The Primal Hunter

Jake still remembered the day he got the skill. It was the signature skill of his first proper class and had been damn awesome when he initially got it. He got a bit nostalgic when he remembered bombarding that massive Storm Elemental atop the cloud continent with Hawkie. The orb from that kill had even helped give birth to Sylphie. To say that the skill had been important would be an understatement… which is why it was just a shame to see the sorry state it was in these days.

[Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter (Rare)] - The signature skill of the Ambitious Hunter: An arrow to strike down a fated foe in a single shot. Grants the skill to summon a powerful arrow designed to strike down a specific foe. The Hunter must envision his foe and, with great focus, channel all of his desire to slay it to summon the arrow. The arrow summoned deals significantly greater damage to the envisioned target while ineffective on anything else. Damage increased further based on level disparity. Adds a small bonus to the effects of Agility, Strength, and Perception when using Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter

Yeah, looking at it, the fact he hadn’t upgraded it yet was just downright shameful. Even at rare after the downgrade from the evolution, the skill was still pretty powerful, but it also had some severe drawbacks. First of all, it only worked against the designated target, and while he didn’t think he could or necessarily even wanted to get rid of this level of specialization, it did suck that it was also ineffective against barriers or someone just throwing a big rock at it. He had gotten around the barrier problem by always shooting it with Arcane Powershot and having the destructive arcane energy sticking to the arrow break the barrier before the arrow could physically strike it, but that wasn’t exactly optimal.

This was naturally only the start of the improvements he made.

He meditated as he pondered on the issue and began to form a proper plan in his head. After about a day and a few potions, Jake was back in peak condition and sadly had to delay his arrow-improvement plans a little bit. Before he could focus his attention solely on upgrading the skill, he had to be done with his other obligations, which included looting. That way he could work on the skill without feeling guilty. Thus he began to scour the ruined capital of the Enlightened Republic for anything useful he or his party members could potentially use.

Jake was pretty sure there would be, considering his Pulse of Perception revealed several hidden underground chambers throughout the once-large city. He even found people within some of them, all acting like the entire city above them hadn’t just been razed to the ground a day earlier. Having to begin somewhere, he started out with these occupied chambers first. He quickly discovered all of them were quite nicely sealed and blocked out pretty much everything going on above ground, including sound.

Within half a day, he went through all of them and found only natives within every single one besides one that had served as a bunker for Otherworlders to seek refuge. There were eleven of them in there, and, well, their fates didn’t really have to be described. Neither did the fates of the natives, many of whom had been down there as experimental subjects. Subjects who – based on the journals and recordings he stumbled upon – were often tortured and involved in fucked-up experiments, yet never had any reactions. They didn’t even need to keep them trapped, as they just followed the order of not leaving without permission.

None of these rooms with what was effectively just a bunch of slaves interested him, and the records on how they had experimented on the natives there less so. Turning his attention to the other rooms without people in them, he finally found an interesting one directly below where the Lord Protector’s spire had been. It was pretty obvious in hindsight, and once he broke in, he found a large archive. Looking through it briefly, he quickly noticed a small safe with magical locks placed on it.

After a bit of tinkering, he thanked his beloved Puzzle Box for the practice before he unraveled the locks and opened the safe. Within, he found just a single journal simply named Dark Witch. He took out the journal and began flipping through the pages as he quickly got a good idea of what he was dealing with.

The Dark Witch was apparently the official name they had decided for the former leader of the fourth faction. Probably because she used dark magic based on the descriptions in the book, but also because she aimed to spread “corruption and chaos” throughout Tri-World, and thus had to be purged.

Most of the content of the journal was just boring history about the fourth faction and how a bunch of Otherworlders who also wanted to get rid of the Karmic Plague had gathered there. The truly interesting part came toward the end after a far too self-gratifying section about how awesome the Lord Protector had been during this entire conflict.

“Defeating the Dark Witch proved a strenuous task, but with the unification of those who saw her corrupted ideology, we managed to end her evil reign and burned the capital of her fledgling faction to the ground. However, even if we defeated her, ending her life proved difficult, but we firmly believe that the fight left her crippled as she fled underground. May the monsters down there consume her, so she can at least give something back to the now-renamed Tri-World. Note: Do keep the area under observation, especially the entrance to the cavern system she fled into.

Update: Recent data suggest the witch still lives even a decade after the fall of her faction. Designate area as a no-go zone.

influence of the witch has spread more than we hoped. Diving into the cavern system is an option, but too risky. Erecting countermeasures using other means is heavily advised. I

successfully deployed. We decided to enter the cave system and discovered what she was trying to do, but we managed to stop her by sealing away a treasure of corruption she

read the journal and was about to contact his party

three Living Seals to unseal the “treasure of corruption” brought to Tri-World by the Dark Witch. Warning: doing this will make it impossible to escape Tri-World with the assistance of

Progress: Living Seals

Seals were honestly pretty self-explanatory, as they were seals

communicated through the Golden Mark after Jake was done explaining the rest of

extra objective is indeed of

you think she will prove hostile or amicable when we make contact?” Dina asked. As she and Sylphie were heading

left behind before she was fully infected by the plague, with her maybe being a boss guarding it or something. Either way, proceed

you remain confident

Sylphie stays with you,

“Ree!”

of Dina for the rest of us,” Jake chuckled a bit to himself. The other four continued talking a bit, primarily out of boredom, as they were all just

scan of the ruined capital city before flying

the Ambitious Hunter. Something it would

any of those directly. No, instead, he wanted to solely focus on adding onto the basic properties of the skill while only ridding it of

started, and he began with the most straightforward improvement. Jake was an arcane hunter, through and through, yet his Ambitious Arrow didn’t have a hint of arcane energy to it. That was definitely something he wanted to touch upon and improve. However, he didn’t just want to do

wanted to improve upon right away for his idea to even work, and one of those was the rule of how the arrow couldn’t hit anything that wasn’t the target. He didn’t need it to be an arrow that would hit everyone equally, but just the option for it still to harm targets it wasn’t specifically made for. Even if it wasn’t

the forest, Jake began to look around for any beasts and quickly found a few D-grades lurking about. They were good enough, and Jake got practicing. He started experimenting by summoning arrow after arrow while he focused on them while moving towards the improvements he wanted. This also quickly revealed another of the “bad” things about the skill now only being rare: it was too

from choosing different targets to constantly summoning arrows for the same D-grade – a goat of some kind - repeatedly while feeling for slight changes. On the third day, he managed to create an arrow that he then promptly used to kill another D-grade than his initial target, proving that the strict requirement for only working on the targeted foe was gone. The only reason it had only taken so long was that he wanted to ensure the skill wouldn’t lose any efficiency in the process, and luckily it hadn’t. In fact, it had overall gotten slightly more power from

day

a simple bolt that looked straight off a small ballista, with runic carvings covering the shaft. This was all pretty standard, and one only truly saw the changes when looking at the arrowhead. It was slightly larger than normal and had the hue of Jake’s arcane mana. If one looked really closely,

dodge. He carefully observed its effect when it hit. The stable arcane energy covering the tip of the arrowhead pierced into the goat like a true physical arrow – something Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter usually didn’t – and a flood of destructive arcane energy came out. However, rather than simply exploding, it rode the curtails of the true Ambitious Arrow