Page 3557

Now, of course, there was a very big problem with his plan here--something that he needed to address before doing anything else.

The thing about feldeaths was that they were very territorial creatures by nature, but normally, they would only kind of try to kill you. To shoo you out their domain, mainly. As long as you ran away properly, they’d leave you alone.

But when you decided to not flee and even attack them back--as Morgunov had done to Kallmakk here several times previously--that was when their cockles got all riled up.

That was the point at which merely running away ceased to be an option. That was the point at which no other being on this planet could compete with the feldeath’s single-minded determination to kill you.

It no longer mattered how far you managed to get away from it. They would chase you, quite literally, forever. They would lock on to your soul signature and follow you endlessly, until either you or they were dead, because their ability to sense souls was unparalleled. Morgunov suspected that they could sense every single soul on the planet at all times. Which meant that there was no hiding from them, either.

Thankfully, however, he had learned of one trick to get them off his case. He kept thinking that it might one day stop working, but he’d used it on Kallmakk in order to end every fight, and it hadn’t failed him yet.

He had to fake his death.

But not just his. He had to fake Bool’s as well. Which was significantly harder.

The key was to give the feldeath that all-important final blow. That satisfying strike. Once the feldeath got that, it would calm down and forget all about you.

They were beings of pure instinct, after all. Or at least, they seemed to be. He’d tried to discern if there was anything more sophisticated going on inside those strange, ethereal minds of theirs, but never had he been able to detect anything else.

But again, this was still a very big problem, because now that Morgunov had reentered its territory, Kallmakk was going to remember him. The feldeath would therefore be attacking him first--and perhaps exclusively--unless he did something about that.

So what was the solution, then? To trick the others into attacking it, as well? That would certainly do it, but he doubted they could be deceived so easily. Even if his knowledge of feldeaths dramatically dwarfed all of theirs combined, they would still know that they should avoid attacking it all costs.