The beast that was scavenging around the dead wolves was a… Well, Jonny didn’t actually know what it was. It looked kind of similar to the dire badger he had fought a few weeks back, but the colors were completely different, and there was something about the way it was shaped that made him know they were different types of animals. Whatever it was, though, it was clearly related to badgers somehow, so he mentally dubbed it ‘badger thing.’The badger thing had a mixture of dark and light brown fur, walked on all fours, and its shoulder was the same height as Jonny’s. It probably outweighed him by at least double, but compared to many of the magic beasts that Jonny had encountered in the mountains, that wasn’t much. It’s punchable, he thought happily.It didn’t notice him immediately. It was too busy digging into one of the wolf corpses, and Jonny was able to get within 50 feet before he decided it was better to stop and observe. Igrette had spent quite a while lecturing him on how to size up opponents, and right now, her life depended on him not screwing this up.The badger thing didn’t have any obvious magical properties. For something weaker than fourth layer, that usually meant it didn’t have any magical properties at all. Beasts with magical abilities were usually more like the glass deer, where their magical traits were obvious at a glance, and this badger thing did not have anything like that.It’s mouth was not overly large, but as he watched, its jaws could open wide enough to easily wrap around his limbs, and when it bit down on the wolf’s flank, Jonny winced at the crunch of ribs breaking. As the wolverine tossed the ribs aside and dug its nose deeper into (...)