"Zone 3!" Came the call from the rail attendant.

Kyrain and the boys stood and got off the guild rail line.

This rail line connected all the zones and was built a few years after the appearance of the rifts. It circled the rifts which also were divided into zones. The closer to the rifts, the stronger the monsters become.

The rail line was pushed all the way out far enough that the Junior adventurers could defend the rail line through their extermination missions, which leaves the full adventurers free to push deeper toward the rifts to accomplish their extermination requests. They wouod cull the stronger and stronger beasts keeping them away from the surrounding cities.

The group disembarked and immediately headed out into the field excited to start killing these monsters and getting cores, but were quickly disappointed. They couldn't find a single monster anywhere.

Finally after another hour they heard it. The tell tale grunting of a pebble boar.

"Finally!" Sebastian shouted as he drew his sword and hand ax.

The boar grunted and turned toward the group with a sharp squeal. It charged Sebastian who laughed and swung his ax down with ease.

*ping!*

The ax was deflected off its rocky pelt as the beast continued its charge and sank its black obsidian like tusks into his leg.

With a scream he felt the boar rip it's tusks out of his leg, which allowed him to limp away as Tobias and Kyrain stepped in to block the way for further damage.

The boar charged Tobias only to be stopped by a shield he carried and then Tobias tried to press the boar to the ground.

To his suprise he wasn't able to. The boar just kept coming until he pushed off the shield and got around the boar out of the way.

"I'm back!" Sebastian shouted coming back into the fight.

"Having someone able to whip us back into shape is useful." He said throwing a thank you wave back at the Elijah who just waved and continued to watch the boar.

Kyrain saw it was his turn. He targeted the boar with his antimatter skill and tried to get rid of anything in boar, but found it really wasn't an aether ability. It was just it's actual flesh. He did drain aether from the beast, but it wasn't near as effective as when he disrupted people.

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He did succeed in tiring the beast out a bit by draining the aether away. Kyrain darted in with his sword toward the beasts face, a risk he knew, and lunged. The beast turned it's head at the last moment causing a tusks to hit the blade and letting it rip up cutting through the side of its face and through an eye.

With a squeal of pain, the boar twisted it's heavily muscled neck and ripped the sword from Kyrain's hand and flung it to the side.

Tobias shifted in front of Kyrain and swung a flanged mace down on the head of the boar which seemed to do some damage. Parts of the boar's rocky hide when flying from the impact as it continued to squeal.

Kyrain ran around the side of the beast, grabbed his sword and went in for another strike on the boar. He looked underneath the boar and saw a lighter tone underneath. He did a baseball slide up next to the boar and slamed the blade up into its front armpit.

He expected the blade to stop, but when it didn't, he overcommited tons of strength and the sword went clear through the inside of the beast until it was stopped on the other side by the hard outer armored flesh.

There was a new panicked squeal that was deafening. Kyrain ripped his blade straight back toward himself and out ripping more flesh and causing even more bleeding before getting clear of the new adrenaline saturated beast that had begun thrashing and kicking.

"How is this a low level monster?! There is no way these should be this hard to kill!" Sebastian shouted irritably as the monster began to weaken more from blood loss.

After another minutes the boar began to sway on its feet and become almost dazed with lethargy.

Sebastian darted in and slammed his sword through the pebble boar's remaining eye. It dropped and began to kick until the nerves finally stopped.

Elijah came up and looked it and everyone over. "Perhaps it's like those beast hunting games where some beasts are strong to different kinds of damage. I noticed Tobias smashing it with his mace did some damage where the swords and ax needed soft points to have any effect."

The four of them looked at eachother then started laughing.

"Yeah...almost like we got classes on this in school too." Tobias said.

After a brief pause they got the core out of the beast. A green and brown D rank core. They pushed on and continued hunting around. The following hours went by like they were carried on the back of a snail.

The armadillos were way harder to kill as they would curl up and they had to be bludgeoned to death and exhausted. Sebastian was also bored with those as he couldn't get through the creatures armor and they didn't set his class off.

Tobias had a mace and beat them to death agonizing slow.

They had finally killed the final D Rank monster as the sun began to crest the horizon on the following day.

"We see videos of these extermination missions and they make it look so darn easy, but this was rough and miserable." Kyrain said bone weary tired.

Elijah pulled the core from the beast and put it into their core pouch for the full 20 they needed to take out.

The boys then made their way back to the guild. After a quick stop at the screens they turned in proof of mission and recieved 20 more D rank cores which they split evenly ten each.

They were not interested in any conversation or additional jobs. School would be starting up soon again with the end of the summer and they were about to be juniors in high school.

They were all excited because they were initiates with their first job done and that meant bragging rights and looking cool.