As Arthur and Lyra stepped out into the damp subterranean thoroughfare, a heavy commotion echoed behind them. Madame Vespera herself, flanked by dozens of hardened female mercenaries, lieutenants, and black-market traders, emerged from the underground sanctum to see him off. The crowd of rough, dangerous women parted respectfully, their eyes filled with shameless admiration and quiet awe as they watched the young man walk away.
"Don't forget your promise, my handsome king!" Vespera called out with a seductive, breathless smile, waving a gloved hand. "The entire underworld will be waiting for your return!"
Arthur didn't turn back, merely raising a single hand in a cool, dismissive gesture before continuing up the stone incline.
Walking beside him, Lyra's face burned with a dangerous mix of jealousy and fierce possessiveness. She pressed closer to Arthur's arm, glaring back at the crowd of women before looking up at him. They all see how incredible he is... but he chosen me to walk with him, she thought, her heart doing a frantic flip.
Using a portion of the silver coins Vespera had returned to him, Arthur stopped at a low-tier armory at the edge of the slum district. He purchased a basic, un-enchanted steel longsword, a pair of durable leather vambraces, and a sturdy traveling pack.
"Where are we going now, Arthur?" Lyra asked, her violet eyes wide as she watched him strap the blade to his waist with practiced efficiency.
"We need fluid capital," Arthur replied smoothly, checking the balance and weight of the steel. "To build an empire, one requires a substantial operating budget. The most direct path to immediate liquidity in this world is hunting monsters and harvesting high-grade mana cores."
Lyra's face paled instantly. "T-The wildlands?! Arthur, no! The dangerous forests outside the city gates are crawling with monstrous beasts! Even seasoned, fully equipped silver-rank adventurer parties die out there! Please... it's too dangerous!"
She grabbed his sleeve, her eyes brimming with sheer terror, desperate to stop him.
Arthur placed a reassuring hand over hers, his voice calm, firm, and absolute. "Trust me, Lyra. I am not going out there to die. I am going to collect resources."
Seeing the unshakeable resolve in his eyes, Lyra swallowed her panic. Though her knees trembled, her sharp intelligence quickly kicked in. She straightened her posture and tightened her pack. "Then... then I am coming with you. I won't let you go alone. I know how to process monster materials—I can skin hidings, extract core glands, and identify rare herbs."
"Good," Arthur smiled faintly. "Then you are my official logistics manager."
They passed through the massive, heavily guarded southern gates of the city, heading directly toward the Blackwood Forest—a treacherous, dense wilderness known to harbor lethal creatures.
The moment they crossed the treeline, the air grew cold, heavy, and thick with ambient magic. Shadows stretched long across the ancient, towering trees.
Lyra stayed glued to Arthur's side, hyper-ventilating at every snapped twig. "Arthur... the outer perimeter is where slimes and goblins hunt, but if we go deeper—"
SWOOSH.
A massive, razor-fanged Shadow-Stalker Wolf leaped from the thick brush, its crimson eyes locked onto Arthur's throat, moving at a speed imperceptible to normal humans.
Lyra gasped to scream, but before the sound could leave her throat, Arthur moved.
Without drawing his sword, Arthur flicked his wrist. A concentrated needle of compressed air—formed instantly through his perfected, chantless magic—drilled directly through the wolf's skull mid-air. The beast dropped instantly to the dirt floor, stone-dead without emitting a single growl.
Arthur didn't even slow his pace. He walked right past the corpse, his eyes scanning the horizon. "Efficient."
Lyra stood frozen, her jaw slack. A tier-two beast... killed in a microsecond without a spell casting circle?!
Realizing Arthur's terrifying power was on a completely different plane, Lyra's sharp mind took over. While Arthur strode forward effortlessly clearing a path, Lyra pulled out her skinning knife. With practiced, surprisingly nimble fingers, she expertly extracted the wolf's intact mana core, stripped its valuable shadow-fur pelt, and harvested its primary razor fangs.
As they pushed further into the forest, a rhythmic pattern emerged.
Group of toxic dire-horn vipers? Arthur swept his hand, incinerating their heads with pinpoint arc-lightning while preserving their valuable venom sacs.
A territorial pack of razor-claw bears? Arthur used a subtle, localized gravity spell to crush their movement, stepping forward to cleanly sever their necks with a single, elegant stroke of his steel sword.
Arthur effortlessly cleared every threat in his path, stepping over fallen beasts like a king walking through a quiet garden. Meanwhile, Lyra followed right behind, utilizing her brilliant memory and resourcefulness to harvest every single precious material, core, and rare medicinal herb they encountered, packing the surplus high-grade monster meat into enchanted preservation wrappings.
The forest grew increasingly quiet, the trees thicker, gnarled, and pulsing with dangerous, heavy mana. The light faded into a dim, violet haze.
"Arthur..." Lyra whispered, her voice trembling as she looked at the ancient runes glowing on the giant trees around them. "We've passed the outer and middle rings... we are entering the deepest part of the Blackwood. No human has ventured this far in decades."
Arthur stopped at the threshold of the deep zone, his gaze penetrating the misty dark ahead. A calm, ambitious smile touched his lips.
"That," Arthur said, resting his hand on his sword hilt, "is precisely why the highest-value assets are waiting inside."
The deep zone of the Blackwood Forest was a realm untamed by civilization. Ancient trees, thick as castle towers, stretched into a canopy so dense it choked out the sun, leaving only a surreal, violet bioluminescence pulsing from strange moss and glowing fungi. The ambient mana here was heavy and suffocating, pressing against their chests like dead weight.
Lyra's breath hitching was the only warning.
A deafening roar tore through the misty clearing—a sound so violent it shattered the surrounding silence and vibrated directly through their bones. The canopy exploded outward as massive, feathered wings beat the air, creating hurricane-force gales that snapped ancient branches like matchsticks.
Descending from the violet haze was a creature of myth: an Ancient Shadow-Gilded Griffin.
The beast was towering, twice the size of a war wagon. It possessed the razor-sharp beak and piercing golden eyes of a giant eagle, fused with the massive, corded muscle structure of a abyssal lion. Black and obsidian feathers covered its front half, shimmering with dark mana, while razor-like talons carved deep trenches into the earth as it slammed to the ground. A heavy, aura of terror radiated from its chest, where a pure, high-tier purple mana core pulsed visibly beneath its skin.
Lyra collapsed to her knees, paralyzed by the sheer pressure of an S-rank apex predator. "A... a Griffin..." she gasped, her voice choked with terror. "Arthur, run! It's an ancient calamitous beast! Even a battalion of royal knights can't—"
"Quiet, Lyra," Arthur interrupted softly. His voice was entirely devoid of panic.
The Griffin shrieked, opening its beak to release a localized beam of compressed shadow-fire directly at them. The jet of black flame tore through the forest, vaporizing solid stone boulders in its path.
Arthur didn't even draw his blade. Extending his left hand, he executed a complex, multi-layered spatial redirection spell—a formula he had restructured in his head while reading Vespera's grimoires. An invisible, mirrored barrier of distorted space materialized three feet before him. The black fire struck the barrier, bent harmlessly around its curve, and discharged into the sky above, illuminating the dark canopy in brilliant violet sparks.
The Griffin's golden eyes widened in primal shock. Before the beast could recalibrate, Arthur moved.
His body flickered, leaving a residual blur of blue mana static where he had been standing. Utilizing a localized weight-reduction gravity spell on his own frame, Arthur propelled himself upward, ascending twenty feet into the air in a fraction of a second.
He drew his basic steel longsword. To an ordinary fighter, a mundane steel blade would shatter against a Griffin's mana-infused feathers. But Arthur didn't rely on the weapon's metal—he used it as an ether-conductor. He poured his vast, boundless mana into the steel, compressing it until the blade burned with a blinding, white-hot edge of pure plasma.
The Griffin lashed out with a razor talon, fast enough to break the sound barrier.
Arthur parried mid-air. The plasma-coated steel cleaved through the monster's unbreakable talons with zero resistance. The beast shrieked in agony, flailing its massive wings to retreat into the clouds.
"You don't get to withdraw," Arthur stated coldly.
Mid-air, Arthur snapped his fingers. A massive circle of gravity magic locked onto the Griffin's body. The weight of ten thousand tons instantly slammed down onto the creature's back, forcing it out of the air and smashing its gigantic body into the dirt floor with a deafening CRASH.
As the dust settled, Arthur drifted down gracefully, landing lightly on the Griffin's thrashing neck. With a single, precise thrust, he drove his plasma-infused sword straight through the beast's skull, severing its brainstem instantly.
The titanic monster gave one final, shuddering gasp before going completely limp. Silence returned to the deep forest, broken only by the soft crackle of residual mana.
Lyra sat on the ground, her mind completely shattered by what she had just witnessed. An S-rank calamity beast—a terror capable of razing entire provinces—had been dismantled and slaughtered in less than sixty seconds by a nineteen-year-old boy wielding a cheap longsword.
Arthur casually withdrew his blade and wiped the glowing residue on a piece of cloth. He turned to her, his posture straight, his breath completely even.
"Lyra," Arthur called out gently. "Harvest team. It's time to work."
Shaking off her stupor, Lyra scrambled to her feet, her heart hammering against her ribs with pure, unadulterated devotion. She rushed to the corpse with her skinning tools. Together, they spent the next hour extracting priceless assets: the pristine, flawless S-rank purple mana core from its chest, fifty razor-sharp obsidian feathers capable of piercing heavy armor, two undamaged giant lion hides, and five hundred pounds of prime, mana-rich creature meat.
Packed with a fortune that surpassed the annual budget of a mid-sized noble house, Arthur slung the heavy, enchanted storage pack over his shoulder and offered his hand to Lyra.
"We have our startup capital," Arthur said, looking back toward the distant lights of the city horizon. "Let's go claim what belongs to us."
Lyra took his hand, holding it tight as they left the dark depths of the Blackwood Forest behind.
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