X stared up at the contest notice, giddiness thrumming so hard through his veins he almost stumbled right where he stood.
A one-of-a-kind heirloom straight from the city lord’s personal collection!
Lord Lawrence was an A-rank professional, a man who’d stacked up enough legendary service medals for the kingdom to fill an entire vault over his career. If he was giving something away as a prize, there was no way it wasn’t worth a fortune.
And that was just the reward itself. This was the perfect opening. Play his cards right, and he’d get a face-to-face meeting with the lord himself. If luck was on his side, he might even earn the man’s patronage.
“Not a single person’s beating me to first this time.”
X swore the oath quietly to himself.
A few feet behind him, Jack’s face stayed perfectly impassive.
Truth be told, he couldn’t care less about the city lord’s fancy heirloom.
Winning that prize meant every greedy, prying eye in the whole region would lock onto you.
Frostveil City was crawling with desperate, ruthless men, and not all of them were scared off by the
Ghostblade Swordsman’s infamous reputation.
Jack followed the rest of the crowd through the city gates, and the landscape hit him like a punch to the gut: nothing but endless barren desolation as far as the eye could see.
Withered, brown grass stretched to the horizon, with a handful of skittish wild beasts darting across the distance now and then. This close to
Frostveil City’s defenses, no real monsters dared wander close enough to risk being hunted.
“Hey, all of you! Who’s down to join my crew?”
X raised his voice, waving to the gathering crowd of contestants.
“If I take first place in this contest, I swear on my family’s name—everyone who ran with me gets a fat cut of the reward, no questions asked!”
X’s family held serious clout in
Frostveil City, so his promise wasn’t just empty talk.
Dozens of people crowded forward immediately, jostling to sign up for his party.
Jack wasn’t among them. While X was busy fielding the flood of applicants, he slipped off into the wasteland without a single person noticing.
He’d come out here for one reason only: to knock out the three quests the system had assigned him.
Sticking around X would definitely lower his risk of getting mauled by monsters, sure—but every decent piece of loot they found would go straight to X first, no arguments. No thanks.
Watching Jack strike out on his own, Viktor, who’d been lurking in the edge of the crowd, almost cackled out loud.
“Fucking idiot. You just handed me the perfect opening!”
Viktor muttered the curse under his breath, a savage grin splitting his face.
He’d been stressing all morning that Jack would leech onto X’s crew for protection, leaving him no clean shot to take the guy out. He never expected the dumbass would actually wander off into the wasteland alone.
“Track him. Wait for a good moment, then grab him and drag him back to me.”
Viktor hefted his twin iron hammers with a venomous glint in his eye, barking the order at one of the goons hanging at his side.
Right now, he needed to grind as many beast kills as fast as possible if he wanted to challenge X for first place. He didn’t have time to deal with Jack personally.
“Got it, boss!”
The goon nodded immediately, eager to prove himself.
His name was Dean, an E-rank Slicer by profession.
The second Jack was out of sight of the main crowd, his danger sense pinged hard. Someone was tailing him.
The guy was being careful, keeping his distance and sticking to cover. But Jack picked up on his trail almost instantly.
Still, as long as the idiot didn’t actively attack him, Jack couldn’t be bothered to waste time dealing with him right now.
Hunting monsters was the priority. Everything else could wait.
He pulled up his map and charted a course for the nearest low-tier monster hotspot: the Bramble Thicket.
Before the Eternal Law descended, the area had supposedly been home to a whole troop of wild apes. Once the Law took effect and every beast across the globe mutated into monsters, those apes had changed right along with them.
They controlled the high ground at the center of the Thicket, while the lower slopes were swarming with weaker, lower-rank monsters.
Jack pulled out the Blood Talons he’d traded for from that mysterious hooded woman, strapping them tight to his wrists.
Then he found a thick, overgrown patch of brambles, hunkered down, and went completely still, waiting for his first target.
It didn’t take long. Faint, shuffling footsteps drifted through the underbrush from up ahead.
Jack breathed in slow, holding it as he locked his gaze dead on the path ahead, every nerve in his body coiled tight.
A few seconds later, a creature padded into view: stocky, low-slung limbs, pelt the color of dried blood, frame roughly the shape of a wolf.
The weakest of the weak. An F-rank monster: a Crimson Wolf.
Barely a threat. Its corpse was worth practically nothing, too—outside of that bright red fur, the rest of its body was totally useless.
But Jack didn’t let his guard slip for a second.
The Crimson Wolf was weak, sure, but Jack wasn’t exactly stacked with power right now either.
He activated his Wasteland Hunter class skill on the spot.
Predator.
【
Predator: When initiating an attack from stealth, gain a 30% increased chance to one-shot a target of equal or lower level.
Upon successful execution, all base stats are increased by 10 points for 30 seconds.】
With this skill, he didn’t need to fight monsters head-on at all.
All he had to do was lay low, wait for the right opening, and strike.
That was the whole reason he’d picked the Bramble Thicket in the first place. The tangled underbrush and uneven terrain were perfect for hiding and pulling off ambushes.
The Crimson Wolf was still sniffing the air, scanning the area for smaller, weaker prey to pick off.
It didn’t sense a thing.
Jack was already behind it, moving so fast he barely made a sound.
A flash of cold steel. The Blood Talons punched straight through the wolf’s skull, clean through to the other side.
Jack had angled the strike deliberately, careful not to ruin the pelt—it was still worth a few copper coins, after all.
The second the monster stopped breathing, the familiar system chime rang out in his head.
【 F-rank monster slain: Lv.2 Crimson Wolf. Experience gained: 100 EXP. Current level increased to Lv.2. EXP required to reach Lv.3: 500.】
【
Level 2 reached. New skill unlocked: Rapid Surge.
Rapid Surge: Activate to gain a temporary 50% movement speed boost. Cooldown: 24 hours.】
Jack stared at the stream of notifications, barely able to believe what he was seeing.
He’d taken down one measly low-level monster. One. And already he’d leveled up completely and unlocked a brand new skill.
“One Crimson Wolf gives 100 EXP. That means five more kills and I hit level three.”
He ran the numbers in his head, a flicker of excitement sparking in his chest. At this rate, he might actually be able to grind enough levels to promote to a D-rank profession before the day was over.
“The only real roadblock is going to be getting my hands on a D-rank beast carcass for the promotion quest.”
Just as that thought crossed his mind, a deafening, enraged howl ripped through the silence of the Thicket.
“What the hell was that?!”
The sheer force of the sound made Jack flinch. Instinct kicked in instantly: he grabbed the Crimson Wolf’s corpse and dove back into the dense brambles, pressing himself flat to the ground.
Right on the heels of the howl, the system’s urgent broadcast blared in every professional’s head within range.
【
Urgent Global Alert!
Alert radius: All awakened professionals within a 50-mile radius.
B-rank Monster: Lv.27 Gale Ancient Ape has been inflicted with a Forbidden Curse. Rank reduced to C-rank Monster: Lv.27 Gale Ape!
Gale Ape is now afflicted with Bleeding status… Gale Ape has entered Berserk state!】
Hearing the broadcast, a cold chill ran down Jack’s spine.
A B-rank monster. That beast was the undisputed apex predator of the entire Bramble Thicket, the king of this whole region.
And now, thanks to whatever random curse had hit it, that top-tier monster had been knocked down a whole rank, reduced to a C-rank Gale Ape.
A B-rank and a C-rank monster weren’t even in the same universe of threat level.
If it was still at B-rank, even Lord Lawrence himself would have a tough time taking it down without backup.
But now that it was weakened to C-rank…
It wasn’t just the city lord who could kill it. Even a ragtag party of D-rank and E-rank professionals, if they worked together, had a real shot at taking the beast down and claiming all its loot.