Chương 78: Cosmetics Are the True Endgame

[Time]: Day 48, Friday, 09: 45 AM [Location]: Royal Rosas Hunting Reserve · The Novice Zone Stepping out of the obsidian fortress and into the untamed canopy of the Hunting Reserve felt less like a walk in the woods and more like descending into the stomach of a massive, breathing organism. The temperature spiked. The canopy above was so dense it choked out the sun, painting the world in a hostile, shadow-drenched green. The formation fell into natural order. Rhode on point.

Bella holding the right flank with her C-44 Riot Halberd—Hathaway was committed to the correct name—held at easy carry. Hathaway trailing slightly left, the Gun-Axe resting against her collarbone at an angle she'd identified as both visually good and mechanically ready. Her boots hit the fallen leaves. Crunch. Hit a dead branch. Snap. Hit a patch of wet root. Shlk. She was producing the sound signature of a construction crew.

"Are we seriously going to find anything?" Hathaway kept her voice low, which felt increasingly futile given the acoustic situation.

"Our noise discipline is essentially non-existent. And even if the local wildlife is completely deaf, neither of you are exactly practicing camouflage." Hathaway gestured vaguely toward their faces. In the deep, shadow-drenched gloom of the canopy, Rhode and Bella's crimson irises were projecting distinct, aggressive beams of red light straight into the brush. It was less 'stealth hunting' and more 'police helicopter search'.

"The weak do not flee from the Crimson Gaze, Eclipse," Bella intoned, her single visible eye sweeping across the dark ferns and painting them with a stark red spotlight.

"They are paralyzed by the inevitable. Like moths drawn to the inferno of our lineage, they wait trembling in the shadows, ready to offer their flesh to the abyss."

"Irrelevant," Rhode said, not lowering her voice at all, completely ignoring the poetry.

"You're thinking about normal animals. Magical beasts aren't deer. They don't hear a snapped twig or see a pair of glowing eyes and bolt for the next county." Her steel scabbard shoved a curtain of dense fern aside. Beyond it, the path dropped into a deep pocket of standing mud.

"Their sheer mass and magical physiology mean they burn calories at a terrifying rate," Rhode continued.

"They are almost constantly on the verge of starvation or dehydration. They literally cannot afford the energy expenditure of fleeing every time a leaf rustles." She raised her left hand. The ambient mana warped around her palm, and the mud field ahead dehydrated and calcified, fusing into a perfectly flat grey stone path. She stepped onto it without breaking stride.

"They have to hold their feeding and watering grounds. We just find a resource point, wait ten minutes, and the prey comes to us." [Transmute Mud to Rock], Hathaway catalogued. Tier 5. Used strictly to avoid getting mud on her boots. Excellent Quality of Life (QoL) spell application. Terrain modification seamlessly integrated into basic traversal mechanics to optimize the player experience.

"Besides," Rhode added, surveying the vegetation, "we're in the beginner zone. Look at the plant life. It's all standard deep-canopy material—no mana-dense roots, no high-tier herbs. This ecosystem can't support the caloric load of a medium drake or anything larger."

"So no bosses."

"Nothing that can bounce a Fireball off its chest, no." Rhode stepped over a root.

"The creatures that survive in the Novice Zone share exactly one trait: extremely high magic resistance.

"Because anything that didn't have it was found by a Divination Witch, scryed from a comfortable chair in White City, and hunted to extinction for dinner.

"The small dragons here are alive because finding them costs more than they're worth—burning three hundred Solars' worth of high-grade divination incense to pinpoint a lizard that yields maybe a hundred Solars in spare materials is mathematically idiotic.

"Their survival strategy is being economically unviable." The ultimate defense mechanic, Hathaway thought. Negative profit margin.

"The scent of ruin," Bella said. She stopped. Her visible eye had locked onto a patch of crushed vegetation near the base of a massive tree, still and absolutely certain the way a hunting animal goes still. Hathaway looked at the same patch of vegetation. She activated [Analytic Vision]. She catalogued the visible mana signatures. She physically squinted. She was looking at a patch of wet leaves, several identical ferns, and a length of exposed root.

Her Perception skill, if this were a game, had just rolled the worst number on the dice. Where are the glowing yellow footprints, her brain demanded, quietly furious. Where is the quest marker. Rhode crouched down. She picked up a cluster of crushed leaves with two fingers, turned them over, examined the chew pattern along the broken edge. She stood and checked the tree bark at her shoulder height, running a thumb along a shallow horizontal mark in the wood.

"Wine-Fruit flower petals. The sap is still wet." She looked at the bark mark.

"Friction scoring here—the scale pattern on the source is small-variant, and the dietary preference lines up." Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. She looked back at the tree line.

"Palebone Dragon. One, maybe two. Small variant. The scales have a natural Illusion-resistance property—pale gold with a bone-white trim on the outer margin."

"Very beautiful," Bella said, stepping forward.

"The shed skins of the undying. Their scales absorb and refract the light of false visions—a gift the dark bestows only on the truly dangerous." She stepped directly off the stone path and into the brush, moving through the hanging ferns with total silence and no apparent concern for her hunting gear. She emerged holding four scales. Each one was roughly fifteen centimeters, broad and curved, gleaming with a layered metallic luster that started as pale gold and faded at the edges into a clean, ivory-bone white.

She held all four in one palm. In the filtered green-grey light of the jungle canopy, they caught what little illumination existed and scattered it slowly, like something that was used to being looked at. Hathaway's loot-goblin instincts overrode the rest of her conscious processing. Pale gold. Bone white. Her eyes fixed on the color coding with the automatic recognition of someone who had spent years calibrating reward feedback in digital environments. That's the Rare drop palette.

In every game, in every genre, in every era—pale gold with white trim means Rare. That is not a coincidence. That is a universal law. Premium materials. High demand. Massive profit margin— And then her short-term memory violently hit the brakes. Wait. A hundred Solars. Rhode literally just said the whole dragon was worth a hundred Solars. The illusion shattered. The pale-gold palette wasn't a marker of high economic value. It was a cruel evolutionary trick. It was a trash-tier mob wearing an SSR skin.

It was completely, utterly worthless.

"The scales are deceptively light," Bella said.

"Novice Witches craft them into concealed inner vests—they call them the Aegis of the Fallen Wyrm. Against heavy artillery, they offer little resistance. But against cowardly hexes, minor illusions, low-tier compulsion spells—" she turned one over to show the inner surface, "—they simply refuse. The dragon's contempt for trickery persists in the material." She selected one scale from the four—the one with the cleanest geometry and the most consistent coloring. She held the pale gold scale in her open palm.

A pinpoint of highly compressed azure heat flared at the center of her glove, softening the calcified material. A surge of precise telekinetic mana wrapped around the pliable scale, folding, twisting, and layering it in mid-air like phantom origami. In less than three seconds, the flat scale bloomed into a perfect, multi-layered replica of a Wine-Fruit flower. Chime. A sudden micro-pulse of frost locked the shape in place with a crisp, metallic sound.

Still radiating a faint, pleasant warmth, Bella slid the pin into the silver hair above Hathaway's ear. A minute ago, Bella's eye had been projecting enough harsh red glare to navigate a dark cave. But as she leaned in, her single visible eye locking onto Hathaway's, she consciously dialed her bioluminescence down. The tactical spotlight smoothly softened into a smoldering, dangerously romantic crimson glow.

"A fragment carved from something that refused to be hunted," Bella said, her voice dropping into that dark, velvety register.

"Until today. Let it remember what it came from." Hathaway's toes had been curling inside her boots for the entire duration of this theatrical display, severely testing the structural integrity of her steel toe caps. And yet. The flower sat perfectly in her hair, the pale gold contrasting beautifully with her silver strands. The residual warmth was comforting. And, infuriatingly, Hathaway realized something terrible: It was working.

As a closet gamer who still remembered every edgy, dark-fantasy lore text she had ever written, Hathaway was allergic to second-hand cringe, but she was fundamentally weak to high-tier Chuunibyou aesthetics executed with this level of flawless production value. The woman had literally dimmed her own eye-lights for cinematic effect. Something inconvenient happened in the general vicinity of her chest. She had just been successfully, effortlessly flirted with.

To aggressively shake off the feeling, her analytical brain immediately hijacked the moment. How many pretty Witches has she used this exact routine on? The delivery was too smooth. Was Bella just a natural prodigy at flirting? Her terminal Chuunibyou should have made her socially radioactive, unable to practice this kind of routine on actual people without being laughed out of the room. Then, a memory from yesterday loaded. The club courtyard.

Bella, standing next to a sports drink vending machine in a JRPG final boss dress, delivering a profoundly dramatic speech about "sacred embers" and "ashes of enemies." And Rina. The RNG Demon, cheerfully raising her premium sports drink and shouting,"Let's do our best to devour the light together!" At the time, Hathaway had assumed Rina was executing a flawless, high-tier "faux-innocent" troll maneuver—mercilessly mocking Bella's gothic delusions with weaponized sunshine.

She had assumed the junior Witches standing around them were simply paralyzed by secondhand embarrassment. But now, replaying the memory in high definition, Hathaway saw the horrifying truth. Rina hadn't been sarcastic. Her ruby eyes had been sparkling with genuine admiration. And those junior Witches in their tracksuits hadn't been cringing. They had been looking at her with rapt, starry-eyed, absolute reverence. Holy mana, Hathaway realized, a jolt of cosmic horror striking her right there in the jungle.

This world doesn't have the concept of Chuunibyou. They don't know it's a disease! To the rest of Witch society, Bella isn't a socially awkward nerd playing make-believe. She is a dark, brooding, tragically romantic aristocratic poet with an eyepatch! She has an actual harem!

"Once the hunt concludes," Bella continued, straightening up and breaking Hathaway's horrified epiphany, "the entire carcass will belong to us. If you desire more scales, they will be yours."

"Looking forward to it," Hathaway managed to say, her worldview permanently altered. Clank. Ahead of them, Rhode had lifted the greatsword from her shoulder and let the tip drop to rest against the stone path with a single heavy impact. The casual resort-guest posture was gone. She was looking into the dense, shadowed canopy where the trees grew close enough that the light stopped, scanning the dark between the trunks with the patience of someone who knew what she was looking at.

"Track's fresh," Rhode said.

"It's close." She didn't look back.

"Lock and load." Hathaway adjusted her grip on the heavy dark-wood handle of the Gun-Axe, squeezing the weapon until her knuckles turned white. She aggressively dragged the horrifying sociological implications of Witch culture into a mental trash folder and forcefully emptied the bin. She absolutely refused to stare into that specific abyss today. She needed to ground herself. She needed something simple, violent, and highly structured. She needed a loot table.

As her fingers brushed against the pale-gold flower pinned in her silver hair, she let her gamer instincts completely hijack her system to overwrite the existential dread. She didn't care anymore that the material yield was mathematically idiotic. Pale gold. Bone white. Actual dragon scales. In the gaming world, there was a universal truth that superseded logic, stats, and profit margins: Cosmetics are the true endgame. It didn't matter if the Aegis of the Fallen Wyrm was paper-thin against heavy artillery.

It didn't matter if it was technically low-tier trash loot. She was going to skin her very first dragon, and she was going to wear its gorgeous, pale-gold scales as a cloak. It was a milestone achievement. It was a cosmetic unlock. Her expression settled into the cold, ruthless focus of a player who had just identified a highly aesthetic, bound-on-pickup transmog set. First real hunt. First exclusive cosmetic drop. First dragon. Good content.