At this point, Kairos recognized that his goal was to get Chen to gather more points to max out his stats. He couldn’t think of any easy way to get points as of now, so that was why he tried to encourage him.
Chen scoffed.
“Don’t you know that the monsters don’t give points anymore when you kill them at the D rank? You can’t be oblivious to even something like that.”
Kairos’ eyebrow twitched.
“…Well, I heard from Nicole that if you kill enough of them, you will get points through a multi-kill.”
Nicole turned to look at Kairos a little strangely, as she had not said something like that to him before. However, she didn’t object to it whatsoever.
Chen clicked his tongue upon hearing that.
“Of course I know about that, but you only get a tenth of a point for killing twenty-five of them! That’s far too many to be worthwhile.”
Kairos scratched the side of his head.
“But if you just get a little bit more points, then you will be able to promote to the C rank!”
Chen shook his head.
“If I promote to the C rank now, I’ll probably have way too much difficulty getting more points from now on.”
Kairos narrowed his eyes slightly.
“Yes, but if you think about it, there might be some super strong monster you encounter, and the only way might be fighting. In that case, you might need to do an emergency promotion for when the time comes. Otherwise, you can stay at the D rank.”
Nicole gave a small nod.
“It doesn’t sound like a bad idea to have it available.”
Chen narrowed his eyes slightly.
“I suppose that isn’t a bad thing. Alright then, if there are any large groups of monsters on the way, I will take care of them to increase the points that I have.”
Kairos raised an eyebrow when he heard that.
“Ah, then where are you guys heading right now?”
Chen shrugged his shoulders.
“We’re just trying to find a place that has some food. All of the edible food in the place we last were ended up ruined, so we’re off to find someplace else.”
Kairos nodded several times.
“Ah, but won’t it be really hard to find? Especially since it sounds like most of the food in the world has changed.”
A boy in the back called out with a bit of anger.
“Hey! Why are you putting all of us down! That much is obvious already, you don’t have to say it!”
The rest of the group also looked rather displeased and uncomfortable. It seemed that losing their entire food supply was quite the blow that they couldn’t really take. Chen also looked a little despondent as he looked up into the air.
“But it’s not the worst thing in the world. One of our group members, Jake, has the ability to locate food if it’s within the range of about fifty meters. Though he may not be the best fighter, he’s still an invaluable asset.”
The boy, who was Jake, smiled proudly.
“Heh, If you don’t want to starve to death, then you gotta protect me!”
Kairos gave a small nod after hearing that.
“Ah, that does sound great!”
Nicole tilted her head to the side.
“That… does sound convenient.”
She then let out a gasp, once she suddenly realized something.
“Ah! I forgot to bring food!”
Kairos gave her a glance and coughed a little.
“What do you mean you forgot? All of the food we had was ruined by that red stuff, remember?”
Nicole blinked a few times.
“Ah… right.”
Chen chuckled bitterly.
“It seems everyone’s in pretty much the same situation. I hope you guys know that if we do end up coming onto food, we will prioritize feeding the people that were originally in the group if there isn’t enough. That much is reasonable, right?”
Nicole frowned slightly.
“Why would you do something like that? That’s completely unfair.”
Kairos shrugged his shoulders.
“It can’t be helped. We’ll just have to hope that there’s more food available.”
A woman in the group called out with a frown.
“…But if there is enough food for everyone but one person, just know you aren’t going to get it, Kairos!”
Kairos let out a soft sigh.
“Alright, I get it.”
Chen waved his hand dismissively.
“Anyway, let’s move on. We already talked about this enough. If we come up on some food then we can talk about it further then.”
The woman grumbled.
“Ok…”
One thing Kairos noted was that they were going further and further from the city, which was definitely a good thing for him since the whole city situation might get a little awkward if they were to get there.
As they continued, Kairos got a little more cautious, as he was genuinely afraid that there might be some unnaturally strong monster that would genuinely threaten him and Nicole. They were very quickly entering territory that they hadn’t seen before.
As they traveled, they did eventually encounter some monsters. There were roughly thirty or so monsters resting under the shade of a large building.
Upon seeing this, Chen let out a sigh.
“Alright, I said I would deal with them before, so I’m going to do just that now.”
He put both of his hands onto his sides and drew out a red knife in each hand out of what seemed to be nowhere. They were both rather small knives, enough to be considered pocket knives most people used to cut open boxes.
But that didn’t make Kairos look down on them in any regard. After all, they were red weapons, and all of those seemed to have something strong about them or at least some value.
Chen threw both knives toward one of the monsters while they were still unaware of what was going on. Both of the knives landed squarely on the monster’s head, causing it to whip backwards.
Right afterwards, like they were pulled by an extremely strong magnet, they shot back over to Chen, handles landing squarely in his hands. Without wasting a second, he pulled back his hands and whipped them forth with a grunt.
Once again, both knives landed on the same monster’s head and ripped it directly off its body, causing it to collapse. By now, all the other monsters knew that they were being attacked. They ran towards Chen with fervor, with very clear hostile intentions.
At this point, Chen rushed in with the knives and began slashing the closest monster up rapidly. He slashed at the neck several times, and messily beheaded it. Right afterward, he jumped to the side to avoid the attacks of a few monsters.
From there on, he began slashing at the monsters from any point he could, whether that was their arm, chest, or neck. The entire time, he would skirt around the edges of the monsters, backpedaling and going to the side so that they had a hard time hitting him.
And it did work out, making it so that he didn’t get hit whatsoever. However, it did take a little long, compared to how aggressive Kairos and the others usually were.
This made Nicole look at it with a bit of boredom.
“…This is taking a while.”
Jake pouted when he heard that.
“It’s because he isn’t using any of his mana! If he did, then he would be able to stomp through them, but it’s better to save mana for emergencies! Only fools would waste their mana.”
Nicole scratched the side of her head.
“Oh… I guess so.”
Chen continued to fight the monsters in the same way, but the way Nicole said that hurt his pride. It was ironically because it sounded like Nicole wasn’t trying to insult him, but rather just state her honest opinion.
Once there were only five monsters left, he decided to be a little more aggressive. This time, he directly jumped into the middle of them and began slashing all of the monsters while in the center. He ended up getting scratched several times as there were simply too many attacks to dodge.
However, a purple energy suddenly began emanating around the daggers and whenever they dug into the nearby monsters, his injuries seemed to heal a little. In fact, when one of the monsters ended up getting decapitated, its body shriveled up and all of Chen’s injuries disappeared.
This aggressive style let Chen kill the monsters much faster, ending the entire battle in a little over five seconds.
Chen felt that he did pretty good with that and unconsciously smirked. He shot a glance over at Nicole to see if she was impressed, yet there was the very same look that almost felt like pity, but more so disinterest.
On the other hand, most of the other group looked excited and clapped. Jake, in particular, cheered for him.
“You took care of all of them and didn’t even get injured!”
Chen shook his head and put it past him, though he was a little disappointed. After coughing, he gestured to the group.
“Alright, let’s go. We don’t have time to waste.”
Kairos rubbed his chin as they walked, wondering if this really did seem normal to most people. He wondered if he was just desensitized from fighting against and facing incredibly powerful things all the time, or if these people really just were weak.
But after pondering over it for a moment, he found that it was too early to judge.
After all, Chen clearly wasn’t overexerting himself for that battle. It seemed he casted a spell while fighting, but that was mostly just to speed up the battle a little bit. From the way he fought, it was also fairly clear he never took his fights lightly.
Even if it was very easy, he was still cautious enough to fight in a way that he wouldn’t get injured. On top of that, even when provoked, he only did the slightly more risky move once there were a few left.
Kairos couldn’t help but feel like fighting against this kind of person in the future might end up being a huge pain, considering how safe they played.
Nonetheless, he didn’t say anything about this and the group continued on further on into the city.
As they continued on, Kairos began noticing fairly large concentrations of mana in the distance. Though, since they were behind walls, he couldn’t make out what they were.
But then he noticed they were moving around, like they were alive.
Kairos thought about bringing this up. After a few moments, he thought of something that he could “provide” to the group.
“Hey, I have a bad feeling right now.”
Jake scoffed upon hearing that.
“What? Are you scared? I’m so many years younger than you, but I’m not!”
Chen turned to look at Kairos skeptically, but was open to it.
“A bad feeling you say? Why did you bring that up?”
Kairos shrugged his shoulders.
“I mean, sometimes it’s just a false alarm, but usually when I have a bad feeling, something goes wrong afterwards.”
Chen raised an eyebrow.
“Really now?”
Nicole put a finger on her chin, then nodded.
“Ah, now that I think about it, that seems right! He helped me out a lot when I was about to trip onto stuff!”
Jake frowned.
“What? So one of us is going to trip over something and fall?”
Chen narrowed his eyes.
“Keen intuition, huh? Well, just to be safe, everyone bring out your weapons and get ready to fight.”
Most of the group didn’t seem to want to, but they begrudgingly followed his commands. Chen also pulled out his daggers and began to walk up slowly and quietly. Kairos noticed that three of these mana beings suddenly began moving faster, almost like they noticed they were nearby.
They rushed backwards, and since everyone in the group was staying silent, they were all able to hear the sounds of footsteps.