The Summoner is Going c243 Part 1
The time was 11:30 am.
There was a reason as to why we were taking things a bit slower.
Of course, we wanted to check the lighthouse.
But the three Mermaids were already doing their best in the area.
They managed to catch and kill some fish for us.
They weren’t monsters though, just normal fish.
In no time, we had fish, vegetables, and even some herbs to make a delicious pot of seafood.
A hot pot by the beach… It had a nice ring to it.
The hotpot didn’t have any miso in it, but that couldn’t be helped.
「By the way, what are we going to do after lunch?」
「I don’t want to do any hunting in this map, okay!?」
「Yes, I think it would be best to refrain from hunting here…」
Adele and Irina immediately answered my question in similar ways.
In the back, Hyodor excitedly nodded in agreement.
「To be honest, I wanted to do some hunting in the sea…」
「At the sea, huh…」
「Neither Adele nor Irina have enough underwater Summon Monsters for that to go efficiently though?」
「Ah, that’s true.」
Haruna and Konohana didn’t look so excited about it either.
Our past bad experiences with the S3E1 map only discouraged them even further.
Although another way of looking at it would be that we had all the prey to ourselves.
But if that was what we were looking for, it would be better to just keep grinding battles with pairs of Sphinx and Spinks in front of the Relay Portal at the southern end of the S5 map.
That would be better in a lot of ways
Yep, that was my intention.
「How about we head further south?」
「To the S4E1 map?」
Haruna looked deep in thought for a while.
No, maybe she was just going through the information on the forums?
「There’s no info on the place.」
「Well, even all of the information about S5 is coming from us, so I suppose that’s to be expected. Does that mean it’s probably not cleared yet?」
Everyone nodded at Konohana’s take on the situation.
That was probably what it meant.
Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the Union that cleared the S3E1 map had the same idea and was already clearing the S4E1 map as we were having the conversation.
「That’s a good idea!」
「We could get some extra bonus points from doing so too.」
Oh?
Irina sounded quite enthusiastic for once.
The reason behind that was probably the skill 【Speedcasting】.
I knew that Irina had been spending all of her Bonus Points on new magic skills, and even got the title of Spell Archive from it.
But…
It seemed like she did not have enough Bonus Points to get that essential skill called 【Speedcasting】.
Oh dear…
That must be painful.
「Would it be alright?」
I asked the question to Haruna, Konohana, and Hyodor, to confirm whether they were on board.
It looked like there were no objections.
Well, we did manage to clear the S5 Area Portal after all.
The only issue was that we had next to no prior information on the place.
Well, we just had to make do somehow.
「Alright, let’s head there on the ground.」
「Focus on mobility, huh… Not too much of a change.」
「Yep, true.」
I changed my Summon Monster team back to my previous team, one that was based around mobility.
I recalled Remus and summoned Zangetsu.
Although Adele and the others made some changes to their Summon Monsters, they all switched to a lineup prioritising mobility too.
The biggest change in their Summon Monster teams was the Orthros in Adele’s team.
Moving into the neighbouring map almost certainly meant having to deal with tougher monsters too.
It would be good to raise my fighting strength as much as possible.
On horseback, it would probably be possible to reach the boundary to the neighbouring map within three hours.
If we could dodge battles along the way, we would probably be able to cut down that time even more.
Well, that all depended on the terrain.
There was no way for us to know what would happen until we actually got there.
I guess we had no choice but to find things out firsthand.
Well then, let’s get going.
What measures did we have against the monsters in the map?
Avoid battles as much as possible.
Well, it was a simple strategy.
But I knew that even small changes in our stats would have drastic changes in the time spent for each battle. Knowing that, I spent the next few minutes focusing on casting enchant spells on myself.
Of course, the first spell was Physical Enchant: Wind.
Next was Physical Enchant: Fire and Physical Enchant: Earth.
And Gravity Mail too.
Intercepting the attacks from the Frigate Birds was probably impossible, but it would probably be easy to avoid most of the other monsters.
Well at least, that was the intention.
Avoid as many battles as possible and focus on running away from monsters.
If there were other players with us, I would consider kiting the monsters to finish them off later, but there were few other players on the map.
No, there were probably no other players on the map.
Besides the Frigate Birds, what other problems did we run into?
I found out that surprise attacks were quite common.
And the horses were an issue too.
Well, it didn’t really matter how many of them would try to chase us, I was only really concerned with the horses that would be fast enough to be able to catch up to us.
I thought that in that field, we would be alright.
I was naive.
We were certainly able to shake off most of the horses.
Only one horse, and one at a high level too, managed to catch up to us.
It would have been quite dangerous for us, had we not been focusing on casting strengthening spells on ourselves.
Amenofuchikoma Lv.7
Monster Enemy Target Enraged
Battle Position: Ground All Attribute Resistance
Just the look of it was quite scary.
It looked quite angry too.
But I wanted to think positively about it.
Maybe being targeted by this one horse meant that the other horses in the region would lose interest in us?
I decided to just be content with that conclusion.
「Don’t use any arrows! We can’t retrieve them anyway!」
『Okaaay!』
「But what are you going to do to shake off this horse?」
「We’ll use it as target practice for our attack spells!」
I didn’t want to get anywhere near that thing, after all.
I didn’t have to either, so I decided to dodge the extra risk.
I just had to think of it as a good practice target to shoot attack spells at.
My spells didn’t cause much damage, but over time, it would probably add up to a lot.
10 minutes passed uneventfully.
The horse was still tenaciously following us.
About 70% of its HP bar was still remaining.
What a persistent beast!
At the beginning, I was seriously striking it with every spell I had.
But it lasted so long that it started getting boring.
It didn’t even bother showing me even the slightest intention of dodging my spells.
I hadn’t missed a single shot.
After a while, I decided to switch up the spells I was using.
I switched to mainly using Force Bullet.
It would make the burden on my MP bar as easy as possible.
But…
I thought the low amount of damage would be a bother, but it ended up working in my favour.
I noticed it after shooting about 10 shots.
The decrease in its HP bar.
It wasn’t changing by much.
Before switching to Force Bullet, the last spell I used was Fire Ball.
It looked like the damage that both spells did to the horse was exactly the same.
「Just Force Bullet is fine, shoot it with that spell as much as you can!」
『Okay!』
『I’ll try…』
Everyone started shooting Force Bullets at the horse behind us.
We were still running away at full speed, with the horse closely behind us.
Occasionally the spell casting would fail too. That was how many times I had to use the spell.
Still, the barrage of Force Bullets seemed to be working.
Slowly but surely.
Slowly but surely, its HP bar continued to decrease.
Maybe because it was in an Enraged state, the horse started regenerating the damage too.
But the damage that we could accumulate through our Force Bullet barrage was higher.
Nias also started shooting arrows of water.
Since my MP bar was completely full again, I started doing the same.
Riding on Zangetsu definitely helped, because sitting still made my MP bar recover faster.
All of our horses had been running for quite some time.
But it was soon time to make a stop. We managed to take it down.
It took so long that at some point, we managed to reach about halfway to the border with the neighbouring map.
It was a dreadfully persistent horse that was chasing after us.
But there were some things I had to keep in mind.
The meat. The meat would be our consolation prize.
【Material】Amenofuchikoma Skin Raw Material Grade C+ Rarity 6 Weight 5
The skin of an Amenofuchikoma. The hairs on the tail are frequently used for woven cloth, and the skin is frequently tanned into leather for use in clothing.
It is sometimes used in ceremonies and rituals, as it is a material linked to the descendants of sacred horses.
Hmm?
What happened to the meat?
It wasn’t meat.
Skin?
「What do you think about this?」
『Woah! Maybe it just happens to be a rare drop?』
『Maybe because it was a high level monster?』
Both Haruna’s and Konohana’s hypotheses were quite convincing.
It made a lot of sense.
『A reward from the GMs for putting up with that horse for so long maybe!』
Adele?
I… Don’t think so.
『Maybe it’s an item that drops after a certain number of other item drops?』
Hyodor’s opinion felt like it had some truth to it too.
But nothing obvious came to mind.
『We just defeated the horse completely using spells… Would that be related?』
Hmm?
What about Irina’s point?
Well I had encountered monsters that had changes in the item drops that I could obtain based on other conditions…
I remembered that burning Branch Golems and Puppet Trees would allow me to obtain charcoal as an item drop.
What about the monsters here? Could it be that the same logic applied too?
NEXT CHAPTER
RELEASE RATE
Summoner is Going
Speed up schedule by 10 hours
Current schedule: Every 80 Hours
Thanks for the treat.