Eventually, I decided that my best bet was to simply find a town and ask around for what I could do for some work. Looking up at the sun that was about to set though, the first thing I was going to do was set up camp. I stepped off the road, searching for an elevated patch of ground in case it rained, then set up my simple tent, basically just a waterproofed piece of cloth that I could prop up with some sticks or a piece of rope, and hunted one of the horned rabbits that seemed to be everywhere for a meal before I went to sleep.

    I woke up not long after dawn, and packed up my sorry excuse for a tent before heading back to the road. I was quite annoyed with my non waterproof boots as I did so, as it had rained again overnight, but the small water catcher I’d made meant that my water pouch was filled up. I wasn’t a big fan of the water pouch, as it made the water taste funny, but I couldn’t find a proper canteen at any of the stores, and rationalized that any canteen they could make with current technology in this world would probably impart a different annoying flavor to the water.

    The road itself was actually quite nice, and likely made with earth magic of some kind. It was one continuous strip of a flecked grey stone, with a very slight grade in it to make the water pour off of it. I walked all on my lonesome, which was quite unusual. Almost every other traveler that I saw was in a group of some kind, some groups riding on horses, others with carriages, but I only saw a few groups that were traveling on foot. I rationalized away that most lone travelers weren’t going to be crossing the border over to Delfin, and then proceeded to try and come up with other possibilities to entertain myself on my boring walk.

    I noticed that the traveling groups were using the language that the System imparted to us, unlike the demons, who used their own. I wasn’t sure if it was simply cultural, or if there was a different reason for it.

    A few days passed in the same manner, and I was running dangerously low on my horrible cracker like rations and dried fruits when I arrived at the first town I had seen in Eln.

    The first signs of civilization were massive plots of farmland, dark green stalks of this world’s equivalent of wheat waving in the breeze.  It took me most of a day to get past the farms to the city proper. On the bright side, I was able to purchase some fresh vegetables from one of the small farms I passed from a cheerful old man, and ended up making a stew with one of the horned rabbits that lived in between plots of farmland. Once I arrived at civilization proper, I was a bit shocked at how large it was. It would likely take most of a day to get from one end to the other, and there weren’t any walls, which wasn’t particularly surprising considering the tendency demons had of not invading anyone. The city wasn’t anywhere near a border with one of the other human countries, so it wouldn’t need to hold up under siege from any of them either.

    I shook my head, it was still odd to know the general geography of all the nearby countries without having had to learn it properly. Once I arrived at the city proper, I finally started to notice something odd. It seemed like a good seventy percent of all the people I passed were females. Running through my new knowledge, I realized something interesting, it seems that for all the different races, females were a significantly larger portion of the population than males. I hadn’t really noticed it while I was in Delfin, but that was likely because, well, muscles.

    At least the females here looked normal, though open carry weapons were quite common, likely because you always had to deal with those stupid bunnies who would try and impale you with their horn whenever you went outside the city.

I wandered the well designed streets for a while, surprised at how organized the city seemed, straight roads with road signs, and brightly painted buildings everywhere catching my eyes. After a bit, I found a dark green building that had “Joenn’s Tavern” written on its side, along with a big picture of a foaming mug.

    Figuring that fiction on earth could never go wrong, it would be the perfect place to gather information. Walking in, I was hit with the smell of smoke and alcohol. Smoking on earth had seen a massive resurgence once healing magic had been shown to cure cancer, so I wasn’t surprised to see it was common here. If you went in to get a heal for something like a common cold, it would also cure any damage that smoking had caused.

    Healing magic worked in an interesting way, it put the body back to its most ideal state, simply requiring more mana the worse the damage was. With enough time and mana, even missing limbs could be healed. It also had the side effect of everyone having perfect teeth.

    Ignoring the smoke and chatter from the other patrons, I went up to the bar, a solid slab of wood coated in rings from the countless mugs of beer that had sat upon it, and got myself drink, handing over two of my coppers in return. Deciding to get some information on what I could do, I handed over a few more before starting my questioning.

    “Any ideas where I could get some work? I can’t do much but fight, but I can do that pretty well.”

    The short, dark skinned woman, likely Joenn, looked me up and down, likely questioning my ability to do anything. I’d put on a decent amount of muscle, but I still wasn’t built too largely, and seeing as how I was hiding my horns and slit pupils with my illusion magic, she was likely assuming I was a bit weaker than I was.

    “Well assuming a pretty boy like you can actually fight, you could either join the army or go work for the hunters guild.”

    “Hunters guild?”

    She looked at me funny, and I figured I probably came across as either completely clueless or a foreigner of some kind. My knowledge came with no information on the hunters guild, and apparently it was a well known organization.

    “Yeah, you join, take a short test, and if you pass they’ll contact you whenever they get a request to take out some monsters. Get to be a higher level and you’ll get better pay.”

    I nodded, it sounded like what I was looking for. It sounded more like a temp agency than the adventurers guild I was used to from the fiction I’d read back on earth, but it would hopefully pull in enough money to make a living.

    I asked for directions, then finished my beer, leaving a tip on the counter. I’m pretty sure I heard a “Pretty boy is going to get eaten up” from her as I left, but decided to ignore the comment. I followed the directions she had given me, and soon arrived at a massive complex of buildings.

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    Walking inside the main building, it looked more like a bank than the stereotypical adventurers guild that I’d been sort of expecting, one large line trailing through a roped off section to keep the line from getting out of check, leading to a large counter that had dividers to keep each person’s business relatively private. Getting in the back of the line, I looked around. There was only one other person in the thirty or so people in line that was male, and he was built like a truck, in sharp contrast to my reasonably muscled frame.

    None of the women seemed to be ridiculously built like those of the demon race, but they all looked terribly athletic. A quick run through my knowledge let me know that females in this world were naturally stronger than men, and so most occupations that required fighting, or even physical labor were taken up by them. While that gap could be closed by training, and men generally weren’t discriminated against like women had been on earth for much of our history, males tended to take up jobs like merchants or storekeepers rather than the more physical ones.

    Eventually I got to the front of the line, and went up to one of the men lining the counter. He asked me a few questions, such as my level, age, name, and skills. He filled out a form, then had me step out to a small training yard for a test of my fighting ability. The training ground itself was quite large, with dummies people were hitting, what looked like a rudimentary weight section, and a small track where the ground was visibly more beaten down for people to run in.

    When we arrived, he grabbed one of the women there, a blonde woman even taller than I, and from comparing my height to my previous life, I was a good six foot two. He talked to her for a bit. She walked over before looking at me with a bored expression.

    “Well let’s see if a small little boy like you actually knows how to fight.”

    I ignored the jab, and was passed a wooden training sword. I declined the offer of a shield, and took up a ready position. Shields generally weren’t used much when fighting monsters, as it was better to have both hands on it to use more force to cut through the tougher monster’s hides, so I took up a stance, crouched down a bit to stabilize my center of gravity, and waited for her to come to me.

    She started off terribly easy, and I easily handled the slow blows. She slowly ramped up the difficulty until I started breathing hard, and eventually she got fast enough that I couldn’t keep up whatsoever.

    I leaned back against one of the training dummies as I took a deep drink from my water skin.

    “Seems you actually know what you’re doing.” She turned to the man who had brought me out here, and told him to mark me down as a silver level. The man then prompted me to follow him again, and he informed me that I could either find a place of residence and inform the guild, or stay for free at the hunter’s guild to be on call at any time. Seeing as how I was quite poor at the moment, I decided to stay there.

    The man who had been leading me around brought me to a room, and we opened the door to see a woman taking off her shirt. I slammed the door closed and looked to the man, but he just looked at me funny.

    Not long after, the door was opened by said women, who had a grin on her face.

    “What’s the matter? Didn’t like what you saw?”

    I turned a bit red before replying. “They, uh, didn’t tell me the dorms would be co-ed.”

    She laughed. “Well you’re going to have to get used to it. It’ll be nice having someone else be the newbie. So what did they rank you as?”

    “Silver.”

    Her eyes widened for a bit as she looked me up and down. “Surprising.”

    I shrugged. My build wasn’t even purely physical focused, but considering most builds were pretty even, I wasn’t too far behind for my level in stats. If you built purely for strength, you couldn’t keep up with people with higher dexterity. If you built purely for dexterity, you couldn’t hurt people with high constitution. If you built purely for constitution, you couldn’t hurt anything. The only exceptions were if you had a really, really good weapon. The only ones who would go a pure build were mages, as they only had to cast big spells from a distance.

    I would be losing a bit from putting some points into wisdom, but my mana construct skill would give me a very, very sharp weapon and very solid armor, so I would still be able to hurt things, and my sword skills would keep me alive versus anything or anyone that wasn’t too high above me in stats.

    I shrugged at her comment, it was getting a bit annoying being looked down upon. She soon let me into the room, and I ended up with the top left bunk, as the both beds of the right bunk bed were taken, and the girl, who had introduced herself as Kara, would be taking the bottom bunk of the left.

    The room itself was a small little thing, holding nothing more than a bunk bed to the left and right, with trunks sitting at either end of the beds. Everything in the room was made of a dark red wood, which made sense considering how many forests were nearby. If plant growth was as ridiculously fast as it had been on earth after the System appeared, it would be basically impossible to deforest anything, so wood would be a very popular resource.

    Once I was done, I took a good look at Kara considering I had been a bit too distracted to get a good look at her when I first opened the door. She had blue eyes, and strikingly red curly hair which was cut short. She wasn’t what I would consider beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly either, her plain face in stark contrast to her eyes and hair.

    I put my stuff in one of the ridiculously heavy looking trunks at the base of the bed, and was given an old fashioned skeleton key to it by the man who had brought me here. Figuring I had nothing to do for now, I decided to ask Kara what exactly we would be doing until we got a mission to do.

    “Well we get three meals a day at the mess hall, I’ll show you where it is in a bit. Other than that, the only real thing to do is training or doing whatever you want around the city. Most jobs are going to take a few days to even get to the job site, so waiting a day for the hunter assigned to it isn’t going to hurt too much.”

    “So what exactly are the jobs going to be?”

    “Usually monster extermination requests. For the easier ones, if a herd of horned rabbits or a horde of goblins show up, they’ll assign a few hunters to go clear them out before they cause much damage. For big cities like this, the army will clear out any monsters nearby on a regular basis to train up their troops, so there’s not much actual work. We usually get sent to outlying towns and villages to deal with problems for them. It’s a lot easier for them to hire a few hunters rather than petition the government and maybe get a response. The hunters guild is subsidized by the government anyway. Then there are the people who hire hunters for rare materials like chimaera bones.”

    I nodded, it seemed to be pretty similar to what I’d expected. After a bit more discussion, Kara brought me to the mess hall for some dinner. The mess hall was much closer to the stereotypical adventurers guild than the building I had first entered was, tens of tables scattered across the room in no discernable pattern, with hunters throwing back mugs of what was likely some alcoholic beverage. It was terribly loud as well, filled with laughter and discussion. Kara led me to the end of the room, weaving through the tables, to get a bowl of some mystery stew.

The stew was surprisingly delicious, with lots of meat I recognized as the meat from the horned rabbits, with some sort of pepper giving a kick to that and some vegetables I only recognize because of the knowledge from the spawning pool. Once we were finished with our meal, me taking two bowls and Kara four, we both settled down for the night, and I was introduced to Lira and Erin, the other two who would be rooming with us. The looks they gave me would have made me a lot more worried if they weren’t so attractive, but as it was, I was practically preening at the attention. Lira was a beautiful girl who I estimated at five foot nine, with hazel eyes and light brown hair, while Erin was a short girl, maybe a hair over five feet, with dirty blonde hair and pale green eyes.

    A couple days passed with me spending most of my time at the training grounds working mainly to raise my dexterity, as they had completely neglected any sort of dexterity training when I was doing the demon’s training. I hadn’t managed to raise it a single point by the time I was handed a mission.

    I was told to go to a meeting room, and when I arrived, there were five other hunters, with the man who had guided me around standing at the front of the room, which contained a large table in the center of it, seeming like a meeting room from earth. He gave a short rundown of the situation. A town called Haven had been facing regular goblin attacks. While your average adult could fight a goblin one on one, one of their people had seen a large gathering of them, and so they had sent in a mission request to have them hunted down.

    After he had finished talking, I was introduced to the mission mates I didn’t know, as one of which was my roommate Lira. The others were all female, which was no surprise, and it wasn’t long before we were on the road to the small town of Haven.