The figure that had materialized from nowhere stood between Ishiki and salvation—a monument to biological wrongness that made the carnivorous trees seem almost mundane by comparison.
It was massive. Easily twice Ishiki's size, perhaps more. The creature moved on four legs that ended in hooves thick as tree stumps, each one cratering the earth with impacts that should have been thunderous but somehow produced no sound at all.
The body resembled a rhinoceros—In basic structure at least. It had the same armored bulk designed for devastating charges. Hide made up of plates that looked like calcified bones, growing in irregular patterns across flanks and shoulders.
But where a rhinoceros would have had a head, where any creature with a claim to sanity would possess eyes and a snout or maybe features recognizable as face...
This thing had nothing.
