UNTAMED! UNNATURAL! UNBRITISH!

Bartholomew Percival Barrett-Stryker III is not on a singular quest—he is conducting a grand circuit of the world’s most outrageous quarry, the kind of legendary game that civilized society politely pretends does not exist. In gentlemen’s clubs from London to Nairobi, his name is spoken with equal parts admiration and disbelief. His estate’s trophy hall bristles with creatures that naturalists refuse to acknowledge: iridescent tusk-beasts, swamp drakes with operatic mating calls, and the stuffed remains of a six-eyed ridge-cat that once tried to steal his wallet. Yet for all his triumphs, the list of beasts worth the chase remains long, and Barrett-Stryker hunts them with encyclopedic zeal. Among these targets, the Great Downy Strider is merely the next challenge—albeit a particularly gaudy one. Reports of its electric-blue fur, plume-striped tail, and appalling “Yiff Season” theatrics have circulated for decades, each tale more outlandish than the last. But the Strider is only one entry in Barrett-Stryker’s leather-bound ledger, a book thick with sketches, notes, and clipped newspaper warnings about creatures whose biology seems to have been designed by a deranged haberdasher. Fresh sightings across the globe have stirred him from retirement: antlered sand-wolves in the Saharan margins, chitin-backed tree mimics in Borneo, and now the Strider resurfacing within the Verdant Rift Basin. The Basin, with its fog-walled cliffs, colossal trees, ruin-choked pathways, and territorial furforms, is merely another stop on his ever-expanding itinerary of impossible hunts. Polishing his rifle and adjusting his monogrammed collar, Barrett-Stryker strides into the jungle with the unshakable confidence of a man who believes the world still exists for him to conquer—one absurd, magnificent creature at a time.