Before the sun rises our group leaves the city towards the forest, we don't wake up long before the sun rises because there is no need to do that, but the best option for us is to find the pack of magical beasts as soon as possible.
In the best-case scenario, we are going to kill a group of normal magic beasts and in that case the time we wait to kill them is irrelevant, but if the magic beasts are complicated because they are uncommon the time, we wait to hunt them can make a critical difference.
The sooner we find the magical beasts, the easier it will be to eliminate them, as this mission shouldn't take long to complete and most of the team isn't carrying much extra equipment. Most backpacks are filled with the basic necessities that should be taken on a mission, as far as I know the only different ones should be mine and Ana's.
Hers should have several magic tools that might be useful or necessary during the quest, in mine I carried in addition to my tools to create or manipulate runes I'm carrying some bombs that might be useful.
Over the past few months, I may not have had as much time to improve my rune engraving abilities, but I have managed to expand my arsenal to have more options for destroying my enemies. Thanks to the large amount of completed quests I was able to access some copies of rune arrangements created by runemasters that I could create is the material needed to create them, the cores of magic beasts with the element or elements in the correct form are very difficult to char on the market normally.
I'm carrying with me two explosive bombs, one for lightning, poison and ice. This last bomb is very expensive to manufacture the tier two magic beast cores with the ice element are very expensive to buy in the market, without being able to requisition the material for the logistics of the bases I don't think I could have been able to manufacture one ice bomb.
I had to spend a few cores in order to master the crafting of my new arsenal, the lightning element was the only one that was easy to practice because instead of using a beast core I just needed to use my lightning element to power up the rune array to test how it works.
The effect of the bombs is different from what I expected neither one of them is simply an elemental explosion like a normal bomb that uses the fire element or the combination of wind and fire element. The lightning element bomb tends to have a much smaller blast radius than the fire one, but this makes its destructive power very concentrated.
She's a great choice to blow a hole in any strong defense and to top it off she also does great internal damage on any service that comes in contact with the lightning blast. The ice bomb is basically a rain of thin, tough ice that not only rips the flesh of its victims but each puncture caused by the ice shards discharges a large amount of ice element energy into his body.
The hardest to sweat is the poison bomb, it's not hard to sweat it out without affecting the rest of my teammates as it's also hard to justify using it in my reports, any tool, rune set or weapon that uses poison and is highly regulated to prevent such weapons from being used on a large scale.
In addition to carrying a few doses of antidote to the poison from the bomb in case I can't control the area that the poisonous gas will spread well, the area of dispersion of the poisonous gas is quite large and its effect is very accelerated, even if it still takes a while. little for him to kill a victim. I chose a very deadly poison because it wouldn't make sense to make a poison bomb to be used as a last resort with a harmless poison.
But I have to admit that my teammates weren't too happy with my decision to manufacture a poison bomb, the only person who didn't care was our leader Ana because she already had her own dose of antidote to sweat, if necessary, in fact she has plus some antidotes of different characteristics to defend against a considerable variety of poisons.
After seeing Ana's set of antidotes, I tried to get one of these sets to have in my bag, they don't take up much space because they are concentrated doses of the antidotes.
When the sun began to illuminate the forest, we had already covered a good amount of the forest, but there was no sign of one of the magic beasts, but after a few more hours searching the forest after arriving at the place where the patrol was attacked, we found some bad signs that tell me magic beasts are going to be troublesome.
We found the mortal remains of some warriors in the forest in the open hole, the magical beasts did not try to hide what was left of their prey.
"Is something wrong with what's left of those soldiers, Wolf?"
"It depends on what you think is important, Lance. They are not soldiers in the first place, what's left of their weapons and armor shows that they weren't wearing the standard guard gear. I think these are leftovers from adventurers and between them there are at least the rest of two different women, which lessens the chance of being criminals."
"It's not that woman can't be criminals, but most of them wouldn't put themselves in mine in a forest surrounded by other criminals who can probably subjugate them."
My comment doesn't seem to have accurately countered the penetrating gaze of Carmilla who seems insulted by my comments about the remains of female bodies in the grave.
"No need for such precise comments or amending pointless explanations, Wolf, how many bodies do you think are buried there?"
"Hard to say, but probably eight to twelve people. Without digging deeper to see if we can find more bones and quite difficult to get a correct number, these magical beasts seem to be able to eat bone if they don't have enough meat to fill their stomachs."
"That means they've been feeding on human flesh for a long time, so it's not likely that they're the type of magical beast that grows stronger from eating human flesh, Wolf. If they were that kind of magical beast, they would have already attacked the city for having been strengthened enough to risk hunting a large number of humans."
"But that doesn't mean they can't have another purpose for eating human flesh, and it looks like they've had a good amount of time to feed on several victims I wouldn't be surprised they had another pit like this. It seems a long time since a bone was dumped here, the rest of the soldiers must be buried elsewhere."
"What is this story of magical beasts eating human flesh? What is so special about them about eating human flesh?"
Okay, Luke is really an idiot. I've suspected this for a long time for several clues, but he's been hiding it well until now that he's asked the dumbest question possible, has he ever read a book about magical beasts?
Everyone else is looking at him like an idiot, he's lucky he's so close to me to avoid noticing the faces of half the team behind him.
"Silly boy, you need to read more research about beasts and magical animals and very important for any warrior or mage, I order you to spend your free time from now on reading some bestiaries, understand?"
"Yes, leader."
I didn't expect to see something like this during my time in the army.
"We better go find the magic beasts or does anyone else have any questions? Wolf, lead the way, the magical beasts shouldn't be too far from us now, so everyone be prepared to face them."
When I finished analyzing the pit, we found I noticed that there wasn't even an elemental trace in the region, there was only a small concentration of mana around the pit and that doesn't come from the bones and pieces of equipment buried there. Probably the beasts stayed a long time around the pit finishing eating their victims.
It's quite likely that the weakest of the pack will spend their time gnawing on the remnants left by the stronger members of the pack, so the lack of elemental energy here means that these magical beasts start out as magical beasts and can absorb the element from their victims.
I've faced this type of enemy before, but I hope it's a different type of magic beast because a wild brood mother would be a very tricky enemy to face, last time I had a lot of advantages that I wouldn't repeat this time.
But as there wasn't even a kind of trail left by the magical beasts in the forest I had to follow randomly going deeper and deeper into the forests.
Fortunately, it didn't take long for us to find our enemy, when we were attracted by a roar that broke the silence of the forest, but the moment we advanced towards the roar I realized that we were heading towards a trap even though we weren't able to see our enemies. still.
"Careful, we're walking into a trap."
I changed the direction we were going to try to attack the likely ambush of the magic beasts from their side, I don't think it's a good idea to go directly into the simple trap of the magic beasts.