Hello and welcome to YWS. I am here to review this of yours, because the part about the villain really quite intrigues me.
I did like the last effect of prolonging the whole chapter so that it's very apparent that the leader is the last one to, last one to be preyed upon. I think that maybe if you could play around with that a little bit more, than you could maybe make the leader count down the seconds until death since the monster is so precise it looks like he's walking around with a timer and counting the time precisely between each attack.
I also really have come to enjoy your writing style, and I like how smooth this whole chapter is, because it seems like it just is from one event, and one thing to another. And I have always just got to admire that a little bit. 
Personally, I have this distaste for prologue, and I mention this in all of my other reviews, but I basically think that prologues are very rarely executed well. Basically, before you write a prologue and include it in your novel, you have to ask yourself if you can't include this scene anywhere else in this whole entire novel(as a flashback or memory perhaps.) Also, in order for this to actually be valid, you need to allow for a time lapse between this and your first chapter, so that no reader actually get confused. And then, there's another problem, quick readers, like me tend to skip over these prologues unless it really grabs their attention, like the first sentence or the title of the prologue. So I will always warn writers, remember to have an even stronger beginning/hook in Chapter 1 to introduce your story, in case a reader did decide to skip it. I hope that this all makes sense to you.
Five men run through the still night. The sent of freshly fallen rain still hangs heavily in the air, though it had stopped raining a long time ago; even before the men had set one foot in the forest, when they were a group of twenty-five.
I have a tendency to pick on first sentences, and for some reason I felt like this one probably could be rearranged to make it have a stronger "hook"and beginning, because this kind of seemed kind of clunky to me. I would definitively switch around the order of these two sentences, and make it like this:
"The men had set one foot in the forest, when they were a group of twenty-five, now just five; the sent of freshly fallen rain still hangs heavily in the air, though it stopped raining a long time ago."
The thing that would intrigue me about that sentence ^ is that you already gain the information that you are missing twenty people, which is a massive shocking statistic. Even though I have included that part about rain, I would personally exclude it, because this breaks a rule-of-thumb that I once read in a writer's article " Never start anything(novel,chapter,story,etc.) with the weather because that's just so boring <,<[/i] I'd rather have any other type of description than just this, because rain seems a bit mundane,.
Scanning through the first paragraph, it does seem to me like you misused the use of semi-colons in one specific sentence, because of your obvious awkward placement that you have put in.
The trees are unusually still; tall, yet having deep sloping arches that almost touch the ground.
First of all, just some basic grammar that everyone knows is that a semicolon is supposed to connect two separate sentences, (meaning one subject and one verb on each side). This is lacking here, because on the second side there is just a prepositional phrase since you start it off with the word "yet". Then you also interrupted an adjective pair, where you could have simply put an and. I would rewrite it, so that it could correctly look like this:
"The trees were unusually still and tall, yet having deep sloping arches that almost touch the ground."
And I bet you are, you bastards! Thinks the leader of the somber men.
I don't understand about who is this leader even thinking about here? Is he talking about the men that are following him, or is he talking about the monster/villain.
The leader is glad that the night covers the gutted man from his sight.
This seems quite contradictory here, because I don't understand how this leader can see all of the gore if indeed it's dark night and the slain body is under the cover of darkness. It just seems as if he really does have a supernatural eyesight, which you mentioned before when he identified the shadow. So why is this leader even glad, if he saw the gutted wounds anyways since he can describe them in the paragraph above?
Fears runs through his blood.
You did an extremely great job of showing what that fear really looked like, so I'm sure that this sentence really isn't necessary here, since the reader is seeing all of the context in the paragraphs around it(where all of the anticipation is happening.)
Without warning, the thing lunges.
This sentence is kind of bothering me for a bit, because it's not what I imagine. You gave this impression of a precise and careful kill where the eat almost has a timer in their head and has equally spaced intervals. So the leader should be counting on that, instead of thinking that the beast is giving him no warning. Also, since he is the last one left, I would get the impression that he is expecting the best to kill him and soon, because he is the only one left.
That ending is so bad-ass, like I wasn't expecting revenge to come, even if this supposed leader survived or died. I think it's unique that you did this, because I'm getting pretty bored and tired of happy endings. They usually aren't always these happy endings in real life, so reading this makes me realize that, and me kind of liking this "bomb" ending.
That's all I have for this prologue, and I hope that this review helped you improve your writing. If you have any questions feel free to reply below.
~P.S.
Points: 37216
Reviews: 346
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