Spirit Conductor

The flash of the human silhouette was of course Shira Yashura.

He dashed cautiously forwards the gorilla and sent a light slash with his short sword. After that, he swiftly escaped like a jumping frightened rabbit.

“RWAAAARGGHHH!”

The gorilla beast furiously turned and chased the human brat. Yet, it still couldn’t even catch his shadow.

Shira steadied his breath after he was able to shake away the chasing of the enraged beast. He sneakily entered the concealed bushes once again. He waited, while feeling at the same time light tremors from the ground. It was after he drank a cold, yet warming stamina potion, that Shira decided to check out the situation and skillfully climb a wet, tall tree near him.

From the tree branches, Shira could see how pitiful the beast was. The light slash he gave it was not too deep, yet fresh blood was leaking nonstop from the wound.

Shira observed carefully, narrowing his eyes. He didn’t want to miss a single detail of this.

Thirty or forty seconds have pa.s.sed. Even with the distance, Shira could easily tell that the wound was closed. Shira took out a handy notebook from his pocket to write his a.n.a.lysis with a short, wooden writing stick that Good-Natured Spirit called pencils. Later, his small notebook soon filled with fast and sloppy handwritings about the duration, effectiveness and strategies he could use with "Open Wound" attack-type skill.

He didn’t know, if he could bring the head of the gorilla back to Badril Village, everyone would hail him as a young hero.

But he didn’t plan to do so. “It was harder than I thought,” that was what he said to himself.

Shira wasn’t a hardworking youth after all. He did a little math. Humans could die if he loses almost half of his blood in his bodies, which took two to four hours or more, so he guessed large beast was the same. He had to cast hundreds of times the ‘Open Wound’ in order to achieve that.

In addition to the effort, how much of stamina and mana potions that he needed to consume in order to fight hours of guerrilla battle?

Like h.e.l.l he would do it just for the ugly-faced gorilla.

Well, at least Shira had learned a lot about the three attack-type skills. He even felt proud of how pragmatic and efficient he was. He obtained knowledge with a little effort, while the truth was all of it happened to be just excuses he told himself to justify his slothfulness.

“It was a hard day,” he told himself again. The day getting dark. Now, it was time to eat and sleep.

Shira still could hear the gorilla’s rage half of a mile away, but he didn’t care a bit. All he did was happily setting a small and clumsily-made tent, starting a bonfire and then making some snake meat stew for dinner.

It was strange for the annoying spirit not showing up around this hour, as he would usually spout some nonsense or sentences full of dirty words to pick on the lazy youth.

Before his dinner was done, two silhouettes of human youth stepped out from the darkness.

“Hey, we have some mushrooms here. Can we use your cooking pot later?” asked Pilek with a reluctant face.

Shira gave the two youth a short glance, shrugged his shoulder and said with a carefree tone: “five silvers.”

Pilek let out an unsatisfied grunt. The other young man, Polio, didn’t say anything and threw to Shira some silver coins.

After he was done with the cooking, Shira poured his stew into a small wooden bowl and ate without minding his guests. Polio mumbled something when he picked the small, hot cooking pot. It couldn’t even be considered a cooking pot—just a tiny metal container, which one could easily carry around on his belt.

“You were smart to escape the gorilla beast when you had the chance,” Polio said all of the sudden.

“I’m not escaping,” Shira replied while shook his head.

“Do you know what it means to enrage the gorilla beast around this mountain?”

“No. Is it bad?”

“Very.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

Polio put a leisure sitting pose and said, “ten silver coins.”

Shira frowned. It didn’t matter if this was then, but now, he already offended the gorilla. Ten silver coins could be considered cheap to buy some warnings.

After Polio accepted the coins, he narrated something about the elite monster of Badril Mountain.

There’s some gorilla clan that resided here and became some kinds of overlord since decades ago. The gorilla clan was a direct subordinate of the Forest King, who built his own beast kingdom at the forest behind Badril Mountain. They always followed the Forest King orders, but decrees didn’t happen often. So most of the time, they do and act as they wish. All the beast clans were very arrogant towards the human, especially the musclehead-type like gorilla beast.

Late at night, three of them went to sleep. Pilek and Polio slept with only dry leaves as beds. While Shira entered his own small tent.

He didn’t have a good sleep the entire night, as he was anxious that the young men outside would prank him like they usually did when he was young. But the night was calm. The only sounds could be heard was distant crickets’ noise deep in the woods. Later, when he opened his eyes in the morning, the youth found that his two guests were gone somewhere.

The sun getting high and brighter hours after that, and Shira packed his own things into traveling bags of his.

He wanted to continue hunting today, but realized his own experience point didn’t have any signs of progress even after he killed two beasts stronger than his own peers. People didn’t call him trash for no reason. Shira could only let out a sigh. In the end, he decided to take a stroll around the mountain and pick any berries or herbs he can find along the ways.

The first interesting thing he found that day was a life-and-death battle between mountain beasts and a party of hot-blooded youths.

Shira climbed a tall tree and watched the battle unnoticed from above, while occasionally leisurely chew sweet berries as his morning snacks. He recalled his memories, and found some familiar faces he didn’t see for years when he glanced at the battling youths. Back then, Shira always followed around his cousin Mila Yashura whenever she went to play around with a bunch of older kids. If he was lucky, the kids would allow him to play with them, but most of the time he just got pranked. Shira Yashura never liked them, but he didn’t hate them either, as he recalled some kind-mannered village girls also were in the battling party.

From the conversations of the party that Shira overheard, the youths below were totally screwed. One of them provoked a high-leveled wolf and out of seven people in the group, only two recently obtained their own cla.s.ses. They couldn’t overrun the swift wolf beasts and knew their chances of survival lied in their ability to bluff and scare the beasts.

The oldest youth in the party was a hardworking and reliable young man, he always hated incompetent people his entire life.

However now, seeing his own party members fight with their lives hanging by a thread, all he could do is blamed himself and his incompetence. It took two hours for the party to repel the beasts, but one of his members was dying in order to achieve that.

“Don’t close your eyes, Pandy, you will survive!” yelled a panicked member and held the hand of dying youth tightly as he could.

“Please, let me go home…”

The party fell silent as they heard the dying member’s last wish. They already closed his wounds yet the blood loss was too much for him to handle.

“s.h.i.t! If only I knew this would happen! I will buy health potion as much as I can!” the party leader was so furious at himself that he started to strike an innocent tree with the strongest punch in his life.

Then, suddenly, the party leader saw a falling silhouette from the tree he punched, followed by a pained grunt of a human youth. The party leader gawked, then proceed to check the bushes where the silhouette fell. He didn’t see anyone there. Yet, his whole body trembled, as his eyes glued to a gla.s.s of health potion lying on the ground.

“Thank you! Thank you, whoever you are! I will repay your kindness if I can find you someday!”

The party leader kowtowed three times in the bushes before he picked up the health potion and save his party member’s life.

On the other place, Shira was hissed and rubbed his hurt b.u.t.tocks while strolled around to another place. He walked for another twenty minutes, until he reached a fork-like path that could lead to two different places.

He didn’t know where he wanted to go, so he decided to randomly choose his path.

However, the Good-Natured Spirit appeared out of the blue.

“Ol’ Spirit, where did you go before?”

Good-Natured Spirit didn’t answer his questions. Instead, he grinned suspiciously and pointed a particular path with his thumb.

“Brat, do you want to go to some ‘secret’ waterfall of young pretty girls? Come this way!”

Shira narrowed his eyes at the shameless spirit. He took three seconds glances towards the suspicious pathway, then proceed to walk toward the opposite path.

“Brat! Where do you want to go?! You s.h.i.tty-s.h.i.t brat! That road is filled with mortal dangers!”

But the ‘road that was filled with mortal dangers’ turned out to be the safest and most quiet path Shira encountered. Even animals that live here were harmless and cute like racc.o.o.ns and bunnies.

On the way, Shira found a lot of herbs and edible mushrooms. He even picked some rare type of berry that could be sold at a high price on the market. The youth immediately got curious after he found the gems of the mountain and decided to explore further. After an hour, he found a lot of nice things, which made him consider to descend the mountain before dark today.

He walked back, but somehow lost his own track.

After circled around, he entered a field of colorful flowers somewhere in the mountain.

And there he saw a lone young girl happily picked pretty flowers without a care in the world.

Shira Yashura didn’t know why, but, he suddenly found himself cutting through the walls of colorful flowers, slowly approached the girl.

“Hey, you’re not from here, are you? What’s your name?”

The girl seemed surprised when she saw a youth approached her. And instead of answering, she swiftly ran as fast as she could and rang a noisy bell that she held along the way.

Shira was speechless, and found that he felt embarra.s.sed by the strange event. He decided to search for a way back home after that. But when he turned his body, he suddenly noticed something felt wrong that brought gooseb.u.mps on his neck.

He turned his head again, and saw a bunch of hostile magical projectiles fly toward him.

“Wha—”

Booom! Booooom! Boooooom!

Outside the flower field, a fierce cold girl narrowed her eyes and put down her recently used bow back to her back.

“Sis Bhela, why did you shot your own fiancé?”

“Why did you rang the bell?” Bhela Malikh asked back. “Did he hurt you somewhere?”

“Eeeeh?” Lyla Blackwood didn’t know how to answer her own mistake. Because of that, she decided to throw herself into Bhela’s embrace, hugging the cold girl tightly and put an innocent face complete with the big and cute round eyes of hers.

Bhela could only give the girl a faint smile and said, “mmm, it’s not your fault. Next time, please ring the bell only if you were in a real dangerous situation, okay?”

Lyla Blackwood nodded happily. And then they went away somewhere and acted like nothing had happened.

In the already destroyed flower field, the messy clothed Shira Yashura crawled back from a hole with a face full of dirt.

He felt wronged…

Today, for some reason, he tasted the full powered attack of the rumored, most unique Cla.s.s of Tiramikal Continent!

“What… what did I do wrong?”