Rui moved on to the remaining three sections, and he found interesting quirks about each of them.
Hunting missions at the Apprentice-level were all exclusively domestic missions, despite the fact that most hunting missions in general were beyond the borders of the Kandrian Empire, since most beast species exist beyond human settlements. However, those were too far above his paygrade.
The hunting missions he had access to were all domestic in nature. These included verified sightings of beasts that posed too much of a threat to civilians, or an overpopulation of certain beast species in certain parts of the forests and other natural habitats.
The Kandrian Empire hadn’t exterminated every single dangerous beast species, mostly because it was not viable. For better or worse, the beast species of these natural environments were extremely vital to the balance, health and the maintenance of these environments.
These species usually played extremely important roles in the fragile ecosystems and food chains. Haphazardly and carelessly annihilating every trace of them would be a foolish blunder that could cause such ecological disasters that could very well bring the entire kingdom to its knees!
This was a much worse problem than the beast species themselves. Beast species were a much simpler and easier problem to handle than such a complex ecological catastrophe. Martial Art could handle former, it could not handle the latter!
The Royal Family even authorized the establishment of a Ministry of Ecology and Environment. Among the many tasks and duties this executive entity was responsible for, coordinating with the Martial Union through Royal authorization to regulate the populations and distributions of beast species was one of them.
,m A lot of hunting missions were centered around extraction of valuable resources. This included flora and fauna resources that were dangerous to obtain, and thus required Martial Artists. However, beyond this, Rui realized that the hunting class of missions at the Apprentice-level were limited in variety and diversity.
“There’s a limit to the variety of flora and fauna in the true wild natural environments outside the borders of the Empire, and flora and fauna within the Empire.” Rui murmured. He wasn’t sure at what realm would he be qualified to be able to take hunting missions occurring outside.
He dismissed these thoughts, moving onto the two remaining sections once he was satisfied with his exploration of the hunting section.
The covert operations section fell within his expectations, for once. The missions were centered around clandestine and furtive missions. Shadowing, reconnaissance, tracking, infiltration etc were the kinds of missions that populated this class of missions.
He was surprised by the fact that these missions were legal, while the offense class wasn’t. But it made more sense when he considered the Kandrian Empire wasn’t Earth. On Earth, the right to privacy and physical and intellectual property were protected by the state. However, the Kandrian Empire and most sovereign states he had some awareness about were culturally and politically centuries behind Earth during his lifetime. These rights that were fundamental and extremely important back on Earth were not that important here. Part of it had to do with the lack of communication technology and information technology, slowing down development and allowing missions like these to be legal.
Out of the four classes of missions thus far, this was the one class of missions he was least qualified to undertake. The pre-requisites for these missions required stealth-oriented maneuvering techniques, of which he had none and didn’t intend to get any.
His interest in this class of missions was the least, after all, he was a martial arts fanboy, not a spy fanboy!
Having had his fill, he left the section before heading out to the last section.
The miscellaneous class of missions.
This was the class of missions that he was least familiar with, intuitively. He had of course learnt about it in the theory lessons mandated in the Exploration Stage. However, since the missions of this class did not share any common trait, asides from not smoothly falling into the other four classes of missions, it was hard to even come up with a picture of what the missions of this class might look like.
“Well, this is just chaos.” Rui chuckled as he scanned missions, walking around in the section.
The missions were all across the board with no common element or pattern unifying the entire class. The Academy had done its best to lump missions of a similar kind together. Grouping missions that had some degree of raw manual labour together, lumping missions that were required services of Martial Artists that had nothing to with actually using their Martial Art.
“This one wants an interview with a Martial Apprentice.” Rui laughed mirthfully as he skimmed through a particular aisle.
He shook his head. The Martial Union must have created this class because there were too many weird and strange commissions. Rui wondered why any Martial Artist would ever come to this strange class of missions instead of the primary four.
This was, until he noticed why.
“The remuneration proportion of this class is higher than the others…” He noticed, understanding why Martial Artists ventured into this class.
Money.
Not only was the miscellaneous class of missions, by far, the safest, they were also quite remunerative in comparison the classes, pound-for-pound.
This attracted just enough Martial Artists to this class of missions to ensure that supply of Martial Artists matched the number of missions of that class.
Rui was not particularly interested in this class of missions either.
“Guess I will be primarily focusing on offense, defense and hunting primarily.”
As he lurked around gathering his thoughts, he realized how he was surprised by how different each class of missions was. He’d expected each class to be relatively similar in all aspects asides from the fundamental differences between them, but this was not the case.
“They were incongruent from each other in many different ways.”
The defense class was the most normal and diverse class of missions. It had fairly well-distributed client-base, it had a decent amount of variety and diversity. Furthermore, it was the only class that was not limited in the Apprentice Realm.
The offense class at the Apprentice Realm was entirely Royally authorized, making a very singular source of commissions. At the Apprentice Realm it was also limited to the town that the Apprentices operated in.
Hunting missions were also limited to the Kandrian Empire, and their difficulty and variety were also largely reduced.
Covert operations had the most troublesome skill pre-requisites among all of them
As for the miscellaneous class…
“The less said about the better.” Rui shook his head, before a voice called out to him.
“Apprentice Rui Quarrier.” A support staff member called out to him. “Your application has been approved and your learner’s license has been registered.” She said, handing him an envelope.
“You may now accept a mission.”