Confidence became easier to fake as the conversation moved away from what happened and towards how it happened. Exasperated frustration lent itself better to my actual feelings.

“Look, every stack subtracts a flat hundred percent from status resistance and amplifies both duration and severity by fifty percent, stacking multiplicatively with itself,” I explained, “One sixty eight status res goes down to negative one thirty two. Finally, the Stun Bomb itself applies a twenty five percent duration amp on top of everything. Base duration of forty seconds, times one point five, six times...oneninetyseventwoninetysixfourfiftysix, say five seventy after the amp, times two point three eight, thirteen hundred and fifty five seconds. Which is twenty two and a half minutes. And a smidge. It’s not that complicated.”

Mona levelled an inexplicably suspicious side-eye at me.

“Does learning chemistry have ‘Massive Nerd’ as part of the reqs, or does that come with the crafter ranks?”

She grinned impishly as I answered with a light-hearted shove. To my surprise, it was like trying to move a hill.

“Bloody hell,” I heard myself mutter.

“Yeah, being a Knight’s pretty great,” she gloated, “Iron Bulwark especially. ”

I took a quick look at my own set of thoroughly unimpressive passive skills.

“Well, I’m immune to natural fall damage when lightly armoured,” I said with a self-deprecating chuckle, which only sharpened her grin.

Suddenly, her attention shifted to Charlie and Jack.

“You guys alright?” she asked, with an edge to it I couldn’t place. The two had been very quiet, come to think of it.

“Yeah, yeah, we’re perfectly fine,” Jack answered, just as snide as ever, glancing back at the last member of the group, who remained silent, “Some of us aren’t interested in bragging about ‘our’ skills.”

Right...As unimpressive as my own abilities were, at least I had them. Jack didn’t even have a craft, nor anyone to mentor him in one. Mona was as unimpressed as ever, but didn’t follow up on it. Even if there wasn’t any legitimate pain behind it, for Jack frequently revelled in his own lack of responsibility, putting it out there still killed the flow of the conversation. We finished the trip to the old Hunting Ground in silence.

What we encountered there was...I would not say ‘shocking’. Maybe it would qualify as ‘surprising’, but if it did, it was only barely so. Though it’d been a lifeless waste for longer than I’d been alive, it only seemed right to see monsters in the Hunting Ground.

“Hey, hey! Who called it? Didn’t I say I had a feeling?” Mona crowed.

Clear as day, lazily sat upon a rock, was a lonely Red Gel. A viscous solution of water and F-grade mana crystals, animated as a head-sized, barely ambulatory blob. Among the lowliest of monsters, it was the weakest variant of the weakest branch of a monster family oft considered weak. Even if it were naturally aggressive, which it wasn’t, an untrained civilian could end one with a particularly forceful stomp.

“Come off it. Your training plan is still full of crap,” Jack sniped back, “It’s a Red Gel. It’s so weak, it won’t even be worth a single point of experience.”

Mona grumbled something that sounded like a reluctant concession, though I wasn’t paying enough attention to recall her exact words. The Gel wasn’t quite the clear, homogenous mass I offhandedly knew one should be. Rather than idly musing on the matter, I put my education to work.

Bestiary Expertise: Chemistry [Grade 4]

Analysis — Gel The cloudiness within the solution is a sign of a newly born Gel, a couple of hours old at most.

As I was mulling it over, there was a...well, the sound was a little difficult to describe. ‘Muted thunderclap,’ perhaps? Like the incredibly muffled sound of a firework going off.

“Did you guys hear—?” “No shit, I heard—” “—The hell are you talking about?” “Hear what?”

I was the first to spot the culprit.

“Another one?” I asked rhetorically, carefully watching the second Red Gel that’d appeared only a short ways away, “Any idea what’s going on, Charlie?”

Charlie paused and the rest of us waited. His father had once been the village’s Scout, back when that’d been a necessary job. His craft might’ve been carpentry, we all knew he was the one who knew the most about monsters and adventuring as a whole, having grown up on his father’s stories. He’d been more into the idea of us all eventually becoming adventurers than even Mona.

“I guess, with the guildmaster dead, the village isn’t a safe zone any more…”

Well, that’s obvious.

“...Before the guild came here,” he continued uncertainly, “My dad told me this place used to be a full, one to fifteen spawning ground. It wasn’t just basic monsters here. If monster power tied to the area, it makes sense that it’d bounce back quickly, even after two decades...But...”

He frowned pensively.

“When did you—When did the guildmaster die?”

“Just before dinner yesterday,” Jack shot me a dirty look, “What?”

“And you didn’t show your ugly mug until this morning?!”

“I thought I’d reward myself with an early night, y’know? It was tiring work—”

“Guys,” Charlie said, in a tone that would brook no argument. We both stopped and Charlie went to speak again, before yet another muffled burst tore both Mona’s and my own attention away from him to find yet another slime behind us.

“...Monsters aren’t meant to spawn like that,” Charlie finished lamely, whatever he was about to say having been undercut by reality, “I don’t think they should’ve spawned earlier, but they definitely shouldn’t be spawning like this.”

Though I considered myself pretty well-read, Metaphysics weren’t my area of expertise. I had a full Rank 4 in Alchemy, and I considered myself to have a decent understanding of certain other subjects like combat from a theoretical standpoint, but I honestly found the more esoteric details of spiritualism and venatry to be incredibly dull. The little I read was thoroughly wrapped up in details that were frequently more about moralising than anything practical. Still, I couldn’t help but speculate. Was the Guild’s safe zone like a dam, allowing aether to build up without dissipating? Was it like a vacuum that was suddenly able to be filled? Whatever was happening...well, it could be good, could be bad.

“So, how long till we find monsters worth smashing then?”

Mona probably knew this too, even if she didn’t care. I might’ve missed a lot in the past two months, but it wasn’t hard to tell that having achieved the first step of her dream in becoming an adventurer had only pushed her aspirations towards the next step; gaining levels and moving forward.

It was actually something I’d considered asking her about, before I remembered ‘right, Jack’s still here.’

“I...don’t know,” Charlie answered reluctantly, “Maybe the hunting ground repopulates with slimes, then more powerful monsters? Maybe they grow— Look, I don’t have a bloody clue.”

Mona was, of course, not impressed and I tuned them both out as I considered the matter for myself. Practically speaking, this was a great boon. The village had relied almost entirely on basic crops, critters, and trawling the aether for discarded items to sustain itself since the Guild had attached itself to the town. We’d all had it drilled into us that this was anything but normal and appropriate. Monster drops were the lifeblood of most towns, absorbed by adventurers as experience, and their drops turned into gear and consumables, even out here in The Shores, where monsters were infamously weak. Maybe even moreso. Weak drops worked well for weak civilians, and without the advantages of scale granted by large populations, it just wasn’t efficient to fuel a town via gathering, even if that’d been what we’d been forced to do.

...But then, who was going to farm them?

Charlie’s father had been the last person with actual levels we had. Those who’d been allowed to survive were lifetime crafters and merchants who probably didn’t even have a single weapon skill—

I jumped a little, as Jack put his hand on my shoulder.

“You’re thinking about stuff. Talk.”

I sighed. It was so much easier to edge away from conversations and keep my thoughts to myself. Back when there were enough kids around for there to actually be an ‘in’ group and ‘out’ group, I hadn’t even really bothered pretending to try. I wasn’t sure if my act had ever completely fooled Charlie and Mona into forgetting the real Leo ever existed, but Jack still remembered. I should really have been trying to maintain my act, but…

I composed myself.

“Don’t worry about it, I just had a great idea for—”

A-woooooooo...

We all froze.

“That came from outside the zone, right?” Mona asked obtusely.

No shit it came from outside the zone.

It wasn’t like it’d been close. It was...well, I wasn’t a tracker or a scout, I could only tell we weren’t in immediate danger. The safe zone had discouraged monsters from even approaching the zone divider, but even I recognised that howl.

“Wolves are, what? Minimum of level five, right?” I asked, “Or are they—”

“Yeah, wild ‘Young Wolves’ start at level five at the lowest,” Charlie interrupted, “My dad said we used to get a lot of wolves on the outside of the zone. Most of them were level ten at least. Those were what he usually had to deal with. They’re aggressive...and they can cross zone dividers once the pack gets big enough.”

Knowing that was more than enough to set me on edge. Even Mona seemed like she had little desire to tangle with a full mob when she was still only level one.

And yet...

I kept an eye on Charlie’s expression, as he looked out towards the wild zone with an expression half thoughtful, half longing.

“Charlie—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I—Fine, fine.”