Taking the High Road

For the month remaining until summer, I immersed myself in a maelstrom of study and prep for both the camp and the exams, successfully passing time quickly that way. Once again, I scored the highest in the final, though with the more advanced material of the Inner Court, I was no longer getting perfect scores.

This time, the head-of-year instructor brought us from the Inner Court back to the Outer before leading all 100 students to assemble at the teleport formation as usual. Just like the two previous years, I was 3rd in line. This time, though, I was of course one of the ones being stared at by the underclassmen who were getting their first looks at the "gifted" Inner Court students. Although, I was just as confident then as I was a year ago that we totally looked just as eccentric as the previous Inner groups before us. Possibly even more so.

It had been more or less spelled out for us in a TS class close to departure that the expected course for the ten of us would be to start northward immediately, while the 3 normal classes would mostly concentrate on the other 3 directions. The island had been populated such that the beasts even a little bit north got stronger overall much more quickly than southward. About halfway to the volcano, the Head Instructor had said, 6th Realm beasts of the lower Stages became routine to see. Us five aiming for the place, then, would advance without hunting until we got that far, while the other five, conveniently enough, needed to aim for now to reach the 6th Realm themselves, and so would hang back.

And once again, I had very little need to plot out my own course so as to not clash with the others, since while the others would be picking their way through the thick jungle at ground level, I'd be traversing the jungle treetops. Similar grinding had been one of my favorite pastimes in Frontiers Online, the VRMMO in which I'd come the closest to making a name for myself in the old world. However, once I did start grinding, I discovered that I was in for a much rougher time than I realized. I had expected to mostly fight bird-type magical beasts—and there definitely were those—but the top of the food chain in the canopy was a chimp of some kind which I only later learned was known as a Lightning Monkey. It was named for its speed rather than any actual ability to shoot lightning, but they were such small targets that I struggled quite a bit. Whenever I DID hit one with an arrow, it was killed instantly, and if I got one with my sword it was at least taken out of the fight and easily finished off, but that wasn't easy.

I'd gotten pretty badly hurt the first time I took them on, but fortunately, starting this year pills that healed one's body were available at the main camp's store. The bird parts I brought back were a lot more valuable than the monkey carcasses, and I no longer dared press forward without a good stock of the healing items. Methodically, I advanced to the 5th Stage of the 6th Realm by the time two weeks had passed. When I asked Jue Zhu for an update via communication stone, he said that from what he knew, I was a little bit ahead of the others—though not him—but not by much.

I was, I estimated, about 3 day's journey to the volcano when I began to notice that I'd gone for quite a ways without finding any more attackers. Less than a minute later, I was set upon by a large, loud, and what was most troublesome, coordinated group of them. They came close to overwhelming me in the first five seconds, but once I'd beaten a few of them away, I was able to escape encirclement a decent while later. Once I had, I noticed most of the chattering was coming from a somewhat larger monkey with purple fur around its head, sort of like a mane. I figured going for that one who was clearly the leader was a good idea, but I was shocked at how effective it was. The underlings actually threw themselves in the way of my arrows if they would otherwise hit the leader. With a good number of the remaining little assholes now focusing on defense, the battle turned in my favor.

By the time I brought down the leader, there were five of the normal ones left, and they clearly weren't able to use team tactics the way they had been before. I was hurting quite a bit too though, and it wasn't in a magical beast's nature to retreat. Still, I managed to finish off the rest of them without getting anything as severe as a broken bone, which I felt made the victory a major one, especially since one of them had nearly wrenched off my left arm at the start. Fortunately, I'd been suspicious enough that there were enemies I couldn't then see to have my sword in hand, because another had gone for my right arm at the exact same time, and I'd beaten it off just in time to sever the other one's arms.

And if that wasn't enough to call it a major victory, the fact that I'd scored three cores, including a 5th Stage core from the leader, definitely was. I hung up my tent to rest and let a healing pill do its unfortunately non-instant work. I'd just finished when Jue Zhu contacted me.

"Is everything all right? Jong reached out to me saying he's been hearing a lot of screeches from above and they only just stopped."

"I need a little recovery, but I won. I reckon I have enough cores right now to jump a full Stage, too. I'll probably save them for jumping from 8th to 9th Stage. I'm close to 6th Stage now."

 A short time passed, then Jue Zhu contacted me again. "Jong said to tell you he salutes your 'PvE' skills, whatever that means. But also that you won't be ahead of him for long."

"Gamer thing. Remind me to explain it to you sometime once we're back together."

I advanced more cautiously after that, focusing my senses to avoid getting surrounded by the little bastards again. In just a couple more days, I broke through to the 6th Stage. Not long after that, bird enemies started to become more common, and the monkeys showed up less and less. Checking the System map that night, I confirmed that I should be close to one of the Ascended Beasts—a Gust Falcon. I knew the beast's identity not because I'd actually been taught about it, but because all the Ascended Beast locations were marked on the map data we were given, and unlike most of them, this one had been marked simply as "Gust Falcon's Nest."