“Alright, so we’ve basically capped out on all of the D ranked crystals we could find, so we’re going to be hunting C ranks from here on out. We’ve all gotten our bone and muscle enhancements to C rank, so we should be able to handle them if we work together.” Lynna leads the conversation, as she tends to be the best when it comes to organizing things. Sen is more battle focused, and Julie, while amazingly intelligent, tends to focus on one thing, missing the forest for the trees.

“We’re going to head into the forest, as there haven’t been any dungeons discovered that have C rank monsters. From what I’ve found, C rank enemies seem to be rather rare, and their strength can vary a great deal. The weakest ones should be a walk in the park, but there are some that even professional teams have wiped to.”

The group nods, Sen excited for the tough fights to come, the rest more determined than excited. They leave the city in one of the automated vehicles, heading to the forest to the north. The forest to the east tended to have groups of mobs, even when it came to C rank mobs, and no one has been willing to take that challenge.

As they arrive at the forest, they walk through with no trouble, the few mobs that are willing to attack the group of higher level people quickly killed. Eventually, they arrive at a much deeper area of the forest. Before continuing, they take a break, Julie setting up an array to keep any random mobs from bothering them as they log out in turns to get food and drink.

After they’re well rested, the sun is starting to rise for the short two hours that it will be up, and the group continues in a cautious manner, hoping that the first C rank enemy that they run into won’t be an ambush predator, as they tend to be some of the worst types of enemies to deal with.

They walk for quite some time, the forest practically deserted except for the occasional D rank mob, but eventually they start hearing the sound of massive footsteps. The sound is a familiar one to Sen, and when the footsteps continue to come closer, he sees a familiar figure of a blue lion, though one significantly smaller than the one Sen had seen before, and it instantly opens its mouth at the group.

“Scatter!” Sen yells. The group follows the direction without any hesitation, and a wave of frost comes out of the frost lion’s mouth, encasing a tree in ice. The lion, seemingly not able to use the same move in quick succession, swings one of its massive paws towards Xue. She uses the shield she’d started to bring along to block the heavy blow, but is sent sliding along the ground, not stopping until her back hits a tree. She’d managed to take the force of the blow without a serious wound though, and the group capitalizes on the opening the frost lion has shown, going in for heavy blows upon its body.

While most of the blows manage to land, each one empowered by skills, the frost lion manages to twist its body enough that Sen’s blow with his large weapon only manages to give it a small cut. The blows of the others hit it with, but even empowered by the water whips, only manage to cut a bit more than an inch deep, their smaller weapons being less useful against a large enemy.

The frost lion swings its body around towards Sen, swinging out with its paws at the same time it launches its prehensile tail at Lynna. They both block the blow, Sen’s sword cutting slightly into its paw, but not deeply enough to be a serious wound. The attacks both send them flying a bit, but Xue has managed to close in by this time, and stabs a few inches into its flank.

By this point, Julie has finished setting up her array, and a few images of her start attacking, each one of them leaving shallow cuts along the body of the frost lion, while the blows of the frost lion simply phase through the images. Sen shudders, he may have a way to sense where Lynna is, but the pure energy constructs that make up the fakes can still do a decent amount of damage even if he tries to catch her real body. Luckily for her opponents, this particular array takes a good amount of time to set up.

They slowly wear down the frost lion, the fake Julies trying to bait out as many of the blows as they can, but eventually the frost lion wisens up, and starts targeting anyone but the images of Julie.

Julie takes advantage of this though, coming in for a powerful strike with her sword, leaving the deepest wound so far onto its neck. The frost lion goes to bite at her, but she’s already used her skill that seems to give her an explosive amount of acceleration to retreat by then.

The Lion eventually falls to it’s myriad wounds, and Sen makes the mistake of asking Tir if that is normal for C tier.

“That was a juvenile frost lion, a mature frost lion has approximately double the stats in all areas.”

Sen blanches. C tier has that much of a discrepancy in stats!? He knows that a frost lion is one of the strongest monsters in tier C, but to be twice as strong while remaining in the same tier? He shakes his head, he doesn’t think they’ll be able to handle that with their current stats. Maybe once they’ve absorbed a decent amount of C rank crystals.