Encounter

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A same message came on top of every one's devices, which also arrived yesterday at the same time.

"Rey, are we really attacking them?? Isn't it more rational to just pass them without making ourselves known!!"

Jim was not in the team of 'Rey's plan is good', he was the only one who thought that the risk was bigger than the reward.

In the morning, Rey iterated his plans to take down the red hyenas, blood hounds and the 'One Eyed Jaguar' entirely once and for all.

After fighting the red hyenas for the entire night, Rey and his party had to take a longer route to enter the middle regions. But this route had much more difficulty than their previous route.

Even after changing the routes, this time the blood hound came himself with his large army of the hyenas. Rey went all out and started a massacre, the others too didn't held back. But as soon as the blood hound and the hyenas were killed, 4 blood hounds and a 'One Eyed Jaguar' appeared out of no where.

The blood hounds were all high E-Ranks and the Jaguar was a low D-Rank monster. Add to the fact that, all the members of Rey's party were exhausted.

Since the tables were turned upside-down by the sudden growth of power of the enemy, Rey made the call for run.

This constant running for two days made every single one of them frustrated. This led to the plan Rey made to destroy those beasts.

Rey wanted to kill all five of them and so was also the case for others, so they agreed readily. Except for the ever scared Jim, who still wasn't convinced of the plan.

Rey's plan was straight and simple. Rey will keep the Jaguar busy with himself and the other three would lead the four blood hounds to a ground filled with various traps set up by Natalie, and finish them of with the traps assistance.

The only thing that was lacking right now was the solution to the hyena problem. Hyenas were in the numbers of hundreds around the whole territory of the Jaguar.

'How to separate the five from the mobs of hyenas?'

That was the question.

"Do you guys have any idea on how to deal with those hyenas?" Rey asked his teammates for any ideas as he was not having any of them.

"No~" Natalie shook her head dejectedly.

"It's just not going to work! I am telling you all!" Jim started spraying his negativity once again.

"Oh God Please !!! Just shut up your damn negativity, Jim!"

"It's not called negativity, it is the reality!! Why don't you get it? The numbers of enemies is above four hundred in total, how can we cope up with those numbers? . . . . . . .And for the last time, I am not being negative, but rational!!"

And then started another argument between the two. This was their third time arguing in the last two days.

But there was one guy who stood silent behind the bickering of Natalie and Jim.

Kale stood their alone lost in his own thoughts. Rey noticed the lost Kale and asked him the same thing again,

"What do you say Kale?"

The sudden question brought Kale out of his thoughts and it also garnered the attention of Natalie and Jim.

"I think something can be done about the hyenas."

The other three broke out in excitement about the possible solution for their troubles. They gave Kale the center spot to talk his idea out.

"Hyenas are inherently are pulled towards a dead corpse. In fact their favorite meal is a freshly died corpse of a huge monster. If a very huge corpse of monster of say an E-Rank is to be placed in their territory then almost everyone of them will have at least a single bite from the corpse. What if we poison the corpse then??"

"Red hyenas are F-Rank monsters, so they will all die if they consume an E grade poison, which is what I exactly have with me."

Kale looked at everyone else to see and hear their responses, but

". . . ."

No one spoke anything, not even a single reaction was given to Kale's plan for a good minute. And then suddenly the three broke out into cheers.

Even Jim nodded in the approval of the Kale's idea.

But there was still one big question for the team,

'Where the hell will they find a giant monster inside this dense forest?'

"Rey, can you use your detection skill once again? It was so useful last time, you can use it to find a large monster, right?"

"Yeah, that's right! Let's leave the task of finding and killing a huge monster to Rey, and we will split our task of creating the perfect trap battlefield among ourselves." Jim gave a suggestion out of nowhere.

It was weird that the guy who opposed the whole thing from the start, was now actively taking part in the division of the tasks. Also it was rather one-sided distribution.

Rey was given a huge task compared to the others and when he was just about raise his voice for an argument, both Natalie and Kale started applauding Jim for his wonderful distribution and to how fairly he had done the distribution.

"Hey! this is not done. Why am I tasked with the tedious task of finding and hunting the monster. And why you lot get to set mere traps on ground?"

"Listen Rey, we have no choice but to give that task to you. Only you have the detection skill and you are strong enough to take on any E-Rank monster by yourself. Even if something goes wrong, you can deal with it yourself. And as for our tasks, there is nothing else to do beside that!"

"You understand, right?" Jim spoke all the reasons behind his distribution of the tasks and tried to make Rey understand his point of view.

In the end, the group decided to follow Jim's advice and they separated in two units. One consisted of Rey alone and the other one with Kale, Natalie and Jim.

**Rey's POV**

"F**k that Jim! I know he was coming back at me for rejecting his almost all opinions." I was angry at them but at the same time agreed with their reasons.

'It's just so annoying to be on the losing end!!'

~Sigh~

Actually, I don't even have a detection skill. All the things I said earlier were lies. At that time I was taking the help of Jerry's Essence detection ability, and I disguised it as a detection skill in front of them.

'Jerry! You know what happened right?'

[ As always, You come to me for only this type of tasks, huh! ]

'Hey, Now don't be like that. Please help me, please!!'

[ I already did a scan all around for this area and unfortunately, you have no luck here! Go to a new location for me to scan there. ]

'And there he goes off once again.'

"Hmm. . . A new location, I came from the eastern side and the northern side is the way to the inner regions while the southern side is the outer regions, So. . . .Let's go to the west!!"

After a constant running for the past 1 hour, I entered a pretty deep inside the western area. The topology didn't change that much from the previous area, but there was still a pretty different feeling in this area.

It felt like something was staring at me, but there was nothing around me. Not a single living soul existed in the nearby region. I confirmed it again with Jerry's scan, and still there was nothing to be found.

'Why does it feel so uneasy to be here?'

At that moment, a slight movement was detected by my senses and I quickly ran towards the noise.

"Students?"

This was the first time I saw the students after passing through the outer regions. There were a total of four. Two girls and two boys, and there was something else lying in the back.

Since it was quite far, I couldn't see the exact things but could only see things vaguely. There was some kind of argument going on between the girl and the rest three. The girl was crying non stop and kneeling on the ground.

"This does not feel right!"

I quickly started moving towards them and when I reached a reasonable distance, an utterly ridiculous scene unfolded before my eyes.

The girl who was crying and kneeling was suddenly decapitated by the other girl with her sword.

"Murder.....!"