Those stupid tiger statues had no essence in them, just like the golems from the sky bridge. That was fine, except that more and more of them just kept showing up. Velik hadn’t kept careful track of how many he’d reduced to piles of broken rock slowly liquifying in the magma that had spilled out of them, but it was at least fifty by now.

They’d started coming at him two or three at a time, then eventually in an endless deluge with more showing up as fast as he killed them. It was only after he climbed another mile or so that he figured out what was happening. Some great machine was making more and spitting them out, a new one every minute.

Velik destroyed it, then spent some time looking around to see if there were more of them. If there were—and he figured that was almost certain—they were far enough around the curve of the mountain that he could bypass them. Instead of wasting more time hunting for monsters that had no essence, he finished his ascent.

He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been expecting—maybe some great palace where Tesir lounged on a massive cushion and devoured the raw carcass of his latest kill, or maybe just some stinking cave in the side of the mountain littered with the remains of anything stupid enough to get too close. What he found was an enormous caldera several miles wide shrouded in mist. Patches of green jungle peeked out here and there, and the temperature stabilized the moment he crested the rim of the caldera.

Velik just stared at it for a moment, completely lost for words. Never had he expected something like this at the peak of what he suspected might be the world’s tallest mountain. Seeing it sprawled out in front of him, he wasn’t sure what exactly he was supposed to even do.

It didn’t take long to firm his resolve. The scent leads here. Follow the scent. It doesn’t matter if it goes up the side of an elemental-encrusted mountain or through whatever the hell this is supposed to be. The only thing that changes is I have to be even more wary of an ambush now.

There were no trails leading down into the caldera, but Velik simply leaped into the open air and ran down to expedite what would have been an otherwise tedious climb. It was at least half a mile down, with sheer cliffs the whole way. Without [Inevitable], he would have been concerned about being ambushed by some sort of flying monster the whole way.

The humidity down at ground level was so thick that he was practically drowning in it, but it was refreshing after the bone-scorching waves of heat rolling off the outside of the mountain. For the first time in the last few hours, the mana draw from his new [Flame Ward]

skill finally abated, though it was far too late to save the ragged scraps of clothing he’d started with.

Naked wasn’t his ideal choice for monster hunting, but it would hardly be the first time he’d done it. He did miss having clothes enchanted for durability and self-repair, though. That was a quality of life he’d gotten used to, and he wondered if there was anything similar outside the system.

There has to be, though. Every divine beast I’ve met wore clothes, and they all fight at levels well past the point mundane fabric could hold up. It’s not armored; I know that much. If it was, I’d have had to punch through it when I hit that bat guy.

He supposed it was possible they just had extensive wardrobes, but he thought it was more likely that they just knew the magic that went into the enchantments he was familiar with. Unfortunately, the way the LPS worked, he couldn’t replicate an enchantment on tools or clothes, only himself.

In the end, he wasn’t there to be fashionable. His purpose was to find and kill a white and gold-striped tiger, and that was exactly what he was going to do, even if his piece flapped in the breeze the whole time. It was a shame he hadn’t run across any monsters that had hides he could actually use on his way up the mountain though. If those stupid birds hadn’t combusted every time he’d killed one, he’d have at least a loincloth at this point.

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It wasn’t like he had a lot of time to process the hides anyway. With a sigh, Velik let the whole thing go and stepped through the trees. He kept his spear in hand and his senses sharp. Vision was limited, but that was an old issue he’d been dealing with for a decade. There were plenty of other ways to navigate a forest, even one as thick as the jungle he’d unexpectedly found himself in.

Sound and scent were the two big ones, but with the ability to sense essence and magic in his arsenal as well, Velik had no trouble picking out any number of threats. Surprisingly, some were simple animals that had no interest in him, or which saw him as a potential meal and quickly decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Animals rarely survived in monster-infested environments, but he’d been seeing a lot of them on the far side of the sand sea.

The monsters were there, too, though they seemed smarter than usual. Velik wasn’t entirely sure why, but other than treating every monster like an ambush predator who didn’t just blindly rush at him, he didn’t worry about it too much. Here, though, the monsters weren’t just lurking in the trees, waiting for him to walk by. They were actively hiding.

What is up with this place?

he wondered as he threaded his way down an overgrown trail.

There were a ton of snakes everywhere, both hiding amongst the tree roots and wrapped around branches overhead. Not a single one made a move at him. Birds fled if they realized he was there, not that many of them saw him coming. There was even a quadrupedal monster with a jaw that split into three pieces when it opened its mouth that abandoned its kill in the middle of eating when Velik got close.

He was only attacked twice, and only one of those was because he wandered into something that was territorially suicidal. It was some sort of ape with incredibly sharp senses that noticed him a quarter mile away and immediately started charging at him. He rammed his spear through its chest, pinning it to a tree wider than he was tall while the monster did its best to climb the shaft so it could reach him.

The second time, a pack of massive, sleek worgs caught his scent and started hunting him down, only to fall prey to him when he backtracked in his own trail and ambushed them. It was a strangely nostalgic fight for him, since he hadn’t had to deal with that particular monster in a long time. The fact that they were all the equivalent to a level 70 or 80 monster did not at all ruin it for him.

The behavior of the local monsters was weird enough, but it paled in comparison to what Velik found an hour into his exploration. He stood on a game trail, peering both ways and frowning. To his left was a stream of surprisingly clean water, something he could have expected to find close to a mountain spring if the mountain in question didn’t have about a thousand vents spewing lava out of them.

To his right was a simple hut made of mud, grass, and sticks. It was primitive. It was delicate. It absolutely wasn’t something any monster or animal would build. There were more huts past it, ringing a clearing in the trees. Civilization existed in this caldera, which up to this point Velik had assumed was Tesir’s domain.

I thought there were no humans outside the system. So… Either Tesir lets them shelter in his domain, which feels… unlikely, or he led me here on purpose to meet these humans and this isn’t where he lives. But then why were there those stone golems that looked like him guarding the outside of the caldera?

He was ready to put the mystery out of his head, if for no other reason than the answer changed nothing about his purpose here, but then he heard something. There was movement on the trail, half a mile away near the stream. The huts’ owners were returning, and despite himself, Velik found himself curious what kind of people lived in a world where even the weakest monsters were stronger than the platinum-ranked hunters back home.

He quickly hid himself and waited for the locals to appear, balanced on a thick branch thirty feet up and a hundred feet back from the trail. It didn’t take long for them to come into view, at which point Velik’s jaw dropped. They had blue skin, and scales, and frills on the sides of their heads. Snouts lined with razor-sharp teeth jutted out of their faces.

Undoubtedly, they were monsters.

That did not change the fact that each one had a leather harness holding knives, hatchets, and other tools. Several of them held crude spears in hands that included opposable thumbs. Others carried heavy skins full of water, obviously made from the hides of some massive creature since they were four or five times the size of Velik’s head.

They talked softly as they walked, their language filled with hisses and clicks. He couldn’t understand any of it, but it so obviously was a language that it was impossible to mistake it for anything else. There really was only one way to describe what Velik was seeing.

Civilized… monsters?