I awoke to my nemesis, my phone, blaring its alarm next to my head, and instantly pressed the snooze button. The second time I woke up though, I managed to convince myself that it would be better for me to turn off the alarm and get up, so I slowly dragged myself out of bed. I was getting up a bit earlier than before, as I wanted to explore the town some before heading out to go hunting. I hadn’t seen what things were like for the general population, only the militia.

I was soon dressed up with my armor over top of everything. While I didn’t expect to need the armor until later when I went hunting with Lars and the group, I’d become comfortable wearing it, and going without it made me constantly feel like something was missing. I ate a quick meal of monster meat, and headed out, waving goodbye to John, and leaving Lily to sleep.

I went outside, and started walking to the more populated districts. I looked around while I walked, looking at the many broken out windows of the nearby buildings. I wasn’t sure if they had been broken by monsters, or humans, but it gave the place a post apocalyptic feel this early in the morning with nobody awake. My head tilted to the side, I supposed it really was an apocalypse, it just hadn’t been a particularly harsh one, at least so far.

As the sun started to climb higher in the sky, the streets started to populate some, and soon there was a constant chatter from people talking. Curious, I decided to walk into one of the buildings that people had come out of. What was once an office building had been converted into housing and sleeping areas, all of the desks and such pushed to the sides, with different types of beds, varying from simple piles of blankets or clothing, to actual mattresses, ranged around the room I entered. Continuing my exploration, every floor seemed to have the same pattern, there would be all of the previous furniture shoved to one side, or packed into a single room, and people with their belongings would each have a small area to sleep in. It had to be horribly awkward for them, at least the militia was in a building with a lot of small rooms, so they only had to share with a few people.

Wondering about the other buildings, I wandered around, and found some that weren’t so bad, and others that were basically one big open space, so everyone had to share. Feeling extremely grateful that I had a place to stay, one with an actual bed, I decided it was late enough for me to go meet up with the others, and was heading to the militia building, when I noticed someone.

It was a nondescript man, neither tall nor short, but the interesting thing was that he was up on a box, preaching about the apocalypse. I snorted, it’s the end of the normal world, and people are still doing apocalypse predictions.

“And the arrival of the monsters is just the first horseman! We have yet to see War! We have yet to see Famine! And of course, we have yet to see Death! We must repent for our sins, we must cease in our sinning, and we must come to see God, for otherwise the end is truly coming for us!”

I started to zone out after listening to him for a bit, and asked a nearby person how long he’d been doing that for.

“Well he showed up one day, not sure from where, he’s only been preaching for a few days now though. I’ve seen more and more people start to join him and go to his preaching sessions though. I guess people will always find solace in a belief system, though this guy in particular seems to go a bit far at times.”

“What do you mean by a bit far?”

“He’s openly advocated for attacks against anyone using magic, or against those who are using the status screens.”

“But… That’s one of our best ways to fight against the monsters, we’re going to run out of ammunition eventually, and then it’ll all be down to magic and people fighting using the stats they get.” I sighed, some people just didn’t understand how dangerous the world was now. I thanked the guy I’d asked for the information, then began walking over to the militia building.

I soon arrived and found the room that my group was staying in, and walked into a small argument.

“I’m telling you we can take the four star mobs already. We’ve been hunting the three star ones constantly, and we need to be able to fight the four star ones in time for the next monster wave! The military managed without us last time, but they’re running out of ammunition for their machine guns and high caliber weaponry, and normal guns can barely get through their skin.” Liz was saying.

“And I don’t want to get anyone here killed. We don’t know how strong four star mobs are, and we can fight them when they attack if we have to” Lars replied.

I stepped inside, and decided to give my input. “Lily and I have fought one before, that thing was damn tough. They can kill you pretty easily if you don’t have some significant stats.”

“Well what level are you then?” Liz asks.

Deciding it would be a good time to pull up my stats, I thought status in my head, and watched as it appeared from nowhere to be in front of me.

Name Roland Level 36

str

22.0258

Grimoire

agi

24.3692

Recipes

wis

35.1685

sns

7.5362

end

25.1876

res

8.2693

vit

20.7418

lsp

2.7500

“I’m currently level 36” I said, completely ignoring the fact that I was saving up my level up points. I’d spent every spare moment I could meditating, so it’s not like I didn’t have respectable stats for my level.

Loss’s eyebrows went up a bit. “And I thought we were hunting a lot, Liz and I are 29, Rachel is 27, jake and rachel are both 25”

I chewed on my lib a bit before replying. “Well if you’ve been training your stats, we may be able to hunt a four star mob together. If we’re going to do that though I want Lily with us as well, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable hunting with her, and we could use the backup, maybe even include her group of lackeys as well.”

Loss nodded, and Rachel got an annoyed look on her face. I knew she wasn’t a fan of Lily because of what had happened, but I wasn’t comfortable going hunting without someone I knew could help me handle a four star mob. Not that I was looking down on Loss and the group, but they’d mainly been just hunting for food, while Lily and I had been grinding our stats as hard as we could in the other world, and we’d had an extra three weeks of grinding with the time difference.

I still wasn’t sure about going hunting for four star mobs, but I also figured that it would be best to fight to the edge of our abilities, as I wanted to be as strong as possible for when the next monster wave came about. Deciding to do some research before we left, I took out the book about monsters that I’d had to repurchase when I went to the other world with my real body. As I opened it, Lars asked about it, and when I explained what it was, and that it would have some information on four star mobs, they crowded around to try and read.

Finding the four star mobs in the book was easy, they were conveniently placed between the three and five star mobs, and I was soon reading aloud so that everyone could get an idea about the monsters.

“So the four star mob that I fought was called a borow. It’s similar to a gorilla, but has stunted legs and larger and longer arms. It seems to walk with its arms more than its legs, but it can rest on its legs while swinging at you. From experience, the thing is damn strong, and everyone aside from Lars probably doesn’t want to be blocking it.

As for the ones I haven’t fought, there’s the glaneous, which has a snakelike body with four legs, a mouth bony like a turtle, but with protrusions all around it, four eyes which can each look a different direction, and its entire body is covered in a paralytic mucous.

Then there’s the Reik, it’s another quadruped with wide forward limbs, with its back limbs placed closer together, no eyes on it’s face, a large shell like a turtle covering its back, and eyestalks that stick out from holes in the shell..

There’s Moscs, but they live in water so they’re not really what we’re looking for. They’re mollusc like, with four tentacles and a cubic shell. They jet around with water and have a very powerful beak they can bite right through bone with. They’re basically harmless outside of water though. We should probably announce them to the military though, we don’t want anyone dying while fetching some water.

Finally, there’s the feth. They look like human sized stick insects, but with a pair of wings made of chitin and feathers made of a clear material, they stand on four of their legs, and their front two have very sharp opposable claws.”

I took a deep breath after having read most of the basic information. After I had gotten the basics covered, I went over the different weak points of the monsters, the borow had similar important bits like a human, but with two hearts, the glaneous you wanted to try and sever the spine, with the reik you could only really target the part that stuck out of the shell, moscs you just stab the fleshy part, and the feth didn’t really have a weak spot, and you wanted to dismember them as they would still move after having their head cut off.

Once we had finally gotten through that, I decided to ask about where the monsters could even be found.

“Well the only place that has four star monsters that we know of is actually in the city. They’re in the northern area, and we don’t know how far they extend out, there’s only one other group that has hunted them, and they haven’t explored much of the territory that the four star monsters seem to control.” Sydney explained, and as per usual, I had to stop myself from staring at her model like appearance.

After clearing my mind a bit, we discussed the plan to go hunting, and the group started to geared up while I went to fetch Lily. When I arrived back at the building I was staying at, I decided to ask the lady at the front desk if Lily had left, and was pleased to find out that she was still here. Heading over to the elevator, I pressed the button, only to have it open with Lily inside of it.

“Hey Lily, my group was planning on heading over to try and hunt some four star mobs, and I could really use you as backup. We could bring your group too if you think they could handle it,” I explained to her.

She seemed to consider it for a bit before replying. “Let me check in with my group, we may join you.”

“Alright, where should we meet up?”

“Why don’t you just come with me? It won’t take long.”

I shrugged before replying with a “sure”. It wouldn’t be going out of my way, and if I was going to be stuck with her lackeys for the day anyway, meeting them a bit early wouldn’t hurt. We were soon headed off to a building pretty close to the militia building, but which seemed a bit more deserted compared to it.

“So why doesn’t your group stay with the militia?” I questioned.

“Well they have their own building set up, they all wanted more room to themselves, so they took a building that wasn’t being used,” she replied.

I nodded, and we had soon arrived, and the inside was a surprise to me. Once we had gotten a bit inside, Lily started going room to room collecting her lackeys, and by glancing in, I noticed that all of them seemed to have a proper bed, and only one occupant per room. How they had managed to get a building all to themselves, I wasn’t sure, maybe their families were similar to Lily’s father, and somehow had enough power after the update to get their own place.

We slowly collected members, and plenty of them seemed to take offense that I was with Lily, giving me glares, but not deigning to talk to me. I shrugged, them not talking to me wasn’t exactly something I was going to complain about, and soon we had the entire group together.

Lily was soon explaining to them the plan, and mentioned that anyone who wasn’t willing to risk it should stay here, or go hunt three star mobs for a while longer, but nobody seemed to be scared of hunting monsters that were significantly more dangerous, some of them arrogantly claiming how easy it would be for them, possibly trying to show off in front of Lily.

Soon we were heading over to the militia building to collect my group. We arrived, and I instantly went over to them, more comfortable being with them than with the lackeys who seemed to think themselves above me. Regardless of how our two groups seemed to act like oil and water, we were soon headed off to hunt some four star monsters.