A Way Around

Due to previous experience, Ezra kept having this feeling of uneasiness, like something bad was going to happen. The last time he was in a C rank gate after he it got upgraded from a D rank one, he ended up dead and transported to some abyss. There was no telling if he was going to be taken there if he were to die again, and Ezra wasn't at all keen on finding out about his relation with cats.

In the end, Ezra found himself being on edge for no reason, though the boss fight was a bit rough, they pulled it off relatively smoothly. This time Ezra could see every move everyone made clearly, and felt like he alone could even deal with the boss if given enough time. Also, for this raid, he brought a sword with him, as he didn't want to fight like a savage in front of all these eyes, it would be embarrassing.

Alas, his dream of being a samurai of 'One Man One Sword' was gone, and the system killed it. If only he got better weapons, he wouldn't have been forced to use his bare hands. Now that was the best way he knew to fight.

Truly, the future always has its own plans.

After killing the boss, Badger collected the C rank boss core, and they left. Though in real life monsters don't drop items and all of that, they drop cores, and the hunters get to keep them.

"Let's return everyone!" Badger, the team leader said, quite audible. It wasn't a job for him, he had a big voice that easily spread without him even trying. One could say his very throat was acoustic.

After they came out of the gate and the loot was divided amongst all, Ezra looked at his share of monster cores and felt unreal.

'I've never held this good of a monster core in my life.' He said in his mind, as he subconsciously held it out a little and looked through it. Surely, this one was clearer and pearlier than E rank ones.

"Never seen a monster core before?" A voice brought Ezra out of his little daze.

"Oh, nothing much, it just looks so much clearer." Ezra said, which sounded a bit weird to the listener.

"Well, we still have another gate to get to today, wanna join?" Badger asked. He asked to bring Ezra for only the first C rank gate, but seeing his performance, Badger took the initiative to invite him for the second and final one.

"Yes, definitely."

The second raid didn't take much time, and the money Ezra made that day only, he quickly found it to be more than he had made in his entire life, that is including all his previous raids.

During the raids, Ezra remained cautious, remembering not to over perform and show himself too much. He did just good enough that he wasn't and would be seen as a C rank.

After that day, Ezra was fixed into another attack team that was short of one member who had gotten injured during a raid. Apparently, his injury was one that would put him out of commission for the rest of his life. With that, he split from Badger. It was a good thing for him, since Badger was too loud for him to begin with. Nonetheless, they still met up in the training area when Ezra came to mend a certain someone's views of strength.

After a week and a half of raiding gates, Ezra quickly spotted the problem he had already seen coming ever since he heard the idea of joining a guild. Since he got out of the abyss, he was yet to receive a level up notification, and he had already spent all of his remaining stat points. Even the growth of his skills had stagnated. The only thing that had shown some growth was his extra skill Steal. Since the usage time was so much apart, he could only use it once per day, and on days where he had no raid, he would just find some random person and use it on them. The best luck he had gotten was a D rank short sword from a boss monster.

'I need a way to enter dungeons alone, somehow.' Ezra thought to himself.

After thinking for a while on how to have the entire raid all to himself, so that he could kill monsters to his contempt and speed up his leveling, the only real way he arrived at was to find new dungeons that had not been registered or discovered, and raid those. The problem with that was that dungeons seemed to appear in places with human live being present, if not the entire world would have gone to an apocalypse by then.

"The problem is that, it's very unlikely to find any such dungeon, since they'll be easily discovered."

After all, dungeons were also a great income source, so the association and guilds had special teams for dealing with them, and finding them. After all, if the guild was to discover a dungeon within their territory first, it belonged to them and they would not have to share much with the association. Now, if the association was to find it first, that would be a different game.

"There has to be a solution to this, I can't just wait here till whenever." Ezra pondered on the matter for a bit before focusing on other things.

Ezra had the balls to think of such a solution because he would one day be an S rank hunter, and those at that level were not even controllable by the laws, to a very large extent. The other reason was that he was from a small country, so they weren't too strong in many parts.

'There are some ways around that.' Ezra thought to himself.

While he was racking his brain planning out different things, the news came on, and the breaking news was quite shocking.