The hours wore on, and the intensity of the battle showed no signs of waning. Kain’s arms ached from the constant motion, and sweat poured down his face.
His breathing was ragged, but he couldn’t afford to slow down. Each beast killed brought him closer to his goals, and kept the citizens of the city safe.
As night fell, the long-awaited bell to relieve them of their duty finally rang. After coming down from the top of the wall, Kain slumped against its hard surface, his body trembling from exhaustion. However, he still dragged his exhausted body to the few yellow-grade and orange-grade beasts that he’d managed to kill.
He signalled to Kairos and they both headed to their four joint kills.
“Any preference for the parts you want?” Hopefully, he doesn’t have a need for the brain like Bea, since the brains of all their joint kills have already been taken care of.
“We can each take two spiritual orbs each. And I also want the talons and eyes of the Night Echo Owl,” Kain nodded in acquiescence. Both the talons and the eyes were quite useful and the most valuable parts of the owl. However, the Night Echo Owl had a dark-attribute, which would obviously be more useful to Kairos than himself.
Therefore, Kain chose to give up the more useful parts of the owl now in order to have his pick of material from the other spiritual creatures.
“I’ll take the feathers then, and its voice box, and we can just divide the meat equally.” Kain pulled out a knife and began removing the black and white speckled feathers that were shimmering faintly in the moonlight. The Night Echo Owl isn’t known for its defense among spiritual creatures of a similar level. The value of its feathers were more so in their beautiful appearance.
They should sell for quite a lot to be made into items of clothing and accessories for rich women. Additionally, the Night Echo Owl produces sound attacks, therefore its voice box should have some value and may be used to produce enchanted equipment engraved with sigils that cause sound attacks.
After Kairos and him had both used their knives to extract the materials they agreed on, they moved to the next one.
Next, they went to a large insect with wings, the Flickerfly. When it was alive it was difficult to look at clearly due to the intense light that it gave off. However, now they could see the delicate iridescent wings that glimmered in a kaleidoscope of colours in a mesmerizing effect.
It’s not a particularly powerful spiritual creature, in fact its probably among the weakest of those at the same level. Its most prominent features are the soothing light it emits and its great beauty.
“I want the light-emitting glands,” Kain said pointing to the abdominal region, “and I want its wings.” Kain then pointed to the wings that occasionally still had arcs of light flickering through their intricate patterns and veining.
Considering that Kairos got his pick of the last one, he didn’t fight with Kain and accepted the antennae and other sensory organs of much less value. Majority of the Flickerfly was actually quite useless, even less valuable than many orange-grade spiritual creatures. The only parts of any real value were what Kain took.
The next shared kill was a dark red bat-type creature that Kain was unfamiliar with. However, he suspected that it had the rare blood-attribute.
Since neither he nor Kairos had read about this creature before, and even after asking some of the seniors and guards still around who also couldn’t identify it, they decided to just take it apart and go back and forth in picking the parts they wanted.
Considering it was a bat, Kain took the ears, which were still attached to the cochlear nerve, the vibrant red fur coat that may be valuable to make clothing, and a small blood red crystal.
Kairos then chose the wings, eyes, fangs, and claws.
The last spiritual creature left to divide was very rare, a Whisper Wisp. When it was alive, it resembled the will-o’-the-wisps that Kain remembered reading about in storied back in his original life on Earth. It looked like a giant blue ball of fire and was said to have the ability to communicate with the dead and guide lost souls.
However, after it had died it looked like a giant diamond the size of his head.
Thankfully as they chipped away at it to pry it open it didn’t prove to be as hard as diamond. Although it was definitely harder than the average 2-star weapon.
After removing the spiritual orb, there wasn’t much else left inside of it. There was a blue stone that was giving off a faint heat still, likely the source of its flames and a clear coloured stone that they couldn’t figure out the purpose of.
“How should we divide this…? I’m not sure about the value of most of these parts.” Kain admitted.
“Well the stone shell had been almost evenly cut in half, so we can each take a half, as for the blue and clear stones we can decide by minotaur, golem, phoenix.” Kairos suggested using this world’s version of rock, paper, scissors.
After counting to three out loud, Kain threw out his hand in the “devil horns” gesture with his pinky and index fingers extended, and the middle and ring fingers curled down to represent the minotaur. Kairos revealed his hand that had all 5 fingers splayed out to represent a Phoenix wing.
“Ahh…Phoenix burns minotaur. I win!” Kairos said, before selecting the blue crystal which they had some inkling of its purpose, leaving Kain with the colourless crystal that they knew nothing about.
Sigh
Kain couldn’t fault him for his choice, he likely would have made the same choice. All he could hope for is that it was something useful and or valuable once he got it appraised.
If it could serve as an evolutionary material it may also appear in the simulator to provide Kain with a hint of what it is and its purpose.