"Do you see it?" Zephyr asked Aurelia, standing nearby.

"Yes," she replied, her eyes narrowing as she focused on the patch of dirt.

"Can you use the detection spell you spoke of?"

"Hm."

Aurelia didn't hesitate. She drew a breath, activating the spell engraved deep within her core.

A pulse of mana rippled outward.

It wasn't violent. It was a soft, invisible wave that traveled through the air and into the ground.

Zephyr, with his refined mana control, felt the mana wave as it washed over him. He could feel his own body blocking the energy, a portion of it reflecting toward Aurelia like an echo.

'Like sonar.'

The mana pulse was like a sonar, scanning for anything that could stop or react with it.

"I see." He said.

He took a few steps towards the ladder and the overturned patch of soil.

"Rabbit!" Suddenly, Aurelia exclaimed. "Not one. There are many." She said a few seconds later.

She looked down at the seemingly solid earth beneath the ladder. "They are underground. Right here, near the ladder."

Zephyr looked at the ground. There were no visible holes, no burrows, and no exit points. Yet, if Aurelia's spell was accurate, there was a colony of life thriving directly beneath the spot where a man had almost fallen to his death.

"No, they caught onto me. They are fleeing."

Aurelia quickly said.

"They are splitting up, running through many pathways. This!" She gasped.

In her mind's eye, the earth was no longer solid; it was a labyrinth of light, hundreds of mana signatures igniting like tiny, frantic sparks beneath the soil. The sheer volume of them was staggering.

There was no time for a detailed explanation.

"Stand back." She said, kicking the ground.

Immediately, a second wave of mana, far more violent than the first, drilled into the dirt. A second later, a stone wall rose from the ground.

Zephyr and the rest stood there stupefied as it solidified before them, bringing out trapped occupants of the tunnel, even throwing a few onto the ground nearby.

"Woof woof." The dog, excited to see the furry creatures, wagged its tail.

"One, two, three..." Zephyr's eyes scanned the writhing pile. "Fuck. That's over twenty of them right there!"

Whack.

Aurelia's hand connected with Zephyr's head.

"Mind your language." She said, her expression stern.

Zephyr ignored the pain, focusing only on what he was seeing.

"How many were there in total?" He asked, disregarding the intrusion into his personal space.

"The detection spells only work within a few dozen paces when traveling through ground."

"Give me a number."

"I saw... perhaps a few hundred," she admitted. "It becomes difficult to count when the signatures are that densely packed. There could be many more."

Zephyr felt a cold weight settle in his stomach.

The absurdity of it—hundreds of rabbits lurking in the shadows of a small village—was enough to give anyone pause. But as the pieces began to click into place, the 'absurdity' took on a much darker hue.

There could be thousands out there if you scan the entire village. His eyes moved across the large expanse of area.

A single rabbit was a nuisance. A dozen were a pest. But a few hundred or thousands…

Zephyr felt a headache brewing just thinking about it.

Then he thought of Tom. He thought of the man's desperate claims that his daughter had been killed by rabbits.

The village had laughed; they had called him a madman. But a swarm of that size... they wouldn't need teeth or claws. They could simply overwhelm a child by sheer mass, pushing her into the water, holding her down until the struggling stopped.

Or, if they were smart, a single one could drop something in her food that would paralyse her before pushing her into the river. And when you look at what happened, Zephyr had reasons to believe they were smart.

He looked at the creatures on the ground. Fluffy, twitching, and seemingly innocent.

He knew better. These were the same creatures that would kill their own weak offspring just to lower the collective stress of the burrow. Nature wasn't kind, and these things were far from 'cute.'

They were rats with better branding.

'The way they live reminds me of my parents.' Zephyr thought coldly.

His real parents from his previous life abandoned him. The mother was kind enough to leave him, while the father outright sold him to the worst kind of people out there.

It was luck that saved him.

He stared at the rabbits. Their biological quirk was similar to what happened in his real life. And he didn't like that one bit.

Stuffing back the emotions rising within him, he walked closer to the stone wall that trapped the rabbits. Meanwhile, Elenor caught the few that were running away, trapping them with her bind spell.

"Are they monsters?" He asked even though he already considers them monsters.

"You meant mana beast, right?" Aurelia tilted her head, confused.

Humanoid creatures like trolls, ogres, and goblins, or supernatural threats like undeads are generally called monsters. This classification sometimes includes godspawns and their minions.

It was a loose term generally used to classify a threat to humanity. Zephyr should have known this, and yet he asked whether rabbits were monsters.

This question confused Aurelia.

"Yes, that." Zephyr quickly corrected it.

"They could be classified as such." Elenor poked a rabbit stuck to the ground with a stick and said.

"I sense mana greater than that of a normal rabbit from them. It's unusual."

Zephyr walked up to the wall, touching one of the rabbits. His senses were good enough to measure the mana quantity of a creature he could dominate.

He pressed his hand over a rabbit's head, pushing mana into it.

Just as he sent mana forward, the rabbit whined and squealed. The discomfort it felt was obvious.

However, Zephyr didn't care.

"That's unexpected," he said, receiving the mana feedback.

From what he was sensing, the small body of the rabbit contained a large amount of mana, comparable to a single core of his.

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