The moon had already risen into the sky as the carriage was pulled off the main road, their journey was paused for the night. Reid, Anna, the driver, and the mage all sat around a fire. They enjoyed a simple vegetable soup for their supper.
"So you kids are really D rank hunters?" The driver, Bill, asked bluntly.
"Yep! The rank up exam was tough, but we somehow managed." Anna answered in a chipper tone.
"Oh, trust me, I know. I end up transporting a lot of villagers to the city. Most of 'em are looking for work and think they can make it big as a hunter, only for them to end up returning home after getting stuck at E or F rank. So to be D rank so young is a hell of an achievement. Congrats!" He says with a jovial smile.
"Thank you very much." She says while returning a smile of her own.
"Plus, having two D ranks out here makes me feel a lot safer. I hear bandits have been getting more aggressive lately. Even heard they tried to kidnap some kids straight from orphanage recently!"
Reid and Anna exchange an awkward look.
"I heard about that one too. They say the plot was foiled by a passing mage, and that he killed all the bandits in some horrific and excruciating manner." The mage, Ivir, spoke up for the first time since they began their trip.
"Oh come on, that's just propaganda made by the guards to scare the other bandits and make them think twice about causing trouble!" Bill said with a know-it-all look on his face.
"I don't know, I've met some pretty unhinged mages in my day. Give them an excuse, a good reason to let loose, and they would run with it." Ivir countered.
"Heh, I've met a couple of that type. Can't say you're wrong. I'm just glad the orphans and that caretaker lady made it back safe. I met her one time, and I gotta say, she was an absolute sweetheart. Would've been a real shame if something happened to her."
Reid and Anna hadn't interrupted or corrected the somewhat false information the two were discussing, though their reasoning was different. Reid hadn't spoke up because he was too embarrassed to interrupt at the start, and now found it too awkward to correct them. Anna hadn't interrupted because she was enjoying seeing Reid's reaction.
"You're right about that. Glad to see someone was looking out for the little people, like a little hero." The mage said.
Reid's face suddenly took on a deep shade of red.
"You alright boy?" The driver asked
"Oh, I'm fine. I just leaned too close to the fire for a bit." Reid said with his quick wit.
"Gotcha, just be more careful, the winds blowing the flames all over the place."
"Will do."
Anna enjoyed every moment of his embarrassment as they all finished their meals.
"I'll take the first watch." The mage volunteered. "I'll wake you after about 4 hours, does that work for you?" He asked Reid.
"Yeah, that'll be fine."
With dinner finished, they all began cleaning the dishes. Afterward, they began preparing their tents and sleeping bags while the mage cast a simple warding spell.
"Amos vort molis." His chant was quick and efficient.
The simple warding spell he used drove off bugs and small beasts. It wasn't strong enough to drive off monsters, hence the need to keep watch, but not having bugs crawling over you in the night was a welcome improvement.
With the tents set and the sleeping bags unrolled, their preparations for the night were complete.
Reid gulped nervously. With the small amount of spare space on the carriage, they could only bring two tents. The first would be used by Bill and Ivir, meaning the second… would be just Anna and him.
He stares blankly at the tent, not fully prepared to head inside.
"Whatcha staring at?" Anna asks while sneaking up to his side.
"Oh, uh, nothing. I was just… thinking." He says, too flustered to think up a good excuse.
"Mmhmm." Anna says with a knowing smile.
She leans forward and whispers into his ear.
"I'll see you in there… little hero."
His face is dyed crimson as his brain short circuits. Anna takes a quick peek at his face before merrily walking into tent. It takes Reid several minutes before he works up the courage to enter behind her.
By the time he finally entered the tent he could hear her soft exhales, the kind that let him know she was truly asleep. There was enough space in the tent that their sleeping bags weren't touching, but that did nothing to slow his racing heart. He quietly squeezed into his own sleeping bag, trying not to wake the sleeping girl.
He realized that with his nerves he wouldn't get much sleep.
⁘⁘⁘⁘
The morning came without incident. The night watch was able to rotate without confusion, well, except for when Reid tried to wake up Anna.
After gently shaking her awake, Anna asked if he 'Couldn't keep your hands off me, huh?' Causing Reid to panic and explain that he only touched her arm to wake her up. She let him stammer for a while before explaining she was only joking.
With the morning sun now peaking over the horizon, they packed their gear. Ivir resummoned their 'horse', and they were on their way.
Hours passed by in a flash as Reid and Anna decided it was the perfect time to train using spirit meditation. They moved the energy throughout their bodies, aiming to improve their control. For spirit users, the most important aspects to improving control are to increase your spirits flowrate, and to improve its precision.
During the three months of training, their mentors had stressed to them the importance of improving those aspects in unison. Spirit arts without balance were incredibly unreliable. If a user has a high flowrate, but no control, they will needlessly waste their spirit energy and become drained before achieving anything. On the flip side, a user who only had precision could use their attacks for an extended duration, but those attacks wouldn't do enough damage to accomplish anything.
That was why their instructors focused on balance. Users always have specializations and preferences toward one aspect or the other, but there needed to be enough of balance to maintain functionality. They wanted Reid and Anna to avoid the common novice mistake that had led to many untimely deaths.
A shout from the front of the carriage interrupts their impromptu training session.
"Monster!" The driver shouted.
The young hunters' eyes shot open as the carriage came to a screeching halt. Reid and Anna grabbed their spears as they jumped from the back of the carriage. They scanned their surroundings before making their way to the front of the carriage.
When they arrived at the front, next to Bill and Ivir, they finally saw the monster.
100 meters away, a large bison creature stood on the road. Its massive hooves pawed at the ground, as its jet-black hair flowed wildly as if it were caught in an invisible storm.
"Is that a Balt?" Ivir asked.
"Looks like it, but what the hell is it doing on the road? I've never seen one act aggressively like this before." Bill replied.
His statement hung in the air. Balt's were known to avoid conflict at all cost. The large herbivores had extreme speed that allowed them to run away from anything that wanted to harm them. They only ever fell when a predator managed to sneak up on them.
Amadeus wanted to learn more about the creature that seemed to defy its nature, but the speculation would have to wait. For whatever reason the Balt was coming, and it was coming fast.
The creature's charge was a beautiful thing to watch, so long as you weren't in its intended path. Its powerful limbs pushed off the ground while air around the beast entered its hide in a strange flow. A massive amount of airflow gathered inside the beast while it ran, only for it to be pushed out it's back in a focused Jetstream.
The mage froze up as Reid and Anna began to push forward.
"We'll stop its charge while you go for the kill." Amadeus gave quick and precise instructions.
""Got it!"" They shouted.
Reid crouched down and placed his hand onto the dirt road. A complex brown runic magic circle appeared on the ground before it suddenly shot forward.
Amadeus' newest trick allowed him to move his fully constructed runes by pushing it with his mana control. The only caveat was that he needed to be in direct contact with whatever medium the rune was traveling though. The technique worked best when traveling through the ground, since mana traveled faster through solid objects than through air.
The beast was 20 meters away when a rune intercepted it. The circle glowed for just a moment before a two-meter-wide pillar shot up from the ground, directly in front of it. The beast's incredible speed, normally its strongest tool, had betrayed it. It had far too much momentum to stop.
The Balt collided with the pillar with force that shook the world around it. Huge fragments of the pillar crumbled, while blood began to drip from the creatures head as it stumbled backward. Anna suddenly appeared from the side of the rock.
The huntress flowed like a tide as she rushed forward. She struck its front and back legs in a movement that was so smooth, her two strikes appeared to be just one singular slash.
With its legs cut, the creature fell over onto its side, bellowing in pain. It could barely register what was happening when it looked up to see a boy in midair.
Reid had used the stone pillar as a platform to launch himself at the beast from an unexpected angle. The force of his leap and the spirit energy flowing through his spear combined to create a devastating blow. His spear pierced the creature as if it were made of paper. The light in its eyes faded before it even knew what hit it.
The two hunters watched cautiously, making sure the creature was truly dead. Their instructors had been sure to drill into them that both beasts and monsters alike had tenacious willpower. They would desperately cling to life, refusing to accept death until their bodies failed them completely.
But in this case that caution was unnecessary. The Balt was well and truly dead.
"Amazing." The mage's voice slipped out of his throat.
"Damn! These kids must be prodigies or something!" The driver said in shocked excitement.
Their first hunt had been a perfect success (the shadow wolf didn't count!). Their kill had been swift and efficient, anyone watching the display would have assumed pair were veteran hunters with years of experience, not teenagers with only a few months of real training.
Reid and Anna looked at each other with a shared expression of pride and satisfaction.
"Good work." Reid said through his smile.
"You too." Anna replied.
The two bumped the back of their fists together, a habit they had picked up from Aron, before setting out to dissect the beast.
The guild had taught them the theory of dissection, and even gave them a hands on lesson, but that didn't change the reality in front of them. Dissection… was disgusting.
With the help of Ivir's summoned creature they managed to drag the Balt off of the main road before they began. Bill and Ivir stayed a convenient distance away, claiming they needed to be on watch in case another beast appeared. That didn't bother the young hunters too much, they knew those two would be unable to help them anyway.
"Bleh!" Anna nearly retched. The cloth covering her mouth doing very little to help with the smell. She started her cut near the head of the creature, slowly working her way down the belly to meet the boy in the middle.
On the other side of the massive creature Reid wasn't fairing any better. His enhanced senses made the already disgusting smell be almost unbearable.
Despite their discomfort at the process the two continued their work. They delicately removed the massive internal organs, being especially careful not to tear open the stomach and spoil the meat with it's contents. After a thorough removal, Amadeus created a tall but thin pillar of stone. They used the pillar, along with a rope, to hang the creature and remove any remaining blood. While they were waiting for it to drain completely, they removed the creature's core.
The Balt's core was extremely difficult to remove, it was located at the base of its skull, surrounded by thick plates of bone. After mashing and crunching his way through, Reid finally held the core in his hand.
The boy felt a deep sense of unease as he stared at the core. What should have been a smooth milky white crystal was tainted by deep hues of purple and black that grew off it in irregular bumps.
'Analyze'
The results were unsettling to Amadeus as well. The core was being corrupted by malice. The same contamination he learned had infected the demon race and caused them to mutate, becoming stronger and more aggressive in the process.
"Reid, you need to wrap that core in our medicinal cloth before you store it." He warned the boy.
"Really, what for?" He asked.
"It's partially corrupted by malice. The purification properties of the cloth will keep it from spreading."
"Malice?" He asked.
"Wait, the same malice from the myths?" Anna asked.
"The very same. I'm assuming that is why the creature was so uncharacteristically aggressive. Thankfully the infection only covered a small part of the crystal. According to some of the more detailed historical records, beings who were fully corrupted by malice were three to ten times more powerful than their original form. In that case, even a Balt would be a serious threat."
"Ten times!?!? That's insane! How did the alliance ever win the war?" Reid nearly shouted.
"That three to ten times increase was only for a fully corrupted individual. That only represented a small portion of their total forces. Still, it took an alliance between the five races to drive them back to their realm. The records vary, but they estimate around 60-80% of the frontline troops were lost by the end of the war. The losses from those demonic conflicts eclipsed any seen in the great war."
"Holy crap." The boy said.
"Are you sure we should be keeping that thing then?" The alarm in Anna's voice was obvious.
"Yes. Although I don't understand everything about this 'malice', I do know that it needs certain conditions to grow and corrupt. Think of it like a mushroom. They need certain conditions to grow and propagate. If you remove those conditions, they will die, just like any other organic creature. That's what the wraps do, inhibit its survival condition to eventually kill it."
"Alright, if you say so." She said hesitantly.
"It just feels weird that you know all that with so much certainty, but didn't even know you can't keep animals." She continued.
"You- That's not the same!" Amadeus said genuinely irritated.
"I know this much because of my analyze ability and my extensive research in the hunters guild library! The only reason I didn't know about the livestock issue is because it's such common knowledge that no one would bother writing it down!"
"We get it, calm down." Reid cuts in. "Lets just focus on processing this meat."
"Yeah…" Anna replied, a look of disgust took over her face as she looked back at the creature.
"Is it still good to eat?" She asked.
"Yes. The core was only partially corrupted. Malice won't spread to the body until it completely corrupts the core. I analyzed the body anyway, just to be safe. It's clean."
"Alright. Guess we should get back to it..." Reid resigned himself to the task ahead.
Within 30 minutes, the creature was entirely processed. Its entrails were buried to prevent monsters from being drawn towards the road. It's bones and horns were stored, it's pelt was bundled, and it's meat was packaged with some spare wrapping Bill had provided.
With everything loaded onto the carriage, Reid and Anna climbed into their rear seats, which were even more cramped than before. The rest of the day's travel went off without a hitch.