listen to me carefully, pay attention to your safety first, stay close to each other, and do not be ashamed to ask for help if there is a problem, any one of you who refuses to help another in trouble will be severely punished, and none of you will be held accountable for bad results even if you did not hunt a single beast, youngsters, did I make myself clear?"
"Yes." Caesar and all the young geniuses in the group shouted
"Good, and now we come to the embarrassing question... Do any of you have extra followers that you can give away?" The prince averted his eyes from the geniuses of the younger generation and began to look at the elders,
He knew that every squad present had around 3-5 followers and they were all of the average strength, who could give up one of them? although he knew the ugly answer to the question in advance, he had to ask.
"Your Highness, we have three pluses we can share with you." Everyone, without exception, turned to the location of the Burton Expedition, and the one who spoke now was Billy Burton!
"Hmm? Billy, is what you're saying true? Have you managed to find eight candidates in the past few days? It seems we are all useless haha." a saint laughed at himself.
"No, saint Temas, we'll only send in two followers with our main candidate Caesar, he's the one who asked for it since these two are his old comrades... that leaves us with three suitable followers we don't need." Billy shook his head.
"Excellent! Though I still don't understand why you don't need them, but they would be of great use to some of the squads here, thank you Burtons, I think everyone here will remember your help today" For the first time since this little gathering began, the prince smiled
"We'll wait a little more to see if the elders will be able to get others before the appointed time, then we'll go inside together..."
Everyone nodded and separated, each trying to rebuild their survival plans with their candidate and his followers, promising the slaves and mercenaries that if their genius came back alive they would be rewarded by freedom and various other means.
The minutes passed quickly and the different elders began to arrive in succession, most of them returned alone shaking their heads, but some of them returned with relatively good followers, a total of another 4
In addition to the 3 from the Burtons, the seven new followers were distributed equally so that each squad had at least 4 followers, and the rest was distributed to the squads that only had followers at the eighth level to increase their chance of survival
"Everything is ready...let's go!"
"Oh? Is your meeting finally over? A few more minutes and you would have missed the launch." An old man standing in front of the gate of the Black Sun kingdom giggled, that man was the saint responsible for making sure only geniuses and their minions entered and that they met the conditions.
"Just do what you have to do" the prince replied angrily
"Hey, well, well, let every genius come with his followers and announce the family he represents."
The prince signaled to the group of youngsters around him and they began to line up and stood before the elder, "Hmm, it seems you haven't prepared any good followers for the competition, huh? You obviously trust a lot in the abilities of your geniuses huh..hmm? The little earl's family of yours brought in only two followers at the ninth level, and one of them has a missing arm? Haha, what confidence! I salute you."
"Just say if they are accepted or not!" shouted the prince
"Of course, of course, they are accepted, you are lucky that there is no role for the minimum strength or maximum age for the followers, otherwise.. hehe"
"TCh.. when will the gates open?" prince Wiliam was already reaching the limits of his patience, he wanted to run to strangle that man and ask him what's going on here
"Anytime you want, the hunting event already started about an hour ago." The Sheikh raised his shoulder
"What?! Move quickly!!" The prince shouted waving to the geniuses and their followers to open the gate and enter it
After making sure that they all entered and disappeared from his sight, he went back to look at the elder in charge of the gate, "Even the time you gave us was wrong? Ah, bastards of Dolivar.. I hope you disappoint me and nothing happens to our little ones inside, or else... Hmph!"
The elder giggled but didn't say anything
================================
Within the hunting area...
each genius began to pull his followers and go his way.
Even as the adults repeatedly told them to cooperate, everyone here has their own pride, the most they can do is help a genius from another squad if they accidentally find him in trouble.. but sit together from the beginning of the exam to the end? this is unacceptable.
Secondly, what could happen at all? What is happening outside the gates can be said that it's a political quarrel between those elders of the previous generations, but here the situation is different..
they were all geniuses eager for success, each of them wants to collect the largest possible amount of tokens, none of them should be is free for conspiracies and politics
Even the Little Prince, the representative of the royal family, nodded at the rest, then silently walked away, with five people behind him.
Caesar also chose to leave with Theo and Peon.. After a safe distance and making sure no one was around, Caesar looked at them, "I think you're strong enough to kill most of the beasts here alone, right?"
Theo and Peon looked at each other, then looked back at Caesar and nodded. Caesar clapped his hands "Alright, then we're also going to separate here, kill any beast you find then cut off something from its body and keep it with you.. This would be the quickest way to win this event.
But just in case of any danger from those Dolivarian bastards, I will release a faint aura of a certain frequency, you must memorize it and not go out of its range, if one of you encounters a problem, rush towards me, and if I face a problem, I will increase the intensity of that aura, so you come and help me, understand?"
The two nodded again
"Okay, then memorize this aura well then go." A faint white color began to appear in the center of Caesar's forehead.
Within a few seconds of checking it out, the two of them nodded again and set out on their new mission. But the way they took off shocked Caesar
Peon disappeared into thin air as if a small hurricane had swallowed him up, and Theo seemed to be dragged into the earth! more specifically, into the shade of a tree under his feet..
This was the first time Caesar saw them in action, even he couldn't tell which way they went!
"It seems that my father has spared no effort during my absence...." Caesar giggled, then he too took off at a steady speed and in a straight line, not afraid that the two of them would break out of his aura range any time soon,
the aura could reach about 300 meters in any direction, and with the intelligence and ability of both Peon and Theo, they will definitely stay within range.
The area was dense with trees, with several lakes and many huge terrains, in many ways it resembled the beast zone in which Caesar lived most of his life, so Caesar had no problems moving in it...
It was actually nice... as if he was hiking in his backyard.
After only half an hour he found the first beast on his way, it was a huge python of the ninth level, usually, if a cultivator found a beast at the same level as his, he would think of escaping directly, the killing instinct of the beasts and their strong bodies made it difficult to deal with them,
But Caesar moved in a straight line towards the python with his hand wrapped in a bright white cover...
The python's fate was decided in just two attacks.
The same scene was repeated with Peon and Theo at the same time, fighting monsters from the eighth to tenth levels was simply no challenge.
A full day passed like this, the three of them in a circle with a diameter of 600 meters with Caesar in the middle, had managed to kill 11 beasts combined.
one of those was was at the 11th level got killed single handedly by Caesar!
The closest squad to them collected tokens from only 5 beasts during the first day, the main reason for this was that no other squad decided to separate their members to increase the search area...
Simply because separating in a place like this equals death!
On a few occasions one of the three would meet other squads, the members of those squads couldn't comprehend what they were seeing..
Is this someone separated from his squad to work as intelligence, or was his entire squad killed and he is the only survivor? But well, no one cared..
Meetings of this kind lasted for a second or two before one of the two sides continued on his way silently.