During one of the fights within the Scavenger Hunt, three contestants were facing off against a thunderbolt tiger, which was a 3-star monster. Like the name suggested, it’s a monster resembling a tiger but with its stripes in the shape of thunderbolts instead of the usual straight lines. Plus, its coat was in the color of yellow instead of orange and it was at least two to three times bigger than a regular tiger. All in all, it was a formidable beast to face against—one that even three fully equipped adventurers might have trouble dealing with.
Currently, the three contestants were surrounding the tiger in an attempt to slay it and obtain its runes. Each was equipped with a different set of weapons—one with a sword and shield, one with dual-wielding axes, and one with a spear. As each of them continued to attack it with a series of strikes while simultaneously keeping a safe distance from it, the tiger would occasionally retaliate with a couple of swings of its own with its sharp, massive claws.
As the tiger fought back, it would let out a thundering roar as it emitted sparks of yellow electricity from its body. Some of these sparks managed to travel back to its human attackers through electrical conduction as soon as their mostly metal weapons made contact with the beast’s body. Because of this, each melee attack by the contestants would result in a small electric shock in return, which only added to the difficulty of engaging the monster at close range.
“Come on! Why is it taking so long?!” one of the contestants in this particular trio—the one with the spear—yelled. “This is just a 3-star monster! We should have killed it and grabbed its runes by now!”
“I cannot land a killing blow on it!” another contestant—the one with the sword and shield—responded. “Every time we tried to get close, it zaps us with its lightning. Not to mention that it’s a very large tiger! One good swipe from it and we’re pretty much dead!”
“We need to fall back and regroup!” the contestant with the spear suggested. “Hit it with long-range attacks instead! I’ve got a crossbow in my arsenal—”
All of a sudden, the thunderbolt tiger opened its mouth wide and fired a blast of yellow lightning right at one of the contestants—the one with dual-wielding axes. As the lightning coursed through his body, it basically cooked him from the inside, causing him to become partially charred as thin trails of smoke whiffed off of him. While the lightning blast was powerful, it was not enough to completely kill him. Even so, that didn’t matter as the tiger quickly followed up by tackling the axe-wielding contestant and began mauling him to death, finishing him off.
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“Wait, no!” the contestant with the spear cried out, horrified that one of his companions was now gone. With that said, he wasn’t actually dead, just faux-dead and therefore automatically eliminated from the competition.
Due to the implementation of the faux-health rune, the damage being done to bodies of the contestants during the trial were altered so that instead of spraying out red blood from their wounds, they were spraying out pink particles of light that bloomed and hovered in the air. Once the faux-health rune had determined a contestant to have sustained enough injuries to result in a theoretical death, the contestant would vanish from where he stood—disappearing into a mist of pink particles before reappearing in a special room along with the other eliminated contestants.
That was pretty much what happened to the contestant who had received that fatal mauling from the thunderbolt tiger.
“Aww, come on! Already?!” the contestant complained as soon as he was magically transported into the elimination room. As he reappeared, he already saw several other contestants standing around him, ones who had also sustained enough fatal injuries to be registered as dead and thus were eliminated from the competition as well.
Meanwhile, the other two contestants of the trio still remained, facing a 3-star thunderbolt tiger by themselves. Their original plan was to have three of them take out a 3-star monster in order to collect its three star runes to be shared by all three of them. However, they soon realized that this 3-star thunderbolt tiger was too strong even for them to handle.
Should they continue the fight and risk faux-dying themselves? Or should they cut their losses and make a run for it, then attempt to find and take down a 2-star monster instead? Can they even outrun this beast at this point?
However, before they could decide what to do next, the thunderbolt tiger lunged towards them, causing them to yell out of frightful terror. However, right as the beast was about to land its killing blow, someone leapt out from the bushes nearby and shot three arrows straight into its skull, killing it in an instant and saving the two contestants just in time.
That someone was none other than Idris.
