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Chapter 3 by Gaezbo Gaezbo

Claimant crystal? What's that?

Didn't I just read about that?

Claimant crystal?

Now, did that not sound strangely familiar?

Almost as if you had just read about it somewhere, not even a few minutes ago.

A quick check of the update log confirmed your suspicions.

Normally, you would curse the sky blue at having to actively hunt the adventurers, but immediately after a major update meant that nineteen out of twenty of the immortal bastards out there would be the stupidest, rashest, and/or most inexperienced.

If ever there was a time to attempt to kill some adventurers - or ‘players’ as you’ve heard them refer to themselves - it was now, and the longer you loitered, the greater the chance grew of you encountering someone actually competent.

Feeling pumped for combat for the first time in a long, long while, you divest your inventory of the collected pieces of masonry and gather up your <plain bamboo shortbow>, <small quiver> and <basic knife> into your inventory.

with your equipment secure, you scramble up the broken set of stone stairs, and out into the open air of the jungle grown all over the ruins of an ancient megalopolis that was the Kemono-kai zone of Honeyama island.

Surveying the rubble and rampant greenery downhill from you, you grinned your toothiest smile.

The ruin whose apparent basement you were using as your cave was located atop a steep hill, thus granting you a commanding view of your surroundings.

To your left, the hill continued straight down to the rocky beaches of the sea cove and the old dock ruins. You'd spent more than a few leisurely hours fishing down there. That or hunting the lvl 1 and 2 stone-crabs that were the only monsters that spawned.

Behind you, the tower ruins nestled against the sheer rock that came from Honeyama proper, and terminated as one of the cliffs that sheltered the cove.

And to your right, the gentler slope led to the switchback track that was the easiest way to get from the hill down to the old mountain highway, and, beyond it, the rest of Kemono-kai.

Most people would do the sensible thing, and walk down the switchback.

You, however, were not most people.

Securing your equipment into your inventory so it would not snag, you take a running start, and sprint down the steep hillside, away from the path, up a rocky outcropping and from there vault over for the small, scraggly pine, using your weight and accumulated momentum to bend the branch you caught until it brought you to the point from which you could drop down in a controlled fall into the boughs of another pine, use that branch to spring over to the next tree, and so on, from tree to bush to rock, until, finally, you find yourself at your destination, on the ground below the hill, a trek that should have taken you a good couple of hours, condensed down into a thrilling fifteen minute of exercise.

Of course, once the time came for you to get back up the hill, you were stuck with the regular path, but time saved was time earned, however you look at it.

Now, where to go look for the adventurers?

Their town was clear across the zone from you, more or less, and anyway, you were not stupid enough to expose yourself to those numbers. Going there would be tantamount to suicide.

No, what you needed was a place where you could lay out an ambush, pick out one or two.

Where to hunt...

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