More days pass for the group. Lily gaining more and more combat experience until she passes an important point. After having beat up on plants and other similar monsters, Jason sets up a fight with a fox the group comes across. While lower level than Lily, the predator and prey relationship is hard to surmount. This challenge generally left to those who have a bottleneck over the predator or enough friends.

The fight starts with the fox’s confusion. Why was this prey coming at it? This didn’t last long though as the fox shrugs it off. Who would complain about food delivering itself to you?

Then Lily smacks it in the face with a roundhouse kick. Yeah, the fox wasn’t expecting this at all. Lily had been gaining more than just combat experience.

The fox stumbles back in shock, and Lily follows up by batting at it with her front paws.

The fox steadies itself and bites back at Lily. She dodges back but is still nipped.

-1

A spot of blood appearing on her side Lily charges forward takes a savage bite out of the fox. Though unlike earlier fights, she lets go right away and bounces to the side as the fox takes a swipe at her.

Lily hops over the fox and as she lands on the other side she fires off a powerful double back kick and knocks the fox off of its feet. At the same time the fox manages to get another swipe in one her and connects, slashing across her left back leg.

-2

This throws her off balance and causes her to fall down on her side as she draws her legs back. The fox seems to recover first from the exchange and hops at her, going for a killing blow. Lily however was ready for this and only pretending to still be down. She pushes off the ground with all four of her feet and propels herself to the side flipping onto her feet. This caused the fox’s attack to miss.

Back on her feet, Lily pushes off with her back feet and charges forward. She slams into the fox before it can respond, and she sinks her teeth deep into its neck. This time though she holds on using her front paws to steady herself. Then she uses her position to kick her back feet into the fox over and over.

The fox tries to shake her off, but it doesn’t have the time. Lily’s powerful back legs chunk away its health while her large incisors pierce through the important blood vessels in the neck. Just moments later it drops to the ground, dead. Lily now sitting on top of it in victory.

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Over with the rest of the group Rosha is hanging off Courtney begging her to heal Lily. While Jason had been ready to jump in at any moment, Rosha couldn’t help but worry when she saw Lily getting hurt.

Jason off to the side laughs and walks over to Lily. “Outstanding job, Lily! Now let’s get you healed and cleaned up. Courtney will fix you right up.”

Courtney walks up next to them while dragging Rosha along with her. “She took a bit of damage there but easy enough to fix. Though I hope she gains more hp after the bottleneck. Ten at level nine is trash.”

Jason shrugs, “Whatever else she is a rabbit. Their stats skew heavily towards agility and being able to dodge.”

Courtney just shakes her head and gets down to casting a couple of spells. First is a cantrip to clean Lily and her wounds. Then a heal to bring her back to full and last another cleaning spell to remove any blood that she had bled between the first clean and being healed.

Lily hops around the group before she jumps back into her shelter on Jason’s shoulder.

Jason closes the shelter and turns to the others. “So I think she might be ready for her boss.”

Rosha grimaces and then sighs, “yeah, she probably is. Though only if we find a plant boss. No more predators until she gets some more stats under her belt!”

Jason spreads his hands out and shrugs. “There isn’t much that I can do about that. Presumably if we let her fight some more, Lily will get stats through training. Also, she will probably evolve into a new race at ten. Who knows what benefits she will get from that. Though I do agree with the plant boss thing. No matter how much the System tries to balance the challenge compared to her actual strength, a rabbit will always have a leg up against a plant.”

Courtney shakes her head at this. “That isn’t entirely true and you know it. A poisonous plant would be a good counter against her bites. Add in some nasty thorns and you have a good counter to rabbits.”

Jason rolls his eyes, “now you’re just being pedantic.”

Rosha stretches, “of course we need to find a boss for her to fight in the first place. If anything, we might need to backtrack a little. All the monsters I have been spotting over the last day or so have been low level. Like, that fox was the highest level monster all day, and even then it was only a six. Six! When before we had to worry about monsters with multiple breaks under their belts we aren’t even seeing those of equal level to Lily anymore.”

Courtney shrugs, “we just need to continue on. I looked into situations like this over the last few days and we should pass through the disrupted zone soon. The over leveled monsters have eaten or driven away other lower leveled monsters that lived here. The original monster wave should have passed through this area as well. If we had come here a month ago there would still be post fourth break plants loitering around. As it is the local ecosystem hasn’t rebalanced itself. We travel a couple more days and there should be a much more normal spread of monsters.”

Jason sighs and shakes his head, “everything just comes down to time doesn’t it?”