You what?

"Are you serious?" asked Emma.

'Does it look like I´m joking?' Mark thought in his mind, getting annoyed with the raid leader. However, instead of telling her that he decided to be civil and say. "Yeah, I see three lizardmen right there standing next to something like a house. They look fairly similar to the ones we´ve met."

They were still quite the distance away from the monsters so Emma decided to plan out her next step.

"Is everyone ready for battle or do you need some time to rest?" she asked her teammates.

"No problem with me." said Tyler with his seemingly infinite stamina.

"My mana is full. I can go for another round." Lucian told the group while looking into the distance at the crocodilians.

"Yeah sorry to interrupt, but you don´t have to do anything. Despite what you´re saying you are all tired and your magician has under half of her mana capacity. I´ll just take care of the village by myself."

"Sure dude, go for it." Clark encouraged him, thinking Mark was joking.

"Alright."

'Page 19, Thermobaric bomb, locator: artillery'

The screen in front of his eyes displayed a curved line coming from the magic circle in his right hand. Mark started changing the spell settings with his hand, seeing the line change until it seemed to end about half a mile away, somewhere in the monster village.

"Cover your ears if you don´t want your eardrums to burst."

The group looked at him strangely.

"I´m serious. If you weren´t hunters the consequences would be much worse than burst eardrums so do as I say." Mark said with a stone-cold expression.

The raid team reluctantly covered their ears and watched the performance.

As Mark fired off the spell a pitch-black ball appeared in front of the magic circle and launched itself towards the village at great speed.

A few seconds have passed without anything happening so Clark uncovered his ears a little bit and asked. "Is that it?"

At that moment a cloud of black dust rose from the village and burst into flames, creating a great shockwave that in an instant reached the hunters.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Clark shouted as he rolled on the ground, holding his head.

Mark just sighed at the pitiful sight.

"Just heal yourself, dumbass." Tyler told Clark with a chuckle.

Upon hearing Tyler´s genius Mark started rubbing his face with his hands. "He doesn´t hear you, since he just deafened himself."

"Yeah, I didn´t think of that."

While Clark was rolling on the ground in pain with Tyler laughing at him the whole time, the rest of the party looked at Mark´s unexpected power in shock, especially Emma who didn´t expect anything special from the A-rank magician.

The explosion razed the whole village to the ground, leaving a large area of scorched earth even about a hundred meters away.

"Was that your unique skill?" Gina asked eagerly.

"Hmm... sure, you could say that."

"What is it called then?"

Mark thought for a moment and asked himself. 'What would Ashton name the spell?' It didn´t take long for him to come up with a name.

"The power of a dragon, that´s what it´s called." he announced with a lazy smile.

"Nice name." muttered Lucian.

"Yep." Mark said with a nod.

In the meantime, Clark managed to calm down and start healing his ears. "Hey, say something." he told Tyler.

"What should I say?"

"Great, it´s back to normal. I´m never doing that again." Clark said with a sigh.

"I did warn you, though."

"For my dignity, I´m gonna pretend you didn´t." he turned to Emma and asked. "So what´s the plan?"

"We need to find the boss monster and the only way to do so is to explore the cave. We´ll walk around the cave walls until we come across the invisible creature or come back here. You need to watch our surroundings with the spell you used to track it." she told Mark.

"Yeah, that´s what I´m doing the whole time."

Then there was a moment of silence when the hunters just stood around doing nothing.

"Soooo are we going or what?"

"Yes, yes, follow me from behind." commanded the raid leader and headed towards the scorched cliff.

The team assumed a leisure formation with the guests in the back and started walking. They had quite a bit of walking to do, due to the cave´s massive size.

While Mark thought about the countless A-rank essence stones they just left behind Tristan suddenly asked him. "How old are you?"

"Hm? Me?" he asked to make sure and the reporter just nodded.

"I´m 18. Why?"

"I was just wondering since you looked young for a hunter."

"Well, I started before graduating."

"Really? For how long have you been doing this?"

"It should be around four months. I don´t count days. What about you? You´re a famous reporter so how did that happen?"

Tristan smiled at the question and said. "A bunch of coincidences. Nothing interesting. But look at you, a successful hunter at 18 years old, with power comparable to S-ranks. You got that power even before finishing high school. How did you react to that?"

'Ew, he´s sucking up to me like a leech. It feels weird.'

"I didn´t care that much, to be honest."

"Oh, really? You are still a teenager. In that situation many jump over to the nearest guild they see."

"Yeah, I don´t know which guild would like a mage without any spells, though."

"Wow, I haven´t heard about that ever happening. So you bought a runestone? That can be quite expensive."

"No, I made the spells."

"You what?" Tristan asked with a raised eyebrow.