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Before going anywhere we had to prepare properly. First of all, armor, and weapons. I had been teaching them how to fight with their bare hands, magic, and each of their spirits all this time. But the kids all have some preference in weapons though.
Weapons are essential, especially when you are a child with small physical strength. Weapons can offer great penetration, piercing, and slashing power that our bare hands cannot easily do. Although it requires a great mastery over techniques to use weapons properly, it is not as if they had not been training on their own.
Realistically speaking, the only one that could use their bare hands to fight in here is Erika, as she’s made of an incredibly hard, steel-like wood, her hands are as hard as steel weapons if not harder, she can easily punch through trees, although not enough to blow them away into the air.
Chris is a Flame Wizard, that’s his talent, but I had taught him how to use his big body and his fists, so he can fight at close combat even as a magician. But because of his Talent, he gets bonuses when using Staffs, Wands, and the like. Due to that, I just taught him how to use a wooden staff as a weapon, and he had become rather good at smacking foes with it.
And as for Eric, he’s a Druid, they’re not strictly classic magicians, as they’re magicians of the wilderness and have broader bonuses although not as strong as Flame Wizards with staffs and wands. I taught him how to use small knives and bows.
His precision with the arrows are pretty good by now, and he can enhance his precision using the Life Attribute Tier 1 Spell named “Eyesight Enhancement” which costs little Mana and it lasts for several hours. He’s mostly proficient at enhancing the arrows with magic as well, and he had become rather good at ranged fighting.
However, Erika… I wouldn’t just let her use her hands to fight, so I have also given a sword. She was surprisingly good with long swords despite their heaviness, mostly because she’s monstrously strong herself. She has become good at smacking with it and slashing, and that’s good for me as well. She’s so resilient and physical strong that I am not too concerned about her. She also has her army of living dolls from her incredibly amazing Doll House Spirit, which has swordsmen, spearmen, axe warriors, healer priests, mages, archers, and even rogues and thieves for scouting areas.
She’s a one-girl army pretty much. Well, not that much, her dolls can only be created up to a certain amount, and if some die and she needs to create new ones, they cost mana for each one. She has to use them with care so they don’t die so easily by charging recklessly at foes. She has learned a bit about this, but in this hunting session she’ll learn even more about micromanagement. I will be there to help the three of them if things go bad, but I will leave the hunt to them for the most part, as I want to see how they can do by themselves.
After having breakfast, we quickly washed our faces and went off. In this world you can’t take baths all the time, water is precious even when there are tools that produce it, and baths lack drainage as well, so it is complicated and takes a lot of time to take a bath. Usually I take a few baths through the week and use the Clean Spell to clean my body other times.
The Clean Spell is an easy to learn Tier 1 Light Attribute Spell that cleans surfaces, including a person’s body. If it were more widespread, many people could be more clean, all my friends already learned it. They can use low tier spells of other elements than their affinities just fine, so there was no problem in learning the spell in question. Of course, only the weakest and simplest spells, spells of other elements than their affinities that could deal substantial damage cannot be conjured by them at all.
We told Eric’s aunt and uncle that we were going to my house for the day, and that I’ll bring back Eric to them before dinner. After that we pretended to move through the road back to my house as the two stood outside their shop looking at us for a while, but when they finally moved back to the shop, we swiftly made our way into the woods. Nobody saw us get in, so we successfully managed to get inside of the “dangerous” forest.
The three of them were oddly nervous despite having the strength to easily kill Gray Wolves and Imps if they worked together. I couldn’t blame them, unlike me they were children without the experience of someone that lived thousands of years, and well, they had lived their entire lives being intimidated by the existence of monsters and demons.
“We are really doing this…” Sighed Eric.
“Yeah… Ugh… Blake, can’t we go back?” Asked Chris.
“Don’t be such chickens! Aren’t you into the mood to smack something?” Asked Erika while holding a big great sword I had bought for her in the market made of hard steel. It was completely covered in rust, so it was very cheap, but repeatedly using Clean on it and then washing it with a lot of water made it look anew quite quickly and easily.
“You knew this was going to happen eventually. Don’t worry, whenever you get used to killing, it won’t be so hard anymore. You know that Adventurers have to kill other living beings to live, right? Chris, your father is a hunter, you should know this.” I said.
“I-I know! I’ve killed rabbits before… Hunting practice… But nothing like monsters…” Sighed Chris.
“You’ll be alright.” I said.
We walked deeper into the forest as we found ourselves in the second layer of the forest already. The woods became darker and thicker and the wild animals were rare in here, small rodents and the like were nowhere to be seen, and as we walked closer to the third layer, the presence of demon energy and miasma became higher.
While we walked in silence, the bushes around us suddenly began to move. I quickly detected a pair of Gray Wolves moving towards us, they had sniffed us from afar. I’m glad Gray Wolves are becoming less rare now… Maybe they had a mating season? I heard that monsters grow and reproduce quickly.
“Graaah!”
“Roar!”
The two Gray Wolves pounced in front of us, as Chris and Eric gritted their teeth, while Erika smiled excitedly.
“Prepare yourselves, this is the first of many battles you’ll have overcome through your lives. Now show me all the training we have done has bene worth it!”
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