A week had passed since Evan completed his preparations and set out.

Watching him leave, Megumin, who had grown quietly accustomed to his presence, found herself unsure whether to feel relieved that he’d be gone for a while, or troubled by the thought of how much her earnings would drop without a lunatic like him staging daily massacres in the surrounding forest.

"Try not to get yourself killed out there."

She paused.

"Who else is going to fund my future villa if you die?"

Those were her parting words.

Evan, already accustomed to her grumpy personality, wasted no time leaving before she decided it would be more profitable to chain him up in a basement and force him to work for her forever.

The journey was long. Longer than the trip from BranLeaf to the capital, significantly so. In fact, if he combined the distance from Lirath to Branleaf and then from Branleaf to the capital, it would only cover half the distance he now had to travel.

The distance alone was enough to deter most adventurers from taking the mission in the first place. In truth, it was less a kingdom-wide assignment and more a problem belonging to the Greymark Duchy, given that the target region sat within its eastern borders, the ones it shared with the Thornvell Duchy.

It was, by any measure, a matter for those two duchies to resolve between themselves. But one of them was in crisis. BranLeaf’s destruction had taken the duke with it, and his heir had disappeared in the chaos, most likely dead.

The other duchy wasn’t faring much better, still reeling from its own losses, with its heir Alaric badly wounded. Neither side had enough spare manpower to pay much attention to the matter, leaving it largely in the hands of local forces.

"Now that I think about it," Evan murmured, a thought surfacing from memory, "isn’t that area near Luna’s parents’ hometown?"

He recalled the decision she had made when they parted ways. By now, she had almost certainly reached that place.

He found himself wondering whether she had found what she was looking for.

’Hope she’s alright,’ he thought, his mind drifting back to that sudden rank advancement notification from a few days ago.

He wasn’t sure whether the two things were related, but he knew that girl could take care of herself. Whatever had happened, good or bad, he could at least feel through their bond that she was alive and well for the moment.

His supplies were more than sufficient for the road ahead. His storage was stocked with grains, vegetables, and preserved goods, and meat was never a concern, not with the number of beasts he’d put down before and during the journey. If anything, they kept coming to him, steadily adding to his already considerable reserves.

"Finally, some strong opponents. I was starting to lose hope." he said, drawing his sword.

He was standing in the middle of a forest clearing, surrounded on all sides by wolves.

They were large, several times the size of any normal wolf, their shoulders reaching nearly four meters in height. Their coats were a deep, dark blue, thick and dense, marked with strange white symbols that traced across their fur in irregular patterns. Their skulls bore a single prominent horn at the center, and their expressions carried the kind of focused aggression that made it clear these weren’t ordinary beasts reacting on instinct.

Evan looked them over, his expression calm. A dark layer of energy crept along the length of his blade, and the aura it gave off was quietly dangerous.

"Try not to disappoint me," he said.

Then he was gone from his spot.

He reappeared at the other side of the clearing in the same instant, and the head of one of the wolves dropped to the ground before the body even registered it was dead.

[Ding! You have killed a C-Rank (Early-Stage) Tempest Wolf!]

[You have gained +10,000 ESS.]

The ESS flooded into him, and he couldn’t help but exhale with something close to satisfaction.

"Now this is what I’m talking about. I was starting to getsick of those weak beasts."

He let the feeling settle for exactly one second before the rest of the pack moved.

The surviving wolves, which had frozen for just a moment at the speed of the kill, snapped out of it fast. Several of them launched elemental attacks in his direction, wind-type, judging by the compression of air that preceded them.

Evan, who had been quietly savoring the moment, looked up at the incoming strikes and felt his expression shift.

"Nowadays you can’t even enjoy a kill in peace."

"If you’re that eager to die, then die." he said, and brought his blade down.

They fell one after another, dropping in the span of seconds.

[Ding! You have killed a C-Rank (Early-Stage) Tempest Wolf!]

[You have gained +10,000 ESS.]

[Ding! You have killed a C-Rank (Mid-Stage) Tempest Wolf!]

[You have gained +20,000 ESS.]

[Ding! You have killed a C-Rank (Early-Stage) Tempest Wolf!]

[You have gained +10,000 ESS.]

...

[Ding! You have killed a C-Rank (Advanced-Stage) Tempest Wolf!]

[You have gained +30,000 ESS.]

Only a few minutes passed before the clearing was covered with the corpses of C-Rank wolves.

Mutilated bodies lay scattered in every direction.

At the center of it all stood Evan. Not a scratch on him. Not a drop of blood on his clothes. He looked less like someone who had just cleared a pack of C-rank beasts and more like someone who had stepped outside for some air.

With his sword still in hand, Evan turned his gaze toward the edge of the clearing.

Two silver eyes were staring back at him.

Another wolf, but unlike the rest. It stood at least a full meter taller than the others, with two horns protruding from its brow, one small and one large. A silver mane ran along its neck, and the markings across its body appeared sharper and more pronounced, glowing faintly in the darkness.

The pressure radiating from it far surpassed that of the other wolves.

A B-Rank.

"Took you long enough to show up." Evan said.

Around him, the space began to shift. On one side, black mist spread outward before a tall figure emerged from within. On the other, crimson flames erupted as a devilish silhouette stepped forward.

The pack leader had barely arrived when it witnessed the complete annihilation of its pack.

He let out a low, resonant howl, and then the mana erupted from him, sweeping outward like an avalanche.

"human." The voice was rough, half-bestial, half-something harder to place. "You have nerve, coming into my territory and causing this kind of destruction."

The wolf’s body crackled with dark lightning as it coiled across his frame.

"You didn’t just trespass. You slaughtered my pack." The pressure intensified. "Don’t expect to leave this place alive."

Evan listened to all of it without any particular change in expression.

It wasn’t his first time hearing a B-rank beast speak. If anything, the appearance of one only made him more interested in what came next.

"Is that so," he smiled. "Let’s see if you have the ability to back those words up."

His two clones settled into position on either side of him.

And then he charged.