Chương 22: Killing Monsters for the First Time

Maddie and Hale touched down in a small clearing a short distance from Stonefield Town. Since his primary objective was farming good deeds, helping the local civilians evacuate was a far more practical approach than diving headfirst into the heavy frontline. Maddie glared furiously at the iron shackles binding his ankles, her tone laced with anger: "Let me shatter those for you, Master." Recalling a sudden realization, Hale held her back.

"Can you just rip the connecting chain off and leave the ankle cuffs intact? They actually help me regulate my Mana flow much better." Finding logic in his reasoning, Maddie extended her draconic claws, effortlessly snapping the chain links anchoring the two shackles together. Hale checked his current Mana reserve: over two thousand points remained—enough to conjure a barrage of fireballs, he thought.

The moment the two got out of the groove, their eyes landed on giant spiders crawling across the timber roofs of the town's outer homes. Yet, studying their anatomical features up close, Hale couldn't help but feel they resembled giant, pitch-black king crabs with swollen abdomens rather than actual spiders. The abdomen of each scythe spider measured over a meter in diameter, with six legs and a pair of massive pincers encased in coarse, armored chitin.

Their jagged, exposed mandibles looked sharp enough to cleave a human limb clean in half.

"S-spiders?!" Maddie let out an exclamation in the highest pitch Hale had ever heard escape her lips. He glanced sideways, catching a look of disgust plastered across Maddie's face. The fine hairs along her arms looked ready to stand on end.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I hate spiders..." Maddie practically ground her teeth as she forced the words out. Hale had heard of arachnophobia back in his old world, but who knew Dragonborn suffered from it too?

"They look way more like crabs to me," Hale noted, observing that they didn't even seem capable of spinning webs.

"C-crabs?" Hale realized he had just blurted out a term that didn't exist in the local vocabulary. Apparently, this world lacked marine crabs. He quickly clarified: "Yeah, they have multiple legs and pincers, but they live underwater and have brighter shells. Their meat is supposed to be delicious." Maddie looked thoroughly unconvinced by his culinary review, her draconic claws extending fully.

"Whatever they are, I am going to obliterate every single one of these vile creatures. Stay close to me, Master!" Watching her channel repulsion into raw combat motivation, Hale scrambled to keep pace behind her: "Don't go overboard! Watch out for civilians. We're here to save people!" It was questionable whether Maddie even absorbed his warning. The moment they breached the town limits, she began unleashing a relentless barrage of fireballs at the crawling monsters.

Fortunately, her targeting precision was surgical; otherwise, the entire wooden town would have been reduced to ash in minutes. A rapid flurry of translucent system notifications began spamming Hale's vision. For every scythe spider Maddie executed, a +10 Merit reward popped up, accompanied by the description: [Host's subordinate successfully eliminated a threat to public safety.] The constant flickering of the blue interface was proving heavily distracting during combat, so Hale focused his mind on silencing active pop-ups until he manually summoned the log. Sure enough, the floating notifications vanished. Stonefield Town was encircled by a low stone wall, forcing the majority of fleeing villagers toward the main thoroughfare.

However, several massive scythe spiders were currently choking the primary exit; despite the local garrison and mages mounting a defense, numerous civilians remained trapped inside the perimeter. Thanks to the presence of multiple mages on site, Maddie's fireball barrage failed to draw undue suspicion. Given the rampant chaos, so long as she refrained from unfurling her draconic wings and taking to the skies, onlookers simply assumed a friendly mage was providing heavy fire support.

Hale initially shadowed Maddie closely, but he soon observed that the scythe spiders possessed remarkably poor eyesight. They suffered from extensive blind spots, and their tracking ability against rapid human movement was sluggish at best. To compensate, however, their movement speed was blindingly fast, and the crushing force behind their primary pincers was terrifying. Not far from his position, Hale watched a spider crush a wooden beam as thick as a man's thigh while pursuing a fleeing villager.

The man tripped in pure panic, tumbling hard onto the cobblestones. Hale flicked his left wrist, hurling a wind blade straight toward the monster. Out of all elemental disciplines, he found wind and fire to be his most intuitive affinities. Yet, owing to the psychological trauma of his initial fireball explosion, he naturally leaned toward wind manipulation. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

This time, however, the wind blade yielded underwhelming results. It merely sliced a shallow trench into the heavy chitin plating on the spider's leg, splashing a spray of translucent green hemolymph across the stones. The strike flinched the monster, but failed to deliver lethal damage. Agonized by the strike, the spider redirected its aggression toward Hale. Instinctively flinching, he dropped low, slapping his left palm directly against the earth.

A sharp stone spike erupted from the ground with precision, impaling the spider straight through its underbelly. The creature twitched violently for a brief second before going completely limp. The soft abdomen was their primary vulnerability—it lacked chitin plating entirely. Hale's heart hammered against his ribs, a volatile mix of adrenaline and raw exhilaration. This was the very first monster he had personally slain with his own hands.

Behind him, Maddie called out enthusiastically:"Exceptional strike, Master!" Hale retreated to her side, feeling slightly embarrassed like a toddler receiving praise from a preschool teacher. That previous spell had been executed purely on reflex, but analyzing the mechanics now, he realized the primary Mana input hadn't originated from his hand—it had channeled through his feet, which maintained more direct contact with the earth's natural energy field.

Channeling elemental connections via his feet was admittedly far more difficult. Had he possessed both hands, the spell's magnitude and precision would have been vastly superior. Given his current physical limitations, however, this output was more than satisfactory. A wave of confidence washed over him. With his remaining Mana reserves, he could comfortably execute roughly twenty additional low-tier spells. He needed to budget his output wisely to maximize his Merit farming.

Willing the system interface to display his recent gains, two distinct pop-ups materialized side by side: NOTIFICATION Host successfully rescued a civilian from a life-threatening situation. Merit +10 NOTIFICATION Host successfully eliminated a monster that posed a danger to the community. Merit +20 So performing the deed personally doubles the Merit payout compared to Maddie's kills. Hale checked his Mana status: the earth spike had consumed roughly one hundred points.

The ankle shackles were providing an unexpected benefit—with just a fraction of conscious regulation, he could shape magic effects pretty precisely to his liking without risking an uncontrolled Mana surge. Shifting his focus, Hale began raising stone spikes to execute ground-level spiders and clear extraction paths for trapped villagers, while Maddie provided air-clearing fireballs targeting spiders clinging to rooftops. Just about half an hour later, nearly all the monstrous spiders in the town had been wiped out.

Leaving the remaining handful of stragglers for the local garrison and mages to finish off to avoid drawing unnecessary attention, Hale checked his Merit total. His balance sat at just over 1, 500 points—still short of the 2, 000 required for the prosthetic arm. With roughly seven hundred Mana remaining, he had enough fuel for one more push.

"Let's move closer to the dungeon entrance," he instructed Maddie. She fixed him with a solemn look.

"The frontline will be significantly more dangerous, Master. Are you certain?" Hale nodded.

"I'll be cautious. You should do the same. If the situation spirals out of control, we pull back immediately." Grabbing two heavy woolen cloaks drying in a residential courtyard to serve as temporary disguises, the two slipped out of the town limits. The dungeon rift had manifested directly east of Stonefield Town—a site that gave the town its name, defined by a vast, rocky expanse cluttered with massive boulders. Even from a distance, the "dungeon gate" was unmissable.

It resembled a colossal subterranean cave maw descending deep into the earth, out of which a continuous swarm of scythe spiders was spilling. The further they moved away from the town, the denser the rocks became and the larger their size. Some boulders stood taller than a person, making both navigation and visibility difficult. Because a portion of the military force had been detached to manage the town evacuation, the frontline defense here was noticeably thin.

However, the combatants holding the front line were seasoned elites whose combat prowess clearly far surpasses that of the soldiers in the town. This was Hale's first time witnessing high-tier mages engaged in full-scale combat. Their hands wove intricate, decisive somatic gestures in rapid succession, unleashing an unbroken torrent of high-tier magic. Hale finally grasped the core variables that differentiated the mages: density, velocity, and area of effect.

Assuming mages utilized internal Mana to bind and control natural energy, the factor determining a spell's destructive ceiling was the maximum Mana volume a mage could process through their body simultaneously. The difference between a spell created by a mage capable of channeling a maximum of 300 mana and one created by a mage capable of channeling 3, 000 mana within the same timeframe is as vast as the gap between the flat earth and a mountain peak.

It was only now that Hale fully comprehended the devastating handicap of casting magic with one arm versus two. With a single arm, a mage could only project Mana outward to grab and shape atmospheric elements remotely. The resulting Mana leakage during transmission was massive, and fine-tuned control was extraordinarily difficult to maintain. With both hands available, energy integration takes place within the body, and mana can be reclaimed immediately after the move is unleashed, resulting in minimal consumption.

Hale recalled the first fireball he had ever created. If he had both hands, he could continuously conjure fireballs with destructive power equivalent to several kilograms of C4 explosive. The mere thought of it gave him goosebumps. No wonder the whole continent was terrified of "Hale Wallace." The presence of so many massive boulders rendered Hale unable to use earth spikes anymore.

He spotted a few mages casting ice lances, but he recalled that his own ice manipulation skills sat at the lowest tier in his status panel. With limited options, he began throwing fireballs directly into the underbellies of the advancing spiders. However, fireballs consumed significantly more Mana than earth spikes, and Hale could feel his mana reserves rapidly depleting. Should I retreat now, or push a little further to hit the 2, 000 Merit mark?

"Hale Wallace?!" A familiar voice echoed from directly behind him. Without even turning around, Hale knew the Archmage Venessa Halley had spotted him.