The mountains of the Spine were a perilous place in more ways than one. The biting cold was enough to render a fully-grown man lifeless from frost within five minutes without the protection of the warmest clothing in Lightning Country, and the wind was a terrifying and fickle force that could knock a climber off of a precipice to fall thousands of feet to his death with terrifying ease and callousness. The stone of the mountain was brittle and did not lend itself well to securing picks and crampons, and everything was coated with a thin layer of ice that crystalized in a way to slice the skin off of flesh with the slightest of pressure.
And that wasn’t even counting the Danger Beasts that called such a horrific place their preferred hunting ground. From the swarms of Ice Fleas that could turn a human into a skeleton within ten seconds, to the Manticores that prowled the cliffsides and killed not just for food but for sport, the native fauna was a whole hell in and of itself. But perhaps the king of these monsters spawned from the darkest depths of nature’s sick imagination was the Imperial Thunderbird.
A true S-class Danger Beast, it had a wingspan equal to that of four men laying end to end and could displace thirty cubic meters of air with each flap of its wings, generating enough lift to allow it to literally soar above the clouds and made its homes in the most inhospitable of environments, safely out of reach of predators who might steal its eggs or attempt to use it for a meal. But the comparison to other “birds” ended pretty quickly after one mentioned the wings. Its” feathers” were actually razor-sharp, silvery scales that lined its body, making its appearance more lizard-like than anything else. Its beak was at least three feet long, and unlike a bird, boasted a set of serrated teeth the better to rend flesh with. Instead of two eyes it had four or six depending on age. And its talons were wickedly hooked monstrosities that the crature made sure to regularly douse with its own urine and feces in order to make any wound inflicted a guaranteed source of infection and death through sepsis.
It was a piece of one of these creatures that Captain Risu and her dandy new assistant Asuka were to retrieve. It had taken them a week to hike across the haggard foothills leading to the base of one of the mountains that hosted a Thunderbird’s nest, and yet another week to make it partway up to where they could even think about accessing the creatures. Currently, the two shinobi were within sight of the nest.
At least thirty meters above them, the nest was a collection of logs, branches, vegetation, and even a fair number of animal long bones all woven together by mud and excrement into a five-meter-diameter basin, within which likely rested eggs and shed feathers. Between the two shinobi and the nest, however, was a nearly sheer cliff-face whose very top forced the outcropping on which the nest was perched. The stink of ammonia was nearly overwhelming, and issued from the splattered feces and urine hardening on the rocks nearby.
Fortunately, there was no other sign of the Thunderbird, which had likely gone off to hunt livestock from the fields of ranchers hundreds of kilometers away and thousands of meters in elevation below. Evidence of its brutality, however, abounded. The base of the cliff was littered with bones and decaying body parts and refuse in various states of decomposition. And what any shinobi could tell was that at least some of those bones and decaying parts were definitely human.
