God Slayers - Page 237 - High Res

Little bonus for y'all at this tier: the bottom panel unblurred, just for fun.

It's sloppy of course, because I knew it would be blurry, but Xane's still cute af. I never meant for him to be cute. And are we calling him Xane? Is that what we're doing? I'm not glued to the name -- I only picked it because it fit well with Zina, who is on another planet... and also dead. But... I'm also still kinda waiting to see if it sticks.

Oh yeah, he's got some things. Ears. Lots of them. They fold up inside the bigger ears, deploy and position as needed when hunting. The tiny ones at the bottom are rear-facing, enabling him to zero in on and track multiple targets at once. He has an incredibly complex sensory processing center in his brain, enabling him to parse all this information instantly and give him basically a complete picture of his surroundings at all times. He can probably zero in on a weak heartbeat from three stories up. His entire evolutionary path seems to be based on redundancy, so the extra parts probably have overlapping function, and the species on the whole is probably used to losing a few of them over the course of one's life.

One thing I haven't talked about much outside of the TTRPG, but ambush predators are actually somewhat common in Kuserra, at least outside of the Downtown and the other more guarded/populated settlements. Many of them rely on stealth to opportunistically sneak up and snatch prey, or lie in wait perfectly still, waiting for delicious prey to wander too close. Many of them have also evolved to swallow their prey whole, then retreat to safety where they can digest in peace, as in an environment where scarcity is king, successful predators need to be as efficient with their use of energy as feasibly possible. They can't afford to expend a ton of energy chasing down prey and then leave a bunch of said prey behind for other scavengers. So they wait, they conserve their energy for as long as possible, and when they catch something they extract every possible shred of nutrients they can get.

In some outskirt communities, it is probably common for people to vanish without a trace, snatched away in the dark without so much of a squeak.

Interestingly, Xane's particular breed (and Zina's) is probably descended from a favorite Ancestor housepet.