While the hunters were making plans for their next move, Asterion rarely set aside his mining work, but for once, he appeared on the surface after a long absence.
Naturally, he was unaware of the trouble his actions had caused the hunters. Aside from the sea, which he couldn't reach, he had sniffed out and devoured everything in the area where the Kushala Daora and Rusted Kushala Daora had fought, cleaning up any spot stained with Kushala scales or traces.
Time was tight, the task was heavy, his movements were fast, and his efficiency was high. It could only be said that when it came to energy recycling, Asterion was a professional.
In a sense, the reason the hunters' investigation was progressing so slowly was inextricably linked to Asterion's efforts. After breaking his blade, Asterion's whereabouts had become increasingly secretive—which is to say, he spent all day hiding underground finding minerals to eat.
The Mist Weaver.
Ahem, anyway, the hunters, having failed to find any trace of Asterion for a long time, were still trying to deduce his habits based on the behavior of a normal Glavenus. At the very least, a normal Glavenus wouldn't go around gnawing on everything all day like some dragon that eats rocks—or rather, not even ore, just rocks.
And so, they were even more egregiously wrong.
But investigation requires guessing and verification, and misconceptions are inevitable... The worries of the Commander and the scholars actually had little to do with The Huntsman. After all, one could tell from his title that the only thing he excelled at was combat. Therefore, he didn't need to think too much; he only needed to know when to go, where to go, and what to kill.
Sound familiar?
This very scenario is playing out right now all across the Wildspire Waste! The next one could be you!
—From Dragon Lovers Radio.
Ahem, in short, The Huntsman's life was very regular: early to bed and early to rise, meat at every meal, wine whenever available, and when he was bored, he would offer pointers on weapon techniques to other hunters in the squad.
Don't let the fact that he currently uses a Rathian Long Sword fool you; The Huntsman is actually proficient in the use of multiple weapons, including the Great Sword. Otherwise, he wouldn't have earned such a title.
given his adventurous experiences and hunting career, The Huntsman thought there was nothing left in this world that could trouble him. Even if he were to face an Elder Dragon directly, he would feel no fear.
But now, he was truly a bit stumped.
He felt like he was being watched by a dragon. Yes, a dragon—that strange Glavenus.
After an interval of more than half a year, this fellow had appeared before the hunters once again. Yet this time, instead of turning a blind eye to the hunters as he had in the past, he found a spot with a wide field of view, sat down, and stared at the hunters from a distance... or to be precise, stared at him?!
As a pure combat-type hunter, The Huntsman trusted his instincts implicitly. That sensation of being watched by a person... or rather, by a dragon, made him feel prickly all over. It was extremely uncomfortable.
He appeared at sunrise and vanished at sunset. If The Huntsman went indoors, he would leave; if The Huntsman was active outside, he would appear. This Glavenus was simply frighteningly weird!
Is this really a Glavenus?!
It wasn't that The Huntsman hadn't taken quests to protect scholars investigating monsters before. In the past, he didn't think there was anything wrong with those missions. He just had to follow the scholars, watching them hide their presence to secretly observe monster behaviors like feeding and mating from various corners and locations.
But now, for the first time, The Huntsman felt what it was like for a monster to be tracked and observed by scholars. It wasn't an illusion; he genuinely felt that the Glavenus was the scholar, and he was the monster being observed.
In fact, er, his feeling was spot on.
Asterion was indeed observing him, especially when The Huntsman was instructing other hunters.
Improvements in [Power] relied purely on eating, while improvements in [Technique], after much thought, Asterion decided could only rely on hunters. After all, other dragons' combat styles really didn't touch upon the realm of technique.
The Glavenus happened to be an anomaly among dragons, possessing a sword-tail shaped like a Great Sword. In battle, it was also accustomed to using its tail to slash and sweep, making it perfect for learning the hunters' swordsmanship.
It was purely stealing techniques. Asterion had absolutely no intention of working for the hunters, nor did he plan to help them hunt other dragons to show goodwill and then ask them to teach him. Or rather, the fact that he didn't attack the hunters was already his way of showing goodwill.
He would never give the hunters the illusion that he could be tamed like a large monster, or domesticated like an Aptonoth or a Popo.
He had already thought clearly about how to face these hunters who had come to the New World—he wouldn't hunt them as enemies, but he wouldn't get close to them either.
Asterion had absolutely no intention of mingling with hunters and living together. Not only because his path of evolution destined that he could not settle in one place and had to constantly challenge those powerful dragons, but also because he didn't trust humans.
Precisely because he used to be human, Asterion knew better than anyone just how bad some people could be when they broke bad.
This was completely different from accepting the allegiance of the Grimalkyne tribes. The complexity of the human mind was simply not something simple beast-kin like the Grimalkynes could compare to.
The lifespan of dragons is extremely long. This meant that even if the current humans could live with him in friendship and harmony, what about after these people died? What about a hundred years later? What if their descendants changed their attitudes?
In his past life, Asterion had played a game called Final Fantasy XIV. One of the story arcs described the Dragonsong War. The dragons and humans once had a honeymoon period of two hundred years, but after the generation of humans who first established peace with the dragons and their children died, as time passed, later humans betrayed the dragon race out of covetousness for their power, thus initiating a thousand-year war between man and dragon.
Up to that point, it was actually understandable. But what the Asterion of that time couldn't understand was that as the game's plot advanced, humans and dragons finally reconciled after a thousand years, and then the two lived happily together again—that was the part he just couldn't comprehend.
No, seriously, are they that big-hearted? Living happily together again? With the dragons' lifespan, when this generation of humans dies, the dragons will still be alive and well. So if new humans stab them in the back again in another two hundred years, will they have to fight for another thousand years?
Remembering the food but not the beating, right?
Logically speaking, once you've suffered a loss, you should learn a lesson. In Asterion's view, even if the dragons in the story stopped the war with humans, they should have drawn a clear line between their lives—the best measure to prevent crime is not to give people the opportunity to commit it.
Returning to his own situation, Asterion certainly knew what kind of people were in the Fifth Fleet currently in the New World and those who would arrive in the future: nature lovers who cherished life and focused on protecting the ecological balance. But he also knew that the Hunter's Guild had Guild Knights, specifically responsible for arresting or executing criminal hunters, including but not limited to poachers.
As time passed, the Kingdom and the Guild would surely increase their development efforts in the New World, eventually establishing new human nations here. When that time came, all sorts of people would inevitably appear.
Asterion had no interest in using himself to test human nature and the human heart. After all, it was hard to say how hunters would view him in the future, especially if they discovered he would persistently challenge and prey upon Elder Dragons... would they view him as an unstable, dangerous factor?
Stealing techniques was the way to go.
He wanted to be like the hunters, infusing spirit—or rather, life energy—into the blade to increase the weapon's sharpness and hardness, rather than just relying on the pure physical strength of a biting tail roundslash as he did now.
If he could learn the hunters' techniques for using the Great Sword during this process, and be able to perform charged attacks with his sword-tail, that would be even better.
It would be equivalent to using one unit of force to deal ten units of damage. If he mastered this technique, not even an Elder Dragon could ignore Asterion's slash.
This wasn't one of those small knives hunters used relative to a monster's size, but a Great Sword weighing over thirty tons and exceeding twelve meters in length!
Er, former Great Sword.
"The tail is broken..."
Standing beside The Huntsman, The Commander, who had rushed over upon receiving the news, gazed at the Glavenus standing on the distant cliff. Even across such a great distance, he saw the broken tail Asterion was waving behind him.
"It was done by those two Kushala Daoras, right?" The Admiral stroked his chin and said, "Looks like the little guy got hurt pretty badly. He still hasn't reforged his tail."
"The 'little guy' you're talking about is already larger than any Glavenus I've recorded in the past, Admiral," the scholar who had been urgently summoned said with a helpless look.
"Bwahahaha, I know, I know, but he's still really small, you know? When we first saw him last year, he was just a hatchling," The Admiral laughed heartily.
"So what exactly does it want to do?" asked a hunter. He had come today to ask The Huntsman for some tips on the Great Sword, but he hadn't expected to encounter such a strange spectacle.
"I suspect it is observing us," The Huntsman said in a deep voice, looking at the scholar opposite him. "Just like when you observe monsters."
"Like us?" The scholar's eyes went wide with shock. "You mean this monster is collecting information on us?"
"That's impossible, right? If that were the case... can you even call that a monster?" the hunter from before, Kalyu, couldn't help but say.
"Don't make rash judgments, Kalyu," The Admiral patted the hunter on the shoulder. "Nature holds many unexplainable mysteries. Aren't we here crossing the sea precisely to solve these mysteries?"
"Yes, but... but..." Kalyu stammered twice, pointing at Asterion. "Sorry, then what should we do now?"
"Just go over and take a look," The Admiral said in a deep voice, amidst the surprised gazes of the squad members. "Standing here guessing wildly won't solve the problem. Hara and I once made close contact with this little guy. He didn't harm us then, so I believe he is different from ordinary monsters."
In The Admiral's mind, he seemed to have decided that Asterion was a "little guy."
"Correct. Let's go take a look together," The Commander agreed. "Remember to bring your weapons."
Hunters selected for the Research Commission all had a few tricks up their sleeves. As long as they weren't facing an Elder Dragon directly, ordinary monsters really couldn't make them flee at the mere sight of the wind.
Standing atop the cliff, Asterion knew the hunters had spotted him long ago. However, what he hadn't expected was that after a group of people looked in his direction for a good while, they actually started walking toward him together.
Without the obstruction of trees, the Wildspire Waste was generally very open, especially near the coastline.
When the hunters approached to a distance of about fifty meters, Asterion rose from his crouching position, faced them, and let out an intimidating roar. This was a warning for the hunters not to come any closer.
The Admiral and the others received the signal and stopped in their tracks—fortunately, with the hunters' eyesight, combined with tools like binoculars, they could still see Asterion clearly in the distance.
After all, he was such a big hulk.
"The injury is severe. It's not just the severed tail; the shell on its body looks very messy... Hmm, seems to be two layers? There's a part of the shell that doesn't seem to cover the underlying body... Ah! It is two layers, that's right. The upper shell is cyan-blue, and the lower shell is dark red with a hint of cyan-blue. Interesting. How is this color difference caused? Is it ingesting different ore materials? But a Glavenus's shell clearly shouldn't be affected by ore..."
Fifty meters was actually considered close range. From the first moment he saw Asterion, the scholar, Bent, had pulled out his binoculars and pressed them to his eyes for careful observation, muttering non-stop.
"Bent? Bent! Calm down!" The Commander had to slap the scholar hard on the back to snap him out of his agitated train of thought.
"Ah, sorry, I got a little too excited," Bent said excitedly, pushing up the glasses on the bridge of his nose. "This Glavenus has too many anomalies. It's a great subject for research."
"Understandable. But allowing us to approach this close without initiating an attack... hmm, and not turning to leave like in the past either. Does it have something it wants to tell us?" As expected of The Commander, his imagination was vast; for a moment, he even thought of the possibility of the Glavenus delivering a message.
"It is indeed quite strange," the scholar nodded. "The sword-tail is of irreplaceable importance to every Glavenus. Therefore, after a tail sever, a Glavenus will usually reforge the sword-tail as quickly as possible. Only then can it ensure its own safety."
"If the little guy's sword-tail was broken by those two Kushala Daoras, that means even though half a year has passed, he hasn't reforged the sword-tail... On the contrary, his shell still looks completely intact," The Admiral thought quite fast on such matters. "I don't believe the little guy's shell would be unscathed after a battle capable of snapping its sword-tail. In other words, it chose to restore its shell first?"
"And it's a double-layered shell," Scholar Bent added. "To come to our door like this, could it be seeking our help?"
Bent and The Commander looked at each other, and both shouted out a single word simultaneously.
"Ore!!"
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