The wyvern was massive, easily twice the size of anything else Velik had seen over the last few weeks. It had scales like steel plates and teeth like sabers, and its breath was imbued with nauseating gases so powerful that not even close to 200 physical was enough to ignore their effects.

It was also quite dead, the top half of its skull having been torn off by a [Dread Lance] originating in its left eye socket. The ground shook as the body slammed into it, sending loose stones rolling down the side of the mountain, but Velik easily held his balance on four legs.

[You have slain an elite monarch wyvern (level 54).]

[You have been awarded 5 decarmas.]

[You have advanced to level 48. +2 Physical, +1 Mental, +2 free points.]

[Aspect of the Wind Tamer had advanced to rank 5.]

[True Form has advanced to rank 4.]

Finally! Two more levels to go.

It hadn’t even really been that hard of a fight. Velik had used [True Form] more to continue practicing with the skill than anything else. He’d started to get the sense as [Aspect of the Wind Tamer] had ranked up that it was also helping him move the relatively unfamiliar wolf body he used with [True Form], and the bulk of his practice had been in teasing out what exactly the connections between the two skills were.

He hadn’t expected any sort of skill merge between them, not originally, but the more he worked on deepening his understanding of them, the more he became sure it would happen. The problem was that there was no telling if or when that would occur, so the only guaranteed way to open up a skill slot was to reach level 50 and add a new one. That, at least, he could slowly chip away at.

Or he could, except that the expedition was packing up and leaving in the morning. Velik had about three hours of night left to harvest the monarch wyvern and get back to the sky bridge. His contract stipulated escorting the expedition into and out of the mountains, if only because the next strongest person on the assault team was barely level 35.

He made quick progress, but was hindered by the relatively limited size of his bracelet’s extradimensional storage. Velik barely got a third of his harvest stowed away before he ran out of room. That left him with a huge bundle of parts to carry, which he wasn’t much looking forward to since he wasn’t even on the same mountain as the rest of the expedition at the moment. It wasn’t impossible, but he was seriously debating if it was worth the effort.

The only alternatives were to jettison some of the stuff he’d already collected from earlier kills or to make multiple trips to haul it back. Neither of those options appealed to Velik, so he bound the wing bones with rope and started making his way back. The wyvern hide would be left to rot, as would any valuable organs. It was perhaps wasteful, but there was only so much he could do. Mentally, he was already spending his share of the expedition’s profits on upgrading the bracelet so this wouldn’t be an issue again.

Fortunately, Velik had so heavily overhunted the area of monsters over the last few weeks that he’d have to go out of his way to find anything to kill on his return trip. The few remaining monsters that he did detect weren’t close enough to notice him in return, and he made the journey without incident. His spoils went into Jensen’s big storage box, much to the man’s annoyance. Since when doesn’t he want to make money? I thought that was the whole point.

A few hours later, everything was packed up, the whole team climbed the ropes leading back out of the sky bridge, and they were ready to return to civilization.

* * *

Jensen stifled a yawn as he hiked. Velik had woken him up several hours before dawn to dump yet another haul of wyvern bone wings, claws, teeth, and scales into the storage box, apparently either unaware or uncaring of the fact that normal people needed sleep. It wasn’t like they didn’t have a protocol for piling up salvage while Jensen slept, but Velik ignored all that, of course.

There was no point in telling him, not when it was their last day at the sky bridge. They’d broken down pretty much everything, filling almost three-quarters of the storage box in the process, and settled in for a night’s sleep before beginning the arduous trek back home. Velik’s hunting trips were over, and thus the issue of him not knowing what to do with anything he brought back while Jensen was asleep was a moot point.

He walked at the front of their line, right near the cart the storage box was sitting in. None of the wagons had been capable of ascending up the side of the mountain—not that the cart was much better, but it was light enough to be carried when there was no other choice. In that respect, if nothing else, the whole crew was happy to have Velik along. No one else even came close to being as physically strong as him.

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It was still a long, miserable journey back home. Weirdly, Jensen never noticed so much as a single monster anywhere near them, which he took to mean that Velik hadn’t been kidding about clearing out the whole mountain. That was an insane proposition, of course. He’d have had to kill thousands of monsters every day. No one could do that.

And yet… no monsters anywhere.

Their first day of travel ended, and when the sun rose again, they finally left the mountain and started winding their way through the trails in the foothills. It was boring, but nobody complained about that. At this point, they all just wanted to get home and get paid.

It took the better part of a week to make it back to the town they’d left their wagons at, some little speck in the corner of the map whose name escaped Jensen at the moment. Everyone celebrated with hot baths, hot meals, and warm beds—everyone except Velik, of course. The last few months had seen the hunter turn even further away from other people.

I don’t think I’ll be able to convince him to do a fourth expedition. He’s gotten everything he wanted now, everything except that trip to Slokara. But the borders are still locked down, and the mountains… I guess aren’t impassable for him alone.

When it had come out that body-snatching monsters had successfully infiltrated human society, it had sent multiple national governments into a panic. Slokara, more than anywhere else, had reacted harshly and immediately. They’d locked down their borders without hesitation, uncaring of the damage they were doing to their economy or whether they’d violated any trade agreements with their neighbors.

That also put an end to any thoughts of leading an expedition down there, at least for the time being. With there being nothing they could do, Jensen had talked Velik into joining him as muscle for three expeditions by promising him the opportunity to fight strong monsters and make a lot of money. Unfortunately, this latest one hadn’t resulted in any levels or treasure, which were the things Velik cared about.

And now he knows he’s strong enough to cross the mountains dividing Ghestal and Slokara, so it’s a fairly obvious guess where he’ll be heading. And my expenses are about to go through the roof for the next run. I’ll probably have to hire three golds to replace him, and each one will want twice what I was paying.

Jensen would have felt bad about underpaying Velik so heavily, but the truth of the matter was that he’d tried to pay Velik more, only to be rebuffed. The strange young hunter had just told Jensen that he had enough money, that Jensen needed it more to get his expeditions funded. Taking charity from a commoner who’d spent most of his life living like a savage in the woods stung Jensen’s pride, but he’d promised himself to pay Velik back later and graciously accepted the lifeline.

Of course, Velik had gone and brought back a small fortune in raw materials from various monsters he’d hunted. At least a few of those classes at the guild hadn’t been wasted on him, and he knew what sat at the intersection of valuable and portable for every monster he hunted. Now that Jensen was fully awake, he could appreciate the latest haul from a financial perspective. It would take months to sell all of them, and probably a small fortune to transport them to a dozen different cities so that no single market became too saturated, but it was still a fortune in the end.

It's been a good run, Jensen thought to himself with a smile. Even if the loot was a bit unconventional, they’d found several rooms filled with what he could only assume were components for assembling new golems, and those had been enough for [Treasure Hunter] to latch onto. His gaze slid over to the storage box, with its millions of decarmas worth of goods stored in it. A good run, indeed.

* * *

Six beings gathered in a chamber of marble and gold, each arriving through a door bearing a crest on it. They stood in a circle, most of them with bored expressions on their faces.

“Why did you drag us all here?” one of them asked. He was a short man, perhaps five feet in height. A thick cloak covered his whole body, leaving only strands of dark hair spilling out of the hood visible. “Do you think we have nothing better to do with our time?”

She glanced around the circle and saw agreement on their faces, all except for one. Raising a finger, she pointed to him. “His experiment worked.”

“Which one, my dear?” This time, the speaker was a sharp-chinned man, his eyes glinting gold in the soft light. Strands of copper hair were tightly pulled back to show off his handsome features, though his smirk revealed teeth too pointed to be human. “I have so many.”

“Your dungeon seed project produced results.”

That got everyone’s attention. “A new beast?” the golden-eyed man asked, quirking an eyebrow. “And to think, you all called me insane.”

“You are insane,” another voice rumbled.

“Crazy like a fox,” the man agreed.

“And your jokes aren’t funny,” a female voice hissed. “Not now, not ever. What does this mean for us?”

“It means we’ll be remodeling the hall,” the golden-eyed man said with a laugh. “Better leave space for a few more doors.”

“Not yet,” the largest among them said with a growl. “We’ll need to test the results of this experiment. Where is it?”

“Last seen at the Heldark Mountains Sky Bridge,” she said.

“I will go,” the large man said. “I will find the experiment, and we shall see if it’s worth the color of its blood.”

“I will accompany you as well,” the golden-eyed man said. “I need to see the results for myself.”

“No,” a sixth voice said, one that had remained silent thus far. “You have responsibilities to attend to that cannot be neglected.”

“But—”

“No. Send someone in your stead.”

“I need no tag-alongs!” the large man protested.

“Who could I possibly trust with something this important?” the golden-eyed man demanded. “It has to be one of us.”

They all made their excuses, until every eye turned to her. Shit, she thought.