Kapitel 11: First Combat

I shrugged, nodded, and went to join Hasegawa with the rest of Class B. Liam's addressing us turned out to mostly consist of ground rules for those staying in the prepared camp and reminding us of the procedures to follow before we'd be allowed to head deeper into the reserve.

After that, Hasegawa had a few more words for us, and indeed passed out what he explained were Emergency Totems—essentially a way to send a distress signal to the faculty. They were quite disturbing-looking, they were basically wood-carved screaming heads. To activate them, you stuck your fingers inside the mouth and pressed down.

Hasegawa stressed that even with the Elders present and with this measure, it was still very possible to die on the reserve, so we shouldn't hesitate to use it if we need to, lest we find ourselves in a position where we couldn't after hesitating.

Before leaving the main camp, I ended up taking at least a few of the survival lessons, in one particular area. Even if I'd bought enough rations to last the summer, it was still possible for them to be lost or spoiled, so I still needed to know what plants were safe and how well to cook monster meat for it to be safe (if not very tasty). After completing lessons on that in just 3 days, not only was I cleared to journey into the rest of the reserve, the instructor who taught me gave me some materials to purify water, which could also be needed.

Everyone else had a lot more to go—even Jue Zhu, though he was of course a fast learner. I only ever had a head start even close to this good once in my Dive Gaming career once, and for all it ended badly it would have taken me twice as long to raise the quarter million dollars to be here if I hadn't taken the opportunity.

Guided practice period had included the occasional track and field day, so I wasn't totally surprised at my speed bounding across the open plain, but somehow it hadn't sank in that my physical capabilities were already well beyond human norms. Okay, maybe I wasn't going as fast as a racecar, but it must have been at least 30 MPH. I'd never experienced that kind of boost in the Dive MMOs. The technology for a fully functional and contained PVE was leaps and bounds ahead.

It wasn't long past noon when the novelty of my speed began to wear off and boredom threatened to set in. I couldn't afford to let my guard down, though. I'd gone this far without any fighting because most of the magical beasts in the plain weren't interested in and/or able to chase a cultivator in the Fourth Earth Realm, being mostly in the upper stages of the Third Realm. However, there was the occasional Fourth Realm beast, and if I got the attention of a speed-type variety they'd be very likely to attack.

Sure enough, just as the Dark Forest edge was coming into view, in the light of sunset I spotted a streak of movement coming at me from ahead and to the left. As I readied my bow, I got a good enough look to identify the enemy as a Sabrefang Leopard. A moment later, it leapt at me from what must have been over a hundred feet. Rather more distance than I expected, but this wasn't my first time against monsters based on predatory felines. In Dive Games, they were often nimble enough to dodge arrows, occasionally even from less than 50 feet away, but they couldn't change trajectory in midair, so the moment they leaped to strike was the same moment you should be striking. Even Hasegawa's lesson on the subject agreed.

My first shot was a slightly lucky one that plugged the beast right in its gaping mouth and stopped its leap. It let out a pained yowl as I backed off and shot again, keeping it from going back on the offensive. On my third shot, my luck caught up with me, the arrow only grazing its neck. Instead of trying to close the distance and strike, though, it eyed me warily.

It turned to run as I shot again, barely managing to get it in the back before it started hauling ass. I pursued, not wanting it to come back later with friends, especially so close to nightfall. After another couple of hits, it turned on me, now desperately trying to reach my throat with its claws before it expired. I never quite let it get there though, and after another few rounds, it lay still.

Checking my System Menu, I'd indeed gained a couple tens of thousands of Qi from the kill, but I wasn't about to settle just for that. I got out a knife—a hunting knife made from mostly ordinary materials, which was still good enough for the most basic resource extraction from weak magical beasts.

This part I wasn't experienced in from Dive Gaming—I'd always simply been able to loot usable monster parts as though taking them from an inventory. However, given that I wasn't going to use it for meat, the only worthwhile parts were its fangs, which were easy enough to extract. The fangs themselves were too hard even for my arrow shots to damage, but being a low-level variety of this monster, the gums were another story.

It was still with some difficulty that I got the fangs out. I put one into my inventory, kept one of the fangs out, and sliced open its belly with it. Sure enough, after a bit of moderately gross poking around, I saw the core was still intact. There was always a chance that it would be destroyed when a magical beast was killed, but getting an intact one on the very first go wasn't actually out of my expectations. In Dive Gaming, I'd generally had good luck with loot drops. Not great or amazing luck, but good. When it came to dungeon bosses, I'd pull the super-rare drop in two or three goes where other people were on their 10th try, that kind of thing. Even that much had been valuable to other clubs.

Conversely, I'd always had incredibly BAD luck in matchup pairings whenever I tried to enter competitions. Like, if I wasn't up against one of the best in the bracket by round 2, someone was probably fixing the matches. This hadn't happened to me in combat exams only because those matches weren't set at random. I'd made the final match in that semi-pro tournament because I'd finally won against my second round opponent, and the loss in the final match had been narrow too. Quite a lot of people I'd worked with had seen me as a PvP joke because of many such results before that.

AUTORENGEDANKEN
Lheticus_Videre

Starting next week, Cultivating As A Side Character will be moving to 5 chapters uploaded a week, Monday through Friday! To everyone who's checked out my story so far, thank you so much!

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