Chương 34: Hunt

The question of why some regions host high level monsters, while others only support low level populations has been discussed at length in many scholarly works. The answers are numerous, and for the most part complementary. First, it is worth noting that power breeds power. The mere presence of strong monsters puts pressure on the weaker species to evolve or perish. This phenomenon is well documented, but it doesn't explain why a strong beast appeared in the first place.

To this, any scholar worth their title would answer by the theory of mana density. But one could wonder why mana density is inconsistent over Laika, and I shall elaborate on that matter too. Excerpt from Blaise's Ruminations. The plains stretched out before Alexandra. She'd left the city early in the morning while Louis was still asleep, recovering from what he did last night. She wondered what kept him so busy, but she didn't have time to waste. There were verdant beasts to hunt.

As soon as she passed the last cultivated field near Esmera, and the white city walls faded behind her, she focused her attention on the flowers. It was always a sight, pastel hues with the morning sun behind her, but she wasn't concerned about their beauty. She was here to hunt. Training in a vacuum was good, but nothing would replace actual combat experience. She stared at the cluster. Yellow flowers, long stems, large petals splayed open around pistils that stretched too far from their cores.

Maralanes, if Louis' book was right, and if they were actually flowers at all. The beast shared the name. Ambush predator. Strong opening attack. She'd flagged it as manageable without Dark Bolt, but only if she didn't let it land the first hit. Standing at a respectable distance, Alexandra stared at the flowers. She couldn't tell if a monster lurked below, but it didn't change how she would attack. She picked up a stone, a large, heavy one, and threw it into the cluster. The ground erupted.

A single vine shot upward, thick as her forearm, shedding dirt and petals as it whipped toward where she'd been standing. She was already moving left, sickle drawn, and the vine cut through empty air. It reoriented fast. The flowers were gone. They'd been its head, she realized, the yellow petals now peeled back to reveal a ringed mouth packed with inward-curving teeth. It swung at her in a wide arc, low to the ground. She jumped it, came down, and opened a cut along its midsection with the spine of her sickle.

The vine recoiled. A thin clear fluid wept from the wound. It struck again, faster, a straight lunge this time. She sidestepped and let it pass under her arm, then brought the sickle down behind its head in a chopping motion. The blade bit deep but didn't sever. The Maralane thrashed, yanking her forward. She released the handle, let it thrash, waited. It slowed. She grabbed the sickle, pinned the vine under her boot just behind the wound, and drew the blade through the rest. The thrashing stopped.

The severed end curled once and went still, leaking into the soil. Alexandra cleaned the sickle on the grass. The whole thing had taken less than a minute. She looked at the petals scattered around the crater where it had burst from the ground, then back toward the plains stretching ahead. One down. She winced. How could she get rusty this fast? First, she hadn't used Inflict Weakness. She rolled her eyes. Then, she started the fight with the spine of her sickle.

She raised her hand, moving to slap her forehead, but stopped herself at the last moment. Focus, Alexandra. Focus. She wasn't injured. She would see another fight. Always start with Inflict Weakness, and don't swing your blade randomly. She turned her attention to the Maralane's corpse. The book didn't detail a use for this beast's parts. In any case, she couldn't transport them easily as she planned to spend the whole day hunting. Looking away, Alexandra summoned her journal. No skill level. She shrugged.

Her eyes wandered up the page. Quest Journal Daily Reset: 06: 00 | Streak: 10 Days | 1% All Stats Next Milestone: 25 Days Daily Quests: Talk to five people (0/5) She shook her head. That quest was too easy. She could focus on hunting without worrying about her streak. She gave the plains another sweep and walked east. The flower density thinned as the ground rose toward a shallow ridge.

Shorter grass up there, rockier soil, and growing along the ridge's spine in a loose line, a series of wide, flat blooms the color of bruised fruit, deep violet with a dark center that didn't reflect the morning light the way the petals did. She counted seven of them, evenly spaced, each about a meter apart. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! Too even. She jogged her memory. A Pheart? No, that was a Bloomhydra.

She watched the line from forty meters out, looking for movement. Nothing. The dark centers sat still, facing the sun. She found a stone, threw it at the nearest bloom. The center split open. A mouth, a cavity, deep black, and from it a cloud of fine spores punched outward in a tight cone. They hung in the air, catching the light like dust. She hadn't moved. Good. The bloom swiveled on its stem, orienting toward her. The others followed, a slow mechanical pivot, all seven tracking her position. She circled left.

All seven rotated to follow. She stopped, reversed, circled right. Same result. They tracked movement. She threw another stone, this time behind the line. The heads didn't turn. Sound didn't do it, then. The beast knew she was there. She'd have to close distance through open ground with seven spore cannons pointed at her. Alexandra grabbed her sickle and gritted her teeth. She walked straight at them. The nearest bloom fired. She stepped aside, dodging the spores. She kept walking.

Two more fired in sequence, then a fourth. She broke into a run, weaving between the projectiles. The vine erupted from the ground the same way the Maralane had, but thicker, and it didn't lunge at her. It swept, fast, cutting across the ground in a scythe arc meant to take her legs. She saw it and jumped, but it was higher than she expected. The tip caught her left boot and spun her. She came down hard on one knee. Two blooms fired simultaneously. She threw herself flat.

The spore clouds passed over her back, close enough that she felt the displacement of air. Alexandra held her breath. She found the main vine where it emerged from the soil, thicker than her wrist, and drove the sickle around it at the base. She pulled. The whole structure convulsed. She wrenched the blade free and struck again, deeper. The blooms spasmed, firing blind in every direction. She pressed her face into the crook of her arm and kept cutting. On the fourth stroke the vine split. The convulsing stopped.

One by one the blooms drooped, their dark centers closing. Alexandra sat back on her heels and breathed. Her knee ached where she'd landed. She pressed her fingers against it. Not serious. Bruised at worst. She looked at the closed blooms, the severed vine leaking the same clear fluid as the Maralane, the faint shimmer of spores settling in the grass around her. Inflict Weakness. She'd forgotten again. She stood up, and hurried away from the spore still hanging in the air. The sun climbed.

She fought, gathering Ghostbell sap when she spotted the white flowers. A cluster of pale reeds near a stream turned out to be a Shiverwillow, three separate vines sharing a root, each one fast and thin, built for wrapping rather than striking. It cut her forearm before she managed to sever them. She finally remembered Inflict Weakness and used it to untangle herself, then took the vines apart with the sickle. Then the roots. Dead.

A squat, bulbous thing half-buried in a dry patch of soil, its surface ringed with stiff orange petals that rattled when it moved. It charged, rolled, actually, retracting its petals and bowling toward her across the uneven ground. She hit it with Inflict Weakness before it closed the distance. The rattle went quiet. It slowed. She stepped aside and opened it down the middle as it passed. Clean. She stopped at midday beside the stream, unwrapped the cloth from her forearm, and looked at the cut.

Shallow, already crusting at the edges. She rinsed the wound, and rewrapped it with the same cloth. That would have to do until she found a healer. Afternoon came, and the plains deepened in color as the sun moved behind her, the flowers throwing long shadows eastward. She found a Thornmaw half-submerged in a pond's edge, disguised as a floating lily pad. It had reach she hadn't accounted for. The first strike caught her across the shin before she'd even identified the main body.

The second she blocked with the sickle's handle, which numbed her hand to the elbow for a good ten minutes. She killed it. It took longer than it should have. She sat on the edge of the pond. The Thornmaw's body floated in the water. She checked her progress. Sickle Mastery 6 -> 7 Inflict Weakness 4 -> 5 Fighting for real made her skills level faster. She wasn't even that injured this time. A few bruises and cuts here and there, but nothing concerning.

She was counting on the Hands in Esmera to patch her up, assuming they would provide first aid for free like Bamir. She frowned. Her hunt had taken her closer to Lanterne. Perhaps she should swing by the village to speak to her friends and the priest. Alexandra hesitated. After leaving without saying anything… Though, it would help with her daily. Lara, Therion, Bamir… then Marick… and… Mara? She wouldn't have to talk to strangers this way. She stood, brushed the damp from her knees. She could decide later.

There was still time for a last hunt. Her path cut through a denser stretch of the plains, where the grass grew waist-high and the flowers crowded close enough that she had to push through them. The light was lower now, the shadows longer, and the colors had shifted from the soft pastels of the morning to a darker and richer shade. There were a few clusters of Aetherveil scattered here and there. She almost missed the ditch entirely.

It cut across the path at an angle, shallow but wide, its banks overgrown with thick tangles of vegetation that spilled over the edges and spread into the surrounding grass. Deep in the tangle, half-buried under layers of creeping growth, white flowers clustered in dense masses along trailing vines. She stopped. White flowers. Vines covered in thorns. A ditch choked with growth in the middle of an otherwise open plain, the vegetation too dense. Her stomach dropped. She'd read the chapter on Gallowblooms twice.

Long, trailing, thorny vines, thick as her bicep, each one tipped with clusters of white flowers that were not flowers at all but glands, secreting a paralytic on skin contact. Ambush predators. Territorial. The vines could cross fifteen meters in under a second. They targeted neck and limbs, wrapped, constricted. Recommended approach: don't engage alone. If engaged alone, good luck. She took one step back. The vines moved. Not all at once.

One first, a single thick coil sliding free from the mass with a sound like rope under tension, its flower cluster opening. Then two more. Then the entire tangle was shifting, the white flowers multiplying as vines she hadn't counted rose from beneath the growth, and what she'd taken for a ditch was longer than she'd realized, stretching ten, fifteen meters in both directions. She ran. The crack behind her was enormous. She didn't look back. The grass whipped at her arms and she cleared a rise and kept running.

Something brushed her ankle.