novelnext Chapter 190: Modern Weapons can fix Magical Problems, right?
Chapter 190: Modern Weapons can fix Magical Problems, right?
Chapter 190: Modern Weapons can fix Magical Problems, right?
His Extreme Climbing skill got him back to the hole in about four seconds. He launched himself out of the ground and ran without looking back because looking back meant acknowledging what was down there and Eren’s brain had already decided it was filing that entire experience under "never happened."
He ran for about three hundred meters before he stopped and leaned against a tree and just breathed.
I will never walk near a dried streambed again. Ever. For any reason. If someone tells me there’s a legendary weapon at the bottom of a dried streambed I will tell them to go get it themselves and I’ll wait right here.
His hands were shaking but not from the fall. From the legs. All those legs moving in coordinated patterns across surfaces that shouldn’t support that much weight. Insects with fur on their legs shouldn’t exist and that’s not a thing that any reasonable ecosystem should produce. Hairy legs on a bug were a crime against nature and Eren was going to file a formal complaint with whatever entity had designed this planet.
He brushed something off his shoulder and flinched so hard he nearly punched the tree.
It was a leaf.
"I’m losing it.." he muttered and pushed himself off the tree.
That experience down there told him something he’d been avoiding since he arrived. He didn’t have the same survival instincts and emotional stability his Clone had built in one month of blood and desperation. The Clone fell into worse situations than a bug tunnel and kept moving without his heart trying to exit through his throat.
I need harder fights. And I need to figure out what the fuk is wrong with my exp bar.*
..
After the ant tunnel incident and a full week of zero experience from any kill, Eren was pretty sure the problem was the Totem.
His remembered his long hours of conversations with the village elders about what the Totem actually did. It wasn’t just a religious symbol or a cultural artifact - the Totem anchored the system’s functions in this region. Experience distribution, skill evolution triggers, spawn patterns for local wildlife. All of it flowed through the Totem.
And right now a wounded dragon was sleeping on top of that tree probably trying to eat or destroy it to conquer the area and make it her nest.
Whether the dragon had destroyed it, damaged it or just disrupted its connection to the wider system didn’t matter. The result was the same and the experience pipeline or some other thing was broken.
Damn Dragon..
He needed to test this theory though. If it was just him that couldn’t gain experience then maybe the problem was specific to his weird half-elf half-human biology. But if nobody could gain experience in this zone then the Totem was definitely the cause.
So he brought people.
He opened the portal in the flower garden where the old Dungeon of goblins used to be. Far enough from the dragon that his Apex Predator Awareness didn’t pick up its aura signature. The meadow had regrown fast after the Dungeon’s destruction with wildflowers and strange blue grass covering the old entrance.
Mel came through first with her daggers already drawn because Mel treated every portal transition as the opening scene of an action movie.
She was so corrupted by the modern Hollywood..
Rabbu-i followed and immediately crouched near the flowers, examining them with a focus that elves only showed around mana-rich plants. She was wearing her usual nothing-outfit which in the Evon forest context wasn’t even unusual.
Her crouching to the ground showed a heavenly view and Eren gulped but didn’t avert his eyes.
I’m not gay. Of course I will look at it.
Rosa stepped through holding the notebook she’d started carrying everywhere. She had a pen behind her ear and was already scribbling observations about the portal mechanics before both feet touched the ground.
Kalina was the last one Eren was thinking of using as an experiment of exp situation. She exited the portal, looked at the sky then at the meadow and said "this place worth a lot of real estate potantial.." which was the most Kalina thing anyone had ever said while entering an alien planet.
Her words made everyone smile and broke the tension in the air.
Thadric brought his own squad. He came through with Oldir, Nimbo and Toris. The wolves followed because Fury could sense the portal opening from across the farm and Rury refused to be left behind when she heard the word "hunting."
Over the next three hours they killed everything they could find.
Mel slaughtered a pair of vine crawlers with a gleeful aggression that made Eren genuinely question her psychological development. Thadric and Nimbo took down an armored beetle together. Oldir shot a Level 30 bird out of a tree with a bow he’d borrowed from the Earth. It was a modern compound bow and was too expensive for some reason. Eren didn’t dare to buy a second one after this single bow.
Two Thousand dollars for a bow was insane!
Even Rosa got a kill assist when her panicked rock throw actually connected with a stunned creature Eren had charmed but nobody gained a single point of experience.
Every notification came back the same way. 000%. Across all species and all levels and all kill methods. It felt like the entire zone was dead to them.
"It’s the Totem," Eren said while Mel wiped green blood off her daggers onto the grass. "The Totem anchors the system here. Without it working properly nothing in this region gives experience."
Thadric looked toward the northern treeline where the dragon’s mountain was hidden behind kilometers of forest. "Can we fix it?"
"Not with a dragon sleeping on it."
"So we kill the dragon," Mel said immediately.
Everyone looked at her.
"What?" She spun a dagger between her fingers. "You’re all thinking it."
"I’m thinking about lunch," Toris said.
Rury’s tail wagged. [I was also thinking about lunch. The beetle smelled good before we killed it.]
Fury pressed his nose against Eren’s leg. [The air here is wrong. It tastes thin.]
Eren scratched behind Fury’s ear and the wolf leaned into it. "That’s the mana field breaking down. Without the Totem regulating the flow this whole region is slowly losing energy density."
They had learned something valuable. Frustrating and depressing but valuable. The Totem’s function wasn’t just symbolic - it was the engine that made growth possible in this part of Aradne.
And I can’t touch it until I figure out what to do about a creature that roars hard enough to crack stone from three hundred meters away.
..
Today was March 1st.
Six months exactly since Eren had found the door in his apartment bathroom and stumbled barefoot and terrified into an elven forest.
His seventh month on this planet. Two hundred and sixteen elves depending on him across two worlds. A pregnant wife whose belly was just barely starting to round. His concubines at various stages of complicated. Two wolves who ate more than some families. A kobold refugee. A business partner and a weaponized parrot that wanted him to steal ten luck fruits from an army of centaurs.
He was twenty-five years old and still unemployed on Earth.
Happy six months to me..
He’d spent the morning walking the edge of the centaur territory. Not close enough to trigger patrols but close enough that his Observe skill and Apex Predator Awareness could map movement patterns.
What he saw wasn’t encouraging.
The centaurs moved in groups of twenty to forty, always armed with fire spears that they could materialize from thin air and always patrolling in overlapping patterns that left no gap wider than maybe two hundred meters. There were hundreds of them visible from his position on the ridge alone.
The Clone’s memories of this place were a month old now but the defense posture hadn’t relaxed at all. If anything it had gotten tighter with more patrols and more overlap. Whatever the Clone’s fruit-stealing raids had done to the centaurs’ security awareness it had made them permanently paranoid.
These things have Luck stats in the thousands. The Clone threw rocks and spears with homing abilities and they still missed because the targets’ Luck was warping probability itself. That’s not something I can out-skill.
He remembered the Clone’s final days. The desperate running and the traps that should have worked failing at the last second because something always went wrong. A thrown spear curving away from its target despite Calculated Arc’s aimbot function. A perfectly timed ambush ruined because a random creature happened to wander into the escape route at exactly the wrong moment.
Luck wasn’t just a stat in this world. It was a force that bent reality around the creature that had it. And the centaurs had more of it than almost anything else in this forest.
The Clone fought harder than Eren thought he himself would have fought in the same situation. Portal skill aside there wasn’t much separating the Original from the Copy in terms of raw capability. The Clone’s physical stats were lower but his instincts were sharper and his willingness to take insane risks was higher.
If it was me out there that day, alone, no portal..
He didn’t finish the thought.
His skills were built for single targets. Charm one enemy, shoot it, finish it while it’s confused. Against five centaurs that worked fine. Against fifty it was suicide. Against five hundred with Luck that bent arrows mid-flight? He’d need something that didn’t care about Luck at all.
Something that moved too fast for probability to redirect. Something that exploded on impact regardless of where the target’s magical fortune tried to push it.
"Drones worked on the orcs," he said quietly while watching a centaur patrol disappear into the tree line below the ridge. "Scared the hell out of them. But scaring isn’t killing."
He’d used the drones to harass orc camps weeks ago. Buzzing them at night, dropping small objects from above, creating confusion. It worked because orcs had never seen flying machines. But the centaurs were smarter and harder to panic.
But what about something that goes boom?
He turned the idea over in his head while walking back toward the portal point. A rocket-propelled grenade didn’t need to be accurate because the explosion radius covered the margin of error. A hand grenade tossed into a group didn’t need to hit anyone specific. Fragmentation didn’t care about Luck stats because when metal shrapnel flew in every direction from a central blast point there was nowhere for probability to redirect the target to.
How much does a bazooka cost on the black market?
He genuinely had no idea. He knew guns were available in Turkey through illegal channels because every country had those channels. But military-grade explosives? Rocket launchers? Grenades?
I hope it’s not expensive..
He had maybe ten thousand dollars of flexible money left after the farm expenses ate through most of Kalina’s initial investment. That was supposed to cover months of food and supplies for two hundred people.
Maybe I can find a cheaper option. What are those DIY firework things called? Or maybe just a lot of regular guns. How much does a hunting rifle cost legally?
His phone had no signal in the forest but he made a mental note to research Turkish firearms laws the moment he got back to the farm. Legal or not he needed something with range and explosive force that didn’t rely on a magical stat system that currently wasn’t giving him any experience anyway.
The centaurs had Luck. They had numbers. They had fire magic.
But they’d never seen a grenade before.
And honestly? Neither had Eren.
This is either going to be the smartest thing I’ve ever done or the last thing I ever do.
He opened the portal and stepped through to Earth where Selena was waiting with dinner and Emily was arguing with Mel about whose turn it was to use the laptop.
Some problems could wait until tomorrow. The weapons market wasn’t going anywhere.