Arriving back at the outpost, I went back to the room I’d rented at the inn, as sleeping in my tent was simply uncomfortable. Laying down on my bed, I took out the wyvern core. I stared at it for while, before taking out a strip of leather I’d bought for this purpose, and placed it between my teeth. Taking a deep breath, I started to push my mana into the core before pulling it back inwards.

The pain started immediately, and I bit down on the strip of leather, doing my best not to scream from the burning pain suffusing my body. It seemed to go on for hours, wracking my body, but I’m sure it only lasted minutes. By the time the pain was gone, I’d soaked through my clothing in sweat, and I took it all off, not wanting to sleep in the soaked shirt and pants. I put my revolver under my pillow just in case, more worried about Tesser than anything else before going to sleep.

When I woke up, my experiments began. I oh so slowly shoved my mana into the wyvern bones, slowly letting it lose its form, and shaped it into the wand shape I use to determine mana conductivity. Simply doing that took me almost an entire day, but eventually I got it to the point that it was correct, and carved in the motion runes to do some tests.

The first thing I did was take out my wooden and stone wands, and testing them again. They both shoved the large rock I was using to test a decent distance, the wood wand made of the same material the Tesser used for their wands shoving it almost twice the distance the stone wand did.

Taking a deep breath, I took out my wyvern bone wand, and tested it. When it finished, I let out a whoop in excitement. The wyvern bone wand had even more mana conductivity than the wood wand did! I let out a feral grin, if I could get back to Earth and use my workshop, I could make some seriously powerful guns. I felt the grin slide off of my face as I pondered that, I hadn’t found any gates back to Earth in all of my wanderings, and I didn’t know how long it was going to be until I could get back.

I let out a sigh. I needed to get back to Earth to upgrade my weapons, yet my goal was here. I needed to get powerful enough to properly fight back against the Tesser. It felt like this world was simply more real than my old one. On Earth, I’d studied to become a desk worker, sitting there and doing nothing for a massive portion of the day. I may have ended up marrying and having kids, your standard life on Earth, but I simply felt so much more alive here.

I spent my days hunting for a living, and while it could be scary, at the same time, it’s terribly invigorating. I decided to set a new goal, I may go back to visit Earth occasionally, if only for the food, but I’d come to expect that I would spend a majority of my time here, on this world.

Experiment over, I got back to some very monotonous work. I was going to make myself a sword out of the wyvern teeth, and back it with wyvern bone. That action took me a good few days, each day slowly shaping the bone and teeth, slowly melding them together into a seamless whole. My experience with shaping other materials saved me from having to repeat the process due to failure, and eventually I managed to get something I was satisfied with.

Once I’d finished, I let out a breath. There was one more thing I needed to do before I started a large scale genocide upon the wyverns. I needed to enchant my shield against wyvern breath. The pattern I finally decided to go with was a snowflake, as it best represented coldness in my eyes. I carefully engraved the pattern into the wyvern scales making up my shield, and when I was finished, I looked at it in satisfaction.

It wasn’t perfect, but it looked like I wanted it to. The mental image I’d had of it was that of simply absorbing all heat that came towards it, and I tested it out with a simple flame wand. While it wouldn’t compare to a wyvern’s breath, it was a good way to confirm it worked at all. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding as I saw the flame simply disappear as it hit the shield. At this point, I would simply have to hope it was powerful enough to stop a wyvern’s breath as well.

The next few months saw me going deeper and deeper into the foothills of the mountain in my hunt for wyverns. They seemed to be practically everywhere, and every time I hunted one I would load up everything valuable onto my cart and trundle on back to the outpost, getting more and more cores. I started trading in the chips I earned for wyvern cores from other hunters as well, and I could easily feel my speed, strength and senses being enhanced.

Annoyingly, every time I would have to take a break of at least a week in order to process the core, which drove me up a wall. How long was it going to take for me to stop being uncomfortable with the strength increase that came with enhancing my mana? My eyes changed each time, growing more and more bright golden, to the point where I started to believe that they would shine in the darkness.

The wyverns I hunted in the foothills were all quite small, and I started to wonder if I would have to make it to the mountain to start finding larger ones. Once I reached the bottom of the mountain in my forays, I ran into something odd. There was a ten mile or so area where wyverns would simply not approach. I wondered what was going on for a while, but eventually simply started to avoid that area while I was hunting, except to take my breaks there so as to not be bothered.

Each day, I would spend some of my mana condensing my sword, and adding another layer of wyvern tooth to it. The change was very gradual, but I noticed that each time I hunted a wyvern, it cut into it slightly easier. My shield got the same treatment, layers of wyvern scales condensed onto it. The change was made as much to match my growing strength as it was to enhance my weapons though.

When I’d first started hunting, the weight of my weapons had been perfect, considering how dense wyvern materials started at, but as I enhanced myself with more and more cores, they started to feel like toy weapons.

I had gotten my wyvern hunting down to a science at this point. Lead in with freezing bullets, sending one down their throat if they try to breathe fire at me, and then use my revolver until they got right up next to me, at which point I would finish off the crippled monster with my sword.

My only disappointment was that all of the wyverns seemed to be quite small, around half the size of the one which had attacked the camp I’d started out in. I was looking forward to seeing how much of an improvement I had made with hunting.

Each day, I made sure to spend hours on my swordsmanship before bed, but I never seemed to improve, missing the guidance from the group I had been with. Every so often, I would contact Lilya with the walkie talkie like enchanted plate, but each time, she simply sounded more and more down, and I started to worry about them.

They seemed to have simply given up at this point. While they still hunted, they did so only to keep paying for their bar tab. Every time, I would simply be more saddened. With what had happened to Dmiyo and Alya, it was understandable, but I didn’t understand why they weren’t more angry. The Tesser were the ones at fault, and I was going to do my damnedest to make sure they were going to pay.

Each time after the call, I would throw myself back to hunting in a more frenzied manner, and I ended up with quite a few wounds. Thankfully, the regeneration from my enhanced body solved the wounds in less than a week, even the more severe ones. At this point, I could practically see the wounds healing with my bare eyes.

Eventually, I got to the point where I felt my speed, while not as fast as Dmiyo or Alya, would be able to almost keep up with their maximum speed. That only led to more hunting though, and eventually, the wyverns started to leave the area, seemingly knowing they were being hunted.

At this point, I was simply trundling around with no clear goal. I wasn’t going to go into the mountain, as entire families of wyverns lived there, and I wasn’t arrogant to the point where I thought I could handle them. I was simply meandering around, not sure where to go to hunt more of them.

This continued for a few days, until I saw something exciting. I’d finally found another wyvern! It wasn’t on the ground, but flying far in the air, which confirmed my thoughts that they would be able to fly, likely using magic rather than just their wings. Taking a deep breath, I pulled my rifle off of my shoulder and took aim, my magazine loaded with freezing bullets already.

I pulled the trigger, but wasn’t sure if I’d hit it, so sent a few more bullets towards it for good measure. I must have it it with at least one of them, because I heard a loud roar, and it was soon swooping down towards me. I stayed calm as it slowly grew bigger in my sight, then started to panic as it didn’t seem to stop growing bigger.

This particular wyvern dwarfed even the one I’d killed at the camp I’d stayed in when I first arrived at this world, its head alone a good four meters tall. I turned horribly pale, and started to run. Every now and then, I would snap off a shot at it, yet it still followed me, seemingly playing with me, not moving any faster than I could. I was forced to abandon my cart, as it would have slowed me down, and I gulped at the oh so sharp teeth it would show occasionally.

In my panic, I started to think of the place where I’d seen no wyverns at all. I wasn’t sure what was dissuading them from going there, but I was going to do my damnedest to find out. I thanked all the gods I could remember the name of that the wyvern seemed more intent on playing with me than killing me, as even with my body enhanced by magic, it simply remained flying above me with seemingly no effort.

Occasionally, it would breathe fire at me, or dive down for a second to snap at me, but I would always manage to put a tree between us, or dive to the side to avoid it. Eventually I arrived at the place where the wyverns had avoided. I noticed the wyvern hesitate for a moment, flying in circles around the edge of the area, before deciding that it wanted to finish me off, and it dived towards me in a much more serious manner.

The claws missed me by inches, letting me feel the wind on my arm from them, and continued my flight. I kept moving deeper into the area, avoiding each blow by a hair’s breadth as it seemed to be more intent on trying to kill me rather than simply toy with me at this point. I continued to run, until I came across something that would have made me stop and stare if I wasn’t running for my life.

It was an idyllic little log cabin, with flower pots out front, and painted a bright white. There was a little path out the front of it to a small well, and on the porch sat a man seemingly a little over middle age, smoking on something that created psychedelic colors from a pipe.

The man simply looked from me, to the wyvern, let out a sigh as I ran past him, and walked towards the wyvern. I shouted at him to get away, but he simply ignored me, and as the wyvern dived at me, he crouched, and jumped off the ground faster than I could follow even with my enhanced eyes towards the wyvern.

I watched as the wyvern opened its mouth to seemingly eat the man, but he somehow managed to jump again in the air, and slammed his fist down towards the top of the wyverns head. I had no clue how he managed to generate so much force while he was in the air, but his fist sent the wyvern crashing down faster than it could dive.

It slammed into the ground with a massive crash, and didn’t move from where it had landed, a very visible dent in its skull, completely ignoring the scales that had simply written off my freezing bullets as useless.

The man landed, then slowly made his way to the well, pulling up a bucket of water and washing off the gore that had gotten on his hands, before waving to the wyvern, saying “All yours,” and went back to smoke his pipe he’d set to the side.