The three boars charged through the forest, crashing through trees like a runaway rig through paper. Axl ran, the healing potion stored in [Gastric Cauldron] struggling to stabilize the three tusks embedded in his arms and back. Moxlin was stuck to his shoulder, pouring a healing potion on the wounds from the outside to help, but the effect was minimal.

  It was a rude awakening, his rising out of the rift feeling like an immortal motherfucker, and the first early F-grade creature he attacked quickly proving to be largely immune to poison and quite adept at ranged attacks Axl had a hard time dealing with. Then the boar got reinforcements, and Axl decided to go for his nuclear option, finding in the worst possible moment that [Attuned Drill Strike] failed to activate.

  The only option left was to run, lucky that his Agility was above that of the creatures chasing after him. He slowly gained distance with the occasional empowerment of [Mana Shroud] to boost his speed at the expense of some bodily injury. Nearly an hour after his ill-fated attack, he sensed the boars slowing down substantially, then hesitantly turned back.

  Axl kept going for another few minutes just to be safe, then ducked into the hollow of a fallen tree as Moxlin set up an illusion and detection talisman perimeter. Without a word, he drank his last health potion and slowly dug out the tusks from his body. Each was unbelievably heavy, dense with a bone-related Mana that was both incredibly tough and entirely resistant to the centipede's poison.

  He'd felt so damn clever when he managed to recreate the poison, it feeling like a potent addition to his arsenal, able to coat it on his blade and his throwing stones. He should've realized that creatures daring to have their territory right next to a colony of poisonous centipedes would have some way to deal with that sort of poison. But it was even worse than that.

  "I feel like my body is moving much less well," he said to Moxlin, his need to address the problem overcoming his embarrassment at the situation. "Like I took a dip in my Attributes or something."

  "Yeah, I noticed that, I felt it odd that when you left the rift. You were moving more slowly, but thought you were doing that on purpose for some reason. I'm not a fighter after all, so I didn't realize that was weird. You really didn't notice?"

  "Not only that, but my Attuned Drill Strike skill failed to even happen again, and I'm not sure why."

  Moxlin's eyes widened, her legs curling close to her body. "That… That's super scary! It was already hard to believe you couldn't activate it when you first got it, but it breaking like this… I've never heard of this sort of thing being possible! Are you sure you're not still poisoned in some way?"

  Axl shook his head, about to disagree, but then he paused. That was an F-Grade rift after all, maybe there was some lingering damage that he just couldn't detect, being in the G-Grade? Or maybe something else was the problem? He managed to first activate the Skill with some strange, indescribable sense of rightness he got when Moxlin decided to join him, and maybe that was just a temporary thing that ran out?

  Still, he'd just been almost killed by an early F-grade creature, and regardless of what caused his new weakened state, it starkly meant his fighting posture was well below what it needed to be to survive in the Shrouded Crescent. He groaned to himself, realizing he likely had to do something well before he really felt ready.

  "I think we need to go to that longhouse place," he said.

  Moxlin exhaled in relief. "Whew! I thought I'd have to yell at you for a while until you agreed to that. They have a healer after all."

  "So they say, at least."

  "Yeah, yeah," Moxlin rolled her eyes. "I know you're trying to be sneaky clever like mommy, but it's a thousand years too soon for you to do that."

  "Fair enough," he muttered, his latest defeat making that fact blindingly clear.

  They stayed hidden for the night, Axl carefully monitoring his body, as he found himself unable to sleep. He managed to largely heal himself by morning, three blood-stained tusks in his dimensional pouch a grim reminder of his weakness.

  Before heading out, he redrew [Mind-Soul Bulwark], expanding the neat cube of mental protection around his soul into an octahedron. He then checked the dimensional ring he'd found in the dead orc, finding it able to be opened. He looked inside and found a much larger space than in Olkan's, a cube five meters large at each side. It was largely empty, however, dominated mostly by mundane stuff: a bedroll and some camping gear to a side, food and water that didn’t look special, and a large closet with clothing clearly to be worn under heavy armor.

  The rest of the stuff was the real windfall, however. There were five shortswords and shields to one corner in neat racks, all in the F-Grade, and one set of heavy armor meant to cover the entire body in dull red metal. There were also twenty F-Grade natural treasures in small boxes, all of them emitting a bloody feeling. A set of pouches was also on a small table next to the gear, holding bright blue coins of three sizes neatly organized by size, currency of some sort that Roken was unfamiliar with.

  "Ohh," Moxlin stared at one of the natural treasures he brought out. "I guess this is congealed bloodlust."

  Axl stared at the shriveled claw before him with [Mana Shroud]. "I can't see any Mana in it, even if it's interacting oddly with ambient Mana."

  She nodded. "Bloodlust is a type of Intent. It's different than Mana, but I don't know much about it, to be honest. An old boyfriend of mine pursued a related form of Intent, but it made him super weird. Like the things that he wanted me to do to his boy hole got—"

  "Okay, got it," Axl shot up, eager to derail the conversation. "Off we go to the longhouse!"

  "Yay!" Moxlin jumped back to his shoulder, pointing forward with a determined foreleg. "To social adventure!"

  Axl ignored that she was pointing in the wrong direction, and he started towards the actual direction of the longhouse. He came to truly appreciate his enhanced sense of direction, no doubt courtesy of his mental Attributes, which provided him almost a mental map of the area he'd visited so far. Nothing like what Nox implanted in him in the caves, but more than enough to keep him from getting turned around.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  He briefly tried to use one of the orc's shortswords, but it was too heavy for him, the shape wrong in his hand compared to his [Webcutter], so he put it back into the orc's ring and hid the ring back on his boot. After all, flashing a dead comrade's stuff at their camp might give the other orcs the wrong idea, so he wanted to see what the situation there was like before doing anything with this new loot.

  They progressed slowly, largely so Axl could avoid any more boars, and luckily, their Perception was rather poor. He also encountered two other types of creatures, one a large frog that constantly emitted a booming croaking sound, and another a stick-like insect that looked almost identical to the forest's spectral trees. He avoided all of them and thus took another full day and night to reach another sign pointing to the longhouse, and another several hours before he noticed a pair of Orcs nearby.

  Axl thanked his high Luck stat, since this encounter let him skip his plan's step of skirting the edges of the encampment to find small pockets of Orcs before stumbling into the large group. After a few minutes of preparation, he enacted the plan he and Moxlin had come up with for this occasion.

  Stumbling and with shaking legs, he stepped out from the forest, his armor torn and blood-soaked. The two orcs turned to look at him, first the shieldbearer in the back, followed quickly by the lightly armored one at the front. They drew their weapons, the scout a set of daggers, the backline orc a long spear that clearly came out of dimensional storage.

  "Oh, you one of the Longhouse guests?" The dagger-wielder at the front lowered his weapons. "I don't recognize you."

  "I just saw the sign," Axl said. "It said you had a healer?"

  "You sure do seem like you need it," the shield-bearer chuckled. "Bit off more than you could chew in the ground's grade, ey?"

  Axl nodded, that being not that far from the truth, in fact, but still annoyed the orc could so easily tell he was in the G-Grade. "I stumbled into a bad match for my build."

  The two orcs laughed, their weapons put away and body posture entirely relaxed.

  "I think more than the healer, you should see our trainer," the heavily armored orc smiled at him, his helm now also removed, showing a quite impressive under-bite with two large fangs over ash-grey skin. "Only a true novice would say something like that."

  "Also work on your use of Charisma," the scout said. "It's clear you're faking your injuries. Not a bad deception for the G-Grade, but almost everybody here is well beyond that."

  "Don't be such a stickler, Lokpar!" the armored orc slapped at his partner’s back. "Boy's clearly some overeager young talent only getting started. Oh! Now this is new, did you spend your every waking moment cursing the Deep System's mother or something? This quest is insane."

  The other orc grew tense, his daggers up again.

  "Lokpar, what are you doing?" the rear-guard Orc's spear was out, his armored bulk repositioning to shield Axl. "Kid's on the way to the longhouse, this isn't how we do things."

  "He's not there yet, Soffal—and as you said, this quest is too good to pass up."

  "That's not what I said."

  In a flash, Lokpar charged forward, jumping over Soffal's sweeping spear-strike, descending onto Axl, both daggers pointed to his neck.

  Axl stepped back, [Mana Shroud] flaring to empower his blade's speed as he unsheathed his sword, striking at the two daggers, the orc still midair.

  The force of the parry pushed Lokpar back, the orc's eyes widened in surprise. Axl didn't give him time to recover as he charged forward, [Mana Shroud] extending fully on his body to match the orc's higher Agility while also giving it additional heft.

  But the rogue adapted quickly, deftly parrying Axl's slash with one dagger, the second coming down to his face as he leapt into the air. Axl was still able to unbalance the orc slightly, so he had barely enough time to step back, the dagger narrowly avoiding his face.

  A spear erupted from Lokpar's chest, the orc slowly looking down. Deflated, he dropped his daggers to grab at the spear with an unsteady grip. Axl didn't hesitate and stepped forward to seamlessly decapitate the orc. A surge of Karmic Energy entered his body, quite a good deal more than he expected, in fact.

  The body fell, the shield-bearing orc behind him standing with a grim expression on his face, staring at Lokpar's body. Slowly, he extracted the spear from his former ally, and with a simple hand gesture, the body and severed head were gone, presumably into dimensional storage.

  "Let me walk you to our encampment," Soffal said. "Once you're properly announced as a guest, you won't see more of this unacceptable behavior. But I understand if you simply want to walk away, our longhouse disgraced by what happened here."

  Axl was half-inclined to do that, the outcome of this encounter not at all what he hoped for. Still, it was better than the worst-case scenario of every single one of the orcs eagerly attacking him. He turned to Moxlin, now on his shoulder again, then back to Soffal, who patiently waited for his decision. Axl grimaced as he realized he'd likely find the same problem at any other pocket of civilization he'd encounter, and at least with this one he had a guide that didn't seem willing to cash in.

  A few hours of mostly silent walking later, Soffal and Axl reached a clearing in the trees, before the base of a gentle hill. At the top of the hill was a perimeter of sharpened wooden stakes, forming a ring five meters tall, regular sentries standing guard over the edge. The four guards at the entrance turned to Soffal with surprise, but let him pass without saying a word, all pointedly ignoring Axl.

  Beyond the ring of stakes was a large open area, in the back a large building, clearly the eponymous longhouse. At the southern perimeter of the encampment were many small huts and houses, all labeled in Saptish with various services, Axl noting eagerly the one labeled as the healer's clinic. To the north was a large training ground, with only a spattering of buildings in the area that seemed of more solid construction than the artisan workshops. At the middle of the encampment was a stone wall, looking like a more permanent structure than the rest of the buildings, built with more rounded edges and aesthetic care than the surrounding, purely functional buildings. Sounds of metal on metal rang from within the central enclosure, the sound oddly reassuring.

  "I extend the invitation for Roken and Moxlin to join our Longhouse as guests," Soffal's voice boomed, the dozens of orcs milling about turning to look at him. "Do you accept my invitation?"

  "I do," Axl and Moxlin replied. Axl half expected some sort of notification, but there was nothing, and the orcs in the area returned to their business.

  Soffal breathed out in relief. "I need to report back on what Lokpar did. You may see the healer and take a bed at the Longhouse, the open ones have a white pillowcase, turn any one inside out to the blue side to mark it as in use. I will be in the training yard."

  "Thank you," Axl said to the retreating figure, who simply raised an arm back to him, as if too tired to say any more.

  "See?" Moxlin whispered to him. "I told you it would all work out just fine."

  Axl stared daggers down at her. "You call that fine?"

  Moxlin shrugged, so Axl just shook his head in disbelief and headed over to the healer.

  The hut was a simple building identical to the many others lining the encampment wall, each labeled with a hanging sign with Saptish and one other language that Roken didn't know, but he guessed must be Okkar, the shamanic orc language. A sign on the door said to knock before entering, also in the two languages. Axl did so, and soon a deep voice told them to come in.

  The small room within had a bed to the side and a desk, behind which sat a green-skinned elf with a flat, bulbous nose, thinning white hair, and a huge belly. It was easily the ugliest elf he or Roken's memories had ever seen.