It turned out that hunting with Hunter was a definite step up from hunting alone.
With his wolf and hawk, I only had to spend a little mana each fight. The bigger surprise was that his arrows could not be recovered afterward, so he often fought lower-level monsters here with an axe instead.
Apparently arrows were a controversial topic in the hunter world in general.
"So wait," I say, flinging a bolt of mana at the front left leg of a charging wolf, "you spend fifty copper per arrow?"
"Yeah." He sidesteps the beast as it stumbles, helped along by the fact that my spell had already thrown off its charge, then swings his axe into its side. "I don't settle for the cheap stuff."
"That's a lot of money, though. Is there no middle ground?"
Iggy, Hunter's wolf, takes the opening and locks his jaws around the other wolf's hind leg, making any counterattack a lot harder as Hunter's axe comes down again and bites into its neck.
"There is," he says, already crouching to skin the creature out of habit, "but why would I settle for subpar? The cost is worth it, and I'd rather rely on my axe anyway."
Then he glances up at me.
"Wait, wasn't this yours to skin?"
"Yeah, but don't worry about it." I pull the nearly finished map from my inventory. "We don't have much left."
"That's good. I want to get back before it gets dark."
"We'll see about that," I say. "If this thing is all the way across the region, we might be out of luck on that plan."
"Fair."
He stands and looks around.
"Just a bit more west, right?"
"Northwest."
"Alright."
He starts walking that way, and I follow, taking a lemonade from my inventory as I go.
A few more minutes are all I need before the map is finished.
"Yep," I say. "That's the last of it. Just sit tight for a while."
Hunter nods and rests against a tree, petting Iggy while letting Falk play scout overhead.
I place the map on the ground and start building the locating spell.
It requires me to imagine my mana spreading thinly across the entire area represented on the map, searching through it like a second set of senses. It is not an easy process, and it takes at least another ten minutes.
That was just the part I could measure afterward.
When casting magic on this scale, I have to shut out everything else and focus completely on one thing. That makes it risky.
Still, it works.
A scorched mark appears on the map.
"It's in the mountains," I say. "I think we're looking for a cave. I'll be useless if we take the fight right away."
"Mana?"
"Mhm."
"Well, we can camp out here for the night. That's fine."
He pulls a boar fillet meal from his inventory and starts eating.
"You camp out here?" I ask, taking out a bowl of stew of my own.
"Sometimes. I'm not the biggest fan of the city. It's too small for the number of people living there."
"Yeah, that's fair."
Not much more conversation happens that night. After eating, we both settle down to sleep and let Iggy and Falk keep watch for us.
Nothing in this area ever really roams outside its path, but some of those paths are large enough that it can feel like they do.
One thing that catches me off guard before sleeping is Iggy's eyes.
They are real.
Or maybe he is real is the better way to put it.
That is what surprises me most. At one point, he had to have been just some random level ten wolf in The Meadow. Now he is clearly more than that.
That raises too many questions to deal with tonight.
I hate to admit it, but there is something genuinely eerie about this region, enough that even I feel it.
Even knowing, logically, that I am probably fine and that most of the horror here is meant to be atmosphere, it still makes sleep harder to come by.
Not hard enough, though.
I still end up sleeping late into the next morning.
"You awake finally?" Hunter asks.
He is sitting nearby, eating a very good-looking salad.
"Mhm. You really spent the inventory space on two different foods?" I say, stretching a bit before pulling out another stew.
"Yeah. I got a bag-crafting recipe for leatherworking off the auction house."
"Ah. How much?"
"Twenty silver. But I sell bags for five silver each, so it turned a profit quick."
"Fair enough. I don't check the auction house as much as I should."
"Check it more often, trust me. The lower-level people are desperate for money and sell some really good stuff cheap."
I shrug.
"Yeah, I'll look."
It is a little depressing to hear, but at the end of the day they need money and I have money. It is not like I am exploiting them.
"You ready to go?" I ask, finishing my stew.
"You eat too quick, man. But sure."
He drops the rest of his food on the ground.
Food here is not scarce. To level Cooking at all, people have to make hundreds of meals, so the market is already saturated.
Still, seeing him waste it bothers me a little.
"So," he says, "I'll have Falk look for promising caves."
"Mhm."
It does not take long before Falk returns with good news, pecking at a spot on my map.
It is close to the burned mark from the spell, which is a good sign.
Better yet, it is only about a two-hour walk away.
The time passes quickly. Even though we do not talk much, the silence never turns awkward.
Once the quest is done, it is obvious we will probably go our separate ways, but that does not make this a pointless grouping.
Hunter and I are clearly alike in one important way.
We both prefer being alone.
So, instead of asking for something more permanent, I borrow a page from Sheral's book.
I send him a friend request.
[Friend Request Accepted]
By the time we reach the cave, it is obvious the system has ramped up the realism here.
This is not amusement-park horror anymore. It feels more like walking into an actual haunted house.
The air is stale and reeks of rot.
It is enough to make me want to gag, though not enough to actually do it.
Blood stains the walls of the cave, and somehow the inside is lit even though there are no visible torches or lanterns. We still cannot see very far in, though, because the tunnel bends sharply to the right.
"Something feels wrong about this, Hunter," I say, stopping before I take another step inside.
"Go on?"
He stops too.
"Your animals. They're clearly real. Or at least real enough. That proves the system can turn things into actual beings."
"Okay. What about it?"
"I think this elite will be the same way. It'll probably have some level of intelligence. Maybe not a lot, but at least something like the necromancer."
"Okay, well, if we need to run, I'll stay behind. It's my quest after all."
"That's not what I'm talking about," I say. "I just mean we shouldn't expect the usual braindead strategies to work."
"Alright. Didn't plan on it, but okay."
He shrugs off the advice a little more than I would like.
I give him a quick eye roll, which feels like too little, but it will have to do.
Then we start walking into the blood-stained cave.