Their walk continues, and while they run into a lot of D ranked monsters, it’s a good two hours until they run into their second C rank monster. This particular monster seems to be similar to a scorpion, a shiny black carapace making up its segmented body with eight legs and two pincers, and a long tail with a curved stinger at the tip of it.

Sen lags a bit behind as they charge the monster, which goes to stab at Xue with its stinger, snapping its pincers at Lynna and Jennifer as they go to circle around the sides of the monster. The stab from the tail is just barely blocked by Xue, the stinger actually piercing through her shield, luckily above her arm, less than an inch from piercing her shoulder.

At this point, Lynna and Jennifer go to chop at the monster, but do nothing more than leave small scratches on its carapace. Sen joins in a moment later, slamming down with Weight of the Mountain, but even though he’s gotten to the point where he has an image of a mountain appearing over his blade, it only cracks the exoskeleton.

Xue has started using a movement ability to dodge the stinger while Julie has made a couple of images to try and distract the scorpion’s pincers. The rest of the group, and Julie herself, get to slowly wounding the monster. Each blow leaves only a scratch, but repeated blows to the same area start to wear through its inch thick armor.

The first to get through to flesh is Sen, his larger and heavier sword giving him more power behind his blows, and the scorpion lets out a weird clicking scream. It instantly stops targeting Xue and the images of Julie, turning its focus to Sen.

Sen isn’t willing to try and block the tail as it speeds towards him, doing his best to divert it just a bit to the side as he dodges in the opposite direction. While he manages to not get hit by the tail, he’s off balance enough to get cut by one of the pincers, which if it had come just a bit closer, would have entirely chopped off his arm.

Sen laughs from sheer adrenaline as he continues to dodge, using Gale Steps in conjunction with Earth Step to avoid each of the blows by a rather narrow margin. The entire time he’s doing so, he’s reducing the wind resistance in front of him, along with pushing himself with the wind in order to speed himself up enough to keep up, and he can feel his energy draining at a scary rate.

Eventually, Lynna gets frustrated enough to blow a good third of her energy on one of the C ranked skills she has learned. An image of an icicle completely surrounds her sword, and she stabs forwards, the image of pure energy piercing deep within the exoskeleton of the scorpion, seemingly ignoring the armor.

The scorpion lets out it’s clicking scream again, and the second it turns away from Sen, he uses Weight of the Mountain on the same area that Jennifer had been attacking for a good deal of time already. The thick carapace already mostly broken, the energy behind the blow crushes through the remainder of the armor, cutting deep within its flesh. As the scorpion is distracted by the pain, Lynna steps into the range of its pincers, jumping on the monster’s head and thrusting her sword as deep as she can into one of its eyes.

She must have gotten deep enough to hit its brain, as the scorpion flails for a while, no longer attacking anyone in particular before collapsing. They take another break, and Lynna has a frown on her face.

“Aagh! We’re never going to get enough damn crystals this way!” Lynna shouts.

“Well we could always switch to the eastern forest,” Sen replies

“And what? Run into groups of C ranked monsters instead? The crystal shop won’t even let us trade in the D rank crystals for C rank!”

“We need to find a C rank dungeon,” Xue says all of a sudden

“And how are we going to do that?” Lynna asks her with a frustrated tone.

“Well from what I’ve seen online, a few cities have found one, and the dungeon location actually follows a pattern.” She then goes into some obscure branch of mathematics to explain the placements of them, and the group has their eyes glaze over.

Around halfway through Julie’s dissertation, she interrupts her. “So in short, you can probably find us a C rank dungeon!?”

Julie stares her down. “I’m sure we won’t be the first ones to find it. Any reasonably sized guild will have had someone notice the pattern. The guilds are probably fighting for control of them already.”

Sen feels a grin sliding over his face. While most of the Ares guild is only leveling to do better in PVP, sticking to the already found farming areas, if they can find a good C rank dungeon, Sen is certain he’ll be able to get them to join in on a large scale fight, and controlling a C rank dungeon is sure to be one.