Vyshak-Nak

An Escalating Threat....

It had started but a couple weeks ago. He and his party had been requested to find some missing people. Rumors of a cult had been circulating around town recently. Sightings of torchlight and chanting by robed figures had become prominent in the surrounding woods; the mayor feared that his citizens were being sacrificed to some terrible deity or demon. Naturally, they'd accepted the quest. This had to be put to rest before something terrible erupted from it.

Eventually, they had found the cult's ritual circle. Blood soaked the entire area but not just from the dead citizens who'd been taken. Five cultists laid dead around the circle with.... something crouching over one of the butchered, robed person devouring down flesh, bone, and even clothing. It was unlike anything they'd ever seen.

It was on the short side - larger than a halfling but shorter than a dwarf - and lanky with arms and legs that appeared dis-proportionally long compared to its body. Its head and legs only vaguely reminded them of a rabbit's, but that was only because of the shape. It's dark grayish body appeared to be a carapace, akin to a beetles, though it was dotted with a number of large spines producing the appearance of it having thick strand of fur that were in segmented parts of its body due to the plates of its rigid carapace. The carapace narrowed towards its lower back out to a point farther passed the top curve of its legs. From underneath this point emerged a segmented tail that had no spines on it at all. The tail was on the shorter side and only appeared as a means to help it keep balance.

The grotesque sounds of it chewing seemed gurgled. Their elf companion had pointed out seeing what appeared to be slits behind its jaw hidden but exposed under the plate of its head. These slits appeared to be deep, undulating horribly as it breaths and blood spray out as the creature gorged itself.

As they had looked on in stunned silence, one of the long protrusions on the the top of its head - horns that appeared reminiscent of rabbit ears - rotated in the socket of its head plate towards them. It turned its head slight revealing a deep eye socket in the temple of its skull-plated, rabbit-like head. A small, red light pierced their very beings as it finally took notice of them.

The thing before them turned to fully face its next victims, forgetting its current meal entirely and paying no mind to the blood and gore dripping freely from its wide, gaping jaws. Four, beady eyes colored a deep crimson hue stared soullessly into their own, -two on the front of its head and two positioned in the temple area - all embedded in the spiked, skull-like fixture it possessed. Its claws, large and powerful with webbing between all its fingers save for the thumb and pointer finger, curled menacingly.

His party had readied itself as it took a step forward with is webbed, clawed feet. A deep chattering reverberated from its throat, the sound echoing with a garble due to the aforementioned slits. It reared back and unleashed what could only be described as a roar that rippled through them with the graveled chattering and garbling from before at a much higher volume. Its mouth dropped open with a width that seemed impossible for its size. The bottom jaw of the creature splits apart down the middle revealing long, sharp teeth. From its top jaw emerged two fangs that appeared similar to the ones that belonged to a viper. A second set of jaws could only slightly be seen in the darkness of its gaping, gore-filled maw. 

It had charged them... it had been a bloody mess. Looking back, it hadn't been the most difficult thing to defeat it, but something about it just unnerved all of them. Their very cores were shaken. Their instincts screaming that this thing was unnatural. When the thing finally laid still in the light of the ritual fire, the party was alive but horribly wounded.

That should have been the end of it, but a week or so later hunters came screaming into town into a panic shouting of ferocious beasts they'd never seen before ripping apart animals and humanoids alike without remorse. What had they expected? Werewolves? Displacer Beasts? They would've been preferable. 

Five of them. There were now five of those things. How? They'd killed the only one the cult had managed to summon. How was that possible? Fortunately, they saw the pack of those creatures from afar and had been wise enough to turn around to gather allies for the encounter. 

Despite an advantage in numbers, the creatures proved to be an ever greater threat than they had predicted. They seemed bizarrely coordinated and at one point he had even witnessed one of the creatures noticing their rogue going in for a sneak attack only to be noticed by another on the other side of the battle. This normally wouldn't have cause much alarm had it been the second creature to do anything about it, but it had been the target of the rogue that had spun around and attack despite never even noticing the rogue was there. After an immense struggle and the loss of several allies, the creatures had been felled. The corpses were burned as a precautionary measure. That should've been the end of it, but unease still hung eerily over their party.

So they gone back a few days later to the sight of the battle to investigate. His party had not been convinced burning the corpses would've been enough. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary and they'd because to head back to town.... the ground started to move. The blood-soaked earth beneath them shifted and writhed as if in agony. The dirt, grass, and stone morphed and twisted as slowly shaped itself into over twenty bipedal creatures with disproportional limbs until the material fell off it like a dried crust. 

Now staring down the hungry, red eyes of two dozen of these horrors, he could only shiver in terror as he silently prayed for a quick death even as he turned to flee with a gargled chattering screeching behind him.