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.

wasn’t entirely due to some altruistic intent from the multiverse’s major factions. Sure, there probably was

small planets belonging to a major faction, chances are the faction would retaliate in kind but with more force to not appear weak. So they would send a few B-grades and blow up even more planets… only for the first faction to then send A-grades before finally a bunch of gods are going around wiping out all life in galaxies. This kind of “war” would have no end and only lead

instead far more accepted to just send the first group of C-grades after another group of C-grades. Then they could fight, and the only “fair” retaliation would be something similar, making

was also viewed as safer. In Villy’s words, most gods or even just very high-grade people were fucking cowards. They didn’t dare to fight others around 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 a tournament with A-grades or a war with C-grades, all while setting rules to make

if some random A-grade had once been born there or maybe some god

to pass the final step and become a Godking. Two thousand years later, two S-grades were fighting and ended up accidentally destroying the planet, resulting in the Godking descending in the middle of the fight to destroy both of them for their transgression. He had then proceeded to wipe out both factions the S-grades were leaders of for good measure

because they had ruined a

or you could piss someone off unintentionally. That, and it

didn’t blow up any asteroids. No, they were more than overpowered 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

life. Life meant plants. Plants meant Dina could also ask a damn forest that had existed for tens of thousands of years about stuff, and it would know, while sometimes even asking its friends, resulting in their fastest asteroid clearing – including getting a

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

while learning the lesson that going full murderhobo on a

what to expect. What more rules

forty-four ended up feeling kind of… personal for

about how valued large groups of weaker people were and how one should leave

spread all throughout. Both below the water, on the water, and floating up in the sky. Each island had its own little ecosystem and was covered by some kind of barrier keeping all the creatures inside. New monster variants had

Identified as a level 250 Researcher but, based on Jake’s senses, was actually far more

of value to the multiverse as they represented new and growing Records. A

many powerful people appearing there resulted in massive growth potential even for the average Earthling. People who could never reach C-grade

and sometimes a more powerful variant than both of them would emerge. Adding new variants thus mattered a lot to some factions, even to the gods. This was naturally something Jake was very well aware of, considering his status as a so-called “Harbinger

making a variant on floor forty-four. The Primal Juice or whatever was far too

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 around, you would leave it alone. If you did want to get rid of it, one could always just send someone around their own level, at least allowing the

variants and taking notes, with the Researcher then deciding if the observed beast or monster was considered rare enough to

just killing them

but to be aware that some creature variants were to be killed