The Second day is over!

**Elliott's POV**

'The rank of the Orc lord was low D-Rank, so I thought that taking it head on would be somewhat easy.....!'

"How wrong I was, . . . . Hyaaahh!!"

The Orc lord swung his giant blade at me and almost made me lost my footing while deflecting the shot.

"Foolish human! You dare think of something else while fighting meee!" Despite his raged tone of words, his face and body was anything but.

This was the result of the artifact he was wearing.

The Crown of Orcs.

This type of artifact belongs to each and every race. They are known as the 'Crown Artifact'. The leader of the entire race owns such artifacts and it is usually divided into multiple small artifacts, which is then distributed to all the important members of the race.

The distributed artifacts are generally in the ranks of E-D, while the whole combined artifact goes up to B-S grade.

This is the second way of collecting powerful artifacts, that is by slaughtering a whole race or just by collecting all the smaller artifacts. This piece of information was known much later in time.

Only after a decade from now, the existence of the intelligent monsters who set up their own whole kingdoms, were became known to humanity. The monster islands and the open dungeon islands in the ocean that were left untouched, became various territories of different monster races. In these large number of races, there were 8 that stood above all.

These races were called 8 supreme monster races. The rest were directly or indirectly part of these eight, with some special exceptions. In the decade where these races kept quite, they were actually solving their internal conflicts among themselves for ten years.

After all the races of monsters were united under the eight supreme, they made their existence known to the humans. A huge shock was given to humanity when the monsters arrived for the negotiations. They wanted a trade between them and humans, for their various needs which won't be fulfilled within island masses. In return, all the dungeons opening in their territory will be closed by the monster tribes. This included the very difficult open island dungeons. And also a lot of knowledge and various raw materials.

This was a very good deal for humans, so they readily agreed.

But it was found out later that, three out of eight supreme powers were already colluding with the demons. They were all secretly reviving the lost powers of the demons.

In the end, for all the good intentions of the remaining ones, they were all corrupted by the demons and had a major civil war between them. The humans did sided with the uncorrupted monsters but as soon as the victory was achieved, humanity betrayed the weakened monsters who were allies.

After another war, all the monsters were wiped out from the face of Solaris. But it left two things for humanity.

Abundant of Crown Artifacts and all types of materials for weapons and armors. And the now reawakened demons.

Though the decision of betraying the monster race gave us huge benefits in terms of our strengths and also a lot of power boost with really powerful artifacts, the reawakened demons still defeated the humanity's strongest alliance force.

'This time, I have to do something which will make the existence of monster races and the vast monster territories known to the world much sooner. And hope to get rid of all the traitors who helped the demons.'

'Speaking of the traitors. . . . . . . . the Supreme race that the Orc Emperor submitted to, was also a traitor.'

"Huh!...."

I was surprised as I saw the seen which unfolded before my eyes. The Orc Lord, who was having an upper hand in the fight till now, suddenly faltered and lost his balance completely.

"Haaahhh!!"

I clearly did not miss my chance and attacked with a powerful horizontal slash. The sword slashed through his stomach, cutting all the intestines within. Green blood poured out of the wound like a rainfall.

"Kuuuaaaarghhhhhh!!!. . . . . . Aaaaaaaa!!!"

The Orc lord gave out a loud cry from the unimaginable pain from the wound. And as expected, the Lord still wasn't on it's knees.

This time, I directly went for the chest. The Orc lord just managed to dodge the attack with the slight movement as he side stepped, but the stab at the chest was a feint from my side and all I was waiting for was the side step.

I changed the trajectory of my sword in mid air, and slit the throat of the Orc Lord. The fight was over.

'It was much difficult without using any essence....but what happened at the end there??'

As I was thinking about it, my party arrived at the spot where the dead Orc Lord laid.

Emily came forward towards the corpse and started searching for something. We all looked at her curiously, though I anticipated what she was looking for, And I was proven right. She was searching for non other than the part of 'crown artifact' and she found it.

"I knew it!! He was using the artifact to resist me. . . . . . . . . !" Emily hummed in a low voice, but I was able to hear it clearly.

'So it was her . . . . '

"What is that Emily?" I asked while looking somewhat confused, same as the others.

"It is an artifact that enables the user to counter all the taunts, insults and even mental attacks to some point. This also helps the user to be calm, collected and make rational decision at all times. It's a very useful artifact in times of a huge battle."

Emily was very excited holding the artifact, her eyes were shining brightly as if the artifact was a jackpot for her. To be honest, I wanted to take the artifact from her for my own plans, but now it seems to be a bit difficult after seeing her this happy.

As I was looking at the blue gem, Emily and my eyes met, and she somewhat understood my intention without any words.

She came forward and stretched her little hands forward towards me with the blue gem in her hands. Her head was slightly down, I could see her blushing a little. She opened up her hands fully, and the blue gem was resting on her fair little palm.

'No matter how I look at it. . . .she is letting me take it, right?'

"Can I really take it?" I asked just to confirm.

"..."

She did not respond but only nodded slightly. I took the artifact off her hands and placed it in my storage space. I was really thankful for Emily's gesture.

"Thank you so much, Emily!"

"It's alright, leader!" She replied with a hint of red on her cheeks. Her index fingers of both hand were crashing into each other.

'Is this the legendary state, 'being someone's crush'? Does Emily has a crush on 'ME'? If it is true then I have to stop her quickly!'

"Hmm?" I remembered something.

"Why are you guys so quite?"

I asked the other ladies on my team. Since the beginning they were all extremely quiet, even I completely forgot about them as I was only thinking about the artifact and Emily. Usually, they wouldn't even let me talk and bombard me with their own chatter, but right now it was too weird to see all of them so quite.

Hearing my question, they all were startled as the topic of conversation suddenly shifted to them. Even Emily looked at the other three.

"N-Nothing! We are good, right? We also took care of those goons of his!"

"Yeah, that's right! We just didn't wanted to come into your conversation.."

"You seemed busy!"

Somia, Amisha and Juhie all said their reasons for keeping quiet. It really smelled fishy to me, as it was pretty obvious from their awkward faces. Even Emily was oblivious to their reactions.

There were two reasons for their awkward reactions which Elliott and Emily were oblivious to. The first being the utter shocking and gruesomeness they all saw from the girl before them and the second was the clear approach of her towards Elliott.

They all had a thing for Elliott now, so looking at the previous scene in front of their eyes, they felt some tingling in their hearts and their expression changed while talking to Elliott suddenly.

"We should hurry and loot all the food stock from the Orc Lords Mansion, before anyone else notices something." Amisha said with an urgency in her voice. She quickly wanted to come out of the spotlight.

"Alright, let's hurry up!"

Seeing the attention was lifted from them successfully, Juhie and Somia gave a big thumps up to Amisha.

They began their journey towards the Orc Lord's mansion and after taking away all the food stock from his house, Elliott's party spend their night in the previous shed once again.

And like that the second day of the camp passed.