“Who’s master loot?” Raphael asked, grinning as he walked towards us. “that was amazing. That thing had like eight hundred hit points and you guys just kept getting crit after crit. I don’t think I have seen an elite fight end that quickly. It was like, pow pow pow! Incredibly fast.”

I shook my head. “We don’t have a master loot. I guess you mean one guy that does all the looting? Well, I usually prepare it and cut out all the valuable bits, and if it has hide or meat or useful bones we clean it up and Shiana cuts out her arrows, and then Shiana loots whatever is left, and then we just collect whatever pops up. Usually, I take the extra ingredients, and Cassie carries the treasure loot, and I usually carry any gear loot neither of them needs since locals only have a small inventory.”

“Then how do you split up the value?”

I scratched my head. “We don’t? I mean, if instant money is important to you, you are welcome to collect the treasure that drops, unless I think I need something for crafting. I am trying to start experimenting with enchanting, so we usually set aside the gems.”

I noticed that each of the heads had a glow, and grinned. This was going to be a very rich haul! There were at least 6 cores, one per head, and another core in its heart, and my skills were showing me a huge number of valuable scavenge targets. I started carefully using my cheater knife with its mismatched spatial edge to cut the skin off as cleanly as possible.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

“Cleaning the carcass. If we clean it first before we loot, we get a ton more stuff. I also have to dig the valuable bits out by hand before Shiana loots or we lose them.”

I chuckled a little, “Have you ever killed predator animals that were hovering over a kill they made?”

He nodded slowly, so I continued. “Have you noticed that they are tearing meat off and breaking bones off their kills? Well, if you loot an enhanced creature like this, with a core, you don’t get a core. You also might or might not get a couple of slabs of generic meat, and whatever weird loot items whoever or whatever runs the system has decided it drops. But a creature like this? I have had snake meat before, it is very tasty, and something like this probably has over a thousand pounds of meat, all of it able to create magically-enhanced food and potions, plus almost a dozen eyes. Alchemists pay GOLD for dangerous monster eyes. Add in a few internal organs, some useful bones, the chemical sacks it uses to make its fire, and sometimes even the contents of its stomach and intestines, and something like this could pull in a hundred gold easy.”

His eyes widened as I spoke, and he nodded. “You use a crafting knife or a special tool?” he asked me.

I shrugged and showed him my knife. “This is just a knife. Admittedly, it’s enhanced now, kinda like enchanted but you have to feed mana into it to make it work, and both it and my skills will let me butcher this thing in less than an hour even as big as it is. But the bigger they are, the more valuable they are. The higher level they are, the more valuable the components are.”

I chuckled a little, “This place is great. You know that healing salve I gave you?”

He nodded, slowly, and tugged the jar out of his pouch.

“Well, I made that out of weeds, and it was experimental. It heals wounds instead of giving you hit points back. It will work just as well on a level… I dunno how high the levels here go, but it will do the same job on someone with ten thousand hit points as it would on someone with twelve. Shallow surface scratches will heal in a couple of hours. How much do you think it’s worth? Weeds and seeds and a little mushing and cooking?”

He peered closely at it, and then almost dropped it when I could see his identify skill go off. It slipped out of his fingers and only his quick reflexes let him catch it with the other hand. “Two hundred gold?” he exclaimed loudly, “You just tossed me a salve worth as much as I make in a month! Why oh why didn’t I sell it instead?” he sobbed melodramatically. “Even with merchant scamming, I still could have paid my rent for two months.”

I shrugged, “It’s not a big deal. If you sell a lot of it, the price will go down, it’s probably only valuable right now because no one makes it for some reason. I think it takes cooking skill instead of alchemy skill, though.”

“That’s why we are not too worried about splitting up cash. You cannot eat money, Adventurers are rare enough that it’s hard to find really valuable magic items yet, and except for a few dozen potions we picked up while we were shopping, there’s not a whole lot to spend money on that we cannot make better.” I conjectured.

I looked at Raphael carefully. He needed better armor. “Tell you what. We are only half a day’s travel out from town, but we made pretty good time and I am getting hungry. How about we finish this monster, make camp early right here, I make some eats and we talk about what kind of stuff you need? I do have a few concessions I would be happy to make, but there’s some stuff I won’t do.” I finished detaching most of the skin on the top and sides. “The first thing is, we need to roll this bastard over so I can finish skinning it. Snakeskin makes some fine, beautiful leather, and I bet this fellow would be happy to contribute to your armor. I have some ideas for speeding up the tanning process, but if we let Shiana loot afterward we should get some decent additional materials.”

I admit I was feeling a little superior at the moment, and Cassie came over to help. We started struggling to turn the thing over, but then Raphael helped. He was strong, and we got it rolled over so I could finish separating the skin from the meat.

“I am curious though, what the hell was that helicopter thing, and the pounce strike?”

He smirked proudly, “that was my spinning strike, it hits everything around me dozens of times, and was my new stunt for level 8. the double strike was level 5 and was unlocked when I got my new class. The cooldowns are rough, but supposedly, by the time I hit level twenty, I won’t have to use basic combat at all, I can stick with a full stunt combat chain which boosts my DPS a LOT.”

“You get more maneuvers like that? I asked curiously. “do you have defensive stunts too?”

He nodded, “Yes, but so far my perfect dodge lasts thirty seconds but has a ten-minute cooldown. I think the only reason I got a dodge tank class so early is that I practiced acrobatics in real… in my own world.”

I nodded, “Why did you start attacking the body instead of going after the head?”

He shrugged, “Double strike is twice basic damage, but you cannot crit with it. You guys were tearing it up so quickly, I wanted to contribute to the damage, and I don’t have a taunt yet.”

I finally got the skin off. It was in pretty amazing shape, all things considered. Mostly we had killed it with blunt damage, except for the gashes where Raphael had gotten it, and if I could tan it in one piece it could be quite valuable. The scales were an interesting green and brown wavy pattern, and any armor I made out of it would likely give a camouflage bonus as well as looking exceptionally cool. I rolled the wet skin up, but despite its weight, I was able to press it to my chest and tuck it into my temporal storage.

I started carving off the meat and tucking it in as well, which went much faster since the snakelike body didn’t require any particular carving types. It also helped me to get to the valuable insides, where my scrounge skills were making several valuable bits glow to [observe].

We didn’t have Rik’s pavilion anymore, but Shiana found a nearby bit of clean ground and was helping Cassie set up the tarps and tents. I would take care of getting the fire started once I got over there, but considering the local wetness, we wouldn’t have to do much preparation to make a safe fire. This fellow I was carving up had likely chased off any other local threats, so this was probably a reasonably safe place to camp.

The heads I saved for last, collecting the cores, 8 useful eyes, and ever-so-delicately removing what I could see of their chemical pouches for later analysis. I was very interested in whatever chemicals it used to shoot flames from each head were. There was no way that the little heads had enough brains to tan such a gigantic hide, so I didn’t bother. There was nothing of interest in the monster’s gut, so I finally called over Shiana to do the final honors.

Shiana had indeed set up a fire for me with tinder, and I pulled some heavier twigs and wood out of my storage, dumping enough seasoned deadfall for the entire evening out and stacking it near the fire ring she had built. There wasn’t enough dry wood around here, but good deadfall had been all over the place on our route south, so I had a large amount of it in my space. A bit of boiled water later and we were all cleaned up.

I was going to cheat again. I had been eagerly waiting for some apple cider vinegar, and I opened and sniffed the bottle. It was not great, but it still had the sweet apple overtones, so I blended it with some dried seasonings I had both made and bought. Without soy or Worcestershire sauce I had to make do with a fermented pepper sauce I had made, which, added with crushed onions, salt, garlic, honey, cumin, molasses, some wine, and pepper, made a darned fine southern marinade for red meats, if not exactly matching the flavors I was used to.

I wanted to show off for Raphael, so I used some of the dire bear meat and did a quick marinade by [pushing] a carefully measured dose of temporal mana to soak it for twelve hours. I was able to create a darned fine carne asada. I spent the next hour making wheat tortillas which were incredibly simple to make, especially since I had found the soda I was desperately missing at a local alchemist shop. [observe] had been very useful in finding local equivalents of many cooking ingredients I had been missing, but sometimes they were weirdly expensive or wound up in unusual shops as dyes, alchemical ingredients, or even as something added to animal feed, like molasses. Tortillas were only flour, salt, soda, and water. Cook them with a hint of bacon fat and they tasted amazing.

I asked Raphael, “I don’t know much about changechildren. Are you obligate carnivores?” At his confused expression I amended, “I mean, do you have to eat almost entirely meat, preferably raw, every single day or you get sick?”

He shook his head, “No, Changechildren generally eat human food, although if us hunter types like cats and wolves go without eating meat for more than a few days we can get weaker., but meat is generally not too hard to find, lots of mobs drop it, and all the stews inns serve have chunks of meat in them.”

I nodded, tossing together the strips of marinated meat, some onions and peppers, and a bit of salt, cumin, and pepper together and then adding a bit of essence to unlock the flavor as well as any buffs it might provide. I wished I had some pico de gallo but again, no tomatoes. I started assembling Carne Asada tacos but took a moment before I started passing them out. I know it wasn’t traditional, but I went ahead and added a few strips of cucumber and a bead of yogurt to each one to give them a hint of Mediterranean flavor.

Mnemosyne, is Raphael going to get that recipe thing? I don’t mind sharing recipes, but I don’t want to give Raphael credit for all of my recipes, especially when I am getting creative like this.

No. The pet bond we were simulating allowed him to credit from your accomplishments. Right now, we are using something close to a party bond, so if you make food for him, it’s kind of like he found your taco gyro lying in a dungeon and ate it.

I snorted, startling Cassie and Raphael, who were talking in low tones as I cooked lunch about metal, of all things. Listening to them talk, I realized that Raphael knew a LOT more about steel than I did, as he was describing how to get a bloomery hot enough to melt iron instead of just beating out blooms. Apparently, it took real coal coke, not charcoal, to get it to the 2800 degrees, or a fire mage. I knew that Japanese swordmasters folded iron and steel together a lot and used clay, but supposedly, it was because Japanese iron was very impure and required a lot of extra work to make into a decent weapon.

I had earth mana now, which could help me sift mud and dirt, but my minor magics were only useable mostly at touch range. Getting impurities out of the iron and adding carbon or other metals into the molten metal with my particular magic would require working at a range that would prove quickly fatal. A man can dream, and maybe there was a way, but right now it was way outside of my skillset.

I wasn’t even that interested in learning metalworking past what I already knew, and it was clear that this world’s backward approach to alloying technology would not last long with the number of Earth humans with access to the internet running around wanting better gear. This world was currently the late bronze or early iron era, but the steel era was as inevitable as monsters and porn. With magic, however, I doubted that industrialization would take off the way it had on Earth. That is unless a certain kobold could get off his ass and learn how to use animation mana and monster cores.

From what I was able to gather, monster cores were something anyone could loot, but they were extraordinarily rare for other people without my scrounge skills until you started getting to very powerful monsters in dungeons. They sold for stupidly high amounts of cash to alchemists and wizards, but the alchemist I had spoken to had sadly shaken his head at me when I asked him what they were used for, as apparently, the guilds were very forceful about keeping those uses secret.

I lined up the gyro tacos on a wooden trencher and people came over to eat. After taking a bite, Raphael closed his eyes and savored it, making a low purr that caught Shiana’s attention. He quickly polished off the first and moved on to more, and I was pleased that I had another convert.

“Wow, that’s amazing!” he exclaimed, “I didn’t even know food could taste that good here,” he said taking yet another of them. I was very glad that I had made plenty as both Cassie and Shiana dug in as well. “You weren’t kidding about the buffs. Did you know your food gives experience points?”

I took one of them myself and started munching. I couldn’t eat as much as the others, but it looked like my experiment was a success. Next time, though, I wanted to add the cucumber directly to the yogurt to make a tzatziki sauce rather than layering them on separately.

Due to several magically enhanced and alchemical ingredients, as well as using the meat of an essence-enhanced creature, your food has provided both a Quintessence bonus and increased earth aspect. This has translated into an experience bonus for the others. They have also gained a 12-hour bonus to skill unlock speed and movement speed. Perhaps you should make more Jambalaya for dinner?

Your quintessence bonus from eating enhanced creature meat has improved your evolution to 210%. Your improved capacity will prevent damage until you are over 400%, but you might want to reduce this if you are going to be fighting giant monsters regularly. You may also wish to recalibrate the percentages as your requirements for improvement increase, as many of your current evolutions require 200% or more to unlock.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but yeah it does. Yet another reason to take the time to butcher instead of just looting, I guess.” I said, stopping to chew another mouthful. “Speaking of which, did we loot anything good, Shiana?”

She nodded, “Yes, four pyrohydra leather, two giant snake skulls, a giant snake eye, gloves of the pyromancer, and Cassie got a good deal of coins. The gloves give a bonus to fire damage and fire resistance, so they might be useful to you, or we could sell them.”

Raphael looked curiously at me, “You are a mage?”.

I shook my head, “No, I can gain a little bit of magic based on what I am exposed to. That’s how monsters get enhanced if they are around a certain type of mana for a while unless they are born enhanced. I am an ice kobold, which is a type that is rare because it is born enhanced with cold mana.” I [pushed] some frost essence, and used [alter] to convert it, into my palm so a small flame appeared for a moment before extinguishing due to lack of fuel. “That’s how I was hitting so hard. I can move small amounts of mana around, twist them into their opposites sometimes, and shift them to improve my attacks.”

I chuckled, “The gloves would help a tiny bit when I convert Frost mana to heat, but my amount of damage with elements other than frost is so small I’d probably just be better off using my claws or tail against something that resists frost.” I shrugged a little. “My staff is pretty nice, but I am so light that I cannot hit with enough force. I mostly use it to improve my reach rather than counting on it for damage.”

He nodded, “Then why don’t you use like a spear or daggers or something?”

I shrugged, “I can only push mana through one thing at a time, like wood, so a spear is out unless it had a wooden tip, and against what we are fighting a wooden spear wouldn’t help any.” and I commented, “if I get close enough I can use my claws as well as I could a dagger, and my tail hits harder than a club without weakening my mana by passing it through something else.”

I scratched my head, “That sort of reminds me. Why don’t you use your claws? They are way bigger than mine, and no offense but your double hit attack was pretty weak sauce. If you’d have hit with one sword you could have buried it to the hilt using your weight, and then clawed the wound open horribly. I also don’t understand what you meant by it doesn’t critical. You have strong legs and big, nasty-looking claws at the end of them. You are extremely strong, I bet if you’d gone with a grapple and a kick, you could have ripped that thing’s head off clean.”

He shook his head, sighing. “There aren’t any claw-based attack chain maneuvers. I mean, I have used them in an emergency before, but I haven’t even heard of stunts that use them, and basic attacks suck.”

I was very confused. “Those claws are wicked and three times as long as mine. Why on earth would they suck? You are as strong as a horse.”

“Wait, you don’t use stunts?” he asked, looking even more confused than I did. “but that whole rolling strike thing, and then the spinning tail drop. Those were not stunts?”

I shook my head, “Nope, I learned some martial arts a while back, and just applied them. Do you know how to fight outside of your stunts?”

He nodded, “Yeah, my family is pretty big, and we start learning Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu and escrima as soon as we can walk. Lots of Families in the area do, BJJ competitions are a pretty big thing around there.”

“Hey Cassie, could you clean up? I want to try something with our new party guy.” I asked.

She nodded, “Anything to get him to never use that weird spinning thing again. I could have opened him up like a keg while he was doing that, and I am not that fast. It left him completely exposed for almost two whole seconds.”

Raphael looked at Cassie, and then me, and then Shiana, and then said “Were those stunts really that bad?”

All three of us said “Yes.” at the same time, even Shiana.

Raphael nodded and sighed. “Yeah. Some of the PVPers have been talking about manual stuff. It looks like you guys do pretty much everything on manual. I guess if I am going to fight bounties I need to learn to fight bounties instead of just letting stunts handle it. Get it on or get left behind right?” he sat down cross-legged on the ground, and then touched two of his fingers to two gems.

He got that vacant, glassy-eyed stare of someone perusing their interface, and I started working on the dishes. We scrubbed them out, using a large sponge I had purchased, and I happily used my new water mana to rinse them off outside of camp. It was kind of awesome to just open my hand and see water pouring out, although it drained a lot of mana to use it, it was way better than trying to use the grubby delta water supplies, some of which were fairly stagnant. It also allowed us to refill our waterskins with clean water we didn’t even have to boil.

It took almost 15 minutes before he spoke again. “I found it. Wow, it’s really deep into the settings menus. There’s a list of things you can choose to do manually, including combat, magic, looting, and trade skills. There are big red warnings next to a lot of them saying they are not recommended, and when I disabled stunts it is asking if I am sure, because this cannot be changed. Should I do it?”

I thought for a moment before quietly saying, “Would you rather use your escrima and BJJ to kick ass or just activate stuff?” and he answered, “Right. Yes.”

After a moment he shook his head and grinned. “I kept the power-ups but disabled the stunts. The cool part though is that disabling them instantly gave me a combat bonus and the true skill accolade, which cuts the cooldowns in half! That means my perfect dodge can run a fifth of the time, I can try to strike crits like you guys do, and I get a 50% damage bonus on anything that qualifies as a basic attack.”

I smiled and pulled out my staff, tossing it to him. He shot to his feet and grabbed the stick, which was a little shorter for him, almost a jo stick. “Cassie, are you feeling strong? Would you like to trade some blows with him? I will work with him on his martial arts, but with stick work, I think you two would be a better match. If he knows escrima, he will be fast and hit hard.”

Cassie nodded, “Are you kidding?” she said, pulling on her helmet. “This should be a lot of fun.”

I nodded and bugged Shiana for the leather. I wanted to see how it did and maybe work on Raphael’s armor.

Pyrohydra leather

High-quality scaled hide

This leather is very tough for how thin it is and gives great resistance to piercing and cutting attacks and moderate resistance to smashing attacks.

An armor made with this leather will give a bonus to temperature and elemental magic resistance and has a chance to improve the wearer’s hiding ability.

Value: High

I was going to make leather armor very similar to Shiana’s, but I was going to use three different kinds of leather since I couldn’t load it with quintessence anymore. I didn’t have much of the seeker leather left, but it should be enough to add stiffened plates on the calves and forearms, as well as over his heart and spine. Some of that incredibly thick and tough dire bear leather would be at his elbows, shoulders, and knees to protect the delicate joints, and the rest would be the somewhat thinner pyrohydra. I already had a helmet I had made out of the thickest parts of the dire bear’s plated skin, and as it was made for Cassie’s head it should fit him easily with a few changes of padding. She had chosen not to use it since it was open-faced, but as a maneuverability fighter, Raphael should be fine with it.

I started sewing new padding for the helmet, watching his head carefully as he and Cassie fought. He was not kidding about the Escrima, and even though Cassie was a higher level, he seemed to have a gift for yanking her shield out of the way and then rapping her helmet soundly. Once he wasn’t using stunts, his speed with a stick was incredibly fast, and if I was reading his facial expressions right, the speed of his attacks was as surprising to him as it was to Cassie.

After about half an hour, Raphael was starting to flag out from fatigue. He finally backed off and held up his hand, stopping the duel, while he caught his breath. “Whoah. That was incredible. Escrima is supposed to be fast, but I have never performed like that, and my stick skill went up like 6 times! I didn’t have quarterstaff skill here, but it started as E rank and is now almost up to D, that is huge.”

Cassie was still going strong since that dwarven constitution was ridiculous, but she smiled at Raphael, “We are going to have to spar a lot more, I got some pretty huge skill gains too, and fighting against a person is way more rewarding for skill growth than fighting monsters that don’t know how to get around a shield.”

I hopped up and started measuring Raphael while he caught his breath. I had already cut some pieces, but a lot of them I wanted to know exactly before I trimmed them. He already had some padding under his ragged leather armor, but it was not in great shape, I was going to make him better padding while he slept, using some of the lighter leather that had already proven to have some self-cleaning properties.

“Dude, I hate to ask you to do this, but you might have to give the ladies a show. I am going to need your old armor off to measure you for the new, especially since your old armor looks like it was made for a broad variety of shapes rather than custom-made for you. Fitted armor is massively better than the generic stuff, even if it’s made of the same leather in the same way.”

Raphael nodded, and then asked Cassie, “You are really good. Most sword and board users I have fought just plant themselves and stick their shields in the way. I could get past it with speed, but I could barely touch you, and even if I had been trying to hit for full strength I probably wouldn’t have scratched you. How often do you guys train?”

I chuckled, and Cassie answered. “Now? Every morning and every night. We do that stretching thing, and then we exercise as hard as we can. I usually take the first watch because I still have some energy when everyone else is exhausted, but all of us have gotten big stat gains from it, especially dexterity. Dwarven warriors train constantly, but we are training all of our abilities instead of just strength and durability.”

Raphael was mostly out of his armor at this point, and I helped him finish unstrapping one of the buckles. His padding was pretty much simply clothes rather than real padding, and I shook my head in disapproval. “Leather clothes are cool and all, but I am surprised you aren’t covered with rub rashes and crease wounds from this stuff, not to mention when you do get hit, with its spacing it probably hurts almost as much as being naked.”

He smiled at me, “I used your ointment. I WAS covered in them, but I used it this morning when I got up instead of last night. The stuff lasts for 12 hours, and I figured it could help me if we got into a fight.”

I nodded, I wrought better than I knew. “Well, I mostly got your measurements down, and I need to spend the evening making your armor. I just realized that I am way too small to spar with you easily since we would both just sort of be running around, and I’d rather just figure that out in the morning. Shiana is more your size, but I don’t know if she would want to melee train with you.”

I chuckled and squared off with Cassie instead for our evening workout. She grinned and slapped her hand against her shield, and then yanked out the heavy leather-wrapped stick we used for training.