22

"Alright, let's head west," I say tiredly while Skooma cleans up his future suit materials from the ground. "If you haven't noticed, we found some dusk imps ourselves just earlier. An icon with some hills and holes in them? There were warriors using hunters as bait to bring in ferecats in bulk but we took everyone there. I even got this Capture skill for catching Lil's new familiar."

Putting his belongings away in his inventory window, Skooma catches up with his group trailing along behind ours and says, "That's something they do when the queen and he coven are going to give birth soon, the sacrifice the old hunters that are still around to make room for the new babies and keep them fed while they grow. It only takes a couple weeks before the babies are out hunting, though."

"The warriors can't go far from the nest," Lil points out. "My character comes with a basic bestiary for monsters D rank and below, so I know a little bit about everything in the forest. If we go back there and Skooma's team recognizes the icon for their nest we can go clear a miniature dungeon."

"I wish this place had a real dungeon," Skooma sighs wistfully. "They found a dungeon down south by Weyerhauser a while back, a bunch of fallen trees on top of one another where about a hundred tree vermin spawn every six or eight hours. A lot of the people who were originally here went there. Tree vermin armor is going to be pretty popular."

"It's impossible for one not to be, it just has to be found," I say frankly, pretending I did not already know where an endless-wave survival challenge was located and usable every twelve hours. "The main combat mobs in this regions are the goblins, vermin, lizards, imps, ferecats, and nightwings. Statistically speaking, there should be a respective dungeon for at least half of them and then a generic location where outlaws gather."

"Good luck with that," Papi says with a short laugh. "Most of the players in this game are nervous, even thought the pain is only half of reality it's still pain and not many people LIKE pain. So, the game has a heavy profession-player base. You can turn the pain off, but that takes you out of rankings so few people will do it unless they turn it on for PVP and off everywhere else."

"Okay, but what does that even mean?" I ask while purposefully missing the point because he never actually made it.

"He means only a handful of groups like ours leave the cities," Skooma points out. "Even then, they only travel out about an hour or so and then start circling around the city hunting by confrontations. Its not bad experience, but there are few discoveries made.

My dungeon was almost ten miles away from the city so I could understand what he meant by that. Most people would hunt and travel within one or two hours where they could run to safety in time at. Unless you started with a character like Skooma's or paid like Papi, the travel distance in this terrain would be around two to four miles.

Of course, if you were classless with balanced stats things would be different. Even the magic defense stat, Willpower, affected your physical body more than just defensively, it also had a small affect on stamina and the like. Like the ability to push one's self beyond their limits in running for extended periods of time or holding their breath in the same fashion.

"Let's go find a dungeon," I say with a smirk as we enter the forest from the road while heading toward where we caught Lil's familiar, making the rest of my team chuckle. "No, guys, I'm serious. Let's find a dungeon. There has to be one more out there for the nightwings or something, they're the strongest mobs here besides a random big game animal like bears. After I finish my quest tomorrow and after we help Beryl tomorrow night, let's get together again and find a dungeon"

Nobody really said anything after than, but eventually who had caught up to the front with his long feline legs says, "I'm game. I usually spend a couple hours every day or every night picking a directing and seeing how far I can run and what all I come across while waiting on everyone else. Since we're done with initiation quests, Let's make a real hunting trip of it!"

Skooma somewhat reminded me of myself just now. He was the leader of his group and he wanted to get things done as much as he could as fast as he could. Unlike me, though, he was slightly held back by his team.

"I want my name on a first clear record, too," Papi cuts in after a few seconds of silence. "Even if we make it big later on, it won't mean anything if we were playing at the start but never did anything at the start. Let's find a dungeon and carve our names all over it!"

Traveling as a group of eleven people made things a lot different than they were earlier. Not just because the numbers of creatures that attacked at once were greater but because confrontations became further apart. Having more and more people meant animals were simply less likely to attack.

However, when they did attack it was almost two-to-one odds of ferecats or even a sudden raid by a group of dusk imp hunters being chased by a group of nightwings. This was a hard battle for everyone because of the mixed enemies and mixed teams of players. At first there was some confusion between Lil's imp warrior and the fiery wolf that Skooma's sister, Agnes, summoned.

This was resolved by dividing our efforts as two groups. The weaker group handled the dusk imps while my group harried the nightwings. I personally fought without a weapon and out away from the group with a nightwing by myself. The nightwing had originally tried to grab me and fly away but I had tried to grab its feet to anchor it but now we were stalemated with swatting harassment.

Finally, I feinted a diving roll away from one slapping pass of its wing and the owl dropped on the spot where I was rolling to in anticipation. I had never even dove until the owl landed and even then it was onto its back while calling out Lil's name. After a few moments and rolling to this side or the other and flapping while digging its beak into my arm for thirty health, it actually started to calm down.

[Successfully Captured: Nightwing, adult female]

[+50XP]

[Do you wish to Tame: Nightwing?]

[YES/NO]

"Lil, hurry up!" I call out while the owl seems to relax but continue twitches its shoulders or turns its head about while testing its chances of escaping. If it ever though to attack my body with its claws and dig in with its beak again at the same time, I might not be able to tough it out. Fifty percent of having my forearm gouged into by a giant owl's beak HURT.

"I'm healing!" She calls back, dealing with both the singed arm of her imp and one of Skooma's teammates who had their lower leg chewed open by an imp hunter an owl dropped.

The game, or the AI, suddenly settled the situation for us because when the last enemy was killed I received a message window and more notifications.

[Due to the end of combat wile the beast was contained, the adult female Nightwing has been subdued and tamed by you. Because you do not having any binding items or a proper binding item, the owl will only follow you for 6 hours while you remain at the base affinity of 10%. Feeding, grooming, healing, and training the owl will increase your affinity with one another. With an affinity above 50% the owl will become permanently yours unless you attempt to harm it and lower your affinity, in which case you have six hours to raise it again before the animal will become wild again]

[+100XP]

[Leveled Up]

[All stats raised by 1]

[Acquired Skill: Taming]

[+25XP]

[Fusing Skills: Capture+Taming]

[Fused Skill Created: Beast Mastery]

[+50XP]

[Granted Unique Title: Classless Beast Master]

[Classless Beast Master: Epic. Passive. As the first classless player to unlock the mastery skill of a beast taming class, you now have an honorary class. As your mastery grows, so too does the number of beasts who follow you and their strength. +(2)% boost to stats, attack, and defense of yours pets. Pets: 2/(3)]

The first thing I did after reading the first message window was to fish out the rest of the meat sticks in my character inventory from my pockets and start feeding the obviously hungry owl. I gained two percent of affinity then and there. Then I gained two more percent by trailing my fingertips awkward over and down its large head through its feathers while reading the rest of my notifications.

Lil came over when I was done reading and considering what to do about continuing to build affinity with my owl. When I hit fourteen percent I received an extra notification that the owl would now stay with my for seven hours. This, at least, meant that I did not have to cram everything into a six-hour period.

"What are you doing?" Lil asks skeptically, watching me raise an arm and tap on it before the hundred-pound owl hops up and tests the extent of my thirty Strength at level sixteen.

"You took too long, they have a healer AND summoner that has a regen skill like yours," I inform her simply. "The system tamed it by default because combat ended. No, I'm not transferring ownership. it's not even permanently mine, yet, and I definitely won't hand it over after I put in the work to make it mine."

Her regen skill did five HP per second for one minute, which actually healed three hundred points overall. It was one of the reasons we lasted as long as we did. She did not have to couple her regen with the summoner's regen for only two injuries, the other play was just a whiny little kid.

"Then what am i-" She starts to demand angrily until I cut her off with a preemptive shrug.

"Tell your imp to climb a tree in a little while, another nightwing attracted to the noise of combat will see it and you can fish for owls that way," I reply casually, walking unsteadily away with my bird who gave me another two percent upon landing. Getting through the early stages will probably only take a couple of hours. "I'll catch it for you."

After everybody took the time out of our busy night to ogle my new pet I divided everybody into traveling pairs and used out Regional map to space these pairs fifty yards apart from one another. This way we would see multiple confrontations at a time that were less dangerous because they were smaller. To ensure this and to work on potential future coordination, I mixed the members of my and Skooma's teams together.

Except for Lil and Agnes, I still had to Capture another nightwing for Lil and Agnes was more comfortable with her brother than having her brother with the older Ivana. I tried to put my buddy Go with the cute girl who was definitely around his age but she seemed to be more worried about her brother and girls than herself and boys. Since Go was still a year younger than me I would have put him with Lil if I could.

Lil might have been the youngest here but she has had this crush on me since we met in another game which led to her father forcing me to meet him in yet another game. With pain sensory. To fight him. We had a draw because we were both endgame characters and I made us use the very basic starting equipment and magic because he was a pay to win player.

I did not even like his daughter but he was the kind of enraged parent you simply could not argue with so even though it was a draw I ended up with him for a shadow from that day forward. He was probably chewing his gauntlets like nails worrying about his precious daughter right now. Right now, his precious daughter was begging to ride on my shoulders.

*