Chapter 446: Finding a Ride

After taking the vulture out of the sky it didn't take the group more than a few seconds take it apart. Everyone had been annoyed by its constant barrage of feathers during their fight with the pair of bobcats and outside of wanting retribution for its earlier acts the group also wanted the large amount of experience that the vulture provided the moment it died. For a second Joshua wondered if Lilly would want to tame the creature, but it was already on deaths door by the time it crashed into the ground since Robin hadn't held back as she hit the bird with multiple thunder strikes out of anger. It would have made a decent flying beast for the group to use, but Joshua was fairly sure Lilly would probably be looking for rarer variant beast to tame for her beast companions.

Going forward Joshua planned to avoid leaving any creatures that they had fought with alive on the prairie. It seemed like the predators in the area could be rather vindictive in their pursuits. One vulture had followed them for hours and Joshua was certain that if he hadn't given it the dead coyote body earlier then it would have followed them from the start and probably kept trying to attack them even when they stopped to rest after the battle. It would have been even more annoying to try to deal with such a beast that constantly followed them all day while attacking them whenever it felt like it could catch them by surprise.

From now on they would either take the predators down that they fought with or help Lilly tame them. There wasn't going to be any in-betweens going forward. Joshua quickly put the bodies of the two bobcats away into his inventory to use for the alliance later. He then led the group to the nearest hill where they could rest and get away from the battle ground. This time around Joshua and anyone else that happened to get blood on their armor or weapons made sure to clean it off thoroughly so that they wouldn't get found out by smell like with the bobcats.

In the area they were currently located they had a nice view of the surroundings and there weren't any predators around from what Joshua could see. The only other life in the current area was a group of prairie dogs in the distance that were poking their heads out of the ground and going around collecting any source of food that they could find for the day. The next thing Joshua notice was the fact that even with multiple days of traveling they hadn't covered much ground in comparison to the size of the prairie. The mountains in the distance looked just as far away as they had looked to him two days ago.

"We're going to need to find a faster way to get around this prairie if we truly want to explore it all." Joshua said out loud now that they weren't in any danger of getting attacked for the moment. "We've been exploring for a few days now and outside of seeing the different creatures in the prairie we haven't really found anything that could give us hints about claiming the territory."

"At this rate it will take us months just to find anything." Henry said with a sigh. "I hate to say it, but traveling through the area like we usually do is just not going to work in such a wide open landscape."

"Well we could always ride on the back of Lilly's beast companions." Amy said with excitement. "I mean Tank is a bit to slow for us to ride on top of if we want to explore the entire area, but Titus and Cinder can both move really fast if needed."

"Sure they can, but they'll also draw a lot of attention from other beast because of their size and the fact that they aren't normal creatures for this environment. Standing out is just asking for trouble in a place like this." Joshua explained. Even with that explanation Amy just shrugged and thought gathering attention would just lead to more interesting fights that would make the group stronger. That was certainly true, but too much fighting will just slow their pace down even more and they'd end up going through the prairie at a snail's pace.

"Well we can't ride the horses through the area either. They're surprisingly too small to easily maneuver through the tall grass. Besides Lilly could only have four of them out at a time and that would make traveling as a large group like our own pretty tough." Victor said as he finished cleaning off his swords. "I'd say the best thing we could do is tame a beast that is accustomed to roaming these areas to travel on."

Victor's words seemed to brighten up Lilly who now had a smug smile as she looked towards Joshua. "Yeah, yeah. You can finally tame something, but we're not going to go crazy with it." Joshua said with a chuckle after seeing the unusual look from his long time exploration partner.

"Sure." Lilly simply responded with a giant grin on her face. Joshua spread out his aura sense as far as he could to see if he could find any beast that could meet their needs. The prairie dogs were interesting, but above ground they weren't nearly as useful as they would be underground so they were put to the back of his mind. Another beast that Joshua was able to find with his aura sense was a group of the larger squirrels in the tall grass nearby. They were agile and could be used to travel on, but they were still on the smaller side and four of them would have a hard time carrying their entire group. Lilly could only have four beast companions out at a time so whatever they tamed needed to be large enough to carry them all with only a number of four of the creatures at the max.

Joshua kept spreading out his aura sense for a while to see if he could find anything in the tall grass that would meet their requirements and he was surprised when he found something that actually fit the bill on a nearby hill that had a large tree at the top of it. This hill surprisingly was mostly hollow on the inside with a big hole dug out of it. At first Joshua thought it might have been another group of prairie dogs that had taken over that area, but the creatures inside of the hole were too big to be considered prairie dogs. From the aura he was feeling they weren't as big as the bobcats or even the coyotes, but they had longer bodies and seemed to have the size to fit the bill.

"I can sense some creatures hiding in that hill over there that might be up for the task. They don't feel particularly powerful, but it should be a good first test to see how you can handle taming beast in this prairie." Joshua said as he stood up and put his equipment back in place after he had finished cleaning it. "If we're lucky then they will end up being just what we need."

"Alright how are we going to handle this? I'm guessing we're not going in guns a blazing after all." Madalyn said as she tried to see any signs of beast lingering around the other hill.

"I think it'll be best if it's just Lilly, Vince, and I that go over there. Don't need to scare the poor things off and Vince can create an illusion so that we can get as close to them as possible." Joshua said getting nods from everyone else. "Natalie make sure to keep the mental link between us up just in case anything happens around here while we're gone. It shouldn't take us very long if all goes to plan."

Joshua, Lilly, and Vince all started heading over to the opposite hill where the creatures they were after were located. As they got closer Joshua was getting a clearer feeling of the beast they were going after through his aura sense, but based off their size it was hard to know exactly what they were in the end. After all just about every animal had some kind of giant counterpart to it at this point. When they reached the base of the hill they didn't start climbing it, but instead made their way around to the other side of it where they could see a little hole that lead into the dugout that the group of creatures had created for themselves.

Vince quickly put up some illusions around each of them since there were only three of them going inside. It would make it difficult for the beast to figure out where they were even if they could only slightly sense their presence. Joshua took the lead so he could fill the role of a tank just in case things went bad as they made their way down the large tunnel. The size of the tunnel alone told Joshua that the creatures were more than big enough to carry them through the prairie. When they reached the end of the tunnel it opened up into this large room that had four figures inside of it.

Three of the figures were on the smaller side only being as tall as the squirrels even if their bodies were a lot longer while the last figure was about twice the size of the others. Now that Joshua got a good look at the creatures he could only see them as some sort of ferrets. They had black fur around their feet, but their underbelly was coated with bright white fur with brownish fur on their backs. Joshua could see why the creatures would be able to move throughout the prairie without being noticed since looking from above it would look like a mound of dirt if anything else thanks to the ferrets fur. They had panda or raccoon like faces to an extent with the black fur around their eyes and their bodies were slender even though they had a lot of fur to make them look bigger.

The moment Lilly saw the ferrets she couldn't help but grin as she started making her way towards the biggest one that was looking around the room wearily even though the other three were sleeping. It was clear that the large one was fully grown while the other three were still children. Joshua assumed that the big one was the mother of the bunch and since he didn't sense any other ferrets in the area he figured this was the entire group. With a quick observe Joshua could see that the smaller ferrets were still in the sixties level wise while the mother was level eighty-three with three stars next to its name. It wasn't the strongest creature in the prairie, but it wasn't so weak that a single coyote could take it down. Now all Joshua had to do was sit back and watch the show as Lilly tamed it.