Time ticked on as Desmond stood there, just staring down at the body. Waiting and perhaps even hoping for Ben to get up and continue the fight. But nothing happened. Ben just lay there, remaining very much dead.

“Is that really it?” Desmond said softly. When he thought about it, he was indeed happy Ben was dead. After everything that man did, he deserved a much worse fate. But there was no great sense of satisfaction or accomplishment at his death, and Desmond didn’t quite understand why.

He considered this dilemma a little deeper, and something came to him. He didn’t have the faintest clue what he was supposed to do now. The goal had always been to kill Ben. It had been his driving force, his very meaning of existence, and without that, what was he?

Somewhere deep down, Desmond had always expected his vengeance to get him killed. That he would need to sacrifice his very life to exact his revenge and he had accepted that, but now his revenge was complete, and he was still here, burnt but very much alive.

“Loot,” Desmond stated as he fell back on his hunter instincts. After you finished a fight, you gathered the loot. This had been deeply ingrained in him over his time as a hunter. He would leave having his existential crisis for later. Maybe he could even fill the void inside himself with wealth. Ben would have a lot of wealth on him after all, and it seemed like a good enough purpose, for now at least.

Desmond looked down, checking one more time to make sure Ben was still dead. Then, just for good measure, he brought his foot down, crushing what was left of Ben’s head into paste. Finally satisfied that Ben wouldn’t get back up, Desmond checked his condition.

He was covered from head to toe in burn wounds, but upon closer inspection, none of them were very serious to him, and he had already started to show obvious signs of healing. For as long as Desmond could remember his strength of body had been his greatest asset. Wounds that would kill a normal disaster class hunter were mere inconveniences for him, not that there were any normal disaster class hunters. The normal ones having died off long ago. No, with the panther’s death and this hunt’s success, he would now be considered a calamity class hunter.

Both beasts and hunters were ranked on a tier system, going from tier 1 all the way to tier 7. Each tier had a class name, but Desmond was pretty sure people only used the names for the last four as they were crisis, disaster, calamity, and apocalypse for the tiers four, five, six, and seven, respectively. As a new calamity class hunter, Desmond had finally stepped into the big leagues on this continent.

Desmond walked over and picked up Ben’s severed arm. It had been badly burned after getting in the crossfire of the fight, but the spatial ring was still intact. Pulling it free of the hand, Desmond tried to place the ring on his own middle finger, only to find it was significantly too small. With a little trial and error, he found it fit well enough on his pinkie, which caused him to chuckle a bit.

Running a little mana through the ring, he was able to see the subspace contained within. It was small, only about two meters cubed, but everything inside looked exorbitantly expensive. There were beast cores, books, potions, artifacts, and other things Desmond couldn’t even identify. It certainly paid to be affiliated with a duke. Though his eyes were quickly drawn to the two small amber vials, clearly the same thing Ben had tried to consume during the fight. He was now well and truly rich.

Desmond closed the subspace. He would have time enough to go over everything later, and the ring had been draining his mana quickly. Being stuck out in the Expanse with low mana was always a bad idea, even at the best of times.

Desmond had always made for a shitty mage, but his mana still served him two important purposes. The first was the Empower techniques, which involved moving mana within his body to boost his strength, toughness, or reflexes temporarily. Surprisingly, for how deficient he was at magic, these techniques had always come easy to him, offering him a force multiplier when he needed it.

The second reason was for a simple spell called Force Dispersion, which did pretty much what the name implied. It allowed him to disperse the force of his blow over a wider area, turning his slash attack into a smash attack or just preventing him from sinking his feet into the ground when he tried to push off into a run. This was what he would sink most of his mana into during a fight, but it was a necessary magic for Desmond to be able to use his abundant strength effectively, and was the only real spell he knew.

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Desmond looked around the clearing, still a little hopeful the other amber vial had survived its fall. His hopes, however, were dashed. He found an area where the knee-high grass had exploded with growth to be well over his head. It looked like he wasn’t going to be getting that one back. He felt a little pain at the sheer waste of wealth but was consoled by the spatial ring now on his finger.

Finally, he walked over to the slain beast. It seemed paltry in comparison to the wealth he had just inherited from Ben, but he certainly wasn’t going to just leave it here. He considered dismantling the corpse, but there was still no way he was getting it into the subspace within the ring, so why go through all the work? Desmond decided it was easiest to drag the whole thing back to the Lodge as is. They had professionals there who would take care of the dirty work, and they would probably do a much better job at it than he would anyways.

Desmond looked down at his body and decided it was finally time to go get some clothes. Standing there in the nude was starting to feel, uncomfortable. His body was healing, and he was beginning to look less like a burned corpse and more like a person again, and people were supposed to wear clothes. Though, to his surprise, he wasn’t fully nude, one of his greaves had kind of survived, half melted as it was. Desmond reached down and tore what was left of it away. There, now he was appropriately nude, as nature always intended.

Jokes aside, his and Ben’s camp was less than two kilometers away. There, he could find his spare gear and a change of clothes. He wouldn’t want to walk back into the Lodge in his birthday suit. Though, that would still be far from the strangest thing he had seen come through those doors. Now, with his mind made, Desmond just had one last thing to loot here before he could set off, and that was the beast core.

Ben had dropped the beast core at the start of their fight, so it only took Desmond a few minutes to find the thing half-buried in the dirt of the crater. Picking up the beast core, he closely observed the small shimmering black oval. It seemed almost hypnotizing as he stared at it.

Beast cores played an essential part in this world society. Basically, anything magical needed a beast core to power it or be used in the construction of it. From magic items to potions to the very paint used to draw arrays, all of them used beast cores in some way or another. Hunters could even consume beast cores to gain power. However, this did come with some drawbacks, as consuming too many beast cores would lead a hunter to go berserk. Turning them into something that was no different than a beast themselves. All this led to beast cores being used as a form of currency among hunters.

Desmond found himself captivated by this particular beast core for reasons he could not explain. There was something special about it. Ben had seemed incredibly fixated on it before the fight, and when he finally had it in his hands, he became so oblivious to the rest of the world that Desmond was able to land a clean blow. At that moment, Desmond came to a decision. Since Ben had wanted it so badly, he would eat it to spite the bastard.

Desmond had never consumed a beast core before. The wall that others talk about hitting had just never materialized for him, so he didn’t see the point of it. His decision made, he tore a chuck of the fist-sized crystal off and plopped it into his mouth.

The crystal was surprisingly brittle as he chewed on it, kind of like a hard candy, though that was probably due to his strength. He knew beast cores were supposed to be pureed somehow before being consumed, but he didn’t really care as his jaw wasn’t having any difficulty with it. He put the last of the crystal in his mouth and, after a few big chomps, swallowed.

Waiting a few moments, Desmond was surprised that nothing seemed to happen. Since this was his first time eating a beast core, he didn’t know what the standard process was. Desmond expected some kinda rush of power, but he would have settled for just feeling something. Maybe that pureed process was more important than he was giving it credit for, but there was nothing he could do about that now.

Finally finished looting, Desmond decided to set off to his old camp once more. But as soon as he took a single step, he was hit with the worst case of vertigo he had ever experienced in his life. This made him instantly regret wanting to feel something. It was so bad that he fell to his knees to try and steady himself, but the world still felt like it was spinning, and it was getting faster. The vertigo got worse and worse as he closed his eyes in a vain attempt to keep it at bay. Then suddenly, it all faded to darkness.