John made his way through the halls quickly as he found the short cuts and the less populated areas. He quickly made it to the guild hall and started to look for some quick and easy missions. He quickly found a request to kill a couple of beasts assaulting a town only ten miles away from the guild.
He quickly departed and once he was a mile away he unfurled his wings and took to the skies. The beasts were hardly a warm up as he finished all of them in less than a minute. He gathered them all up and just as he was about to leave, he saw something shining.
He picked up the item and pocketed it as he flew back to the guild. And once again as soon as he reached a mile away he walked back the rest of the way. He quickly made it to the back of the guild hall, it was where he exchange the corpses for money and then he would go inside and he would also get the commission for the mission. He got thirty silver for the 6 beasts and the commission was 10 more silver so all in all he gain 40 silver and 20 merit points as well.
He was distraught when he found out that just a meal was 5 silver already. He realized that he would have to do more challenging quests if he wanted to live comfortably, but his goal wasn't to be comfortable but to reach the peak.
He also decided to check the merit store since he had gotten some from the mission that he had just completed.
The store had weapons, pills of all kinds ones that increase power for a certain time they caused strain on that center of power but the boost was worth it, then there was the things that John was looking for they were martial arts and other cultivation techniques for the higher levels. He also had seen information about forging he decided to shoot for obtaining that information and the martial arts for now.
John started going on missions like a madman slaughtering beasts, assassinating many people and escorting wealthy individuals to their desired locations and he was actually on one of those escort missions right now. He was wearing a black hooded jacket and a mask, he had his gauntlets in a different form that he discovered from a lot of fighting to be much better than normal gauntlets, they were in the form of a extendable blade facing upwards at the top of each gauntlet. An interesting mechanical look was the new look of his weapon, to achieve the added blade to his gauntlets he had to sacrifice defense for pure offensive power, he now no longer had armor anywhere on him to achieve this result. Thankfully due to the result of preforming all the missions he did, one would get a lot of merit points just enough to buy the technique he wanted. The technique consumed as much energy as damage he took and since he hadn't achieved a very high mastery of it, the current rate of conversion was that every point of damage he received used up half a point of mana instead of damaging him.
He sat on top of the carriage and looked out around them periodically, not really seeing anything for several hours. He relaxed a little bit and just waited for this mission to be over.
About half way into the forest in a hidden base, a group were huddled together all looking at a crystal.
"Hey what do you guys think, that carriage looks like the owner isn't doing to bad for themselves. Maybe we should visit them." One of the masked men said while everyone was intently staring at the crystal.
"All right we'll do this, everyone knows their roles so let's move out." The leader said as he picked up his daggers from the table and sheathed them. The rest followed suit and they all headed out.
John suddenly sprung up as he smelled something a few miles to his left. He quietly jumped off the carriage and followed his nose. Trying not to get notice by the hooded men he arrived above of. Unlike the previous group of ten, the group he was above currently only has three people.
John took a deep breath, his neck started glowing a dark reddish color as he was about to use his cursed flaming cyclone.
'Boom'
The cyclone wrapped around the three people and melted their flesh in some spots. John leapt from the tree instantly puncturing the chests of two of them. He let the bodies fall right off of the spikes, their ribs shattered and all their internal organs exploded from the force of the hit. An intense bloodlust filled the area around him as he looked at the only remaining man. He was standing their with a large portion of his body burned, he only barely managed to grab his daggers and held them defensively. Johns wings ripped out from his back as he shot at the only remaining man, the mans head hit the ground before he could even use his daggers.
"Three down, eight left" John said as he began flying to the rest of the scents.