The merchant that bought Outworlder stuff had actually been really interested in the random items Kay had in his pockets when he arrived in Torotia. Kay had kept his clothes, a few things from his wallet, and his phone that had important photos on it. He hoped someday to figure out a way to charge it so he could look at them often.

In the end, after some haggling, Kay had ended up walking off with a startling, to him, amount of five hundred fifty gold.

A chunk of that money had been spent on gear for Kay, a set of leather armor and a slightly nicer sword than the one they’d been using to train him. Kay had questioned the usefulness of leather armor, half-remembering something he’d heard once about “leather armor” not really being a real thing, but Eleniah had just stared at him weirdly until he’d dropped the topic. He reminded himself that this was a fantasy world, things won’t necessarily work the same way here as at home.

The rest of the money went was set aside to save up for an enchanted blood flask.

“This one looks nice…” Eleniah mused, looking over one of the various jobs posted in the Adventurer’s Guild. It had been a few weeks since they’d gone to sell his things, and he’d managed to get his Novice Swordsman (Bastard Swords) to upgrade to the tier two class Apprentice Swordsman (Bastard Swords). Right after that he’d practiced with Manipulate Blood for an hour or two, and upgraded his first class to Apprentice Blood Manipulator.

With that, Eleniah felt he was finally ready to go on some adventuring jobs, with the caveat that she’d pick out his jobs until she felt he was ready to. Also, she’d be supervising him for more than a few jobs past that, to make sure he didn’t die. She’d told him that she’d eventually stop trailing him on jobs, but he didn’t really mind. Not dieing was very high on his to-do list, and having a stronger person tag along to be his backup wasn’t a bad idea in his book.

“What’s the job?” Kay asked, leaning over her shoulder to read it.

“Some weak monsters have started showing up and ruining crops a little ways to the west. They aren’t a big deal in general, but most people without focused combat builds wouldn’t be able to get rid of them at lower tiers.” Eleniah took the notice off the board and headed to a line. “This’ll be a good first job to whet you on.”

“What are the details and the reward?”

“The poster doesn’t know for sure how many there are, so they have a per-head bounty, but they want a minimum of ten dead. Proof of kill to get paid, which is standard…” She glanced at the notice again. “And three large silver a head payment. That’s not bad for enemies of this level.”

A sudden thought struck Kay. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask but I forgot.” He pulled out a silver from his belt pouch and looked it over. “Why do you have currency in gold, silver, and copper?” he flipped it and looked at the other side. “On my world these are valuable because there isn’t a lot of it and it’s not that easy to get and process. But this world is massive, so you must have more of it, and it’s a lot easier to mine if you can get a mining class to tier three. So why is money made out of those metals, instead of something magic or rarer?”

“Dragons.”

“Dragons?”

She nodded. “Right, dragons. Back before there was any real currency and most societies used the barter system, dragons would travel around and trade a lot for hunks of gold, silver, or copper. They valued each of those metals in the same order we do now, so people went out of their way to mine them and keep them around, so if a dragon came by they could trade it for something valuable. That meant those metals eventually became seen as valuable on their own, and now they make money out of them.”

Kay whistled. “Damn. That’s crazy. Why do dragons want those metals?”

Eleniah shrugged. “They won’t tell people. Some theorize that it’s a class or skill related thing, but no one’s sure.”

They eventually reached the front of the line, where Eleniah registered Kay as the person taking the job.

Leaving the building, Kay thought over the information his teacher had told him so far. Weaker monster, destroying crops, not a huge deal but still a pest. “Hey, Eleniah, what kind of monsters am I going to be hunting?” He hoped it wasn’t going to be rabbit monsters, those were a little too cliche for him.

As it turns out, they weren’t rabbit monsters, they were moles. Tremor Moles, to be specific.

Kay watched one of them as it rooted through the dirt. The crops they were after were very similar to potatoes, and he watched as it dug one up an started eating it.

“I thought moles ate worms…” He mused as he watched it move.

“Regular moles do, but monsters don’t always act the same as their animal counterparts.” Eleniah replied. “There’s a kind of monster eagle that only eats fruit.”

“Weird.” He watched the Tremor Mole eat for a moment, then turned to his teacher. “So, what should I know about these?”

She nodded at it. “See those tendrils near its snout?”

Kay nodded. They looked sort of similar to a star nosed mole’s snout, but they dangled off the edge of the toothy maw like whiskers.

“Tremor Moles can’t see or hear very well, they use those tendrils to sense vibrations and movement. They also have sharp hooks on the inside edge that grab prey and pull the into the mouth. They also like to ambush prey that they sense moving by digging up underneath them.”

“Alright.” Kay let out a breath and slowly drew his sword. “Lets get to it then.”

His teacher grabbed his shoulder and stopped him. “Act like I’m not here. I know that it’ll be hard, if not impossible, but act like I’m not here. I’m not going to let you go out on your own until I’m sure that the chance of you dying is slim, but you need to get used to the idea of being your own lifeline.”

Kay gave a deep nod in reply. He knew that Eleniah would save him, if he needed it, but he also knew she’d wait till he really needed it. She wasn’t a boot camp style instructor that wanted to break him down through insults and endless exercise, but she was absolutely ruthless when it came to training him to live through anything. During their combat training, she didn’t hit him with the full power of her tier five class, not when he was only a tier one or two. She just went at his tier one self with tier three power, and upped it to tier four when he hit tier two. She’d smacked the shit out of him over and over, to teach him how to take hits, dodge attacks faster than he was, and all kinds of other necessary tactics and maneuvers.

With her insistence that he learn to stay alive, he knew that she’d let him get seriously injured before she stepped in. And he really didn’t want to get injured.

As he slowly walked towards the mole, the two tendrils hanging down from it’s jaw twitched, and it turned towards him. Dropping the potato, it got on all fours and hissed at his approach. The three foot long creature had an almost triangular jaw filled with small, sharp teeth, and it’s claws looked like railroad spikes.

Kay paused a few feet away, he reached towards his side and opened up the canteen hanging there. It wasn’t a magical canteen made to keep blood fresh, just a normal one, but it had taken them only an hour to walk here from the city, and he’d put fresh blood from the butcher in it as they left. It was still fresh enough for him to float it out and make a large ball of it.

The mole continued hissing at him, apparently not ready to jump into battle, which suited Kay just fine.

He pulled a smaller ball of blood out of the larger mass and flicked his wrist in the direction of the mole. At his level of skill, he still needed motions to properly direct his magic. The ping pong sized ball of blood shot at the monster like a baseball pitch and slammed into its shoulder hard enough to knock it back a bit. It’s hiss turned into an enraged shriek as it staggered, and it started to dig. Within seconds it had made a hole wide enough for it to jump into, and it vanished from Kay’s sight.

But not all of his senses.

After leveling his Manipulate Blood a few times, Kay had discovered that he could not only control blood within his range, he could also sense it.

He shifted slightly in place, letting the mole know where he was as his gaze tracked movement below him. A few moments after the monster had dug out of sight, it rocketed out of a hole to the side and behind of Kay. In one motion, honed to a degree past anything he would have been able to do back one Earth, Kay sidestepped the attack and swung upwards with his sword in one hand. He carved a gash in the side of the mole monster, and it shrieked again as it hit the ground, this time in pain.

Kay capitalized on the beasts momentary pause and slammed more spheres of blood into its side, then grabbed all the free blood and pulled it away. This time the ball was larger, fueled by the monster’s bleeding, and he slammed the beach-ball sized mass into the monster three times.

Carefully walking over, he stabbed down into the unmoving beasts head, making sure it was dead.

“Nicely done.” Eleniah walked over from where she’d been watching. “That bit with making sure some blood stuck in it’s fur so you could track it was smart.”

“Seemed like a good idea.” Kay crouched down and started inspecting the body. “Anything worth taking off these?” Some monster parts could be sold to different people or businesses, with the parts serving as materials in various crafts, or being bought up by interested collectors.

“The claws make decent weapons for lower tiers, and sometimes you can get interesting magical components from the head and tentacles.” She pulled out a sack and a large knife. “I’ll show you how to harvest the potentially valuable parts, and then skin it for proof. Since it’s your first time out, I’ll carry everything for you, but you’ll need to figure out how you’re going to transport pieces and loot in the future.”

She took some time going over how to carefully extract important parts of various animals, with a focus on claws and esoteric items like a Tremor Mole’s tentacles. Eventually they finished with the carcass and Eleniah stood up with a sack full of dead monster bits. “Alright, nine more to go for the reward, and bonus for extra after that.”

Kay stood up and started walking, hunting for more monsters. This would be his life now.

He was finding that he didn’t hate it.