Alphonse stood completely still beside the carcass of the Dire Wolf whose neck he had just snapped. He waited for several minutes, his eyes glued to the monster's body.
However, the phenomenon he expected never occurred. The wolf's body remained stiff, its blood slowly seeping into the soil, and no pixelated particles floated away into the wind.
One second passed, then ten. No pouches of gold magically materialized in the air. There was no loot notification ping informing him about the fangs or wolf pelts he had successfully acquired.
"Even the looting system is gone," Alphonse muttered softly.
He rubbed his chin in an analytical gesture. "This world really has stripped away all of its artificial game elements."
He remembered one of the theories Arcus used to ramble on about enthusiastically—about how if a player was thrown into the real world, some systems might persist to help them survive. But for Alphonse, this reality felt much rawer and far more unforgiving.
Awoooo!
A long howl shattered the silence of the forest, followed by the sound of numerous footsteps trampling over dry twigs. Alphonse turned toward the source of the noise. He didn't look surprised.
"It seems monster habits from the game carried over perfectly," Alphonse said calmly. "When a Dire Wolf feels cornered or is dying, it lets out a howl to summon its pack."
From the darkness of the bushes, the silhouettes of giant wolves began to emerge one by one. The numbers weren't small—there were twelve of them.
Standing in the center of the pack was a larger wolf with dull silver fur running along its back. The Alpha leader.
Seeing their comrade brutally slaughtered, the leader howled in fury. The twelve wolves immediately spread out, forming a circular formation to encircle Alphonse.
Alphonse showed no fear. Instead, the golden glint in his eyes grew brighter. "Perfect timing. I need to test how the magic mechanics work in this world."
He focused his mind. He didn't need to search for a skill menu or press a hotkey.
Instinctively, he felt the mana stored inside his body rush toward the palm of his hand. The movement felt as natural as wiggling his fingers.
A magic circle materialized instantly in front of his hand.
[Tier C – Fire Blast]
A massive fireball manifested, radiating genuine heat that made the surrounding air distort and shimmer. With a single mental flick, the fireball shot forward at breakneck speed right into the center of the wolf pack.
BOOM!
A massive explosion erupted. Dirt scattered violently along with tongues of flame that licked out in all directions.
The four wolves caught at the epicenter of the blast were blown to pieces, while the rest were sent flying, their bodies severely scorched. The Alpha leader was thrown several meters away, whimpering as the fire burned away patches of its skin.
However, the remaining eight wolves weren't dead. Their burning bodies triggered a blind, feral instinct. They got up. Howling viciously. They lunged at Alphonse all at once from every direction.
Alphonse didn't panic. He didn't step back.
His left hand shot up.
[Tier C - Shadow Bind]
The shadows of the surrounding trees elongated, wrapping tightly around the legs of the leading four wolves. Their charge was forcibly halted. Their jaws snapped at empty air.
Alphonse stepped forward. A transparent dagger materialized in his right hand.
[Tier B - Mirage]
A horizontal slash. The first wolf's head flew off.
An upward thrust. The second wolf's heart was pierced.
His movements were precise. Efficient. Devoid of any wasted motion. Within seconds, the eight remaining wolves collapsed into pools of blood on the muddy ground.
Alphonse looked at his own hands, amazed. "The execution of this magic is much smoother than I imagined. It feels like... a natural function of my own body."
The heavily wounded Alpha leader witnessed the massacre. Realizing that their prey this time was a far more terrifying predator, it turned around and tried to flee deeper into the forest on limping legs.
"Hey now, it's impolite to leave without saying goodbye," Alphonse said with a chillingly polite tone.
He tried to cast another spell. This time, he visualized a sharp gust of wind.
[Tier C - Aero Bullet]
But this time, the sensation was entirely different. The flow of mana in his body felt stiff and sluggish.
Alphonse was forced to pause for a moment to visualize the magic circle manually, arranging the runes one by one in his mind so the spell could materialize.
The wolf leader had already run quite a distance by the time the final rune locked into place.
Whoosh!
A transparent bullet of wind shot out at high speed, slicing through the air before finally piercing the back of the Dire Wolf leader's head. The monster face-planted into the dirt, dead instantly.
Alphonse closed his eyes, analyzing the stark difference in sensation between the two attacks.
"I see," he murmured. "Spells that have reached Level 10 can be executed instantly like a primal instinct."
"Whereas spells that are only at Level 5... have to be constructed manually through rune visualization. The process isn't nearly as smooth as max-level magic," he pondered.
He let out a short sigh. "Well, whatever. I rarely used Aero Bullet in the game anyway. I only invested 5 skill points into it as a prerequisite to unlock higher magic tiers."
Alphonse walked toward the epicenter of his first Fire Blast explosion. He crouched down, intending to retrieve the Monster Cores—the valuable energy stones located near a monster's heart.
However, his brow immediately furrowed deeply.
The bodies of the four wolves there had been burned to ash. As Alphonse sifted through the carbonized remains, he only found fragments of reddish crystals that were cracked and completely pulverized due to exposure to extreme heat.
"Damn it," he complained. He stood up and stared at his own hands.
"Raw power turned out to be a double-edged sword. In the game, loot would remain intact regardless of how destructive my attacks were. But in the real world... weapons of mass destruction end up destroying the very economic commodities themselves."
As a guild master, his brain immediately began crunching new calculations.
If the inventory system was dead and large-scale magic destroyed resources, then Pioneer's forces would have to completely overhaul their combat doctrine. Hunting monsters was no longer about who had the biggest magical explosions; it was entirely about precision.
Alphonse walked over to the corpses of the wolves he had killed with physical slashes and the Aero Bullet. He dissected their chests using the Mirage dagger.
This time, he successfully extracted nine intact, marble-sized Monster Cores, as well as one larger, deep-red core from the Alpha.
"Without an inventory, skinning them will only weigh me down," he muttered, staring at the pile of valuable meat and fur with a heavy heart.
He placed the ten Monster Cores into the small pouch at his waist.
[Tier E - Cleanse]
A wave of white light swept over his body, erasing the blood splatter and the foul stench.
Alphonse intended to inspect the surrounding area, but his ears suddenly picked up a noise. His sharpened hearing detected a sound coming from the west—not the growl of a monster, but the rhythmic crunch of iron boots grinding against tall grass.
The rhythm was uniform. Tactical. It was a human marching formation.
Are there other players who landed near here? Or perhaps natives of this world? Alphonse thought.
Given that he barely understood this new world yet, facing an unidentified armed group head-on wasn't a wise move. Leaving footprints behind in the dirt wasn't an option either.
Alphonse quickly pulled up the collar of his cloak. He focused his mind, channeling his mana to cast a modified version of his illusion magic.
[Tier B - Mirage]
Instead of creating physical projectiles or a dagger like before, the flow of mana now shrouded his body, refracting the light around him. Alphonse's silhouette, his black cloak, and even Stella Obscura floating beside him slowly faded out. His form turned into a semi-transparent projection that blended perfectly with the colors of the leaves and the forest shadows.
Another mental flick immediately followed.
[Tier B - Fly]
The binds of gravity snapped away from his body. Without a single sound of footsteps, a flap of wings, or any suspicious gusts of wind, Alphonse's body lifted lightly off the ground. He shot smoothly and vertically through the gaps in the towering canopy, and flew off into the sky above the Eastern Forest like an invisible ghost, leaving the massacre site behind as a puzzle for whoever would find it.
Fifteen minutes after Alphonse's departure, the foliage on the western side of the clearing was forcibly pushed aside.
Spear tips and steel swords pierced through the forest shadows, followed by the appearance of a dozen soldiers in leather armor moving in a tactical formation. They were the elite scout squad under the command of Captain Cedric, the best tracker Wealden City had to offer.
Their footsteps halted instantly as they reached the open area. Their weapons remained drawn, but the soldiers' eyes widened in shock at the sight before them.
The smell of charred meat, scorched earth, and fresh blood viciously assaulted their senses. Over a dozen Dire Wolf carcasses lay scattered across the muddy ground.
A young soldier lowered his dagger slightly, letting out an audible sigh of relief.
"Turns out it's just a pack of Dire Wolves. Looks like a silver-rank adventurer party was hunting and happened to pass through this area."
However, his partner—a veteran tracker—immediately let out a harsh snort.
"Use your damn eyes, idiot," he retorted sharply, pointing at the corpses of the wolves whose heads had been cleanly decapitated. "Look at this pile of perfectly intact meat and fur."
The veteran continued, "What adventurer would willingly leave hundreds of silver coins rotting on the forest floor? They didn't even bother skinning them. They only dissected the monsters' chests to take the cores."
"Maybe they were in a rush?"
"No sane adventurer throws away valuable loot, no matter how much of a hurry they're in."
In the midst of that petty argument, Captain Cedric remained completely silent.
The tough man with a claw scar on his neck stepped forward quietly. His gaze ignored the intact wolf corpses and locked straight onto a shallow crater in the center of the battlefield.
Cedric furrowed his brow deeply. In that crater, the soil was blackened and cracked. The four Dire Wolf carcasses there weren't just dead; they had been turned into horrifying piles of carbon and ash.
The captain crouched down. He could still feel a faint wave of heat radiating from the scorched earth.
"Spread out," Cedric ordered suddenly. His voice was heavy and commanding, instantly silencing his subordinates' chatter.
"Comb the area within a five-hundred-meter radius. Look for footprints, remnants of a campsite, or broken twigs. I want to know who or what passed through here."
"Yes, Captain!"
The entire squad quickly scattered and disappeared back into the thick forest, leaving Cedric alone in the center of the blast crater.
After making sure his subordinates were out of earshot, Cedric pulled off his leather glove.
He reached out a rough finger, touching the remnants of a wolf's ribcage that had been turned to charcoal. The moment his finger brushed the bone, its structure crumbled entirely into fine dust.
The heat from the magic that struck this place was impossibly pure and utterly lethal.
Cedric pinched a pinch of the Dire Wolf's ashes and rubbed it between his thumb and index finger. His gaze grew complicated, filled with deep caution.
"Fire magic with a destructive scale this high... would definitely destroy the monster cores inside their bodies," Cedric muttered quietly to himself. "What kind of adventurer intentionally destroys their own hunting targets?"
This discovery made absolutely no sense to him. If this was the work of a hunter mage, they would use precise, low-impact spells to maintain the integrity of the commodities.
Complete annihilation without a single care for the loot like this was the fighting style of an assassin, or worse... an entity that didn't care about wealth or money. And the clean slashes on the other wolves proved that the culprit was also an extremely skilled close-combat fighter.
One person possessing both lethal magic capabilities and high-level swordsmanship? Or an unknown elite squad? A bad feeling crept up the back of the captain's neck.
About ten minutes later, the sound of his subordinates' footsteps returned. One by one, the members of the elite scout squad emerged from behind the trees with frustrated expressions.
"Reporting, Captain. Nothing," the veteran tracker said, lowering his head. "No boot prints, no snapped twigs, no residual scent of potions. Whoever did this, they vanished like ghosts."
Cedric's brow furrowed even deeper. He stared into the dark shadows of the trees, as if trying to pierce through the secrets of the Eastern Forest.
"We can't linger here. This stench of blood will attract high-tier predators soon," Cedric finally decided.
He stood up and put his glove back on. "Gather the remains of the Dire Wolves that are still intact. We'll bring their meat and pelts back to Wealden City as evidence. Commander Kaelen and Master Vane need to see the trail of this 'Falling Star' for themselves."
Quickly and efficiently, the elite scout squad shouldered the remnants of Alphonse's battle, leaving the scorched crater behind as a silent witness to the birth of a new power in their world.