Chương 80: I-Frames on a Deer

[Time]: Day 48, Friday, 10: 25 AM [Location]: Royal Rosas Hunting Reserve · The Novice Zone Rhode stepped up to the massive, ruined carcass of the Palebone Dragon. She did not immediately reach for a harvest knife. Instead, she planted her boots shoulder-width apart, gripped the hilt of her greatsword with both hands, and inverted the blade. The heavy steel tip pressed into the bloody mud directly between the dragon's vacant, glassy eyes.

The casual, lollipop-chewing delinquent who had demolished a multi-million-Solar security door yesterday simply vanished. What stood in her place was rigid, ceremonial, and ancient-looking.

"You have successfully hunted this beast, tormented by the boiling of its own dragon blood," Rhode intoned. Her voice had dropped an octave, resonating through the damp jungle canopy with the solemn gravity of a cathedral eulogy.

"May the Witch's Moon soothe your agony. May she guide you away from madness, toward the shore of reason, and grant you return to eternal stillness." Hathaway stared at her cousin. What? Her eyes darted frantically between Bella—who was nodding with profound, eyepatch-wearing approval—and Rhode's perfectly composed expression. No. No, no, no. Is Chuunibyou communicable? Is it airborne? Did the dragon blood vapor carry it? Rhode was the normal one! Rhode was my last anchor to REALITY!

Before the emergency evacuation plan fully loaded in Hathaway's mind, Rhode's solemn expression blinked off like a toggled setting. Her shoulders dropped. She casually adjusted her grip, wrenched the greatsword out of the mud, and brought it down in one single, high-velocity arc. SHCK. The blade sheared through neck scales, severed the spine, and cleanly decapitated the Palebone Dragon in one fluid motion. Kill Steal?!

Hathaway's brain desperately latched onto the most familiar gaming grievance available, aggressively using it as a shield to block out the mounting horror. I did all the manual labor! I cast the spell, fired the gun, swung the axe, and didn't even drop a single point of HP! And you just waltz in, trigger an unskippable cinematic cutscene, and steal the execution animation?! She clung to the gamer rage.

If she let it go, she would have to face the terrifying possibility that the Chuunibyou pandemic had claimed her pragmatic cousin. Rhode crouched, grabbed the detached horn, and tossed it upward. The space above her palm warped. The skull vanished into an invisible spatial pocket. She retrieved her lollipop from her jacket pocket and popped it back into her mouth.

"We Witches," Rhode said, her tone returning to its usual lazy, cynical drawl, "are spectacularly gifted at lying to ourselves." She gestured at the headless carcass.

"We come here to butcher monsters, strip their hides, rip out their tendons, and sell the parts for shiny gold coins. But the official Association PR mandate?" Rhode let out a short, dry laugh.

"'We bring peace to suffering beasts, escorting them to the graveyard of the Witch's Moon, granting them release from feral madness.'

"I genuinely have no idea what kind of suffering a small-variant dragon experiences while sunbathing on a luxury resort island and eating exotic flowers all day—but compliance is mandatory. You perform the ritual, or the Association fines you." Hathaway exhaled. Long. Silent. Slow. There she is. The pragmatic, brutally cynical cousin I know and trust. Everything is fine.

"It is a necessary hypocrisy," Bella said, crouching gracefully near the carcass. She used the butt of her Riot Halberd to carve a wide circle into the earth around the dragon's body. Her visible crimson eye gleamed with quiet, dark solemnity.

"The gaze of the Abyss is too blinding to meet directly. We wear the mask of the Savior so the hunter does not lose herself in the slaughter—lest she degenerate into another beast for the next generation to purge." Hathaway watched Bella begin diligently collecting river stones, piling them along the circle's edge, delivering a dark-fantasy philosophical treatise while performing entirely mundane manual labor. Hathaway gathered deadwood.

A civilization of chaotic, hedonistic, bloodthirsty apex predators who genuinely enjoy orbital bombardments and wiping out planetary ecosystems... And they strictly enforce a 'peaceful release' prayer for every single kill. Any other species would look at this and call it psychotic hypocrisy. But it fit. It was a bizarre, contradictory Standard Operating Procedure, and it was perfectly on-brand. That was just how Witches operated.

"Stone circle, pile the wood inside, light it," Rhode instructed, watching.

"The Reserve's logistics team tracks the fire coordinates, teleports an extraction crew in, bags the carcass, and hauls it to the processing center. They take a small handling fee, deducted from the lower-grade material yield."

"How do they verify whose kill it is?" Hathaway tossed a thick branch into the circle.

"What stops a different squad from lighting their own fire and claiming they did the salvation?"

"DRM." Rhode drew a heavy, matte-black metallic badge from her tactical vest. Etched into the center: three pale moons overlapping.

"Pass the A2 Hunter Examination, and the Association registers a unique soul-signature into their central terminal," Rhode said. She tossed the black badge onto the dragon's neck stump. The moment the metal touched the blood, it hissed. A plume of dense, iridescent white smoke erupted—but it did not dissipate into the air. It slithered, flowing downward along the scales, enveloping the entire carcass in a pulsing, ethereal seal. The glow held, steady and silent.

"Cryptographic lockdown," Rhode said, watching the smoke settle.

"Even a High Witch would blow a gasket trying to overwrite that signature without triggering a full Association alert. Your loot is legally and magically incapable of being poached. Once it's secured, you drop the action tags." She produced two smaller badges from her vest pocket. They were aggressively, almost offensively simple compared to the solemn matte-black badge. One red, one blue.

Both stamped with a smiley face so cheerfully generic it felt profoundly, jarringly wrong in the middle of a blood-soaked kill zone.

"Red smiley: Keep," Rhode explained.

"The club hauls the carcass back, processes it, deposits the raw materials directly into your cold-storage locker." She looked down at the ruined dragon, eyes doing some rapid, ruthless mental arithmetic. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"Blue smiley: Liquidate. They harvest it, auto-list it on the Association's vendor network, and wire the proceeds to the account linked to the black badge." She studied the carcass. Studied the stump. The cratered chest plate.

"Raw material value on this one isn't great. You hacked through the most valuable asset—the intact paired horns—with a serrated axe. Mana hemorrhage at the cross-section basically destroys the material grade." Rhode did the final calculation.

"Seventy. Maybe eighty Solars." Seventy. Eighty. Hathaway's hands stopped mid-reach for a stone. Ammunition cost: One specialized 17. 00-caliber armor-piercing explosive slug. Relatively cheap. Magical expenditure: Instantly regenerated within three seconds. Literally free. Gross revenue: Eighty Solars. Enough to cover a very comfortable, mid-tier daily meal plan for a middle-class citizen. Technically, my Return on Investment is positive, Hathaway's internal calculator admitted.

But my 'Effort-to-Prestige' ratio is fundamentally depressing. I am hunting dragons for grocery money. Hathaway exhaled, the glorious future career of "Highly Lucrative Monster Hunter" dissolving quietly into the damp jungle mud.

"Don't look like you're about to file for bankruptcy, pipsqueak," Rhode said, clapping her once on the shoulder.

"Nobody makes money in the Novice Zone. Small dragons are exactly what I told you they were—an economic dead zone.

"You farm them to cover your consumable costs: ammo, potions, gear repair. Veteran squads only sweep them as a warm-up while tracking Medium-variant drakes. The actual profit margins start at Medium and above." Rhode tossed the blue smiley badge onto the carcass and hoisted her greatsword.

"Your spellcasting rhythm is dialed in. Now we farm for volume." [Time]: Day 48, Friday, 16: 30 [Location]: Royal Rosas Hunting Reserve · Sector 4 Extraction Point Six hours of high-intensity jungle clearing with a decidedly unconventional PUG—Pick-Up Group, or in this case, Pick-Up Family. Hathaway sat on the reinforced bumper of the extraction team's armored transport, conducting a detailed post-session inventory.

Her ballistic-weave hunting coat was missing half the left sleeve, had acquired three deep scorch marks across the chest plate, and smelled like dragon blood, jungle mud, and artisanal regret. The Gun-Axe rested against her knee, barrel warped, axe blade chipped, dark-wood handle splintered. Durability: zero. Item condition: "Dismantled Conceptually."

[Hunting Log — Team Ludwig · Day 48] Palebone Dragon (Small Variant) × 3 Spiked-Horn Ash Drake (Small Variant) × 1 Thick-Carapace Bearded Deer × 3 Total Personal Revenue (After 3-Way Split): 250 Solars. I made a profit today, Hathaway calculated, staring at the numbers. I made two hundred and fifty Solars. I am safely in the black. But the financial metrics felt oddly distant, muffled by the lingering, electric hum still vibrating in her veins. She hadn't been "farming for loot."

The first Palebone Dragon had merely flipped the switch—a brief taste of the high that had been quickly derailed by her cosmetic obsession and the terrifying fear that Rhode had caught the Chuunibyou virus. But once Rhode had tossed down the DRM badge and declared it was time to "farm for volume," the tutorial had officially ended. There had been no more interruptions. No pausing to butcher carcasses or haul heavy materials—the action tags handled the mundane labor automatically.

No wandering aimlessly through the brush—Rhode and Bella effortlessly tracked, pulled, and crowd-controlled entire packs of small dragons, serving them up on a silver platter. Free from the tedious mechanics of looting and pulling, Hathaway had slipped into a pure, uninterrupted combat flow state. And that was when she had finally understood. She understood why Witches—a hyper-advanced civilization capable of automating planetary conquest—insisted on stepping into the mud to kill things personally.

It wasn't about efficiency. It was about the high. It was intoxicating euphoria. The monsters in this reserve weren't just target practice. They were ritual sacrifices meticulously curated to feed the absolute, unhinged bloodlust encoded into the DNA of a top-tier predator species. She had spent the next five hours in a state of manic, blood-drunk ecstasy, experiencing the magical apex-predator equivalent of the zoomies. She couldn't stop. She hadn't wanted to stop. Rhode and Bella had recognized it immediately.

Like a pair of veteran lionesses watching a cub discover its claws, they had simply stepped back, folded their arms, and provided the absolute minimum perimeter support. They deliberately suppressed their own predatory urges, content to play backup. They had to—if either of them had given in to the thrill of the hunt, there would have been no kills left to steal. The Novice Zone would have been reduced to ash in three seconds, leaving Hathaway with nothing but smoking craters.

Instead, they spent the afternoon watching her rampage through the jungle with fond, indulgent approval. When the slaughter finally paused, she had looked at Rhode across a smoking crater.

"What happens if an enemy civilization figures this out?" Hathaway had asked, wiping a smudge of dragon blood from her cheek, her game-designer paranoia kicking in.

"If our instinct for slaughter is this overwhelming... couldn't someone weaponize it?

"Intentionally feed us an endless tide of cannon fodder just to overstimulate the bloodlust? Use the kill-high to drive a Witch completely feral so she ignores her own tactical safety, or worse, turns on her own side?" Rhode had leaned lazily on her greatsword, offering the kind of flawless, violently irrefutable logic that only a veteran Witch could deliver.

"Simple. You just kill all the cannon fodder before you go crazy." It was an answer so perfectly arrogant—the absolute conviction that a Witch's DPS would always outpace her own mental debuff bar—that Hathaway hadn't been able to argue. And for the first few hours, she had followed that logic flawlessly. The dragons, it turned out, were perfect, compliant sacrifices for her newly discovered bloodlust.

They behaved exactly like reasonable, predictable raid creatures: standard enemy type, standard attack patterns, standard tragic underbelly weakness. The deer, however, had not. Hathaway stared into the tree line, a vein quietly pulsing in her temple, as the afternoon's most traumatic combat encounter replayed itself with clinical, unwanted precision. What category of hallucinogenic substance do you have to be consuming to classify that as a "Deer"?

The "Thick-Carapace Bearded Deer" of the Royal Rosas Novice Zone were approximately three times the physical size of the Palebone Dragon. Their pelt was not fur—it was a permanent, rolling cascade of localized wildfire with no visible fuel source, open flame adhering to their bodies like a second skin. Their antlers were a dense, interlaced crown of razor-edged obsidian that looked less like natural bone growth and more like someone had strapped a siege catapult to their skull and called it festive.

When they called out—a single, resonant"OUUU—" —the resulting sonic shockwave physically evacuated the oxygen from a thirty-meter radius. And the combat mechanics. That thing had I-frames. Genuine, physics-defying invincibility frames.

When Hathaway had opened with a [Daze] hex—an invisible, formless mental debuff that bypassed physical armor entirely, the kind that categorically should not be dodgeable—the deer had detected the incoming magical vector with some sensory system Hathaway didn't have a word for, and sidestepped it. It left an afterimage of fire in its wake. Stood there for two full seconds, processing the concept that she had attempted to apply a status debuff to its person.

Then Hathaway had tried to anchor it with [Web] to stall its momentum. The deer had ignited the arcane webbing on contact with its flaming coat. It had not panicked. It had simply activated what could only be described as hyper-armor, lowered its siege-catapult skull, and charged—dragging the burning magical net behind it like a comet tail, hooves the size of Hathaway's entire torso shattering century-old trees to splinters at full sprint.

That is a mechanic-heavy gimmick boss, Hathaway stared at the memory with the focused loathing of a professional. Look at its HP pool. Look at its moveset. It has I-frames on a targeted debuff. It has hyper-armor to override crowd control.

"Deer" is not the correct classification.

"T-Rex with a fire-type DLC, a siege weapon hat, and a personal grudge against crowd-control mechanics" is the correct classification. During the hunt, pumped full of adrenaline and ancestral bloodlust, Hathaway hadn't cared. When the flaming siege-engine of a deer had charged her, she hadn't kited it. She had let out a breathless laugh, vaulted three meters into the air, and brought the Gun-Axe down in a brutal, terminal-velocity cleave that split the beast's obsidian crown straight down the middle.

She had stood over the massive, smoking, apocalyptic carcass—panting, covered in soot, absolutely vibrating with predatory dopamine—and waited for the sky to split open and announce a server-wide achievement notification. Rhode had walked over, lollipop in mouth, kicked the severed horn, and said:"Nice work. Too bad these are worthless. Pelt's saturated with fire-poison—completely unprocessable. Horns are too dense, too heavy, no viable market. Total trash drop."

Hathaway squeezed the splintered handle of the Gun-Axe. Now that the adrenaline had drained, the cold logic of the game designer returned. WHY. It has the stat block of an Endgame Raid Boss. It has phase transitions. It has a wipe mechanic. It has I-frames on a formless magical debuff that by all laws of game design should not be dodgeable. And it drops the loot table of a Tutorial Slime. The risk-to-reward ratio is not "suboptimal." It is a crime against the fundamental covenant between game designers and players.

Rhode came back from the vending machine, holding three cans of iced sports drink. She tossed one to Bella without looking, and lobbed the third at Hathaway. Hathaway caught it effortlessly. She popped the tab. Took one long, cold sip of electrolytes. She looked at the rustling dark green of the Novice Zone. Thought about the dragons. Thought about the deer. Thought about the specific, precise way the first deer had sidestepped her [Daze] hex with what could only be described as style.

I'm going to find whoever designed this ecosystem's reward economy. And I'm going to nerf them so hard their great-grandchildren will feel the patch notes. Rhode dropped onto the bumper beside her, cracked her own can, and said nothing. It was, Hathaway's free threads quietly agreed, a pretty good tutorial.