The next morning Sobek was awakened by strange movements. When he opened his eyes he found that some of his brothers and sisters had come out of the nest and were playing on his back. For cubs as small as half a meter, a three-meter older brother was basically like a huge slide for them.
Sobek let them do it: they didn't bother him, so he could let them have fun. Until they started nibbling at him, he wouldn't need to chase them away. Besides, he had more important things to think about. "System, open the main interface!"
[Spinosaurus aegyptiacus]
Level: 3
Length: 3 m
Height: 1.5 m
Weight: 1,5 ton
Diet: carnivore, fishivore
Strength: 170
Agility: 130
Defense: 86
Maximum speed: 4 km/h
Experience points: 180/3,000
Skill Points: 3.5
Fame points: 0/1,000,000
Bonus money: 340
Much to his relief, the amount of experience points for each level up only increased by 1,000 points at a time, not doubled. Even so, however, it was a fairly high expense.
With his current size he would no longer have been able to feed himself with the food his father brought: even if he had kept it all to himself it wouldn't have been enough to satiate him. However, this wasn't a problem: now he knew how to lure his prey out of the forest.
He had decided to continue using the traps until the yolk of the eggs had completely dried up. This was for a very simple reason: sooner or later he would be forced to follow his father into the river to fish. Fishes were the only food source that could sustain him in the long term, since the bigger he got the more he needed large prey, and groups of fishes were the only solution suitable for him for now. However, before entering the water, he wanted to accumulate enough skill points to upgrade [Swim speed].
Currently the maximum speed he could reach was just 4 km/h, which meant that if he had found a big fish or a crocodile he could end very badly. But with [Swim speed] he would have had an escape route. That ability increased his speed for ten times at its maximum, which meant that if it had been maxed out it would have given him a 40 km/h acceleration. However, even just raising it to level 1/5 would have given him advantages: if Sobek was right, then each level of the skill corresponded to a multiplier: level 1/5 to a x2 increase, level 2/5 to x4, and so on up to x10 at level 5/5. Which meant that even a single boosted skill level equated to a remarkable speed.
With that thought in mind he got to his feet and immediately set out for the hunt. He didn't want to wait for his father to arrive with the food: it would have been useless, so he might as well leave it to his siblings. He made a quick tour of the river bank to check if there were any beelzebufo or some large snake, but seeing that there was nothing he gave up and, having obtained some eggshells, went back to the forest.
Unfortunately this time he was not immediately lucky: the first preys he got could actually called miserable.
[Prey detected: Compsognathus longipes, compsognathidae. Experience: 400 points]
Compsognathus was a small dinosaur just the size of a turkey. It was also an insectivore and scavenger, so it didn't provide any skill points.
As if that weren't enough, they were pretty fast. Catching one was far from easy. So even if they moved in groups of about ten individuals or even more, it was impossible to catch them all. Like the fishes they counted on numbers to confuse predators.
Sobek only managed to catch two of them, one at dawn and one around ten in the morning. Their caloric intake would never have been enough to sustain his big body.
However, he had another brilliant idea.
The yolk of the egg attracted only a few animals; but the meat, that attracted many more. With this knowledge in mind, when he killed his third compsognathus he left it in plain sight on the sand.
The results were not long in coming: after less than half an hour an animal similar to a dog emerged from the forest.
[Prey identified: Thylacinus cynocephalus, thylacinidae. Experience: 1,200 points]
Thylacinus, also known as the marsupial wolf, was a canid that reigned in Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea until it was exterminated by humans during the early 1900s. Although in that time it had practically no opponents and was therefore the superpredator of the islands, it reached just sixty centimeters in height and one and a half meters in length.
Before the arrival of the dingoes in Australia it had had no rival; yet in that messy world it was nothing more than a low-ranking predator.
As he had done with the euparkeria, Sobek jumped on it from behind and crushed it with his weight. The thylacinus did not have time to dodge and was hit. There was no need for more: this time Sobek had managed to strike in the right place, and the base of the thylacinus's neck had snapped neatly.
Thanks to thylacinus he was able to satiate himself. Not only that, but he gained 1.8 skill points!
Combined with the 3.5 he already had, he now had 5.3 skill points. He could finally upgrade one of his skills!
The choice was not difficult. Sobek had already thought about upgrading [Swim speed]. After all, [Ambush] needed 10 skill points, which was out of his reach. As far as [Rapid digestion] was concerned, it could wait: although he would have liked to have been able to digest his preys faster, he had to be able to hunt the preys in the first place.
As soon as he upgraded [Swim speed] to level 1/5, he immediately felt something different about him. Physically he hadn't changed, but it was as if he felt more slippery, more hydrodynamic. Not only that: his strength and agility went up exponentially. The first had reached 340 points, while the second 280.
He was eager to put that skill to the test, but he preferred to wait. By that time of day the spinosaurs had already left the river and he didn't want to go into the water alone. So he picked up the compsognathus he had used as bait, devoured it, and then he returned to the nest.
With that hunt, as well as an increase in his skills, he had obtained a total of 2,400 experience points (400 for each of the three compsognathus and 1,200 for the thylacinus). Added to the 180 he already had, he had already gained 2,580 experience points. Which meant that it was enough certain that he would level up the next day.
When he arrived at the nest his brothers and sisters crowded on him again. He let them do it: he didn't want to deprive himself of those moments.
The sad thing was that he knew he couldn't stay with them for long. Once he got big enough he would have had to go his own way. Furthermore, once the first evolution was completed, he probably wouldn't even have been able to stay with the herd anymore: he would have become a different species, so the other spinosaurs would have hardly accepted him in the herd. So he might as well enjoy the time he had left to spend with his family while he still could.
The next day Sobek went hunting as soon as he woke up, without even waiting for his siblings to wake up. He headed for the forest and, as usual, placed the eggshell in plain sight.As on the previous day, the first to show up were the compsognathus. After all, such small animals couldn't go too far, so the little pack was still near and they could smell the egg's yolk. Sobek promptly killed one and left its carcass on the sand as he had done the day before.His hopes were not disappointed: after an hour, another thylacinus came out from the bush to eat. Sobek killed it exactly as he did with its predecessor and devoured it.With the thylacinus and the compsognathus he had gained another 1,600 experience, enough to level up again. He didn't hesitate and immediately agreed.After the usual ten seconds of pain he opened the main interface.[Spinosaurus aegyptiacus]Level: 4Length: 4 mHeight: 1.8 mWeight: 2 tonsDiet: carnivore, fishivoreStrength: 510Agility: 470Defense: 142Maximum
When the sun rose Sobek was already awake. He would had lied if he had said he wasn't very excited: this would have been his first time in the river!Even if the yolk in the eggs had not yet completely dried, that type of hunting could no longer support him. He needed more preys, and since he had proved that the forest was still off-limits, his best way was to follow his father into the river.He was confident enough now to dive into the water. Even if there were very large prehistoric crocodiles, most of them would have lost interest in front of a five-meter predator. The only ones who would have seen him as a prey would have been titans like the deinosuchus, but common crocodiles would have aimed for smaller, more viable preys like fishes.Of course, there were other dangers as well. For example there were snakes: gigantic animals such as the titanoboa and the gigantophis hunted in the water. Or there could be freshwater sharks or other huge fishes...But he had no choice this time.
Now his experience points had dropped back to 180 and the threshold for leveling up had risen to 8,000 points. However, for once Sobek wasn't focused on them. His focus was on other skill points.Sobek had gotten to know how skill points worked during his previous hunts. They could only be supplied by animals that could feed on terrestrial vertebrates: for example, if they ate only insects, they were classified as 'insectivores', while if they ate only fishes they were 'fishivore'.However, it wasn't necessary for an animal to be exclusively carnivorous to be worth skill points; if its size or its abilities were enough to allow it to eat terrestrial creatures with bones, than it was consider a carnivore. For example spinosaurs almost always ate fishes, but their size allowed them to feed on even smaller land animals.As a result, Sobek had at his disposal a wide range of animals that lived in the river that could provide him with skill points. An example were crocodiles and snakes. But
For the next two days Sobek always went fishing in the inlet. At that time he had managed to capture four stethacanthus.Freshwater sharks were particularly abundant in the inlet: the absence of larger predators due to the shallow water had favored their spread. Unfortunately, it couldn't be said that there were thousands of them: Sobek had only managed to take a couple each day.That number was insufficient to satiate him. To make up for it, Sobek had fed on one of the onchopristis captured by his parents. It didn't provide any experience points, as it had been killed by another spinosaur, but at least his stomach was full.However, the effort was not in vain: he had gained other 4 skill points from the sharks. In total, he now had 4.1 skill points. Just one more stethacanthus and he might have upgraded [Swim speed] one more time.In addition, his experience points had also risen, even if much slower than before: he now had 6,180 points. Just a little longer and he would have reached
Sobek had seen it right. Over the next five days he relentlessly hunted the amphibians that inhabited his new fishing area. He spent the whole day there and only returned to the nest in the evening.There were amphibians of all kinds: acanthostega, ichthyostega, crassigyrinus, eriops... each of them was just one and a half meters or at most two meters long, but they had a high nutritional value and there were plenty of them, consequently they were enough to satisfy Sobek.He currently had 7 skill points. Each amphibian had provided him with 0.5 skill points at most, but with so many of them he had accumulated several. He also found a torpedo fish hidden in the mud which gave him 1 more skill point.Thanks to [Swim speed] it was enough for him to sneak up on his prey and charge once he got close enough. Sobek was counting that once [Ambush] was improved, the hunt would have become even easier.Unfortunately, on the contrary the experience points provided by the amphibians weren't much.
When the leveling up finished Sobek opened the main interface to check his attributes.[Spinosaurus aegyptiacus]Level: 9Length: 9 mHeight: 3.3 mWeight: 4.5 tonDiet: carnivore, fishivoreStrength: 1,120Agility: 1,085Defense: 560Maximum speed: 10 km/hExperience points: 3,600/30,000Skill points: 2Fame points: 0/1,000,000Bonus money: 1,250"30,000 experience points to the next level up..." Sobek grumbled in his head. He had hoped he could reach level 10 more quickly.If he found another baryonyx he could have gained a lot of experience very fast, but it was difficult. Even if in that world all the dinosaurs of all ages existed together, that didn't mean that he could found one of them every twenty meters.Like spinosaurs, each baryonyx established its own territory and stayed there. Tramps who had still not find their own place were rare.It was also unlikely that the baryonyx would have settled too close to the spinosaurs pod. If he wanted to find one he had to go further, but
The first thing Sobek had to do was find a suitable place for him. Not exactly a territory where he could fish, but more a place full of preys and with not many predators, possibly with some kind of refuge that he could use as his outpost.Unfortunately, for several kilometers the river continued normally, without offering any safe point. No covered area, no hiding place, not even a denser zone where it would have been easy to camouflage. After several wanderings, however, he finally arrived in a place where the river bed widened and the water became lower.He had arrived in a swamp; the water of the river poured into some kind of marsh, slowing the current and allowing the birth of small islets. Large mangroves grew everywhere and in the areas where the water was lower there were huge reeds. Sobek could see several fishbirds perched in trees or intent on fishing. Not only them: there were also numerous pterosaurs, some of them very large; Sobek was able to see a flock of tapejara, fly
THUMP.Sobek was awakened by a vibration.THUMP.Memory reminded him of the t-rex's footsteps, which made him shiver. However, he quickly understood that it couldn't be the case: a tyrannosaurus wasn't that heavy. Those footsteps seemed to have been produced directly by a mountain that had been magically given legs and had begun to walk.THUMP.Sobek stood up, eager to find out what was causing that sound. However, when sleep completely abandoned his eyes and he was able to focus, he almost jumped back!Next to the islet tha he had turned into his home there were a group of real behemoths that were peacefully crossing the swamp. They had huge necks at least nine meters long and just one of their legs was taller than him![Prey identified: Dreadnoughtus schrani, titanosauridae. Experience: 200,000 points]Sobek was stuck. For the first time he met the giants of prehistory: the sauropods!Sauropods were the largest land animals ever to appear on Earth. Elephants and mammoths were just li