I am one with the animal inside

Shouts of frenzied panic sputtered from the brute atop of Alastor's back as the dire wolf bucked him about like a wild mustang who refused to be broken. All the poacher could do at this point was hold on to Alastor's hide for dear life. If he let go, he would surely be thrown and pounced upon by the behemoth before he knew what had happened. He just had to pray the older dire brute tired before he lost his grip. Unfortunately for the poacher, though Alastor was no spring chicken, he was still in prime shape, a paragon of fitness for his age, and he was still capable of outlasting and outperforming his sad excuse for a wolf. Realizing that he wouldn't be able to buck his foe from him, Alastor got creative. Obsidian eyes scanned his environment for a way to leverage the fight in his favor. A quick glimpse at some jagged stone from a broken pillar gave him a spark of inspiration, and with a malevolent grin, the massive ebony wolf went charging towards it. The wolf on his back bit into his scruff, trying to subdue him, but Alastor barely felt it beneath the rush of adrenaline and endorphins. This was what he lived for! The thrill of the hunt, the heat of battle, the delight of stealing another's life! It was his most favorite game.

The wolf on his back realized far too late what was going on as Alastor charged straight at the broken pillar. He tried to dislodge himself, but Alastor was already throwing himself at the rock, twisting to go sailing backwards into the jagged stone. The poacher wound up crushed between the massive brute and sharp stone, his back breaking with a sickening crunch and squish of flesh being punctured. Alastor slumped forward and turned to find his attack much more effective than he had expected. The poacher was still hanging from the jagged rock, jutting out pieces of crumbling pillar impaled into his back to hang him like a macabre art piece. Paws hung limp at his sides, his sides expanding and collapsing in rapid succession as he gasped for breath, eyes and head moving about in a panic. That was when Alastor realized the truth—he had paralyzed the other wolf by breaking his spine on the rock. Though he was alive, his body was all but useless to him now. A dark glee gleamed in the Mendacium brute's eyes while he stalked towards his incapacitated prey like a predator, growling low in his throat with sharp fangs bared in imminent threat. The brute gave pathetic whimpers and whines, pleading for mercy from the monster that drew ever nearer. He would find none in those empty abyssal eyes.

Alastor lifted his forelegs to plant his paws on the broken pillar to either side of the wolf, standing on hind legs while he studied his victim, leaning in mockingly close, but never enough for the paralyzed wolf to attempt a snap at him. Then the dire brute pressed a paw to the wolf's chest, flexed his digits until razor sharp gemstone claws tore into flesh and muscle, and with an agonizingly slow pull of his muscled foreleg, Alastor began to open the poacher's underbelly like unzipping a jacket. Flesh tore and ripped with wet tearing sounds, blood spilling freely down to the earth, and gradually the poacher's insides began to spill out of his open abdominal cavity, steaming in the cool night air. The brute was already dead, his body just hadn't realized it yet. Paralyzed, he could feel nothing except the dulled pull of his body being eviscerated alive and the hazy weariness that came the tremendous blood loss. Alastor stopped just above the wolf's groin, giving an especially hard yank of his paw free to mangle the mwolf’s male parts in a final act of emasculation before the blood-soaked dire brute hopped back down and turned back to the carnage, letting the dying poacher's final view be his backside as he slunk away into the darkness to finish off his friends.

Coming back around to the campfire, Alastor's tenebrous gaze swept over the bloodbath that the camp had become. Bodies lay strewn about, the fresh spring grasses drenched in fresh blood and the stench of copper hanging in the air from the sheer amount of spilled viscera. He counted the bodies around him—then heard the whining grunt of a live wolf nearby. Like a hawk, the predator's head snapped about to fix the crippled wolf with a lethal glare. The last poacher was trying to crawl away, hamstringed by Scylla. His feeble escape was little more than the last ditch efforts of a doomed creature desperately trying to cling to life. Alastor's expression remained hard and volatile like a ruthless executioner as he drew down on the fallen wolf, fast strides putting him over his fallen foe in mere moments. The wolf saw the shadow loom over him, then looked up into the black form of Alastor. "Please..." he pleaded, raising a paw in surrender, hoping for mercy. Alastor responded by snapping his jaws down on that paw, snapping it at the wrist with a crunch of bone. The poacher screamed in pain as Alastor dragged him across the ground, bringing him back over to the campsite. These wolves had wanted Elysium's deer so badly, then he'd gladly give them what they wanted. Dragging the flailing poacher over to their pile of kills, Alastor tossed the wolf up across one of the poached bucks with a sizable rack of antlers. His foe tried to push and fight him off, but to no avail. Alastor grabbed the wolf's head with his paw, sharp claws digging into his scalp to secure his hold, and lifted the wolf up over those sharp antlers. The poacher tried to protest, to beg, to say anything—but his words were swiftly cut off as Alastor pressed his head down onto the buck's antlers.

There was a sickening squelch as flesh was impaled, and then a popping as the antlers stabbed their way through the unfortunate brute's skull and neck. Bits of skull and brain matter dangled from the antlers as they protruded out the back of the wolf's head, jutting through the soft palate of his maw and through his esophagus, just narrowly missing his spine so the wolf wouldn't receive the sweet mercy of paralysis. Those cries for compassion changed into gurgling sounds of horror as the wolf's mouth and throat filled with its own blood, drowning it while it dangled from the buck's antlers in a grotesque fashion. The fight was over; the wolf was dead even before his body had expired. Even if he managed to pry himself free, the damage was fatal and he would bleed out in seconds. But just for good measure, Alastor kept his paw pressing down on the wolf's head, ever so slowly sinking him further and further down those antlers with wet ripping sounds until the wolf's head had met the dead buck's. By that point, the poacher had stopped kicking and his gurgling sounds had ceased as well. He was dead. That just left one more to go.

Abandoning the corpse, Alastor returned to the wolf he'd beaten silly against the pillar. The poor wretch was still a twitching, bleeding mess on the ground, clearly braindead and just waiting for the merciful release of death now. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, his breathing shallow, and his movements volatile and erratic. He was nothing more than a husk imprisoning a soul that yearned for the end. Even in his animalistic state, Alastor realized there was no fight left in this creature. He dragged the twitching body back over to the campsite to the light of the fire and put the wolf on his back so he could straddle the struggling being and put him out of his misery. Staring down with an almost erotic glee in his obsidian eyes, Alastor wrapped both of his paws around the wolf's throat and slowly applied pressure until his digits were compressing down around the wolf's windpipe with unyielding force. The wolf's body twitched and struggled, but there was no conscious effort to fight off the dire brute that was leisurely snuffing out his life. These were merely the death throes of a creature long past its expiration.

With that manic grin creeping across his dark lips, Alastor stared unblinking down at the wolf's face as it choked and writhed, vacant eyes staring unseeing up into space as they grew dimmer with each second he was deprived of oxygen. Alastor's breathing deepened, his body tensed and quivering with an almost carnal delight as he watched and felt the fight slowly ebbing away from his final victim, paws crushing down around the poacher's throat harder, harder... so hard he could feel the beat of the wolf's heart in the arteries beneath squeezing pads. It grew weaker and weaker, the poacher's twitching slowing, until finally the body lay still and those vacant eyes turned to glass and saw no more. There was no death rattle, no wheeze of a final breath as Alastor choked the life from him. When it was all over, Alastor continued to grip around the dead wolf's throat until he was sure he was gone, quivering with barely contained and borderline wanton glee at the thrill of taking the lives of those who had wronged his family in much the same way he received a primal lecherous pleasure whenever he choked and roughed up Manea in their throes of passion. Breathing a slow, shuddering sigh, Alastor released the corpse from his grasp and flopped back onto his haunches, grinning muzzle tipped back towards the sky as he reveled in the afterglow of battle, splattered in the blood of others while dripping his own from a few fresh, nonfatal wounds. Gods, that had felt so good...!

"Alastor Mendacium"