The good news was that despite Mama Fouger pointing to a spot that was completely off the city map when she located Rulfar from the memory Asher had given her, Reggy still knew the rough location of where he had to be. A quick exchange for a more zoomed-out map that showed the surrounding area was all the confirmation he needed.

  The bad news was that the indicated location was a very well-known hunting ground for people who were both good at fighting and interested in earning some extra shards quickly. It was an area with a few different overlapping monster zones, making it a goldmine for a quick payday, but also incredibly dangerous.

  And according to Mama Fouger, Rulfar had been in roughly the same location for the past three days.

  “The good news is that he’s not dead,” Reggy told them as he showed them out of the house and closed the door behind them. “Mama would know if he were. The bad news is that nobody stays in that area overnight. It’s basically a death sentence. If your man hasn’t left the area for three days, he’s got to be trapped or something. Maybe he got injured and found a cave to hide out in, I don’t know, but he’s definitely in trouble.”

  “Either way, we appreciate the help,” Asher said, only just then realizing they’d never talked about any sort of agreed upon payment. “Sorry, how many shards did you want for Mama Fouger’s help?”

  “We’ll call it even in exchange for you giving her a new memory to help give her scattered mind something to focus on, and as an apology for her trying to shoot you all with her crossbow,” Reggy said, grinning sheepishly as he waved them off. “If you ever need help finding someone in the city again, feel free to come back!”

  “I might come back just for fun,” Moxy snorted as they waved back and vanished amongst the rows of crops. “So, what’s the plan? Fly out there and figure out what in the nine hells happened to our bloodhound?”

  “Maybe we should look into what monsters actually spawn out there in the overlapping zones?” Samantha suggested.

  “In fact, I actually already know what we need to look out for,” Asher said. “That hunting ground is well-known enough that Rosh actually ran me through it. Apparently, the materials brought back from the slain monsters are rather important when it comes to the logistics surrounding supplies going in and out of Furora.”

  “Alright, what are we going up against?” Moxy asked, grinning as she punched her fists together. “Wyrmlings? Ogres? Shock goblins?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Asher said, giving her a weird look. “...Shock goblins?”

  “Yeah, really annoying little buggers that give you a nasty shock if you touch them. They’re actually a bigger issue than you think, because the electricity travels through metal. Try to cut one with a sword, and suddenly your entire arm goes numb.”

  “Huh, that does sound rather tricky… Anyway, no shock goblins. There are three different monsters in the hunting zone, each prized for a different material that can be taken from their corpses. Corpse grabbers, bursters, and dash cats.”

  “Dash cats? The first two sound like monsters alright, but dash cats certainly don’t,” Moxy snorted.

  “According to Rosh, dash cats are the scariest of all three,” Asher said. “They’re not very large, only coming up to about knee-height, but they’re incredibly fast and stay low to the ground. It makes them hard to hit, and oftentimes they’ll be on a group of monster hunters before they know it. Their pelts are supposedly incredibly soft, however, which makes them worth a good bit.”

  “Okay, so keep our eyes peeled for fast-moving monsters,” Samantha said, paying close attention to what they’d be up against. “What about the other two?”

  “Bursters are these unpleasant, spherical creatures covered in what functionally look like giant boils, but are actually sacks of acid. According to Rosh, they’re slow and harmless at range, but they’re really tough and hard to kill. They roll up to people and try to smack into them, bursting their acid-sacks onto them. The acid is a valuable alchemical ingredient if you actually manage to collect it, but most people don’t even bother. Corpse grabbers are sort of like giant centipedes with hands that hide in the earth until a potential victim gets too close. Then they erupt out of the ground, and crawl up the victim's body, attempting to smother and strangle them. Those ones… don’t actually have anything particularly useful, they’re just killed for shards.”

  “Alright, that’s freaky as anything,” Moxy grinned. “I’m not normally big on fighting monsters, but this sounds like a fun way to kill an afternoon. Are you two ready?”

  “Can’t say I like the sound of those corpse grabbers, but yeah, I’m ready,” Samantha said, flaring out her brilliant green wings. Asher pulled Moxy into his rift with a quick handshake, before hopping onto Samantha’s back.

  “Remember, Rulfar would be useful to have, but he’s not worth dying over,” Asher said, getting a nod from Samantha as they took off, blasting into the sky with Rapid Flight. He knew Mama Fouger claimed Rulfar was still alive, but the woman was clearly not quite in her right mind, so he wasn’t planning on getting his hopes up until they found him.

  With Samantha’s speed and the map of the surrounding landscape Incorporated into Asher’s head, they made good time, shooting over to the designated monster zones.

  “Alright, put us down on that hill!” Asher said, pointing toward a small hill in the center of the plains. It was one of the few places where the grass was shorter, meaning they could at least tell that there weren’t any dash cats or bursters waiting for them.

  It could be completely littered with buried corpse grabbers, but there wasn’t much they could do about that.

  Samantha dropped down, letting Asher drop off first by slipping into the astral and testing out their landing zone. When dozens of hands didn’t explode out of the ground to wrap around him and start choking, he motioned for her to join him and pulled Moxy out of his rift.

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  “Mama Fouger could only narrow down his location so much,” he reminded them, scanning their surroundings and clicking his tongue at the knee-high grasses that were perfect for the smaller monsters. At the very least, they could see the larger bursters rolling around in the plains, the fleshy orbs reaching all the way up to their waists. He had no idea how exactly they detected their prey, but seeing as none of them had started rolling in their direction, he could only assume it was based on proximity somehow. “He’s roughly in this general area. But ‘roughly’ is still about a mile in any direction.”

  “Maybe I should stick to the sky,” Samantha suggested. “Fly around and see if I can’t spot him somewhere down-”

  A flash of light-brown fur shot out from the grass at the bottom of the hill, and Asher flinched backwards as Moxy punched what looked like a lunging bobcat mixed with a wolf out of the air with a grunt, its pointed teeth aimed directly for her throat. The monster, which could only be one of the dash cats they’d been warned against, was blasted backwards by an explosion of wind, tumbling back off the hill and vanishing into the dry grasses.

  “Damn, your friend wasn’t kidding. Those things are fast,” she said, already in her combat stance as she waited for it to reappear. If it were a regular animal, even a predator, the dash cat almost certainly would have turned around and fled after its initial ambush was foiled. But of course, it was a monster.

  And monsters always went for the kill.

  Sure enough, the dash cat sprinted out of the grass once more, little more than a brown blur as it streaked across the hill toward them. Though now that they were ready, it wasn’t nearly so much of a threat.

  With little effort, Asher reached out with a dagger, compressing space between him and the monster and simply letting it run face-first straight into his blade. The dash cat died in an instant, its own legs tangling as it tumbled and rolled to a stop directly before their feet.

  “This is why I hate fighting monsters,” Asher grumbled, wiping the blood off his dagger as he watched the small sphere of shards manifest over the dead dash cat. “Monsters don’t make for good opponents! They don’t think, don’t plan, they just run straight at you!”

  “At least they drop shards,” Moxy shrugged, picking up the dash cat’s corpse and giving it a curious look. “Hey, would you mind storing this in your special room for me? I want to see how it works as a pelt with my skills.”

  “Only if you never call it my ‘special room’ ever again,” Asher said, storing the dash cat for her anyway. Snatching the shards, he sighed as he looked at his total and realize it ticked up

  By a measly twelve hundred shards.

  “They’re not even worth the same as a heavy boar! Barely more than half!”

  “I mean, so long as you have some method of detecting them, they’re really not all that hard to kill,” Samantha pointed out. “Heavy boars on the other hand are massive opponents. Not everyone can carefully stab them through the eye or hamstring them without even getting close.”

  “That said, your idea to take to the sky is probably for the best,” Moxy said, cracking her neck as she began stretching. “Runt and I both have methods of picking out hard-to-detect enemies, but you don’t. The grass would be a death sentence for you.”

  “I’m not sure how much help Secret Seeker will really be here, but Moxy’s right. Shard Detection works on monsters too, so I should be fine,” Asher said, mentally thanking his past self for snagging the skill with Permanence. “At the very least, even if a dash cat surprises me somehow, what’s the worst that can happen? I die and then come back?”

  Though even as he said it, a small part of him screamed that risking another visit with what might very well be a freshly born deity of Eternity wasn’t exactly the smartest idea. Even so, he wasn’t going to let that fear keep him from practicing his skills, so he tried to keep the unease off his face as Samantha nodded.

  “That makes sense. I’ll let you two know if I see anything!”

  With that, Samantha took off into the sky, beginning to fly in a large, slow ring around the general area in search of any sign of Rulfar. With her out of harm's way, Moxy finally finished stretching and grinned at him.

  “What do you say, Runt? Want to have the honors?”

  “You just want to see a dash cat rip out my throat, don’t you?” he asked, ignoring the laughter behind him as he ventured down into the thick grass.

  With Moxy’s ability to sense changes in the air and his ability to detect the shards within monsters regardless of how well camouflaged they were, the two of them made quick work wandering through the grasses. Dash cats were stabbed from a distance, while the rolling bursters were taken out with a barrage of long-range air blasts, courtesy of Moxy’s shadow boxing. They elected to avoid the corpse grabbers entirely, as the only other option was to trigger their ambush, letting them erupt out of the ground and start grabbing.

  Asher could have simply slipped into the astral and escaped once the grabbing began, but he really didn’t want to feel dozens of tiny hands crawling all over him, even for a split second. Maybe if he needed the shards it would have been worth putting himself through. But he was rich.

  Rich people didn’t have to risk putting themselves through new types of trauma just to collect a few shards.

  That said, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to snag all the shards from the different monsters he killed as they wandered the plains looking for any sign of Rulfar.

  He and Moxy spent a good hour or two walking in ever-expanding laps around their hill, taking the time to guard over Samantha anytime she needed to land and recover her energy. The monster attacks were frequent enough that both he and Moxy managed to earn a solid sixty thousand shards just killing everything that came at them, and Asher quickly came to understand why these hunting grounds were so popular for those in desperate need of shards.

  It was beyond dangerous, even for him and Moxy, but the payoff would be massive for any normal person if they could manage to survive and take down a few monsters.

  After nearly three hours of wandering, once they began to notice a bit of thinning to the frequent monster attacks, Asher sensed something.

  Though not with Shard Detection.

  “Hold up,” he said, raising a hand and motioning for Moxy to pause. “Secret Seeker actually is picking up something.”

  “What do you see?” Moxy asked, declaring the area safe and motioning for Samantha to fly down and join them.

  “Nothing… It’s the tier two effect that kicked in,” he said, his brow furrowed as he kneeled down and ran his hands over the ground. “That means there’s some sort of hidden compartment here in the ground. But as far as I can tell, it just looks like regular grass and…”

  Asher paused, realizing there was actually a large patch of grass that looked like it had been completely ripped out of the ground and replaced, almost like a chunk of sod. Curious, he gripped the grass at the roots and heaved, struggling for a moment when he realized the chunk was much larger than he first thought. Finally managing to lift it, he nearly dropped it right back into place as he revealed what was hidden in the dirt.

  Lying there in a hole in the ground, curled up in one massive ball and covered in a handful of acid burns and partially healed wounds, was Rulfar the Hound.

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