Chapter 60

With the terrible experiences of his previous life, Timothy felt an extreme rage towards those who had power who were willing to allow the lives of others to die just so that their own positions in the world would increase. It was good that the military was so large and that the Emperor's own orders did prevent large scale damage from such decisions. And Timothy was grateful because it allowed those who had a commoner background such as himself the ability to gain achievements in order to exchange such titles and awards for a higher role in society.

"Now that you are all signed up for the mission as a squad, I would like to recommend that since it looks like your squad was just thrown together last minute, you all should spend at least a month in the most outer layer of the mountain range and focus on killing rank one demonic beasts in order to get your formations and teamwork down. Only then will you all be guaranteed to live through this and will all be able to receive a high amount of compensation!"

Once they were dismissed, the officer escorted them to a teleportation array. Unlike arrays that connected different cities across the empire to make traveling faster, this array was instead a one way trip to one of the entrances to the Demonic Mountain Pass. When the squad was finally transported to the location, they realized that there was only a small building that was home to a handful of soldier squads and only an officer overseeing the area. Thomas handed over the badge given to him by the general as the squad leader and the officer led the squad to one of the many entrances of the mountain range.

There were seemingly endless amounts of barriers and defensive machinery all throughout and it caused even Timothy to be shocked since he was sure that not even a rank six dual expert would have an easy time living through a barrage of these defenses combining their power to a single point. Whether it was magical cannons on watch towers, or just good old fashioned barriers that had offensive capabilities included within them, it was hard to count how many there were and each one had at least two soldiers coordinating within for efficiency purposes!

Before officially entering into the mountain range, Thomas decided for one last time to discuss the three different battle formations that the squad had agreed to use. Thomas would of course be situated in the back of the squad since his healing capabilities could be used as a mid-range technique. The three students who were only mages would use long and mid-range techniques in order to slow their enemies down or to land big blows onto them while it was Timothy's role to be up close and personal.

Since one of the three mages who was named Alicia was of the wind element and had one of the better long-range techniques that could wrap a demonic beast of any size in a whirlwind which would at the very least slow it down, it was decided that if necessary, Alicia would accompany Thomas in the back as a last line of defense while Mark who had some close combat techniques with his earth element such as creating a golem or even wrapping himself completely in his earth armor, would shift to take hits for Thomas and Alicia if the squad would be surrounded by too many demonic beasts to continue using the first and main formation well.

Thankfully, Thomas had a large quantity of low grade energy replenishing pills so in theory as long as Timothy and Mark did not fall in battle, the squad could realistically battle for as long as they needed until every demonic beast present was slaughtered. And so the group headed on into the mountain range with Timothy leading them. Normally, if someone was in a role like Timothy was, they would prefer to wear some very heavy and durable armor, but Timothy felt much more comfortable using his top notch movement technique to dodge any dangerous blows that he might have to overcome depending on the demonic beast he was fighting.

General Black Raven's recommendation was correct and within the first two hours, Timothy and his squad had already killed seven rank one demonic beasts. At first, all of the students were scared and would for the most part remain frozen in battle, but as one after another demonic beast was killed by Timothy with the help of Thomas supporting him, the students had begun to finally become used to battle and by the seventh kill of the squad, their teamwork was finally beginning to show itself. The remainder of the day was just Thomas commanding the squad in order to assist Timothy and by the end of the first day when it was finally time for them to make their camp, they had already killed over fifteen rank one demonic beasts.

Truth be told, Timothy felt like he did not need to go all out since he had such a big squad behind him to assist him. The artifact explained that there will come a time soon where Timothy would have to go all out in battle, but for now it was best to have the squad's experience in battle become higher and to perfect their teamwork so that if Timothy did have to go all out, he only had to focus on getting the job done instead of protecting the students who were frozen like they were earlier just facing rank one demonic beasts.

For an entire week, Timothy and his squad were able to hunt down rank one demonic beasts one at a time and would avoid some of the nearby areas where they knew groups of demonic beasts living together were located. On occasion, Thomas would even allow Timothy to venture out on his own as the rest of the squad took breaks since he could tell that Timothy was starting to become very bored during the mission. Unless they had a special and deadly ability, Timothy calculated that he could take on at least four or five rank one demonic beasts on his own so just hunting one at a time with the squad was in fact boring and unsettling for him.

But by the start of the second week with over fifty five demonic beasts slain and their corpses and cores collected in Thomas's storage ring, it was finally time to let the squad break up into smaller groups and to head further into the mountain range. Alicia and Mark would be in one group while Thomas and the fourth student of the squad Harry were in the other group while Timothy was allowed to go out on his own without backup. Their goal was to take down at least five demonic beasts each day for three days and if each group was able to do that, they would begin to finally head further into the mountain range to try as the whole squad, to take down a rank two demonic beast together.