After beating the first Hard quest, Jerry leveled up to Level 35 and now had 8 Attribute Points to spend upgrading his stats.
All the necessary abilities were activated, that included the Harnessing Swords ability, Slash and the Fire Magic.
Jerry had it in his mind to defeat the next Muloculus without getting hit, but if it really was going to happen was up for debate. The harder Muloculuses sucked more Mana out of Jerry, so he was running out of Mana faster.
"Well, let's go." the quest now started.
Just like the previous Hard quest the egg shaped creature approached Jerry at quite the pace. It was now within his range. The swing from up above was just a feint, but the Muloculus put its guard up above. The one wielding the sword took this opportunity and swung with almost all his force at the side of the creature, which was pretty strong and he cut the enemy in half, once again many eyes manifested out of nowhere and looked at the sword of the attacker with a solemn almost hatred. Jerry still couldn't get over how appalling the many eyes looked.
The Muloculus reconnected its body halves and turned into its stronger form. Although the stronger form wasn't that much stronger, it siphoned Mana faster.
Jerry needed to end it quickly. As the fight reached its climax, they both got faster. "Just like last time." the one swinging the sword thought. "So it truly does have only a few patterns of movement." he countered and waved his sword, but sadly missed, however this was nothing. He would not let the opportunity slip away. Yet the Muloculus managed to get a hit in, the enemy swung its arms and grazed the spot under the knee of Jerry, managing to scrape a bit of skin off. This was one of the most painful moments of Jerry's life. But on the other side he found wearing shorts to have a little upside, if he was wearing a long type of pants, the fabric would've been destroyed pretty badly.
Jerry, fueled by some kind of anger and adrenaline to end the creature opposing him, added 4 points into Endurance to numb the pain. The one fighting was now ready to end this fight. "No more mistakes."
The fight took about 2 minutes, but a lot of his Mana was gone after it.
He gained 9000 Experience and now had 15500/18000 for Level 36.
Another Lesser Healing Potion was bought for 20 Coins from the Shop, although this time it didn't help as much as Jerry wanted it to, so he bought a Healing Potion for 100 Coins, it worked nicely this time and the pain was reduced to an insignificant amount. But that was 120 Coins taken off of his balance, leaving him with 440 Coins. The physical activity he was doing was also making him quite sweaty in this hot almost summer weather. Jerry looked at the Notemp Bottle that only contained 1/3rd of its contents and refreshed himself by drinking half of what was left.
After a little rest to build up Mana, it was time to continue.
When Jerry felt that enough Mana was regenerated he readied all his abilities once again. This time he was not getting hit for sure, he hoped, at least he would try to evade everything this time to his utmost potential.
And he did it, Jerry evaded every blow and defended as much as he could, he came out of the battle unscathed.
With this he leveled up yet again.
[Level 36 : 6500/20000 Experience to Level 37]
He decided to add 3 Points to Intelligence and 2 to Agility to make them both 38. The leftover 3 Points would be kept for later.
2 Hard quests remained.
Jerry drank the remaining Notemp and the bottle disappeared into thin air.
The Muloculus spawned and it all played out exactly how the one doing the quest wanted it to, until the point where he tripped on something while taking steps back, which made him lose balance and the Muloculus seized that opportunity and attacked with 2 arms from the top, so Jerry put up a guard with his sword to block the danger coming from above. However he didn't notice the other 2 arms that were coming from both sides which hit him on the torso, thankfully the one arriving from the left missed the liver, but it still hurt him quite a bit. Jerry took a few quick steps back to recover. Once he had a few meters of space between him and the enemy he was going over ways on how he could've avoided that.
"Damn, that was unlucky." Jerry said as he defeated the Muloculus.
1 Hard quest remained.
"No more mistakes, this time for real."
Because it was the last quest, Jerry had more willpower than normal, which served purposeful for not being hit.
It was almost blissful as the last Muloculus turned into nothingness.
Another level up.
[Level 37 : 4500/23000 Experience to Level 38]
4 more Attribute Points to allocate, which Jerry was happy about.
The friends said their goodbyes and went on their ways. Jerry was incredibly tired, and his T-shirt was pretty moist from the sweat that he sweated during the excessive physical activity while fighting which was combined with hot weather and the sun shining from up above. When he arrived home he changed T-shirts and went to bed, his exhaustion from today having caught up to him.
Quast was also home now, just doing nothing and watching videos in his bed on his phone. He looked at the time, it was around 3:15 PM. Quast had been training regularly ever since he and Jerry did the 100 pushup test thing to see how much Jerry's stats would improve. He got kind of interested in Calisthenics, the idea of having almost total control over his body appealed to him. At first he couldn't even do 20 pushups in a row, but he built up his ability to do so and also gathered knowledge on proper posture. His goal of being able to do a planche on the ground was closer than he thought. So with nothing else to do, and inspired by Jerry's fighting today, Quast got to working out, starting with a warmup. He also learned that his diet was also very important if he wanted to complete his goal, so he started eating healthy.
The Friday passed and it was now Saturday, the bright sun came in through Quast's blinds and woke him up.