12 Obsidian Corps

After spending his third night at the camp, Steve woke up.

Instead of practicing with the other agents, he took one of the horses and went towards Acrine, to look for some books.

Arriving there, there seemed to be some people cleaning the streets. Men were carrying out corpses, others were collecting loot.

As he approached the gates, a man stood in front of him.

"Halt! Who are you?!" the man stopped him from going any further.

"I'm Steve," he answered.

"I don't need your f**king name, what are you doing here?!" the man shouted, clearly irritated by Steve's response

"...Ah, no need to shout... I'm not deaf... I just needed some books" he said with a smile on his face.

"You're pissing me off, dimwit! Normally, I'd have killed you already! Considering what happened here though, I'm gonna let you off just this one time... Just you remember, this is the Obsidian Corps' territory right now. Don't let me see your face again! Now go!" he said

"Fine, fine... I'll go..." Steve muttered.

'It's probably better for me to leave right now, my arm isn't healed and they are outnumbering me hard. I'll just ask Butch to go get some books for me, hehe,' he thought.

He returned to the camp, once more thinking he needs to become stronger... if he was a bit stronger, he'd have no trouble getting the books himself.

When Steve met Butch later on, he informed him of his meeting with the Obsidian Corps.

"It's those guys again..." he said absentmindedly.

"What do you mean? Do you know them?" Steve asked.

"They are a troublesome, fierce bunch. They are always looking for opportunities to get some money and don't mind killing for it. It's quite weird they let you go so easily..." he said, "For now, we can't do much about them though. Don't underestimate them, they have way more men than we do and have been around for way longer. In a head-on fight, we'd lose."

"Mhmm, I think I'll just read the few books we already have in the camp then," Steve said.

---

A month later, Steve's arm was fully healed.

He had been practicing quite hard for the last few weeks. He had increased his training to 10 hours a day, he would read for another 6 hours and sleep for the remaining 8 hours.

In the past month, almost nobody had left the outpost. Everyone was focused on training madly to increase their strength. They all had the resolution to be able to protect everyone around them.

Steve had decided to skip crafting for now, as it hadn't given him any amazing results. He probably needed books that explained how to use alchemy or other magical professions for it to work.

"Profile," he said.

[Name: Steve Monroe

Age: 31

Race: Human

Status: Not even worth calling trash

Title: 'Rookie Monster Hunter'

Level : 3

Experience: 82/200

Abilities: 0

Attributes:

Strength - 8

Dexterity – 10

Stamina – 13

Intelligence – 5

Wisdom – 2

Charisma – 5

Shamelessness - 3

Skills:

Dagger Mastery [2/100]

Sword Mastery [34/100]

Novice Herbalism [78/100]

Note: Don't think you're strong now, because you did a month of training...]

He had surprisingly managed to get his strength and stamina up by quite a bit this month. Training hard really paid off.

Steve was quite sad he had spent those 4 attribute points earlier though, right now... attributes were quite easy to earn by just practicing, however he noticed it became harder and harder to increase his attributes. In a sense, he had kind of wasted the 4 points, as they would'be been easy to get by training.

The clearest example of the slow progress was his sword mastery training. It really went up at a slow pace... At first, he needed half an hour for the first 2 points. After that, he needed an hour for a point. It keeps increasing whenever he gets a point.

Right now, it would take him about 4 hours just to get 1 more experience in his sword mastery, this was really going too slow!

Fortunately, he knew how to solve this problem. The solution was to read books. They had some books about herbs in the outpost and when he started reading them, it actually gave him some herbalism experience!

The main problem was they still hadn't been able to go to Acrine to try and get some more books. The Obsidian Corps was apparently such a scary enemy that they wanted to avoid all contact.

Steve had also killed some live animals every now and then, giving him some experience. Unfortunately, they didn't really give much experience to him.

All agents were still in their daily training, as an unexpected event happened.

"Help!! HELP!!!" one of the female agents came running into the camp.

All agents looked around, to see what was happening.

"Isn't that Lily, the one in charge of lifestock? Is one of the chickens revolting?" one of the men asked jokingly.

A couple of men laughed.

"She's being chased!" another agent with sharp eyes said.

That's when everyone saw there were a couple of men chasing her...