24
1101 Words
That was not normal.
Still, this wasn’t Matt’s first time fighting a mage, and he rolled out of the way, coming out of his lunge in a s***h with his Tier 2 training sword. The blow rent the monster in two at the shoulder, and the fabric fluttered to the ground. Matt eyed the shady remains carefully, but the monster stood down.
Kurt clapped twice to gather everyone’s attention, and with his board, asked, “What did you all notice?”
Vinnie gestured at the cloth on the floor. “A Tier 1 monster had a spell. What the f**k?”
Kurt wrote ‘spell,’ then looked around with a raised eyebrow.
Aster yipped out, “No smell and no heart.”
Kurt added those two additions, then kept glancing around.
Tara said, “It can either only cast one spell or its recharge time is a long time.”
Kurt gestured for her to continue with his hand, so she added, “That means it’s either limited in mana or the spell structure is kinda s**t inside of it.”
Their silent instructor nodded and wrote, “It’s rare, but Tier 1 rifts with pure mage monsters aren’t unheard of. It’s a fun discovery, but not quite what I wanted. We will come back and get everyone used to this, but I want to start with melee combat.”
The page flipped, and he wrote, “Let’s leave, and when I restore your mana cultivation to a tier 1 level, we will come back. “
The next rift was a metal rift with a dagger used as the base, and inside they found a mountain pass. It was heavily populated with goblins wielding daggers made of what looked like bronze.
Kurt raised a hand and, even while he kept his gaze forward, his board showed, “Okay, perfect. Liz, you first, please.”
As a group, they made their way up the mountain pass and fought the ever-increasing groups of goblins until they reached the boss. They came to a goblin riding a large boar, guarding the exit and reward distortion.
After Luna’s training, none of them had any issues killing their way through the goblins. Even Aster was able to brutalize the poor creature and cracked open its chest to eat its heart. She pranced around the rest of the rift with her prize. It was only then that Matt realized his bond hadn’t been able to eat monster meat in almost two years.
While she wasn’t a kit anymore, and her dietary restrictions were far less stringent than they were years ago, she still wasn’t a human. Matt resolved to make sure that she got some actual monster meat in her diet from now on.
Tara used a short sword to quickly dispatch the goblin leader, and Kurt pulled them out of the rift after dispersing the reward distortion. It was a single bent dagger that Matt expected to be tossed away, but Kurt kept it in a box in front of the rift.
They moved through all the rifts for the next seven hours with their cultivation restricted. The Tier 2 rifts were far more difficult, with the monsters being more normal than the Tier 1 monsters.
Matt expected Kurt to have them work them out, but when the sun started to set, he waved them off to do as they wished, as long as they practiced some skill or hobby. He even removed the restrictions on the bands to return their cultivation.
Sam and Liz came right up to Matt and asked for a rift so they could concoct herbs.
He was about to do that when Aster came up and gave him her best puppy eyes. She quietly asked for a snow rift to play in.
As if he heard the questions, Erwin appeared out of nowhere and waited for Matt to create the herb rifts.
Matt talked through his creation as Erwin took notes. “So, with our last herb rift, we found that wood and earth mana worked well for ensuring that the rift actually produced useful plants. But this time, I have wood aspected mana with a subaspect of plant that I want to try.”
Erwin learned in, examined the mana flowing from his ring, and asked, “How do you know its subaspect?”
That caused Matt to pause and consider. “I just get that feeling. Is there an actual way to tell?”
Erwin waggled his pencil. “Not…rigorously. You can get an approximation with the right enchantment of course, but usually it’s just intuition. I was actually working on…not important. “
Matt paused at that. He hadn’t thought to use runes as a way to check a mana type and subaspect.
With everyone watching him, Matt began his first attempt at a Tier 1 herb rift. While the resulting rift had copious plant life, the herbs produced were all mundane varieties. Four rifts later, he got a wide array of herbs to appear by adding a touch of wind and water mana to the mix, along with a bundle of Tier 6 herbs that they had on hand.
He quickly repeated his experiments to get all the way to a Tier 6 herb rift, and demanded promises that neither Liz nor Sam would enter the rift alone. In total, they lost three bundles of herbs throughout his two dozen attempts to create a satisfactory herb rift. But it was a small price to pay when they held a near unlimited number of Tier 6 herbs acquired during their travels.
Aster’s rift was more straightforward, and it only took half a dozen attempts to make a snow rift filled with rabbits burrowed in the snow for her to chase.
He got her to reluctantly agree to the same conditions that she operated under when they were making rifts on the island together, with a few additions. Aster would have to exit the rift every hour to check in, and sleep outside while not skipping out on any of the training.
As soon as she got all the all-clear, Aster shot off into the rift like an arrow.
Everyone else decided to help Liz and Sam harvest the herb rift while Matt worked with Erwin on the finer points of his rift creation process.
Matt liked to think that he had an instinctive grasp on the process, but his understanding was nothing when compared to Erwin’s testing.
Once they were off in their own area, Erwin clapped his hands and said, “All right! Where do we start?”
- Writer
