When the sun rose in the sky illuminating the forest that our group was entering, to my surprise it looks like a very normal forest, taking the mana that saturates the air, land and water of it.
For a forest with tier three magical animals and some tier three magical beasts, it is quite calm and silent. We may only be at the beginning of the forest, but is it supposed to be this peaceful?
This forest is very quiet and silent, there are even few insects making noise through the forest.
I'm using my eyes to search for any enemies and any natural resources in this forest, the various tier one and two medicinal plants in this forest, but of course I'm taking the ones worth the most from both tiers.
Getting all the herbs is well in practice as we would have to carry several kilos of plants, the problem is not their weight but their volume. Carrying a huge bag of herbs is quite inconvenient and dangerous, and a sign that I'm carrying precious materials both a group of thieves and some herbivorous animas wouldn't miss a chance to attack such a convenient target.
As I lead the team through the forest I was bombarded by several questions, mainly from Gloria who may not be so angry about the events of a few days ago, her focus is now on pointing out my mistakes to try to diminish my successes or simply criticize me.
I don't really care, but the problem is that she doesn't really stop talking. We're in a forest and being discreet is always a good thing to do, but Gloria is more focused on criticizing me.
The first day of exploration was as smooth as the second we had, after two days in this forest the easiest mission we had is over and we are finally leaving it to travel a few more hours to reach the peak where the magical beasts we have to kill live.
Unfortunately, we didn't find a very rare resource or union, I was able to find several subjects that should be worth a good number of points. I got a good number of different metals, they have the same characteristics as this one, but their purity is much lower.
Not one of them has strong elemental properties, as the plants we've reviewed only have plants with healing and detoxifying properties. Eat them I feel much better moved on as we now have a lot of healing materials to use on the wounds we will suffer during this trip.
But before we left the forest a really annoying and suicidal magical beast decided to screw with us. Damn monkeys, this kind and magical beast is always and troublesome in our feral, a six-foot tall red-haired monkey with a strong physique is staring at us while a small army of apes of various colors is surrounding us.
"Why didn't you let us know we were surrounded?"
"These monkeys are very fast and small; they will hide very well."
Obviously, this is a lie, I noticed them a long time ago, but the problem with warning first is that this is not something I should be able to do, and as it's only three magical beasts the rest are level two machetes and some three is not a big challenge for us, and just irritating.
With Gloria advancing to the front of the group and me retreating to the rear, an arrow-shaped formation formed. Several rocks were thrown by the monkeys, Gloria easily blocked them, they may have been thrown with force, but it's still just rocks to the if it crashes into Gloria's shield or even the rest of the team's armor they simply break.
It's good to have equipment at a higher level than ours. I responded to their second wave of rocks with some arrows that hurt the monkeys easily, they have enough speed and reflexes to try to dodge but not enough to completely dodge the arrows.
Realizing that his brothers are seriously injured and one of them kicked while bleeding to death, the monkeys that were not injured were very angry, the monkeys that were magical beasts entered the combat. Their leader created a magma ball that glowed the same color as its fur, with the magma ball heading straight for Gloria a combination of wind blade and windshield are conjured by our mage.
The blade cuts the lava ball in mine cooling it and creating a wound in it and when it hits the wind barrier it explodes when the lava ball hits it, with the wind shield packing the lava ball is deflected away of its original trajectory. It was a beautiful combination; the big lead monkey hit is on the ground now burning the forest bush.
In mine of rocks being hurled to some much stronger designs coming from the elemental apes, but all of them were deflected or weakened by Zephyr's veto element magic. He's a really good defensive wizard, with his assistance Gloria has been holding her ground in front of the group while Alice and Hilda advance and retreat killing several monkeys.
They can't kill a lot of monkeys like me, which I can fire without interruption for a while. They have to advance and retreat so they don't end up being swallowed up by the small army of monkeys, the two can easily kill several monkeys while being attacked, but being surrounded by them from all directions is not a smart move as monkeys are beasts. spells can shift your focus to whoever is surrounded and trapped by the weaker apes.
With a steady laugh from the team the winning side has already been determined, when more than half of the monkeys were dead on the ground with one of my arrows or pierced by one of Hilda's or Alice's blows the red fur lead monkey let out an extremely loud roar and full of fury.
This triggered a state of madness and anger in the low-level monkeys, they started running like crazy for us they didn't care about anything but attacking us, even causing serious injuries to them the monkeys continued attacking us as they hadn't been hurt or injured first.
This type of skill is very rare, not all species that attack in groups have this type of resource. But after killing most of the suicide monkeys I notice that the lead monkey really runs away from me in the confusion, without an iota of shame he is already several dozen meters from our current position.
What a smart and shameless monkey, he attacked us probably just to show that he wasn't afraid of the invaders who were already coming out of the forest and the moment he got in a bad situation he ran away.
I don't know if I should say that this is a good or a bad thing, we avoided fighting a level three magical beast that seemed to have a very large physical strength and during the fight someone could be very hurt, on the other hand we lost this monkey's corpse, your fur and core should be worth a good number of points, but in the end, I think avoiding hurting one of my teammates during the first mission should be the easiest and a good ending.
"Where's that shit monkey, I'm going to rip him to shreds! Where is he?"
"Has he already left Gloria, why are you so mad at him?"
"He threw shit at my shield! Look at this dirt, I hate monkeys! Could Hilda help me out a little here?"
I can't believe I missed it, the monkey is attacking fireballs and even magma, but I didn't think he would resort to attacking a project of such a different nature. Because of this type of situation, I say that I hate magical beasts and magical animals of that type.
"Has anyone else been attacked by vile monkey attacks?"
It's a good thing not one more member of the team stopped having been the victim of this type of attack. So, while Hilda summons water to clear Gloria's shield, the others and I went to collect the animal magic cores, unfortunately it only fires two tier two magic beast cores.
After Hilda splashed some water on Gloria's shield and it's now clear, we've made our way out of the woods, still plenty of time for nightfall, so I think we'd better move on.
Taking the lunch break we ended our day camping in the plain very close to the mountain the wave we are going to carry out our second mission. After we left the forest, we only killed a few magical animals, but among them there was a pig and I am now preparing to eat it.
It's a shame we didn't even find a magical beast of the life element, having a meal eating the meat of this type of beast is always comforting and helps the team recover.
During the night I could see several lightning bolts at the top of the mountain where the forest where the storm scum lives, by the number of rivers and several owls there. I think we should explore this mountain top forest very calmly and very carefully; I don't want to end up being surrounded by a barrage of owls that will unleash various wind and lightning attacks against us.