The Primal Hunter

Nevermore was a place where the publicly available information was far from scarce, yet there were still some unknowns.

Nobody knew exactly how many floors there even were in the C-grade version – or those who did couldn’t or wouldn’t tell – meaning for most of the individuals fighting for spots on the Leaderboards, it was just assumed they would never hit a limit. At least not a limit of floors.

The only limit they would hit was the limit of their own abilities and the 50-year time limit. A time limit that many had tried to circumvent through the ages but was upheld by one simple design choice:

It just counted the age of your Truesoul using dungeon-fuckery.

This meant that should one enter Nevermore in C-grade, be in there for ten years, and then leave again, the time wouldn’t stop ticking for the Leaderboard positions.

Now, this is where one truly had to separate the early C-grades that all entered below level 210 and aimed for positions on the Leaderboards and those who were simply in C-grade and did the mega-dungeon at whatever level or pace they so desired.

The people that aimed for the Leaderboards would do best if they spent all of their time within Nevermore, never leaving for fifty years. For the people that didn’t care about the Leaderboards, they truly had no reason to stay the entire duration in one go.

It was also well-known that only the top few percent of the Leaderboards would get any rewards. This meant many gave up after realizing they were falling too far behind and just left Nevermore for a time to do something else.

The total time one could stay in Nevermore remained the same, but every second spent outside of the dungeon was a year wasted when it came to competing on the leaderboards. To those who didn’t care, it didn’t matter. They could be in Nevermore for ten years, leave for twenty, and then do the remaining forty years if they so desired.

If someone competing on the Leaderboards did that, they would do Nevermore for ten years, leave for twenty, and then once they came back, they would only have twenty more years to rack up Nevermore Points. After that, they would still have twenty more years to just do floors, gain levels, do Challenge Dungeons, and whatnot, but they would have already had their final Leaderboards evaluation.

One couldn’t cheat with time dilation either, even if they wanted. You couldn’t enter Nevermore, do ten years, and then leave for another ten years in Realtime, where you actually spent two-hundred years in a time chamber. The cut-off was based on your own personal time, not Realtime or Nevermore’s time.

In many ways, the most important thing for those aiming for high spots on the Leaderboards was time. Optimizing time meant more floors could be done. Of course, in order to do more floors, one also needed the power to actually complete them, even as things would begin to get more dangerous. Naturally, the levels one gained doing the lower floors would also help one go further, meaning leveling speed was also considered semi-important.

However, one often-forgotten power on the scale of importance was the ability to cheese stuff. The ability to totally ruin how a floor was supposed to proceed to the advantage of the Nevermore attendees.

Jake’s party was in a very unique situation, for they had everything. Especially the ability to cheese stuff, which they happily used whenever they could, and they were all eager to proceed after doing floor forty-five faster than any floor prior.

The city floor after floor forty-five was quite a bustling place, but Jake and company quickly moved through after checking the Leaderboards, where they saw they had once more lost the top spot but were only a few thousand points behind the point leader.

Proceeding to floor forty-six, they found themselves on yet another open-ended floor taking place on a large planet. However, this time there was no lesson to be found, and their job was as simple as could be: Slay the Four Beast Kings. Four powerful C-grade beasts each ruled a part of the planet. To do this, they would choose to enlist the help of the large kingdom they initially spawned within, with a bonus objective given pushing them towards enlisting in the military and influencing them to mobilize and take down the Beast Kings.

This was the long solution.

Jake and company picked the fast one.

They split up into two groups, each headed toward a territory ruled by a Beast King. These territories were filled with countless beasts serving their king, and many powerful ones served as mini-bosses that aimed to impede them on their paths toward the lair of the Beast King. All four Beast Kings were apparently in the process of consuming powerful treasures that were the source of their powers and didn’t wish to be disturbed.

They got disturbed.

Group one consisted of Dina, the Sword Saint, and Fallen King, while Sylphie and Jake acted as the second group. The power between the two groups turned out to be rather equal, and not just because of Jake, who was particularly well-suited against high-level beasts, but because of the little hawk with him. She was the highest-leveled one in their group, after all.

Besides, if Jake and Sylphie did end up needing help, Jake could always summon the Fallen King using his mask.

Ultimately, that didn’t turn out to be necessary, at least not for the first Beast King.

After taking out a few annoying pests that tried to get in their way, they finally made it to the lair of the first Beast King on their list. Despite being the northern part of the planet, the place was a huge mud-filled swamp as far as the eye could see, and within a small crevice was what looked like a meteorite with a massive beast lying right next to it.

[Beast King of the North – lvl 290]

The Beast King looked a bit like a hippo but had six legs and parts of its body covered in scales. It was half-submerged in the swamp water, with only the back above the surface, forcing Jake to strain his eyes a bit to see its full form beneath the muddy water. It looked to be more than eight meters long and was bulky as hell.

It hadn’t noticed them, and Sylphie seemed excited to attack when Jake stopped her.

“Sylphie… I have been waiting for a chance like this for over a year,” he said in a serious tone. “Please… let me have this one.”

The hawk looked at him for a moment before nodding solemnly, understanding his pain.

“Thank you,” Jake smiled.

He and Sylphie were floating far up in the air, and when Jake got permission, they flew even further up. They went above several layers of clouds before Jake stopped, feeling the mana in the air begin to act up as they were getting too close to what he assumed was the system version of the stratosphere.

A stable platform of arcane mana appeared below his feet as he held out his hand. A thin string of conceptual energy gathered, forming the faint outline of an arrow as a stable film of arcane energy surrounding it.

When everything was as it should, he hardened the stable energy further and picked his poison. Because Jake wasn’t going to pour destructive arcane energy into the second layer of this Protean Arrow this time… he was going to pour in pure poison.

Considering the size of the beast, using the Sleeping Night wasn’t a good idea, and he didn’t wanna test any of his curse-aligned poisons, so he went with some good old Necrotic Poison. That seemed to always get the job done against flesh and blood lifeforms when all else failed.

After that, he carefully finished the arrow, even adding in a bit of his familiarity with this kind of beast. While it wasn’t as good as if he actually studied the beast, some things were just general for all mammal-looking monsters.

“Ree?” Sylphie asked as she looked at the finished arrow.

“Yeah, it’s a real beauty,” Jake smiled. It was more than a meter and a half long and looked like a mix of black and purple due to the sheer quantity of poison within it. Something Jake had learned quite a bit ago was that his blood did indeed count as a “form of energy” he could pour into the Protean Arrow, and he was getting close to becoming able to use crafted poison too.

Alas, for now, he would just have to give the final product a good coating. A coating of even more Necrotic Poison.

Jake stood there with the arrow floating in front of him as he carefully observed the Beast King. He felt the conceptual energy slowly build up as he found a weak spot without any scales on the back of the hippo monster he was going to aim for. As for what was building up? It was naturally his Hunting Momentum.

It wasn’t much, but it was honest work and definitely worth pouring in.

“Now let’s see what this bad boy can do,” Jake smiled as he took the arrow. He had poured in more than ten percent of his mana and just over twenty percent of his total stamina into this one arrow. He had high expectations.

Nocking the arrow, he took a deep breath as he unleashed his energy.

Arcane Awakening jumped to 60% immediately, his perception of time slowed down as he pulled back the string, and his body exploded with power from a mix of Arcane Awakening and Arcane Powershot.

Sylphie made distance as the area of over a dozen meters around Jake took on a pink-purple hue as energy crackled in the air. Arcane Powershot charged slowly as the energy built up within both Jake and his bow. Soon, ten seconds passed as the crackling in his surroundings became stronger, space itself slightly starting to distort closest to him.

At fifteen seconds, he felt the energies begin to reach their zenith. He knew that soon his arm and shoulder would give out. It was time.

In a massive explosion of arcane energy, he loosed the arrow.

Jake faintly felt something in his arm snap the moment he released the arrow as it fell limply to his side, but he only gritted his teeth from the pain as he focused his attention solely on the descending arrow.

The air itself in the arrow’s way was torn apart as a trail of pure destruction as a vacuum of energy was left in its wake as it flew with ever-increasing speed down towards the still-unsuspecting hippo below. It was an arrow that encapsulated everything he had.

Arcane Awakening.

Arcane Powershot.

Big Game Hunter.

Superior Stealth Attack.

Hunter’s Mark.

Along with his passive Archery bonus, bonus from his bow, and of course, his newly obtained Arcane Supremacy just boosting everything even further. All poured into a single arrow:

Protean Arrow of Avaricious Horizons.

Soon, the arrow broke through the final cloud layer, scattering the entire cloud in the process. This finally made those on the ground aware of what was coming.

The Beast King reacted as its eyes opened wide… though Jake wasn’t going to make it easy for it.

Gaze of the Apex Hunter.

It froze physically, but a torrent of muddy water still flew up to block the impending arrow. The Beast King barely had time to create a small barrier as the arrow pierced straight through, assisted by Umblemished Arrows.

The final defense of the Beast King was broken, and it only barely became able to move the second the arrow struck right between two large plates of scales. It pierced straight through the tough hide of the hippo-like beast as the entire swamp exploded, sending water splashing up several kilometers as a crater was formed from the impact.

From this far up, Jake couldn’t hear the roar of pain, but he would imagine it… moreover, he felt the response from his Hunter’s Mark.

Absolutely massive damage.

Yet the beast wasn’t entirely dead.

Flinching from the pain, he forcefully moved his injured arm as he switched hands, holding the bow in the injured arm and drawing with the still good one. He shot down another arrow and only a hundred meters below him, it exploded, releasing a rain of hundreds of smaller arrows, as he deployed an Arcane Arrow Rain.

He repeated this a few more times as he let it rain.

However… before his Arcane Arrow Rain even reached the ground, he got a notification.

*You have slain [Beast King of the North – lvl 290] – Bonus experience earned for killing an enemy above your level*

*’DING!’ Class: [Arcane Hunter of Horizon’s Edge] has reached level 233 - Stat points allocated, +50 Free Points*

*’DING!’ Race: [Human (C)] has reached level 233 - Stat points allocated, +45 Free Points*

Jake was about to loose another shot when he the notification informing him that the Beast King was dead, having succumbed to Necrotic Poison. He stopped mid-action as a wide grin formed on his lips.

I still got it.

It felt like it was so long ago doing something like this. Killing a boss-tier beast more than fifty levels above his own. And damn, did it feel good. He had to admit that he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to pull something like this off again as he proceeded through the grades, but it was good to see it was still an option.

Also… he was pretty damn sure he was the only one in his party who could pull something like this off. Because the arrow he had just released was the strongest attack that any of them had performed in all of Nevermore so far, even surpassing a Glimpse of Spring from the Sword Saint by quite a margin.

Compounding passive skills was truly an overpowered approach.

Wanting to go down and check the result of his attack, he, with a mental command, quickly made all the arrows falling toward the ground explode, as there was no need to cause further destruction.

Flying down with Sylphie in tow, he quickly reached the ground and saw the fallout. The Beast King had a hole more than one and a half meters in diameter through its back, with a massive crater formed right beneath it. At least he estimated the hole to be about one and a half meters on impact… because, by now, it was far larger as the flesh had rotted around it.

The entire beast gave off a powerful energy of pure death from the sheer potency and dose of Necrotic Poison Jake had dosed it with. It was as dead as dead could be, with a look of indignation in its eyes as its kingly reign had been before it could even realize what had truly happened.

“Ree?” Sylphie asked as she looked at the corpse.

“Yeah, it was a good opponent for me,” Jake smiled. Slow, unaware, relatively unprotected, weak to his poison, high level, so a lot of bonuses counted, and he even got a massive damage bonus due to the distance… yep, the circumstances had been borderline perfect.

“Ree.”

“Only if the next Beast King survives my initial attack… if not, you can have fun with the other beasts in the territory.”

“Ree…”

“I know they aren’t as fun, but hey, you can always hope the next Beast King is a lot more durable or maybe able to dodge the arrow,” Jake tried to comfort the sad bird. “Who knows? Maybe it will survive my attack and put up a good fight even while injured, in which case you can have it all by yourself.

Spoiler warning:

It didn’t put up a good fight after the first shot.

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