Caeden had never heard Snowball roar before. The normally sleepy, relaxed bear cub vanished in an instant, replaced by an angry predator. His volume dwarfed the Rockadillos by an order of magnitude, despite there being over twenty of them and only one of him. Rising up onto his back feet, Snowball got ready to fight.

Caeden wasn't sure how good an idea that was. Despite his volume, the Rockadillos had the cub at a disadvantage. He was still a baby by Icecrag Bear definitions. He wouldn't be fully grown until his second birthday, and he was just over six months old. When he reached full maturity, Snowball would be a behemoth, easily reaching twenty feet tall on all fours, over sixty standing up. A true giant. He would gain potent ice-based abilities that would make him formidable to any monster.

That was not him right now. According to what Lily had learned, Snowball wouldn't gain any elemental powers until he was a year old, and only lesser versions of his adult potential at that. Right now, all he had going for him in a fight was his size. The Rockadillos were six feet tall, hunched over as they were. They had foot-long, thickly built claws. Snowball was much bigger than when Lily first got him, but he was only six feet tall standing up. The Rockadillos had him beat in both size and weight, not even mentioning whatever elemental effects they could produce. Except…

Caeden watched as his best friend's bonded monster rose to his full height. Much taller than six feet, pushing eight. The last time Caeden had seen the big bear cub standing tall, he had been even with Caeden's unenhanced height. A flat six feet. That had been earlier today when they left the Turtle Fortress. There was no way the cub had grown a full two feet in the intervening time. Yet here he was, only a scant foot shooter than Caeden's golden body, growling aggressively in a constant low hum.

As far as he was aware, shape-changing or growth control were not abilities of the Icecrag Bear. They were purely elemental in their magical abilities. Potent effects, but spontaneously growing two feet was not one of them. Caeden had little time to think about the implications, as the Rockadillos were not willing to just stand around waiting. They had the same pathological hatred for living creatures all monsters shared, and now that they had four of them in their presence, they were incensed.

Three of the monsters uphill rolled in on themselves, covering any soft underbellies in more rocky shell before rolling downhill as gravity took hold. The entire team, except for Cat and Sky, were in their path as they picked up momentum. Caeden wasn't concerned for Erik or Lily. Erik had the raw mobility to escape most anything, and Lily could use her Cloud shroud to become completely intangible. Neither would have to worry about being hit.

Snowball was in an entirely different situation.

Despite all the added weight from his sudden inexplicable growth, the cub was still out-massed by the Rockadillos and their thickly built, rock-covered bodies. He would not be able to take a hit from one rolling over him and come out unscathed.

So, Caeden parked himself in front of the aggravated bear and settled in. "Defense form." His body thickened and widened, his skin gaining additional purple accents as his mass doubled. Pulling out Forged Infinity, Caeden selected 002, the shield. The small round buckler that unfolded from the hilt with a pneumatic hiss was not nearly enough for this task, so Caeden went farther.

Another click and the dial rolled to 025, the buckler expanded into a full body great shield, big enough to cover even Caeden's enhanced, nine-foot frame. As a last measure, he used a final mnemonic. "Bramble." Both Caeden's body and his shield blossomed with huge blood-red spikes covering every surface. Whatever hit him would not have a good time.

Two of the three rollers were on a trajectory to rush harmlessly past him, while the third was dead on to hit Caeden. Caeden had taken scant few seconds to complete his setup to receive it, which had been enough time that it was practically upon him when he finished. The Rockadillos had picked up momentum and speed with disconcerting ease.

As the two rolled past, the third slammed into Caeden's spiked shield with a screech of rock on metal. Grunting, Caeden was surprised at the ridiculous amount of force the rolling creature had put into the blow. He suspected that the downhill roll had been magically assisted by some ability the monster held; otherwise, he couldn't explain the sheer force that nearly made him step back.

The hit itself represented no danger to Caeden. His defenses absorbed it with relative ease. In fact, his spikes, though many broke against the monster's rocky shell, had also found gaps in the armor and stabbed in deep. Very deep. Even as he watched, the Rockadillo started to discorporate, just like the Plague Rats. Caeden had barely made a note of the process at the time, more focused on rescuing the unshrouded, but each rat he had killed rapidly lost all physical substance, it's mass vanishing into nothing.

Just like the rats, the Rockadillo didn't completely disappear. Instead, several chunks of steely-grey shiny rocks fell to the ground from within its vanishing mass. Steelshine Slate, if Caeden guessed correctly. A common occurrence in more mountainous continents like this one. Monsters often contained magical materials or even chunks of ether when they died. No one knew if they ate it, created it, or were born from it. The consensus was that the third option was improbable, but no one was sure. Not every monster held something inside them, so it was hard to know.

The others weren't idle while Caeden blocked Snowball's attacker, including Snowball. The bear had charged from behind Caeden's defense to tussle with a Rockadillo that had been coming at Caeden from the side, roaring as he went. The rocky monsters were painfully slow when they weren't rolling, so Caeden would have had plenty of time to move, but he appreciated the effort nonetheless.

Lily had found her Frost Break infusion effective against the rock shells of the Rockadillos, coating their exteriors in a layer of magical embrittling frost wherever his ice longsword touched. Their shells would quickly shatter with a heavy, physically enhanced blow, killing most of them. Lily handled several at a time with this strategy. She would rapidly shift between Cloud and Ice, turning into an intangible fog to dash between the Rockadillos' bulky bodies before summoning her sword and striking every shell within reach. Then she would bolt to another group while waiting for the infusion to weaken the shells of the last batch.

Cat stalled for a long moment until several ghostly white shapes stormed up the side of the mountain. Her spectral brutes were big constructs that looked like ghostly gorillas with a wagon fused to their massive backs. Their featureless faces contained only the glowing eyes that all Cat's specters did.

These specters were Cat's cargo carriers, having crates full of infused weapons strapped securely to their wagon-bed backs. Their mobility across any terrain was amazing, as far as Caeden was concerned. Without worrying about their crates getting dislodged, they could run at blistering speeds, moving agility across rough terrain without a thought. The straps holding down the crates were a part of their own bodies, allowing them to quickly unstrap their cargo on the battlefield.

What they had in carrying capacity and all-terrain traversal, the brutes lacked in combat capacity. Counterintuitively, despite the amount of mass they could carry over a mountainside, they were incredibly fragile if ever attacked, and their thickly built arms couldn't deal much damage at all. They were cargo carriers, nothing more. Cat had deliberately built them this way to keep the shroud costs down. They did what she needed and nothing more.

The second they joined the field, Cat created three workers. Short, spindly things that looked like a two-foot-tall candlestick with robotic arms glued to the sides dropped down on one of the brute's backs. Rapidly they worked together to open a crate and pull out a cloth bundle that unrolled to reveal dozens of daggers in a pale white color. Eight daggers were thrown into the air, only to be caught in the waiting hands of four spectral assassins Cat had summoned.

The assassins, which looked like skinny, cloaked and hooded humans rendered in pale white, disappeared. They would reappear next to a Rockadillo, stabbing into the crevices of their armor. Then the wind infusions on their daggers would go to work, blasting air into the Rockadillo's body, causing it to swell and cracking rock armor under the internal pressure. The elemental advantage of Cat's weapons quickly rendered the rocky monsters into nothing as they died.

Of all of them, Erik had the most trouble. He was a bare-handed martial artist, extremely skilled at evasion and blunt attacks. His shroud had no method of providing piercing attacks, more reliably used to tie up enemies and pin them down for Erik to deliver a devastating blow. The Rockadillos were his natural nemesis.

Their thick rocky shells ate up blunt force attacks below a certain damage threshold. They were so heavy Erik couldn't move them using Stitch and so slow his evasion was meaningless. Erik did have some martial techniques that could deliver the necessary level of damage to crack the monsters' shells, but all of them placed strain on his body. They would often have blowback damage against tougher enemies, which these Rockadillos certainly qualified as.

His one saving grace was that, after his disastrous fight in the faction ranking day, Erik had assented to Caeden making some extra protection for his hands. Not a weapon, strictly speaking, but something to help with his attack style. He already had his binding cloth wrapped around his arms, acting as gauntlets. The special cloth could be softened from its steely state by a specific application of Erik's shroud. He would then wrap it around an enemy to bind them up before reverting it back to its metallic rigidity.

Those were useless against his current opponents, the Rockadillos too slow to require binding and too large for the cloth to cover them in any meaningful way. No, it was the newest addition to Erik's infused items that made the difference. His hands were now covered in dark black gloves with additional plates of sky blue metal over the joints.

They were built to have a simple but highly beneficial effect. The gloves and metal knuckle protectors could work in tandem to enhance the impact of Erik's blows ever so slightly. More importantly, they also significantly reduced any reflected impact Erik might suffer, allowing him to strike much more freely. It meant that although Erik had to resort to his more high-impact techniques, he wasn't destroying his own hands to do it.

As far as strategy goes, Erik would walk up to the side of one of the giant lumbering monsters and start wailing on it, the loud bangbangbang of his blows raining down on stone shells echoing loud off the mountain. In the face of the onslaught, the Rockadillos couldn't do much of anything to stop Erik, but it took him nearly a minute to wear through the armor plating. His fights were much more of a slog than anyone else was experiencing.

Caeden was vaguely aware of all this, but his main focus was supporting Snowball as the bear got his first real combat experience. In all honesty, Lily could have taken out every Rockadillo by herself with her devastating infused ice sword. Cat could have done just as well, and Erik might have taken longer, but he would have made it through eventually. This whole fight was more for them to get a feel for monster fighting, as this was only their second encounter.

The monster they would face in their designated zone would presumably be much more threatening. In fact, it was more happenstance that they encountered a monster type that all of them were essentially safe around. Caeden, Lily, and Erik all had more than enough evasion to avoid the slow, ponderous claw swipes the Rockadillos used. But whenever their claws hit dirt, it created a crater in the ground. They could hit incredibly hard if the blow landed. It just so happened that their team had not a single slow member among them.

Snowball, by comparison, was not doing so well. He had claws of his own, each as long as Caeden's hand. They couldn't break through the thick shells of the Rockadillos, but the cub had struck upon an effective strategy. He would dig his claws into the shell and slid them along its rocky surface until his claws caught in a groove. Then he would heave with all the strength his juvenile monster body could muster. Several yanks would take a section of armor off in a big chunk, through which Snowball would slam a clawed paw, gutting the Rockadillo until it collapsed into vanishing dust. Every time he did it, the bear would look very pleased with himself.

It would have been much more impressive if Caeden hadn't been standing right behind him the whole time, using the first form of Forged Infinity, a single-edged red blade made for cutting, to sever the claws off the Rockadillo's hands. Snowball was fighting literally declawed enemies. Caeden had no doubt that the big cub wouldn't notice the monster winding up a devastating attack until it was too late, and he didn't have enough confidence in Snowball's ability to take the hit,

So it was in that manner, with most of the Rockadillos dying to either Lily's Frost Break or the wind daggers of spectral assassins, only a few killed by Snowball and Erik, that their first real monster hunt ended.

It was incredibly anticlimactic, and Caeden hoped they would face more challenges going forward. He had spent the whole fight babysitting a bear, after all.