Back!

They grew rapidly, like he had. Perhaps a little quicker, but either way, by the time Kedok found them a much larger main room connected by dozens of smaller tunnels and dug-out walkways, they were big enough to appreciate them. It was likely that the Den itself was bigger now than it had been before, accomodating so many unusual land-based creatures might stretch out its insides a little.

That suited the trio of Xenos, though they didn't really care much for how or why it was being done. They cared that their home was now big enough for all three of them to spar a bit, settle their differences, and lounge around after hunting, without being cramped.

They did like close walls, which was why the whole network of tunnels were important to Kedok. If every single one of them were wholly inside the Den, however, that would have been a miracle. They weren't - their hunting tunnel led not to the flitter chamber (they were now much too large for such snack-sized meals, but all four really enjoyed the hunting of little scared flits, too scared to flip between) but now went to a world similar to the Den's original asteroidal composition. On it were prisoners, regularly dropped by local space-law enforcement. It wasn't a colony: it was their oubliette. None of the men or women there were to be spared death, but there was no money in keeping prisoners on the world they came from. So... hunting was rich indeed.

Single-headed Nijosys, while the lowest ranking of their little Hive, was definitely the smarter of the batch. She was the one who first alerted the others to the regular appearance of the ships which landed, kicked out their living cargo, and sped away.

Every few weeks, then, they would get a bonus. Only Kedok wondered if the people sending these souls to their doom realized that the convicts there weren't eating each other...

It also wasn't very long before Kedok realized that something else was watching them in the Den. Not something sinister, though it was something bizarre. And what would come of it, truly was odd...