I stopped by my tent, dropping off the goblin core there, planning on saving it until the core fragments powering my guns ran low. While waiting for some time to pass before meeting up with Sophie and Will, I load up a few magazines for my rifle into some containers on my belt made for that purpose, and put some speed loaders for my pistol into my pocket. I don’t think I’ll need any of it, and it’ll weigh me down while walking, but after running out of ammo earlier while fighting the goblins, I wasn’t going to take any risks.

Once I’d loaded up, I sat around wondering how to pass the time. Eventually, I decided to play around with magic. While it would lessen the amount of mana I could control later in the day, it wasn’t likely that I would need it. I walked outside, grabbed a good looking rock, and took it inside to sculpt it.

I took the rock in my hands, turning it over a few times. Magic is all about image and talent, you need to be able to picture what you’re trying to do, and you need to be lucky enough to be able to do it. Some people could throw fireballs, I got the talent of shaping materials. Along with enchanting, which everyone could do to some extent, it let me make things like my weapons.

I focused, and the rock slowly turned softer and softer until it felt like children’s clay. I pressed in on it, and it slowly compressed, slowly being shaped into an oblong shape. Once I had gotten it close enough to what I was looking for, I took out a mold from my backpack, and pressed the still soft stone into the mold. Once It was entirely inside, I used my thumbnail, enhanced with some mana, to scrape off the excess stone sticking out from the back. I then slowly released the mana keeping the stone soft, pressing a bit of mana in between the walls of the mold and the stone, keeping it from attaching.

Turning the mold upside down, the mostly completed stone bullet fell out of the mold. The last thing to do was apply the runes, so I put a bit more mana in my thumbnail, and carefully scratched out simple arrows around the bullet. Enchanting wasn’t some arcane art that required runes you had to learn. Just like all magic, it worked on image, and the most common image for movement was an arrow. I could press some mana into the rune now, but that would simply send it flying from my tent, so I simply placed it with my other bullets. The mana would be imbued into the enchantment when the hammer of my gun hit the bullet, linking the runes to the core powering my gun.

Going out of my tent to grab another few rocks with which to repeat the process, I was distracted by the sound of an explosion, which soon repeated itself. Heading over in the direction it was coming from, I spotted a girl throwing fireballs at a large rock, but unlike the ones which had simply melted through the goblins, hers exploded with a large shockwave.

I watched for a bit, explosions are always fun to watch, but soon my ears began to ring, and I headed back to my tent to make some more bullets. The rest of the wait was taken up by making my bullets, and I nearly missed the time to go meet up with Will and Sophie. Running over to Johnsons, I arrived a bit out of breath, to see Will and Sophie standing there, Will simply nodding, while Sophie had her eyebrows raised at my running arrival.

I felt my cheeks warm some as I slowed down to a walk and said hi.

“So where are we going to be hunting?”

“Pretty much anywhere honestly. With the goblins driven off the place will be flooded with monsters,” Will replied.

“Define flooded”

“Go more than half a mile out, and we’ll see something within half an hour practically guaranteed. We’ll need two of us to protect our kill while one of us comes back and gets the Butchery to have someone come down for the body. Though that is only the case if we hunt something worth money, if the body isn’t worth much, Sophie will just chop it open and we’ll grab the core before hunting some more.”

“So me trying to go hunting alone yesterday was pretty stupid then.”

Sophie laughed before replying. “Stupid is an understatement.”

I shook my head, this is what I get for not doing enough research. I’d done research on the different monsters, which ones were worth money and such, but I hadn’t bothered to look up the actual tactics for hunting them, something that was biting me in the butt now. I was very thankful to Will and Sophie, it seems they’d be showing me the ropes for now.

We exited the gate, the guard this time giving no commentary, and we’re soon in the forest surrounding the camp.

“So what’s up with the guards at the gate? The fence didn’t seem to do much last night, so it doesn’t seem like it would make much sense to even have them.”

“They’re more to just watch for monster attacks than anything else. They each have a whistle they’ll blow if we’re under attack. You should take a turn, the hunters pitch in to pay them, and you’ll earn like twenty bucks an hour. It isn’t much, but you also get to be the first ones to fight the monsters, and that can make you some good money.”

I had wondered what the whistling sound was that woke me, and I guess I had an answer now. I dismissed the thought, looking around us, deciding that it would be best to be the one that spotted the monsters rather than getting spotted by one.

It didn’t take nearly as long as I expected to find our first monster, something that looked like a giant boar with antlers. The thing had to be at least five feet tall excluding the antlers, and is quite intimidating.

“Nice, a steel boar,” Will says.

“Steel boar?”

“Their bones can be melted down into some metal like material that’s significantly stronger and lighter than steel. They get their name from that. I’m sure there’s an official name from some sciency folk, but that’s what we call them. Their meat is also quite popular. They’re worth a decent amount of money even excluding the core.”

I nodded, and raised my rifle to put a bullet in the beast, when Sophie went running off to fight it. I looked on incredulously as the boar saw her and charged, only to get beheaded as Sophie dodges to the side.

“Well that was anticlimactic. Do you guys really need me?”

Will shrugged. “The backup never hurts, and I saw what your gun did to the goblins. We could use some ranged support if we run into a pack of enemies.”

“Are packs of enemies common?”

“Let’s say that most deaths are from solo hunters and leave it at that.”

I nodded, but still felt sort of useless as Will says he’ll be heading back to alert the butchery about the kill. Sophie and I ended up standing around, with me feeling awkward around someone I didn’t know too well. I was tempted to ask for a photo of her with her ears visible to get my valuable internet points, but I was also painfully aware that it would make me look like a creep.

“So how long have you been hunting for?” I eventually asked to break the awkward silence.

“I’ve been hunting for about a month now. It was a bit rough at first, but once you get used to it, it’s quite fun.”

“So why go for goblins to enhance your mana? Just choosing what’s available?”

“There’s a lot of them attacking the camp, and you get some neat benefits.”

“Aside from the strength that is?”

“Yeah. I actually have a mild infrared vision, it lets me spot animals pretty easily, though right now it isn’t as good as my normal vision with the sunlight heating everything up. It’s invaluable during night fights though.”

I was about to ask about what the infrared vision was like when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye.

“Did you see that?”

Sophie was instantly alert again, and started looking around, trying to spot whatever it was I’d seen. It isn’t long until I get another glimpse of it, and Sophie curses.

“It’s a syth”

“Syth?” I asked, keeping my eyes wide for another glimpse of the pitch black animal”

“Not the Star Wars kind, It’s named after cat sith, a scottish mythical large black cat. Though we spell it differently than normal to help avoid the constant jokes we got on the message boards when we spelled it the normal way. They’re sneaky as hell”

I was about to answer when I spotted it again, up in a tree this time, and I raised my rifle towards it. The beast seemed oblivious of the danger my rifle held as I fired a bullet, and I watched as it jerked in pain, then fell from the tree.

I lowered my rifle as it twitched a few times before falling still. It seemed I’d hit something important, likely the heart from how fast it died.

“Nice shot.”

“Thanks. So are these things worth anything?”

“Well, like most monsters with claws, their claws are unnaturally dense. The military buys them up to make armor piercing ammunition. They’re better than the depleted uranium they used to use.”

“How do you even know all this?”

“Hunter boards. I’ll send you an invite when we get back to the base camp, it has wifi.”

I nodded, a forum for hunters sounded like it would have all kinds of useful information. It wasn’t long until I heard the roar of an ATV, and Will showed up walking beside it. I waved them over, and the guy on the ATV hopped off to start loading up what we’ve hunted. I made sure to pitch in, using my little talent in body strengthening magic to load up the syth for the guy who came driving the ATV. I asked about him getting back, and learn that it’s standard practice to have the hunters escort him back.

We headed back to camp for a bit, signing off that we were the ones who hunted the monsters, and then went back out to do some more hunting. The rest of the day passed with us hunting another steel boar and not finding anything else.

We got back, and I ask how much money they think we’ll make.

“Well the steel boars are worth like seven hundred dollars each but the syth will only earn us around five hundred dollars, their meat isn’t popular, and the only thing of worth is their claws and core.”

I stared for a bit, assuming the core was the average price of two hundred dollars, just the claws were worth three hundred dollars!? That would mean, assuming one claw made one round, it would cost fifteen dollars per round, excluding manufacturing costs. That was absurdly expensive. Either way, I’d be earning around… I pulled out the calculator on my phone. Over four hundred dollars for a day of hunting. Then there was the approximately eight hundred for the goblin cores, I was going to be making twelve hundred dollars in one day. With some quick messing around on my phone, if I kept up this pace I’d be earning almost three hundred thousand dollars a year while taking the weekends off. I sucked in my breath. Even with the risk of death that was an absurd amount of money.

My shell shocked expression must have been quite obvious to Will and Sophie, as they got a big grin on their faces.

“Hunting pays pretty well, doesn’t it?”

I mutely nodded. We then started heading over to Johnsons for some food. When we opened the door, a muted worry seemed to be hanging over the room, the usual chatter replaced by silence.

I look around, and we managed to find a seat near the back of the room. Once we’re there, and we’ve given our orders to Will to have him go order for us, I turned to the short guy sitting in the table next to us to ask about the mood.

“So why’s everyone seem so down?”

“The gate closed. Most of the people are going to run out of food, the only thing left to eat is gonna be the monster meat until the gate opens back up. Everyone is here trying to get one last meal with some variation before that.”

I nodded. I knew the gates sometimes closed, but they’d always re-opened before, usually within the week, though the longest recorded was three weeks. It also meant the wifi would be dead, as we’d lost connection to the outside. What was more troublesome though, was that I had been planning on commuting back to home tonight to pick up more food, as my stores were almost empty.

Resigning myself to eating lots of monster meat from what we’ve hunted, I waited for our order to come up as I relayed to Will and Sophie what I’d learned. They seemed much less worried than I, mentioning they’d brought a couple of ice chests full of food because of last time it had happened.

We finished our meal, me shaking my head at Will’s salad, and hoped he had enough vegetables that he could make it through the gate being closed without being forced to eat meat. Once we left the restaurant, we went our separate ways, and I decided to make some more bullets, so along the way to my tent I collected some nice looking rocks.

Once there, I decided that I should probably make a knife as well, as that way I could probably just chop off the claws and cut out the core of monsters like the syth myself, saving myself having to get an ATV, and letting me hunt for longer.

Sitting down, I got to work.