The next morning, Sen snaps awake as someone enters the room, his hand reaching for the sword he always keeps at his bedside. As he wake up a bit more, he notices it's Alice, and hears a click of her tongue.
"Good morning Dam- Sen."
"Good morning my lady," Sen answers in an alert voice, speaking in a long lost language, before remembering he's supposed to call her by name now. He corrects himself, getting a regal nod from her, before she exits the room.
The following morning is awkward, Xue and Alice stealing the seats next to Sen, though they don't seem to be glaring at each other quite so much as the day before. Sen had heard quite a bit of talking from their room as he went to bed, but they still seem to be hostile, just slightly less so. He does wonder how Alice had even managed to get Xue to talk to her, but isn't going to intrude.
Sen eats his breakfast with all of the eyes at the table focused on him, and by the time everyone's finished, he decides his best option is to escape somehow.
"Let's go hunting."
The group looks at him knowingly, but they still agree, and they've soon rented a gravity car to go hunting for some more C ranked monsters. They decide to do their hunting in the same place, as it's the best place to hunt C rank monsters unless they want to double their travel time.
Along the way, the group learns a bit about the political situation from the galaxy, as Alice is far more versed in it than any of them.
"So the UFoH has been literally enslaving alien races?" Lynna asks.
Alice nods. "Yes. They will take over a world, and then proceed to force them to mine for the materials for their vaunted space fleet, or farm extensively to provide food for their empire. They can ostensibly rise to full citizenship through the fifth dimension, but they only allow a very limited few to even enter. They simply use them as examples to keep unrest down."
Everyone looks at each other. The more they learn about the UFoH, the worse the situation seems. But what can they do about it? Their planet has already been annexed, and their families are living there. They could try and leave, but where would they even go?
The rest of the flight there is spent in uncomfortable silence. Once they arrive, everyone piles out of the vehicle, and Julie sets up an array quickly, hiding the vehicle from any monsters that wander near it.
They all take out their weapons, and hold them at the ready as the start to walk through the rocky hills. The first monster they find is one akin to a massive mountain goat. It's standing on one of the steep walls of the hills, and the second it spots them it charges.
Everyone in the group gets out of the way with their respective movement skills, not willing to take the full force of the charge, and chase after it as it goes past them to prevent it from taking much distance. Once the goat like monster turns back towards them, the first thing it does is go to gore Sen with its very sharp looking horns.
Sen greets the horns with his sword as the rest of the group starts to encircle the monster, Alice seeming a bit lost as she hasn't worked with the group yet. She eventually goes to the same side as Xue, as the mountain goat is easily large enough to have a few people attacking its side. Their weapons barely seem to cut through the goat's hide, and when it wildly swings its horns, anyone who goes to block it rather than dodge is knocked back.
At this point, images of Julie join in the fight, but they can't leave more than scratches on the beast's hide, and the goat utterly ignores them.
Sen gale steps out of the way of one of the wild swings of its head, and takes the opening to go for its throat. Even hitting a vital point, it seems to barely faze the beast. He can only cut in about an inch before his sword is stopped, and his sword is nearly ripped from his hands as the goat turns back to him.
He barely holds onto it as the goat twists its horns towards him, and his sword is nearly knocked into his own body as he tries to press down on the blade in its neck to stop the monster from pressing the horns through his guts. At this point, the monster screams, and Sen notices that Alice has used some sort of skill that has slashed deep into the monster's side, and takes the distraction of the monster to rip his sword free and chop towards the wounded neck of the monster with a Cutting Squall.
This time, his sword bites home, and blood starts to pour out of the monster. The group stays back after this, and it isn't long until it collapses. The group stays back for a while, wanting to make sure it's dead, but then get to the gory task of removing its crystal.
Seeing as how tough the monster had been, Sen decides to get some info on it, looking up "mountain goat monster" on his tablet. The built in encyclopedia soon tells him that it's a "monster goat" with the same lack of naming sense as usual and that its horns have as much value as its crystal, though it doesn't say what they're used for.
Sen doesn't bother removing the lightly curved three foot horns though, not wanting to carry them around without an inventory, and simply stores the crystal in the backpack that rests under his sword's sheath. He's always the one carrying the crystals, though he isn't entirely sure why.
The next few monsters continue to grow easier to hunt as they start getting used to the higher stats the C ranked monsters have. It's definitely a bit of a change from the lower ranks, where each of them could handle a monster, or even multiple on their own. Sen wonders for a bit if this is more efficient than hunting D rank monsters, as they often come in groups, but considering they would have to hunt fifty D ranked monsters in the same time it takes to hunt a single C ranked monster realizes that there's no way that could be the case. Sen ends up being the person to collect all of the crystals, and ends up quite coated in gore.
They don't have any trouble, but then they spot something in the distance that makes them worry.
"Isn't that a giant mist snake? I thought there were only C rank monsters here."
"It is a lesser variant. You can see that the swirling white patterns on it don't extend all the way down its body," Alice explains. Apparently, she's much more knowledgeable than the rest of the party about monsters in the fifth dimension.
"Alice, how do you know all this? And how are you so good with a sword? .You seem to be as good with it as Sen is," Jennifer decides to get some answers.
"My parents in this life are A rank hunters, as are their parents, and so forth. I have been trained since birth to be a hunter."
"She wasn't bad with a sword in her past life either," Sen adds.
The group, now informed that this particular mist snake is only C rank, decide to engage it. They simply hope it won't be shooting water cutters at them. As they approach, it starts to shroud itself in mist, but it barely extends a foot away from its body.
Sen is a bit amused at how weak it seems to be compared to the B ranked version they'd fought, let alone the boss B rank. They go to engage, Lynna taking the front this time, and blocks as the snake snaps at her, slamming her shield into its nose.
The snake shakes its head from the impact, and Sen launches a strike empowered by Weight of the Mountain at its side. It cuts in a little, but bounces off the bone, though there's a bit of a cracking sound. The snake's short tail whips at him immediately after, and he's forced to move backwards, only using Earth Step to conserve energy for the many hunts to come.
The tail flies by him, continuing on to Xue, who simply blocks it, not bothering to get out of its range. She's knocked back over a meter, , but gets off a short strike at its tail. Sen steps back in and lets out another slash, not bothering to use weight of the mountain, simply planning on slowly bleeding out the monster.
Julie's images join in again, and this mist snake isn't able to differentiate them from her real body, and so spends the next few moments snapping at them, until it gives up on anything remotely Julie shaped.
Julie takes advantage of this, getting an opening and shoving her sword into the sensitive nose of the monster, which gets a loud roar from it. Sen still finds it odd that the mist snakes roar instead of hiss, but brushes off the thought as the tail comes towards his face.
He simply ducks down, letting it whistle by above him, and lifts his sword into its path, letting its own force cut a quarter of the way through it. The snake then goes to chomp at Lynna. She simply steps to the side before using the skill that forms an icicle looking image over her sword, plunging it into the side of its head.
The giant mist snake drops like a rock after that, and they confirm it's dead before continuing on their hunt. They don't run into any issues, and head back to the gravity car to sleep for the night, everyone thankful it includes a small bathroom at the back of it, practically a flying RV. It's lacking any sort of kitchen, but the group has brought instant meals that you simply add water to and they become an almost tasty hot meal.
The group all takes care of their needs and detaches the chairs, flattening them and placing them above each other in the included frames to make a bunch of bunk beds. They go to sleep after the girls are done talking for a while, Alice somehow seeming to have joined in the group like it's the most natural thing. Sen's a bit embarrassed as her contribution to the conversation seems to be tales of Sen in his past life, but tries to ignore it.
They stay out in the wilderness for the next week, moving the gravity car each day in order to have enough monsters nearby to hunt. The only time they have a problem is when they happen to run into two of the monster goats, and the group has to split up in order to handle both of them.
The group ends up a bit bruised, the goats slamming both Jennifer and Lynna hard enough to knock them rolling, but they are intercepted by the others before they can capitalize on them being knocked down.
After that, they make sure to be a bit more careful before engaging a monster, Julie using a fancy array she's learned to check for anything living nearby. They go in after they confirm there's only the one monster, and they don't run into any more issues after that, though they have to avoid some areas due to them having multiple monsters.
At the end of the week, they've all eaten a good number of crystals, and they walk to their gravity car, heading back to the city. On the way back, the girls continue their chatter, and Sen wonders about the fact that Alice never seems to run out of stories to tell, usually involving him.