247 Make the most of the system, please! part It took Ryu several failed attempts at sneaking up on magical beasts to realize that since there weren’t any trees or large rocks, he would be spotted from afar, but once he took notice he immediately shifted his approach.
The morning breeze hit him on the face as he ran across the wasteland, his now shoulder length hair waving in the air like a mane complimenting a vicious look like that of a predator. Thanks to his pathfinding skill he was now able to not leave any footprints behind and move faster, uncaring of being noticed by his prey.
>Zoan (Healthy)(magical beast)
The creature now in front of him looked like a red slender goat, with two horns above and another pair of horns under its chin. Its skin was of a brownish color and it didn’t have any hair. It had a slender appearance and a sickly look, but Ryu was desperate to replenish his energy and he was willing to hunt and eat anything that moved.
“Single strike!” Ryu yelled as he lunged forward with his pee shovel, yet the skill failed to activate giving the goat the first strike. A quick tackle left Ryu panting, but thanks to stone skin he didn’t receive much damage.
“Dammit, I don’t get it, why didn’t it activate!?” Ryu grunted. As if the system was replying directly to him, a message appeared in front of him.
>Failed to activate skill: Wrong weapon type.
“This is new! I didn’t know I could ask questions to the system!” Ryu said with a grin, excited to have unlocked a new system function, as he braced himself for the zoan next move.
When the goat charged forward, Ryu dodged skillfully and hit the goat like beast in the side, causing it little to no damage. Without a skill, the damage inflicted depended mostly in the weapon quality plus the wearer’s strength and the zoan had a thick skin. The feeling the hit produced gave Ryu the same feeling he got when he practiced blunt weapons against trees.
.....
It was a hard hit that transmitted a heavy pressure onto his wrist and to his weapon.
‘What was Bob’s skill? The one he used to launch a powerful hit. So far, I’ve only used Luke’s single strike because its faster and caused almost the same amount of damage that Bob did when using his warrior skill. System, what are Bob’s skills?’ Ryu thought, receiving a system message in response.
>List of Bob’s known skills:
Strength boost: increases strength temporarily
Iron strike: Single blow that increases damage according to strength
Overload: unknown
Taunt: unknown
Stone skin: incoming physical damage is spread evenly in a wider area. Gives additional defense against blunt and sharp weapons.
“This is amazing! Now I can now what skills I can possibly learn and...” Another tackle snapped Ryu out of his reverie. The zoan didn’t understand what was he doing nor did it care, this battle meant the difference between life and death for it while for Ryu it was nothing but a meal.
Food was in the top of Ryu’s priorities, but a breakthrough that big with the system could help him hunt more efficiently granting him access to a steady source of food.
The zoan took distance, ready to charge again towards Ryu, but this time he was ready.
“Strength boost! Ironstrike!” He yelled activating both skills. He didn’t know if it was necessary for him to actually shout the names of the skills, but after seeing Bob do it so many times he did it without even thinking.
Contrary to Luke’s skill, his weapon didn’t emit any light. Instead of mana accumulating on the weapon, he could feel it flowing towards his arms. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially considering the poor quality of Ryu’s weapon, but he was a bit disappointed because it meant it was nothing but a type of body strengthening.
While single strike would actively aim towards the closest enemy, Ironstrike was simply a powerful attack that spent part of his mana.
He couldn’t argue with the results, though, as his enemy was now lying in a pile of blood. The zoan was dead and Ryu stood victorious.
Without anything even remotely similar to a knife, Ryu was forced to remove the zoan’s horns to try and craft something similar to a shiv with them. Thanks to the strength boost provided by the skill he had previously activated, he was able to crack them with his pee shovel.
The two horns in the top of the zoan’s head were bigger and of a better quality, while those bellow looked like they had been overused and their tips were dull.
Because of the lack of firewood, Ryu didn’t have the need to drag the corpse to his camp and he simply sat down next to the corpse to craft the shivs. Filing the horns against each other seemed to work for a little while, but they were a lot harder on the inside than they were in the outside.
It took him a while to figure out that the reason the lower horns were dull was because the creature used them to dig food from the ground and they were a lot harder and rougher than the bigger ones. Instead of filing the bigger horns against each other, he used the lower ones like a grindstone making his task a lot easier.
The result were two small shivs that his analyze skill confirmed to be too weak to use in battle, but at least they were sharp enough to cut through the zoan’s skin allowing him to get his hands on some low quality meat.
>Lamb leg (tainted) raw piece of contaminated meat.
‘How could I forget to remove the mana crystal first!? I’m such an idiot!’ Ryu cursed inwardly.
Thankfully, he had only taken a single leg from the carcass, which meant that after finding and removing the mana crystal he would still be able to get three zoan legs.
Ryu took his time in searching for the crystal, using his shiv he performed a series of cuts where he thought it would be possible to find the crystal, but even after making a complete mess and dirtying his clothes with blood he was unable to find it.
Having food so close to him, yet being unable to eat it was more than Ryu’s mental state could endure. Although he had a nice meal the day before, it was merely enough to keep him going, it didn’t even replenish as much mana as he had spent making the water pit.
Ryu took a couple minutes to shout all the swear words he picked up from Luke’s vocabulary and only after venting he was able to calm down again.
Apparently, mana solidifies inside of magical beasts which means that their blood and meat and, once it reaches a certain limit, it accumulates enough to create a crystal. By removing the crystal, all the remaining mana will be absorbed into it, making the meat edible.
“That’s it!” Ryu used his mana sense allowing him to spot the mana crystal immediately. It was located in the zoan’s throat, it was as small as the crystals he took from the crabs but since its body was a lot bigger it would have been impossible to find it with the naked eye but thanks to his mana sense he was able to spot a shiny spot hidden inside the creature.
When he removed it, he was able to see how the mana flow of the dead creature converged into the crystal increasing its shine and, apparently, its size too. It was a change so minimal that Ryu could have missed it if he hadn’t been so focused on it.
When he finished butchering the creature Ryu ended up with the zoan’s untanned skin, it was a lot stronger than wolf fur but it couldn’t even be compared to megalania leather, but thanks to his high skill in leatherworking and butchering, the skin was removed with such precision that not a single inch was wasted. The amount of meat Ryu was able to gather from the creature wasn’t much, it was a small and slim magical beast after all.
That night Ryu found himself in front of the cooking pot, spending so much mana to heat it that he doubted he would be able to regain as much mana by consuming the meat than he spent cooking. But his disappointment didn’t last for long.
Although his hunger made him believe that he would be able to eat everything in one go, a single piece of meat was enough satisfy his hunger and a second one left him full and unable to move anymore.
He felt like his belly was about to burst and couldn’t keep himself from bursting every few minutes, he was also so sluggish that he thought he could fall asleep in any moment. Fearing that he might have been poisoned, he turned to the system to find an explanation.
Much to his surprise, the reason he was feeling weird had nothing to do with poison, but with the amount of food he had eaten and the speed at which he consumed it.
>Ryu (Healthy)(indigestion)
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