As Thunder bone cleft deep into the beast’s neck, Lloyd couldn’t help but be glad it was over. It had been almost a week since he started his hunt for unique beast materials, a week full of close battles with unsavoury aftermaths.

  One of the monsters he had fought had once more tried to crush him, severely damaging his armour and body, just going to prove how much he needed a new chestplate. Lloyd had made the tactical decision to wait for his bonding agent to age further, delaying the creation of his chestplate until he had gathered the materials for his boots and greaves as well.

  It may have been an oversight to assume he could complete these hunts with his current gear, but he had managed, albeit with a lot of struggles involved in the process. Surprisingly enough, Lloyds biggest issue was actually finding the monsters well suited for his armour set.

  Over a week in a place like the forest was enough for Lloyd to spot hundreds of different monsters, but out of all of them, only a scarce few matched his criteria. It hadn’t been obvious which creatures matched his needs at first, -this led to many unnecessary deaths- but after a while, he was able to spot the traits.

  Of the innumerable beasts Lloyd encountered on his hunts, only two had seemed fit for his purposes. For his boots, Lloyd had chosen a powerful monitor lizard that had excelled at lunging large distances to gain great speed.

  For his greaves, Lloyd had ended up taking down his home countries animal icon, killing a massive earth attuned kangaroo. His aim was to hopefully incorporate the traits of the animals into his armour, creating enchantments based on the speed and jumping ability of the beasts the hide had been taken from.

  As he tore the skin from the carcass with delicate precision, Lloyd kept his ears focused, listening for the slightest sound of wings flapping. It had become increasingly obvious over the past few days just how greedy the parrots really were, with some of them travelling what must be tens of kilometres just to steal a level fourteen carcass.

  Unfortunately, with his current strength there really wasn’t anything he could do about it. The birds were simply just too powerful, he had tried to stow the carcasses in his spatial ring and run, but it seemed he couldn’t store any beasts that hadn’t already been processed -dead or not.

  The best he could manage was to leave out a piece of meat in a more noticeable location, but even that was limited in effectiveness thanks to the bird’s uncanny olfactory senses. Honestly, the giant parrots could give blood hounds a run for their money the way they sniffed him out.

  It had quickly become clear that the birds were far more interested in fresh kills than carrion, so he had to get creative. When making a particularly promising kill like this one, Lloyd had resorted to coating the decoy meat in his extremely energy dense -albeit low quality- bonding agent from back in the guildhall.

  This had seen slightly more success, but even when the birds did fall for it, they would just scarf it down in seconds before coming after him. Lloyd had ended up accepting that the best he could hope for was to finish processing the body before the birds got there.

  Because of this, Lloyd’s process had been greatly refined by his need to be fast. With a knife he had carved from the bone of the iguana titan, Lloyd skinned the main body like an apple, the sharp and heavy blade making quick work of the beasts hide.

  It really was comparable to slicing through butter, as even the thick muscular tendons struggled to put up a fight. After the torso was skinned, Lloyd moved onto the outer extremities, in swift, deliberate motions Lloyd swung his arm downwards, severing limbs in moments.

  Cutting right between the joints, Lloyd removed the lizard’s limbs and sent them into his ring, not wasting time to consider their worth. The tail was torn off with a little more effort, but still executed in the way one might cut a pineapple.

  Considering how durable most beasts necks were, Lloyd had stopped wasting his time trying to do a good job, simply severing it with the much sharper -and far less accurate- Thunder bone. It didn’t really matter if the neck was cut cleanly, so this was just the best method as it preserved the head, and time.

  The now unrecognizable corpse was pinned against a tree trunk with mana bolts, ready to be cleaned to allow storage. If he didn’t need to do this to allow his ring to store it he would have preferred not to, as this step was a messy one, and it was best to keep a lot of the more pungent material away from his residence.

  Lloyd braced himself for the smell as he raised his knife to the beast’s stomach with a steady arm. In a quick downwards motion, Lloyd slit open the creature’s stomach spilling its entrails amongst the roots of the tree.

  With one arm covering his nose, Lloyd used his knife to scoop out the stomach, digestive tract, and effectively everything but the heart. All of this was useless to him for crafting, and since he wasn’t a starving worker from the industrial revolution, he wasn’t going to eat it, so it was best he just left it.

  As of yet, he still wasn’t able to store the carcass as he still needed to re— Lloyds ears suddenly picked up on something, as if on cue a distant flapping sound shook the ferns all around him.

  He may have put down some decoy meat on a branch a few hundred metres away, but that wouldn’t distract it for long. With a hungry monster flying directly for him, Lloyd was now on a timer.

  Much more hastily than was ideal, Lloyd cut open the beast’s chest summoning a barrel to his side as he carefully removed the heart. Sending the barrel containing the heart to the recesses of his ring, Lloyd breathed out a sigh of relief as he finally managed to store the main body.

  Not wasting a second, Lloyd burst into a sprint channelling a shallow level of supercharge to speed up his escape. Somewhere in the branches above, Lloyd could hear the bird angrily tearing apart the decoy meat.

  Just seconds later, a tremor spread through the ground as the parrot jumped down to the ground, letting out a shrill screech as it found the remainders of the carcass. Lloyd could feel sweat forming on his forehead as he ran through the underbrush.

  It was yet another close call, but his improved processing method had allowed him to get the job done just in the nick of time. Lloyd could only dream of the day when he was able to kill those big green bastards. They were such a pain to deal with, giant carrion feeders in an area where they out levelled everything by a mile, just an overly powerful pain in the ass.

  A few kilometres from where the parrot was now running rampant, Lloyd slowed to a jog and stopped at the base of a particularly large tree. Shortly after recovering from the fight with the Hercules beetle, Lloyd had stumbled upon this tree in a fortunate turn of events.

  The massive mountain ash had a huge hollow cavity in its trunk, which only had a tiny entrance. This gap was only a bit larger than a doorway, but after Lloyd further concealed it, even he had to squeeze to get through. It had become a base of operations for him over the past few days, and the barrels lining the walls gave it quite the atmosphere.

  It really was the kind of thing you would expect to see in a wizard’s workshop, and Lloyd loved it. It felt like he was in a fairytale factory, which made him fantasize about what a full blown industrial complex would look like with mana integrated into the system.

  He could scarcely imagine how complicated it could get, but that wasn’t a problem here. Lloyd knew exactly what each and every component of this room did and how it served to aid him in his armour making process.

  After discovering synthetic amalgamation, Lloyd had needed to massively increase his bestial bonding agent production, as one piece of amalgamated armour was exponentially more complicated to make than a normal one. Not only did each piece need a unique agent for each respective creature in the mix, but you needed to make additional mixes of different agents for each layer.

  The layer based agents needed to be made of very specific compositions otherwise the ratio between the amount of material from a certain layer and the amount of said beast’s agent in the mix would be off and reduce the efficacy. Then, after all that he still had to make a final mixture out of the correct composition based on the whole armour piece.

  It truly was the most absurd process yet.

  As he took some time to look around and catch his breath, Lloyd concluded that none of the bonding agents were ready yet -except the iguana titans of course. It shouldn’t matter much though, they should be ready within a few days, and he still needed some time to finish his preparations.

  Now that he was in a safe environment, Lloyd wasn’t worried about getting ambushed by oversized sky rats. Without a constant threat breathing down his neck he could take his time, prepping the carcass with care, not speed.

  Lloyd summoned the corpse of the monster he’d just killed, dropping its body onto a large wooden platform stained red by the bounty of his previous hunts. After such a rushed process, there were naturally imperfections with the material Lloyd had harvested, like patches of flesh still clinging onto the skin or somewhere with an incorrect cut.

  With more time to do so, Lloyd had no issue with removing the imperfections from the material, making sure it was ready to be cured. Taking out his bone knife, Lloyd scraped away the imperfections, cleaning the hide before it could be used.

  Without any of the flesh or blood from the kill, the hide was now ready to go through the next step. A useful method Lloyd had discovered to follow his plans more closely, was to straight up copy what the blueprint skill claimed to do.

  If he made his mana dense and focused on channelling his will to make the mana durable, Lloyd could create mana strings that would last for up to two days, or even a week if kept in his ring. It was one of these pre-prepared mana tapestries that Lloyd laid out across the sheet of leather to guide him in his cuts.

  The unmoving strings of mana served as instructions on where to cut out each different piece that would go into his boots. It didn’t take long as the boots were the smallest armour piece he had to make, especially since he only needed one.

  With that done, Lloyd didn’t really have anything else to do regarding armour, at least not until his bonding agent condensed enough in a few days. It was the first time in a while that Lloyd hadn’t felt obligated to do something, first it had been to escape the guild hall, then to go further inland, then to follow Hugmun’s advice and get stronger, but now, nothing.

  Of course, there was still the overarching compulsion to escape the island, but for the next few days he could do whatever he wanted, and at the moment, that was hunting. Because of his overly selective hunting habits over the last week, Lloyd only killed a couple of different beasts, barely reaching level nineteen.

  That was a good three levels above that of his profession, but after he made an additional three armour pieces, and his wall of bonding agents matured -which he had discovered to give a little bit of experience- it would likely be pushed back to second. Not to mention, just one more level and he would get his fourth skill selection for his class.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  While he worked on bolstering his class levels, Lloyd would be able to multitask by improving his carcass processing skill even further, and hopefully find a way to repel the stupid fucking parrots. Hunting was clearly in his best interests from a tactical standpoint, but above all else, it was just fun.

  Lloyd had appeared on this island with no idea how to fight, even now he was relatively incompetent, but he hadn’t had a choice. Had he not picked up a weapon and started fighting Lloyd would be long gone, the tutorial empty with not a single participant, but he had.

  Lloyd had made a spear and fought, and as he progressed, he improved, bit by bit, he refined his methods, improved his equipment, and kept fighting. Now, Lloyd knew just enough to keep himself alive, and he wasn’t going to stop there.

  As with anything that involved learning new skills, Lloyd was willing to do it just for the sake of knowing something new, the other benefits were just a bonus. Every improvement fuelled his desire to get stronger, to become as good as he could possibly be.

  It was fulfilling, self-perpetuating loop that incentivised progression, which when he thought about it, was a simplified version of his entire journey on this island so far. Lloyd considered this as he walked, keeping quiet as he wandered through the ferns taking his time as he breathed in the cool forest air.

  It wasn’t much later when he found his first enemy, then his second, then third, and so on, fight after fight, Lloyd tore through the forest, getting injured, recovering, and retreating when necessary.

  The ease with which he took down his opponents increased exponentially after Lloyd took another huge step in progression. Not long after beginning his hunt, Lloyd pushed past the latest barrier in his progress as he finally passed level twenty.

  For his skill selection, Lloyd got the usual five choices that he had gotten used to for his class, but what he wasn’t used to was the quality of the skills he got. Each one of them either incorporated the positive changes he’d made to his combat style into skills, or brought something entirely new to the table.

  While most of his skill selections had surpassed the category of filler by level fifteen, these were more than that, they almost seemed to be tailored just for him, and his final choice was no exception.

  [Smite (Uncommon)] – invoke the wrath of thunder as you strike your enemies down with the power of the storm. Summon a powerful bolt of lightning to strike a desired target, doing massive damage across a large area. Call upon the power within, let none survive the storm.

  An uncommon skill with power to match its flavour text, a hard hitting finisher to help him deal the final blow against tough opponents. It had been a tough choice initially, but Lloyd was glad he chose it as it was just what he needed to survive in such an unforgiving environment.

  Naturally, the good did come with some bad, some sour with the sweet, but it was all par for the course. Well, bad was a bit of a mischaracterisation, it was just something he couldn’t get his mind off, like finding a small dent on a perfect car.

  Once more, standing there as an inexplicable motif, was that sentence that always seemed to follow a major breakthrough.

  ‘Let none survive the storm.’

  He had first seen that line in the description of Thunder bone, then in Supercharge, and now here. Since it didn’t carry any inherent meaning, Lloyd had been inclined to ignore it, just assume it a preferred description by the system like wrath of thunder or power of the storm.

  As much as he wanted to feel this way, he couldn’t. it always seemed to appear in the same place, right at the end of the description.

  It sat in the same place each time, after the overview that followed the flavour text as a final flare to end with, but there was more to it. Lloyd was sure of it, something within the message resonated with him, something he couldn’t explain.

  Try as he might, Lloyd was simply unable to think of a reasonable explanation, so the topic went on the backburner in favour of the skills usefulness. Amazing, that was the only way he could describe it.

  Summoning a literal bolt of lightning from the sky was exactly what he had envisioned when choosing his class. A devastating strike to mete out judgment against his enemies, something to bring down a powerful enemy after a tough battle.

  Lloyd may have misjudged the skill earlier, as there was one downside. The theme of calling upon a higher power to strike down your foes carried a cruel undercurrent, and the irony was palpable when Lloyd called upon thunder only to be met with his nemesis.

  Each time he used the skill, Lloyd had to consider whether it was really worth invoking the wrath of the vindictive green vermin. Although not actually part of the skill, it was a reasonable downside, and something to make him more careful.

  After all, care was necessary for a skill like this, as letting off a thunderclap at an inopportune time could have potentially devastating consequences. Thankfully, since he could actually run -unlike the first time one of the birds chased him- the parrots weren’t much of a threat, and he could easily outrun them as they weren’t motivated enough to chase down such small and nimble prey.

  Aside from having a chance to summon a feathery dragon from the sky with each use, the skill was amazing, and helped Lloyd greatly, pushing him further that he had possibly hoped. In just a few days, he had managed to push himself all the way from level nineteen to level twenty-two.

  This was at least two levels higher than he had initially hoped, but he had clearly underestimated himself. With the shocking progress Lloyd had made over the last few days, he was confident that his class would keep up with his profession even after he completed his next crafting session.

  Weapon in hand, Lloyd strolled through the forest, his body returning to a state of calm after so much action. The freedom to do nothing but grow stronger was something Lloyd had missed the feeling of, the complete obliviousness which had encapsulated his first days on the island, if only it had lasted.

  The last few weeks had been important, a developmental phase for him to improve himself, but he couldn’t forget his task. Hugmun had told him he had to grow stronger, and that he would know when he was ready to return to southern mountain.

  The tablet he had been given sat in his ring like a crushing, overbearing force he couldn’t control, reminding him there was more to this place than met the eye. On many a sleepless night Lloyd had sat in the moonlit gloom and held it, wondering if he should return.

  Was he ready? Or was it just impatience urging him forwards, perhaps neither, maybe he just didn’t know what he was waiting for. On multiple occasions he had found himself about to break the disc, only to demand answers if nothing else, but he stopped himself every time.

  He had to remember their last meeting, Lloyd had purposefully ignored Hugmun’s only request, going somewhere he was expressly told not to. Lloyd didn’t know what was in that cave, but the way it had made Hugmun act was a clear indication that it was something big.

  The crow had gone from a timid, and unconfrontational to a harsh and stern authority figure, not giving him a chance to dispute. The idea of disobeying the nervous Hugmun he’d first met was one thing, but purposefully ignoring him after seeing him like that was another thing entirely.

  It was definitely something for him to think about, but for now he shelved the idea, as he had arrived at his destination. Weaving his way through the maze of roots and ferns, Lloyd pushed his way through the crack in the trunk, sealing the entrance behind him as he entered his workshop.

  In the time he spent hunting out in the forest this place didn’t go untouched, after almost every hunt he returned to make the carcasses into useable material, as seen by the multitude of pelts hanging from the roof of the hollow. Lloyds one rule for hunting was to not let the bodies go to waste, it didn’t matter if he used the carcasses now or in five months, they could always come in handy.

  There was just no good reason to do so, and it wasn’t like he had any problems with storage. The small mountain of carcasses in the corner was huge but still took up barely any space considering just how big the space within the ring was.

  Luckily, some of the creatures he killed while out hunting had been quite strong, -around level twenty- providing great materials for future crafts. Unfortunately, none of the beasts he felled could compare to the iguana titan, -which Lloyd guessed was because of the titan’s powerful race variant- so they wouldn’t be replacing it in any of his armour.

  On the topic of his armour, the bonding agent had been allowed to sit for just over a week and should be ready to start curing the leather. Picking random spots on his wall of barrels, Lloyd checked and just as he had hoped all of the agents were ready.

  Even the mixed ones that he hadn’t made before seemed to have turned out alright, something he hadn’t been expecting for his first try. Happy that his wait had bore fruit, Lloyd began summoning the perfectly cut pieces of leather, and one by one dropped them into their corresponding barrels.

  The pieces of leather sat in the bonding agent, slowly absorbing the condensed energy as Lloyd sat in the cave, eagerly waiting as he read through his innumerable tomes. He had considered going back out to hunt, but the fear of exhausting the agent’s energy supply while he was gone had convinced him to stay.

  If he got caught in a particularly intense fight at an inopportune time, it would be easy to overshoot the deadline, overusing or even completely exhausting his bonding agent. While the mixture would recover with time, if it became too weak and diluted, it could lose energy beyond repair, effectively becoming red water, so it wasn’t worth the risk.

  In the meantime, Lloyd could take the opportunity to read up on some new information, and practice with his mana manipulation. Ever since he started incorporating mana strings into his crafting process, Lloyd had wondered if there was a way to weaponize it.

  Because, in theory, it would be another great way to keep his enemies locked down so that he could target them with smite, plasma bolt and his mana bolts, doing some serious damage whilst keeping his distance. If he could actively manipulate the strings in combat, then even better, as his current method for area denial -in the form of plasma mines- couldn’t be controlled once deployed.

  A few attempts to execute this had been made, none of which had satisfactory results, but they did show that the method worked. Throughout his testing, one thing was clear, the strings were far too fragile.

  If the beast attacked the strings, or he moved them around too fast they would just break, dissipating into the air. While he could make sturdier strings, like the ones he used for blueprints, those took far too long to form to be viable in combat.

  Just making a metre of the more durable string could take up to a minute at a time, far too long for a combat scenario. His next solution was to try and make the mana strings thicker, and this did help a bit, but it still took noticeably longer to form than usual, too much so for something to use in battle.

  It took a lot of time to figure it out, and even longer to gain some competence in its execution, but Lloyd did stumble upon a solution. Oddly enough, Lloyd could summon several regular mana strings far faster than he could a single thicker one.

  This proved extremely useful as he could summon them in a way that made them easy to braid, quickly manipulating them into something stronger than the sum of its parts. Best of all, a braided rope was nearly always stronger than an equally sized non-braided rope, so this actually yielded a better result than if he had just summoned a larger mana string.

  At the moment, Lloyd was focused on incorporating more mana strings into the braid and combining them into a whole faster. After all, speed was the main goal here, since the mana strings were so laughably mana cheap, should an enemy destroy one of them, he would be able to replace it just as fast.

  Not that he should have to replace them, Lloyd could happily say that his mana strings could now take the average blow from an enemy with a level in the high teens, only taking minor damage. Now, when it came to an enemy at level twenty or higher, that was a different story, same as if they used a skill, in that case his mana strings would undoubtedly be destroyed.

  If this happened, Lloyd would have to quickly replace them, which was where speed came in handy, but as he incorporated more strings into the braids this would become less of a problem. For now, he was happy with where his mana strings were physically, but he still had to properly utilise them in combat.

  Obviously, it was hard to practice something like this without going out to hunt, but using model replica Lloyd could simulate the idea well enough. With mana ropes reaching up to five meters, Lloyd was able to encapsulate an enemy in them, with the ropes lashing at the beasts like whips or strangling them if they were smaller.

  If he was willing to expend the somewhat exorbitant mana cost, Lloyd could also supercharge the ropes, striking out with blasts of lightning whenever they made contact. For this it really was a matter of if he was willing to expend it though, he wasn’t sure why it was, but it was ridiculously expensive to supercharge these ropes.

  Perhaps the system counted each string in the braid when calculating the cost or something, but even then, it was hard to justify a third of his mana pool to supercharge a single rope. Maybe he was just ignorant to how useful this ability was, and it was actually well worth it, but it’s hard to gauge a skills usefulness when you’re fighting a non-sentient mannequin as a placeholder for a wild beast.

  It would probably be best if he went out and tested this new tactic, but with only a few hours left before the leather had to be cured, he just didn’t have time. for now, Lloyd left it as it was, it seemed only time would tell if it was truly worth it.

  After treating it like a punching bag for the last twelve hours, Lloyd finally demanifested the model, returning to his barrels as he prepared to start curing the leather. Now, Lloyd had already cured an outrageous amount of iguana leather back in the spider’s cave, but he had done that with half formulated ideas for the armour he would make.

  Not to mention, he had redesigned his entire chestplate with the goal of reducing impact damage by incorporating the methods in synthetic amalgamation. Because of his change of plans, Lloyd still had to make large batches of cured leather, for his greaves, boots, and layered chestplate.

  It wouldn’t be as bad as it would have been should he have left the iguana leather until now, but he still had almost three quarters of the leather left to cure. Going from barrel to barrel, Lloyd carefully removed all of the leather sheets, placing them on a table in the centre of the room, preparing them to be cured.

  As he slid the lid shut on the final barrel, Lloyd looked across the room to the not so small mountain of leather waiting for him. He certainly wasn’t excited for it, and would be lying if he said he didn’t want to do something else, but Lloyd knew that he had no choice in the matter.

  With a sigh, Lloyd sat down at the table and got ready for the worst case of mana fatigue yet.