Duskbound

As part of his attempts at obtaining some semblance of the education he'd missed out on growing up in the woods, Velik had attended a lecture on what people called 'system theory,' which was pretty much exactly what it sounded like. People wanted to know how the system worked, and it didn't come with instructions, so they made a lot of guesses based on what information they had and tested those ideas out when they could.

It was an indisputable fact that new skills would show up as people grew stronger, but whether that was because of a level increase, or meeting certain stat thresholds, or from skills advancing in rank was still up for debate. It was probably a combination of all three, and maybe with some less obvious factors like general life experience thrown in as well. Even two people with the exact same class and level didn't have perfectly matched options all the time.

As far as Velik was concerned, the takeaway was simple: he needed to check his options before committing to something, even if he'd already reviewed things just last week. There might be something new and better, and making a permanent decision that would affect his build for the rest of his life wasn't something to be done on a whim.

For the past few days, he'd been mulling that decision over. There were a few options, but nothing really called to him as a fix for his weakness at ranged combat. Instead, his best choices were skills that gave him a better variety of ways to do what he was already good at, with the only other selections being utility skills that he wasn't all that interested in.

He had to put something in that freshly opened skill slot, though, and he'd have already done it except for what Gorlath had said right before their battle. Class orbs could be used to modify an existing class, and that meant that maybe the class orb holding [The Flesh Crafter] wasn't just a clue or a memento of Chalin. Maybe Morgus had given it to him as a quest reward because it could augment [The Black Fang] in some way.

Enhanced self-regeneration seemed like a possibility, and Velik had to admit the idea was appealing. Something like what that swamp wraith hydra had done, just growing new body parts and instantly sealing wounds, would make him near invincible. Maybe he was hoping for too much, but he felt it was worth looking into. Even the lesser regeneration the flesh cave's minions had exhibited would be a powerful addition to his abilities.

The problem was that he didn't know how to do it, and the people he'd talked to among the gold-ranked hunters had very little experience. Pevril might know, and Velik was sorely tempted to ask the man, but with the real Pevril turning out to be just as big of an ass as the version that had been instructing the irons for years, he was reluctant to ask for a personal favor. Maybe once he got back with Pevril's kid, he'd reconsider.

The person he really wanted to talk to was Andel Thett, the guild archivist. But since the guild was in the middle of a coup right now and Velik was apparently a person of interest to the enemy faction, he'd been instructed in no uncertain terms to stay away from the guild hall. There was no telling what kind of fallout that could cause, and the golds were heavily invested in controlling what happened.

At this point, he was more than willing to burn any prospects of a future partnership with the Monster Hunters Guild to get what he wanted today. They'd been spectacularly useless in almost every respect outside of providing him with information, but with potentially dozens or even hundreds of corrupted hunters still needing to be rescued, he couldn't justify the possible cost of human life just to get what he wanted a week or two early.

The urge to tinker with the class orb was strong, but Velik held it in check simply by recalling the monster crawling toward him the day he'd first woken up with his new class. Knowing now that it had been his friend, twisted and altered by the very class contained in the orb, instilled a healthy dose of caution when it came to experimenting with such a dangerous object.

All throughout the evening, Velik loped down the coastal road. It had taken him an hour or so to reach it from Cravel's south road, and now that night was falling, his pace picked up. Every forty minutes or so, he passed through another small fishing town. Sometimes, the road went straight through the center of town, but usually, it was a mile or two east through the rocky foothills that the road wove around.

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Either way, no one tried to stop him. He occasionally passed locals leading donkey-pulled carts full of produce or other goods, most of whom watched warily as he sped past them, and twice he overcame mounted patrols of soldiers around the mid-twenties level bracket. The first time, someone yelled for him to state his business, but Velik ignored the man, and no one seemed to think it was worth it to chase him down. It was dark by the time he passed the second patrol, and he doubted anyone even noticed him go by.

The place he was looking for was rather unimaginatively called Hook Town as some sort of joke about it being both reliant on its fishing industry and that the shape of the peninsula it was built on strongly resembled a fishhook. Velik didn't see the humor himself, but he wasn't there to criticize the locals' taste in puns.

What made Hook Town stand out from all the other fishing villages dotting the coast escaped Velik, but for whatever reason, they were by the far the richest of the lot. For that reason alone, it had fallen on them to take out a contract with the guild and bring in a team of monster hunters to wipe out the scalewarks going up and down the coast.

It was a few hours before dawn when Velik finally reached Hook Town. He came to a stop about half a mile away and walked the last little bit at a leisurely pace while looking around curiously. It was obvious that the town was entirely dependent on fishing, as evidenced by the fact that there wasn't so much as a private vegetable garden in sight, let alone any fields. That probably had something to do with how sandy the ground was, but Velik wasn't a farmer and didn't really know how much that mattered in the end.

Either way, the docks were extensive, more than four times the size of anything he'd seen in the other towns on his way down the coast, and they didn't just have small one- or two-man boats moored there. Ships big enough to have crews numbering a dozen or more were all over, their masts rising up over the smaller sailboats that flanked them.

So these guys went all in on fishing. Must do a lot of trade to get whatever else they need. I can see why they'd be concerned about a waterborne monster infestation. Still, scalewarks aren't that tough. They have to have their own methods of defending their ships. How many are there that they decided to call in a team of hunters?

Velik was aware that his job to bring Milly back to her father and Milly's job to eliminate the scalewarks were incompatible with each other. He was fully anticipating an argument when he tracked her down about whether she needed to leave immediately or if she could spend however many weeks it took her team to finish what they were here for.

It seemed to him that there was an easy way to sidestep that issue. He'd just kill the scalewarks himself. It couldn't be that hard for someone as strong as he was. With that thought in mind, Velik did a lap around the outskirts of town, looking for any sort of monster signs, but there was nothing to be found.

Ah, but Pevril did say they were working their way up the coast, so I'm actually in the wrong spot, he concluded. Which probably means Milly isn't here, either. I'm going to have to check each town I come across until I find them.

When people started coming out of their homes, he'd stop and ask a few questions. It wouldn't take long to be pointed toward the monster hunter team operating in the area, but he didn't see much reason to waste the last few hours of extra strength [Duskbound] granted him.

He returned back to the road and started jogging south until he found the next town. When he found no sign of monsters there, either, he repeated the process. At the third town, he finally saw what he'd been looking for. The harbor had room for twice as many ships as were currently there, and all the ones he could see had signs of damage on them.

It didn't take long to confirm monster tracks in the sand, all of them coming out of or going directly into the water. That was probably the most challenging part of the job. Scalewarks weren't too hard to kill on land, but if they took too many losses, they'd simply retreat back into the sea. From there, it became difficult and expensive to pursue them, often involving hefty expenses like water breathing potions or specially enchanted goggles that enabled the wearer to properly see underwater.

If the bestiaries were to be believed, however, scalewarks were amphibious and favored tidal caves as lairs. Velik could locate that, travel there, and enter when the tide was out. It'd be a quick slaughter of the monsters, and the job would be over.

Easy as that, he thought to himself, somewhat sarcastically. A decade of experience had taught him it was never truly that simple, but he held onto hope since it was just a bronze-ranked mission, he could finish it quickly.

First things first, though. He had to figure out where they were coming from.