The Primal Hunter

Jake had a lot he wanted to test on the next floor, but sadly, he wasn’t really able to. At least not right away.

The forty-third floor was indeed another “lesson” from the Wyrmgod, but this one wasn’t as much about any hard rules as it was about a norm and something that was generally frowned upon. It was a message that if they decided to act in a way that many wouldn’t find acceptable, they could put themselves in a bad situation and make enemies unintentionally.

When they appeared on floor forty-three, they were on board a spaceship traveling toward a large asteroid belt, where each asteroid may as well have been a small planet. The story was that they were mercenaries in a vessel stranded in space after a battle with space pirates – yes, there were pirates on this floor again – and during this fight, the ship had gotten damaged.

Their job was to scour this asteroid belt for natural treasures that could be used to repair the ship, but after they arrived, they discovered that dangerous wanted people were also hiding out on these asteroids among the natives.

To further complicate things, these planets were filled to the brim with people of all sorts of races. Tens, if not hundreds of Billions of humans, beastfolk, demons, monsters, elves, dwarves… all sorts of races lived on these asteroids. The most powerful of which was only in D-grade. Outside of the criminals, that is, all of whom were firmly in C-grade.

Calling them criminals was honestly a bit… wrong? They were people who had pissed off major factions in a myriad of ways, some of which Jake deemed legitimate, others he found bullshit. For example, one of the criminals had purposefully created cursed weapons and armor and spread them to unsuspecting people, driving them insane and wiping out a huge kingdom by proxy. That guy was clearly an asshole, and Jake was all fine with stomping him.

However, there were also cases where the big bad criminal had done some rather basic stuff, just to the wrong people. One of them had killed someone with a Divine Blessing in self-defense and was now marked a heretic to be hunted down and killed on sight, and another had taken and consumed a natural treasure some kingdom totally had their eyes on first.

Now, this is where a bit of important context should be added… the spaceship wasn’t really one made for C-grades. In fact, the one controlling it was a mid-tier B-grade automata that had merged itself with the ship and, despite being damaged, could still harness the full weapons system of the ship.

This is to say, it had the ability to blow up smaller planets, or at least these asteroids.

The B-grade automata captain decided instantly that they should also investigate and eliminate the criminals, along with retrieving the items needed to repair the ship. Luckily they didn’t have to fully search the asteroids as the ship had a mobile scanner they could bring with them when going down on each asteroid.

So, to fully summarize, Jake and company had the job of investigating the asteroids for treasures to repair the ship using a scanner while at the same time identifying the C-grade criminals hidden there and eliminating them all. Locating these criminals was the hard part, and all they had to do to beat the floor was collect the treasures, and figuring out if a planet had any treasures wouldn’t take more than a few days for each.

Once it was decided there were no treasures, they could then decide to go back to the ship… and, to “optimize” their points per day, do a little bit of lying by telling the automata that the asteroid was filled with really bad criminals and to blow it up. That way, they could kill all the criminals there without bothering to find each one individually, only at the sacrifice of a few billion F, E, and D-grades.

This was one part of the moral lesson. Because while it was made clear that this was an option, it was also made clear this could be frowned upon. Killing billions to just take out a handful of potential targets wasn’t something any laws directly prohibited, but doing so wasn’t exactly looked kindly on either.

Not to say that actually eliminating the criminals on the asteroids was simple if one wanted to avoid collateral damage, even after they had identified them. A genius-level C-grade and a mid-tier C-grade fighting could wreak a lot of damage, something Jake had been a witness to during his visions of the Malefic Viper, so deciding to kill them also had to be done with caution to avoid widespread destruction.

Sure, there probably was a bit of moral thinking in there somewhere, but one of the predominant reasons was the fear of setting a

So they would send a few B-grades and blow up even

fight, and the only “fair” retaliation would be something similar, making it far less of a slaughter

their own level of power but instead preferred to settle matters through proxies. Rather than two gods fighting, they would rather compete in some other fashion, like setting up

have other unwanted implications. Karma was a powerful thing, and no one knew if some random A-grade had once been born there or maybe some god had recently just come by and

settled down there for a long time and meditated, finally breaking free from his worries which allowed him to pass the final step and become a Godking. Two thousand years later, two S-grades were fighting and ended up accidentally

ruined a nice

done haphazardly, or you could piss someone off unintentionally. That, and it was just a

enough by themselves to utterly cheese the floors. Jake had his wonderful Pulse of Perception and a powerful innate Bloodline-powered ability to sense auras, allowing him to know if an asteroid had any C-grades pretty damn quickly after stepping foot

naturally full of life. Life meant plants. Plants meant Dina could also ask a damn forest that had existed for tens of thousands of years about

spent flying between each of them. Jake got some good alchemy during this time and was gleefully experimenting with Curse Fragments whenever they had downtime. Sadly, there wasn’t a single time he had to go all-out during the entire floor, as the one time they did find a small asteroid just filled with criminals, Jake and Dina had already been sent off to two other asteroids nearby. The Fallen King, Sylphie, and Sword Saint had thus been the only ones to experience proper combat as they spent a week or so killing all the leaders of some criminal gang that had taken over the asteroid while also retrieving the

lesson that going full murderhobo on a bunch of E

honestly hadn’t known what to expect. What more rules

of… personal for Jake. For

valued large groups of weaker people were and how one should leave them alone as a general rule, floor forty-four was all about individual creatures one

had its own little ecosystem and was covered by some kind of barrier keeping all the creatures inside. New monster variants had begun appearing within these domes, with their job to pass on to the next floor being to find and identify at least two

Researcher but, based on Jake’s senses, was actually far more powerful than that. Not quite a god, but definitely A-grade. None of the

them in combat. The lesson from the Researcher was that all variants were of value to the multiverse as they represented new and growing Records. A single powerful variant appearing on

average Earthling. People who could never reach C-grade before had not set foot in the grade, and then those who likely could have gotten there themselves now

variants having a child would lead to a merge of their Records, and sometimes a more powerful variant than both of them would emerge. Adding new variants thus mattered a lot to some factions,

by making a variant on floor forty-four. The Primal Juice or whatever was far too valuable and not something

all of this is to say that a lot of factions would get royally pissed if someone went around killing weak variants for no reason. It was generally considered customary that if you, as a C-grade, saw a lower-grade variant running

massive domes all over ten thousand kilometers in diameter and categorizing variants and taking notes, with the Researcher

them outright,

be aware that some creature variants were to be