One minute remaining... Duke and the others should be able to stall Nathan till then. Arnold nodded and lowered his guns, why waste his mana on making bullets when his summons had everything in control?

Arnold was lost in his thoughts when something went flying past him, he turned around and saw that Duke, his proud warrior was shattered into pieces. Arnold hastily looked back towards Nathan who just with one shockwave blast, destroyed nearly all of Arnold's summons. Before Arnold could react and raise his guns, Nathan shot out like an arrow and grabbed Arnold by the neck, pushing him into a wall. The wall was dented, and Arnold was trapped inside, unable to move.

"Playtime is OVER!" Nathan roared in anger.

Even though Arnold was pinned on the wall, he tried to aim his guns at Nathan but before he could fire upon Nathan, Nathan smacked the guns away from his hands. Seeing that there was no way out, Arnold paced his hands on Nathan's head and activated [ARCANE FLAMES]. A cracking noise could be heard across the hall, before anyone could figure out what was happening... Nathan's head was engulfed in blue coloured flames.

Nathan immediately let go of Arnold. and stepped back. Arnold's hand were burnt and he was shaking them like crazy before using his ice abilities to cover them up but surprisingly Nathan wasn't screaming in pain like he was supposed to...

"What the hell?" Arnold mumbled.

The flames covering Nathan's head, simply flowed down to the floor like molten iron. The flames only managed to burn away his energy shield, Nathan's body was completely unharmed from Arnold's attack.

"Just how many affinities do you have?" Nathan asked with a poker face.

CLAP

CLAP

CLAP

"You've done better than I imagined, Arnold." Nathaniel spoke up. "Although I had told Nathan to hold back against you, you still managed to provoke him. Impressive, really impressive."

"He barely attacked me... "

"Of course he didn't. If he did, I highly doubt you'd be able to take 5 consecutive punches from him." Nathaniel replied, "Your abilities are impressive, but for C ranker only. I highly doubt you can take on a B+ or above ranked warriors with your current strength.

"Thus before I allow you to participate in the family affairs, I recommend you to keep working with our guild for now and develop your abilities. Once you do that, I'd gladly adopt you as my son but before then you're just an ordinary member of the family. And you Nathan, I suggest you to do more meditation from now on because you really need to control your anger."

"Yes, father." Nathan bowed his head towards Nathaniel and left.

"I'll take my leave as well sir." Arnold said and turned around to leave but Nathaniel stopped him.

"Wait a minute, boy. I don't think you have any proper gear on you other than your guns. You should go to the armoury and get yourself some equipment. I'd recommend that you get some defensive equipment, because you really lack in defense, which is a problem. Don't worry about the cost, consider it a gift." Nathaniel patted Arnold's shoulders.

"Thank you sir, I'm really grateful but if I could get some beast crystals instead, then I'd be able to make some gears myself." Arnold knew that he won't be able to use any gear that wasn't made by him or generated by the system, that's why rather than buying some gears from the armoury Arnold tried to get some beast crystals instead.

"Hm... so you're one of the creationists huh?" Nathaniel stroked his beard. "Fine you can have some crystals. I'll inform the armoury staff about it, they'll deliver the beast crystals to your room."

"Thank you sir."

Nathaniel didn't reply and left the hall. a butler escorted Arnold outside the mansion.

*****

FEW HOURS LATER

KNOCK

KNOCK

KNOCK

"Who is it?" Arnold asked.

"Mr. Arnold? You have a package from the armoury." A voice came from the outside.

Arnold opened the door, the Butler handed him a metal box and left.

"Let's see what do we have here." Arnold locked the door and opened the box. There were 30 or so beast crystals inside the box, there were more than 20 [Basic Beast] crystals inside and the remaining crystals were composed of a weird yellow substance. Arnold picked one of these and used the [PROBE] skill on it.

_________________

OBJECT : [Yellow soul] crystal

TYPE : Beast crystal

GRADE : C

REMARK : An uncommon beast crystal, can only be obtained by killing a beast/monster of rank C or above. Important component in many weapons and armours.

_________________

After reading this, Arnold dumped all of the beast crystals into his inventory. Right now he had over 12 [Yellow Soul] crystals and 47 [Basic Beast] crystals.

"Let's hope I'd be able to buy some defense equipments from the shop." Arnold rubbed his hands together and opened the [Equipments and Gears] tab on the [Shop] interface. He immediately went to the armor section, although most of the high level gears were either locked or he didn't have enough crystals to buy them, there were some decent gears available there like [Cloak of Healing], [Cloak of Force], [Cloak of Spikes] etc, as well. He kept browsing through the gears until he finally found something he was looking for.

"That's it!" Arnold exclaimed.