Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 43: The Knight With Empty Eyes
Lannor and Bernie continued their usual work.
The night before, sitting in the tavern, Lannor had briefly considered stopping Little White from gathering the crape myrtle petals. His need for them was not yet urgent.
But after thinking it over, he decided the roads near the village really were safe enough so long as the boy stayed out of the woods.
So he let White do as he pleased.
The two men once more searched the shores of Feck Lake for signs of monsters.
Lannor sat at the bow. His heavy armor and sheer body weight pushed the front of the little boat deeper into the water than Bernie’s end.
The young witcher pressed hard against his temples, fighting off a headache.
Last night had been another one of Mentos “shaking the cola bottle.”
After more than half a month hunting together, the Trace Detection skill Lannor had absorbed from Bernie had climbed to eighty-seven percent proficiency.
Combined with witcher senses, that level of mastery had already pushed his tracking ability beyond the limits of ordinary humans.
His knowledge of monsters was still patchy without proper instruction, true enough. But tracking alone? Even among witchers, he would no longer rank near the bottom.
With Mentos assisting his calculations, he could now reconstruct events inside his own head, replaying what had happened in a location over the span of an entire week.
Sherlock Holmes himself might not have done much better.
But what concerned Lannor most was the Surgical skill tied directly to improving his own combat strength.
Thanks to repeated practice on drowners, swamp hags, and the occasional nekker or ghoul, that skill had already climbed to fifty-five percent proficiency.
The number did not sound especially high.
But Lannor had never intended to become a proper surgeon.
His real goal was operating on himself, cutting open his own chest and implanting that Gene Seed.
Steady hands. Understanding his own organs. Precise cutting and stitching.
For that purpose, this level of skill was already sufficient.
“So ... all that’s left is the elixir.”
Lannor lowered his hand from his forehead and scrubbed at his face to stay awake.
At that exact moment, a dull bump sounded beneath the hull. The boat jolted, then steadied.
“We’re here. Time to work ... Speaking of which, did you not sleep well?”
Bernie jumped ashore first and adjusted the boat’s position.
“More or less ... Ah, damn it. Mudflats again.”
The young witcher muttered bitterly.
Yesterday, on the road, Bernie had spent a long while describing one of his old wolf hunts in great detail.
How he tracked them. Read signs. Lured them. Split the pack apart.
By his own admission, that hunt had demanded every scrap of knowledge and improvisation he possessed.
The mood had been good, and Bernie had talked freely.
Which turned out to be a terrible mistake.
Mentos’s analysis notifications had not stopped ringing the entire time.
Then, when Lannor finally lay down to sleep that night, twenty whole percent of skill proficiency slammed into his brain at once.
The sensation hit even harder than the first day.
By now, the pair worked together with practiced ease.
Bernie crouched low with one hand resting on his sword hilt, studying tracks.
After removing his old bandages, he had stitched himself a long leather glove to replace the one shredded by the drowners. The damaged pair matched again.
“This way. Let’s go.”
Not long afterward, Bernie’s tracking led them to another cluster of monsters.
No swamp hag this time.
Four drowners shuffled across the mudflats, scavenging dead fish and crabs.
Lannor dealt with enemies of this level swiftly now.
In under two minutes, his silver sword punched into the mouth of the last drowner, the tip bursting out through the back of its skull.
He did not even bother dissecting the corpses anymore.
Instead, he slogged straight through the mud toward Bernie, boots sinking deep with every step.
He already had more drowner materials than he could reasonably store.
And unless one showed some bizarre mutation or disease, drowners now contributed almost nothing toward his surgical proficiency.
“Come on. Wearing heavy armor makes me hate mudflats even more than usual.”
His boots plunged into the wet, sticky muck with every step. The sensation made him grimace.
Bernie, moving light and easy by comparison, smirked at him as the two prepared to head toward the next hunting ground.
Then suddenly, from the road beyond the mudflats where the earth turned dry again, a shout rang out.
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