After 80 seconds, the Essov group was skinning the lizard.
Everyone in Kyros' group stood there, mouth agape.
"What just happened…"
"That was so fast, I can scarcely believe it…"
"Was that really a Phase II monster?!"
Eo stretched out his limbs. During the fight, Eo had made sure not to use his tangiform, so it the fight unfortunately took longer than a minute.
"Yep."
Eo really wanted to train, so he gave the lizard corpse to his underlings.
"Here, dismantle this. Um, the best dismantler will get a prize!"
Kyros watched in awe as 4 former bullies looked up to Eo with faces lit up in glee.
"Master is amazing as usual!"
"We know, Lodan."
"Hold on, what happened to 'boss'"?!
Eo finally got a good distance away from everyone else. He immediately stretched out his arms and started synthesizing. Training, as usual, was dull, but Eo didn't mind anymore. Training gave him peace.
After a solid hour of training he could now manipulate the tangiform at 89% purity. He wish he had more time, but as convenient as that excuse sounded, the real reason he couldn't do anything was because his innate understanding of essence was starting to reach its limit. Adding onto that, generating 89% pure tangiform required many times more essence than 85% pure tangiform. It was getting to the point of impracticality.
Eo decided to start summoning different types of metal. The amount of metal he could synthesize was at least at the level of a red-rank, but he didn't train in it much more because it wasn't very challenging. The metal he always synthesized was iron, and it was extremely easy to visualize in comparison to something like essence or tangiform.
Eo decided to try summoning something like titanium. Being that it was something he was not too familiar with, it expended quite a large amount of his essence and resulted in a misshapen and impure nugget. Eo was still sad even though he sort of expected those results.
Eo finally returned to his team.
"Let's get going guys."
Eo and Kyros' groups continued down the E zone towards the epicenter. Along the way they confronted another Phase II monster, and Eo held back from fighting to see yet again what Kyros was going to do. Kyros turned out to be a pretty impressive fighter himself, and dealt the brunt of the damage himself. Eo was still amazed at how much Kyros had grown, given that he was much newer than Eo himself.
In the latter half of Zone E they ran into some Yellow Ranked groups. At first the Yellows ridiculed the Recruits for even attempting to go this far but then stopped after seeing that Kyros was with them.
"Kyros, you're so useful as a passport!"
"Ah, shut it, Eo…"
That's when they saw 4 Phase II Wolf-types.
Eo didn't like the fact that there was a leader. He also didn't like the fact that they were staring straight at him. They were intelligent, and managed to discern the fact that Eo was the most dangerous one.
Eo started synthesizing a sword.
"Agh, here we go again."
"Are we going to seriously fight them?"
"Well, it's not like we've been seriously challenged so far… so sure!"
Kyros did not like Eo's logic.
☆
The wolf-types didn't charge in blindly like the other monsters previously did. Instead, they all seemed to protect the biggest one in the back, which seemed to have a strange glowing diamond on its head.
"Anomalies." Eo muttered. "And an intelligent one at that."
"Whaddya call that ugly mutt again?" Jimmy asked.
"An anomaly. They're mutated forms of the monster that give it superior stats."
"Stats? What's tha-"
"Er, I mean, the monster becomes stronger."
"Ohh."
Eo looked at Kyros.
"We'll take care of 2, you take care of 2."
"Wh-what?! But our highest tested strength was against 1 Phase II!"
"I claim dibs on the diamond head one!" Eo called back.
Kyros immediately called in a formation, but then saw Eo charge straight in.