all.

We'd found very few clues and no scales or anything that would actually let us identify the creature beyond large, reptilian, and terrestrial. That could still be so many different things it wasn't even funny. It could be some kind of dragon. It could be a Graouilli. It could be a Peluda. It could be a drake of some kind. It could be a Chiwen. At the end of the day we didn't have a very good picture of what we were hunting but at least we had Red. With his nose and training we'd be able to chase the beast and mean it. Tomorrow. When we got up tomorrow. I just had to wait until then. Now if only I could get a little bit of sleep…

No.

Fooey.

We got up bright and early at least. We got out of the hotel. I was drop dead tired already and the day had only just begun. The sun was barely up when we started combing through all the remaining houses which had been attacked along the outskirts of Junon. So far the inside of the city was safe. But being outside of it in the foothills could be a death sentence.

We started with a low manor built into one of the hills. Powerful claws had dug down into the house to get at the juicy morsels within and rip them out and devour them alive. The creature's tail left long tracks in the grass and that three toed claw was everywhere.

We moved on to a little hut which I think had once been a hut but was now nearly entirely gone. It had been burnt to a crisp with blackened wood and the roof had collapsed inwards and there wasn't a hide nor hair of life. Peach found a white scale which told us not a damn thing about it. Port's stupid class was useless. It was good for absolutely nothing. Our combat skills had better be good because our 'Grimm Studies' was garbage. Maybe we should complain to the Headmistress that we were literally not getting the education we needed to save lives. But if that came it would have to come later.

Rosé at least seemed to have a picture in her head of what to do. Pine did too. It must have come with the apprenticeship hunting thing. Rosé trained under Cloud afterall. Her experience for her age must have been second to none. Or maybe Pine. Pine acted like she'd been out hunting big game before. But for me and Peach it was a little new. Peach claimed to have killed little fish in and around Nibelhiem but nothing big enough to come home and brag about and besides the odd 'humanoid' Grimm around Wutai that had been leftover from when Cloud came through I'd never killed anything noteworthy either. Peach was probably the outright strongest of us and was our tank and anchor. But that didn't make her suddenly in the know or experienced about this sort of thing.

The next place we went to had tan walls and was three stories high. It looked like the monster had just ripped a large section of the house apart on the second and third stories to murder whoever used to live here. It left chunks of roof and house down in the grass and little trees. Some of the trees had been crushed under its feet. I was beginning to hate its prints.

We scouted out a farmhouse which had the roof ripped off of it. The bodies of the farmers had already been carted away to the morgue. The only things left behind were the clawed, three toed prints along with the swish of a long tail in the dust.

"What is it?" I squatted down and looked at one of the prints in the grass. Red came up to me and gave it a sniff and nuzzled the print with his nose. I gave him some head pets and scratched his ears.

"I've never seen whatever it is before…" Pine trailed. "It's like… a giant lizard."

"I miss the internet already," Peach sighed. "We should be able to just look it up, you know? Gods this is frustrating." She kicked a piece of the roof across the hard tile floor. She walked over to me and Red and put her hands on her hips. She had hip windows to the tights she wore. I wasn't really sure how she could just show off her body like that with a tight tube top and her heavy gloves and boots.

In contrast I was wearing a whole hoodie and my shield and a pair of cargo shorts. Even out here with nobody around I wouldn't show off my body like she could and did. I was too self conscious to do anything like that at all. I liked that about her. How confident she was in her body. I thought it was nuts.

In contrast Pine wore a full gown down to her ankles that I knew she could move in. It showed off her collar but that was about it. And Rosé wore a combat skirt and leggings. She had her sword by her hip and was looking at Red.

"Red!" She called out. "Lead on, boy. Lead on." The dog started walking in the direction the prints were heading. Off into the woods. It was sniffing the ground as it did and it moved at a speed fast enough that we'd have to jog to keep up.

We took off after Cloud's dog. Rosé knew Cloud's commands evidently which made sense. It also made sense why he'd loan us his dog for this mission. We chased the dog into the forest and there were trees occasionally stripped of their bark and pushed aside. We didn't need the dog to lead us to that but then the animal took a left off the clearly defined path and down over a stream at lopping run.

That was why the dog was useful. So we didn't have to chase the trail around. We could just follow the dog and take some shortcuts. It had a few days on us and if we started chasing it now following its same path it would take us days to find it. With a dog we could head it off. Maybe get in it's way before it kills again. That would be the best goal we could come up with out of all this.

I leapt the little brook with ease right behind Rosé and followed by my other friends. We crossed an open grassy plain and found more tracks there. We followed them for a while to a dusty valley and entered a massive gorge. We ran through the entire thing at a decent rate. Not so fast that we would actually be tired when we came across it but fast enough to get the job done. I readied my shuriken as we ran and shifted my shield. I didn't let that slow my gait with the dog and my team leader just a little ahead of me.

As we ran we organized ourselves. Peach took my spot near the head. She was the heaviest hitter out of all of was the tank of the group by and large. Rosé dipped back a little as we kicked up dust in the gorge. I took the spot in third and our teleporting angel with her ranged dust options stayed in the back.

This was how we wanted to encounter it. Whatever it was. We wanted to have roughly this formation or marching order.

We transcended the gorge out of a sloping end of the canyon. We had to slow down as we ran up the hill and purple mountain with pine trees on either side. The dog eased down so it wouldn't leave us behind. I couldn't see the trail that the animal was following at the moment. The sweep of whatever tail it had or the three toed prints in the dust and gravel.

We traced around the outside of the mountain and then around and there was a cave on the far side of the mountain. It was dusty and dark inside. There were prints all over the place but there was no sign of the monster.

Peach crouched down and started planting a dust crystal in the dirt with a switch and a trigger. Red sat beside her panting and with a big grin on his face. I gave him another quick scratch. "Good boy," I informed him. "Good work."

"Set, don't step there," Peach informed us as she stood up.

"Heard," Rosé announced. She was staring down the sight of her rifle down the mountain and scanning. She must have not spotted anything because she lowered the gun. "Well, we know it doesn't have wings. So that's a plus. I hate tracking things with wings."

"It's decently sized, though. I've never hunted anything this big before," Pine added. "Thank the gods for this dog. Without Red we'd be wandering the wilderness blindly. Well, not totally blindly."

"It bothers me that we don't know what it is," Rosé murmured. "Cloud spent a lot of time drilling monsters into my head even if Professor Port does not. Whatever it is, it came up the coast near here and started snacking on people and we don't even know its weaknesses."

"I'd be a lot more comfortable in my skin if we at least knew what it was called. Past hunters who were just able to look it up were so lucky," Peach agreed.

Rosé sighed. "Let's move out. Lead on Red. Who's a good boy?"

The dog took off again running down the mountain and we took up our marching order behind it. We ran down the gravelly hillside and back into the forest with trees on either side torn up by scales and sometimes knocked over.

Red stopped at a dividing river and turned around in a circle and sat down.

"What do we do? Look for a place to cross?" Pine asked.

"We swim. You fly. It crossed here, we cross here," Rosé decided. She squeezed the hilt of her sword by her side a little. It was… a little reminiscent of the way Cloud would do that sometimes. Just for reassurance. It was like the way he'd once squeezed my hand when he saved me to let me know he was there. It was an odd habit to pick up on one hand but then again not so weird. It was a search for something to hold onto. Just a reminder that there was something there in it with you to the end of the line. A good weapon was like that.

"Come on, boy. Into the water," I told Red XIII. He leaped forward and belly flopped into the yellow water with a splash and started paddling to the opposite shore.

Pine flew across and once she'd secured the other side in the context of not finding the monster immediately waiting for us she signaled for us to swim. I secured my weapon to my back and braced myself. My shuriken was heavy but not so heavy I wouldn't be able to swim with it. It just wouldn't be easy. I dived in and submerged. I kicked off from the bottom and started front stroking to the opposite shore. To be honest, if I allowed myself, I could enjoy it after the dusty gorge and den. The water was cold and I came out soaking wet. But if I kept my glass half full it was refreshing and I had been hot before I dived in. I was just muddy now but not too bad.

Red paced up beside me and braced himself. "Wait! Don't! Aw man," I blurted as the dog shook off right next to me and I smelled the wet animal.

"Unlucky," Peach commented. She pulled her boots off. Gave them a firm shake. Then put them back on.

"You guys alright?" Pine asked us after our little dip.

"You're so lucky you can fly," I bemoaned. I shivered in the hot air. I'd have to air dry.

"Yeah, because faunus are treated super well by everybody all over the world," Pine rolled her eyes.

"You can fly! Shut your mouth!" Peach shouted. "Are you serious right now?! You're fuckin' around and having a laugh, right? You can fuckin' fly."

Pine shrugged haplessly with her staff and her shield strapped to her right arm.

"Let's keep moving," Rosé murmured. "I want to find at least another den if we don't find it out right."

We started following the river bank and Red's nose again. He caught onto it's scent pretty quickly with only a bit of wandering on this side of the river. You could smell the salt of the sea on the breeze mixing with the fresh scent of the pine trees. It was strangely pleasant and we dried off quickly as we ran in the sunshine under the trees.

The river delta'ed into the ocean. Was that a word? Delta as a verb? Flowed. 'Flowed' worked better. It became shallow over smooth little river rocks and formed an estuary as it met the great blue. There was a cliff between us and a rocky beach below where the river actually met the ocean.

"Don't tell me we need to cross again!" Peach complained.

"We need to cross again. Same plan," Rosé ordered. Pine flew across the estuary and landed on the far side with her wide white wings.

It was shallow enough that we were able to wade across with our weapons and gear held above our heads. We found a real trail with the footprints and tail marks and everything. Red barked. And we heard something moving in the willow bushes.

It had a snake-like head attached to a lizard-like body with a long neck like a sauropod. It opened it's massive jaws to reveal giant serrated teeth. It was about the size of four pickup trucks and was easily the largest monster I had ever encountered by mass.

"What the fuck is it?" Peach demanded. Then she hauled off and chucked a dust crystal at it's head. It collided and it exploded with the sound of thunder and a kazzap of lightning. The explosion rocked the monster to the ground and blew off half of its face and scorched it across the flank.

Rosé opened machine gun fire into its body with tight bursts and Pine let loose three bolts of light from her staff which burned and melted at the monster's body. Red darted forward and sank his teeth into one of the front legs of the monster and tried to pull it off balance and get us a better shot.

The monster let out something between a snake-like hiss and the roar of a jaguar. Half of its face was gone. I tossed my shuriken and the blade flew and sliced the beast's head off just below the jaw. It slumped to the ground with its long neck trailing in the grass and stopped moving.

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-WG