Our teacher for Omegafaunas and Monsters was this guy called Scrag Commfab, and he walked into our classroom with confidence and vitality that betrayed his bearded, wrinkled face- he was getting in on the years, he said as much as he entered our room, and when he finished putting his personal belongings on the teacher's desk, he walked up to the front of the stage and said, “this old man has gone feeble, please be patient with me okay?”

As everyone zipped their mouth to give our teacher his much needed silence, I thought about Sir Scrag's singular ingame quest; and what it is about is essentially him asking the Player to start finding ingredients across the world so that he can make an Elixir of Life.

Because of how the ingredients are hidden, doing his quest for the first time is a pain in the ass and even then, the Player still has to present him with one of the ingredients before his quest becomes available, making it so that the Player has to find one of the super secret things before they can even discover said quest's existence.

Lorewise, the explanation for this is because Sir Scrag wouldn't have realized that the Elixir of Life is actually real before he sees one of the ingredients for himself.

Meanwhile, the ingame explanation is that the item that he gives when the Player finishes his quest- a timer that tells when one of the Catastrophes wakes up, - is super duper broken and so, they had to nerf it using this method.

And why did they need to nerf it? Well it's because of what the item does; which makes it so that the Catastrophes don't cause “events” to happen every once in a while, effectively forcing them to go idle and turning those ancient Omegafaunas into raid bosses that the Player can beat whenever they want.

Even with how useful the Calamity Timer is, Sir Scrag’s quest is still bothersome to deal with- which honestly won't stop me from completing it in this life because I need to find out when these gigantic fuckers wake up because Lucille would be forced to take care of them when they do and what if she dies? It'll be my fault because I didn't do anything to figure out a way to stop it beforehand.

Someone to my side poked my cheek and forced me to focus back on the lesson.

“-ut enough about the various types of Omegafaunas,” I heard our teacher say as I turned right to glare at the person responsible and seeing Naviri grin at me playfully made me sigh and apologize for being so aggressive, she said it was fine and that we just finished discussing the different types of Omegafaunas before pointing to the blackboard where all of their names were written down- Calves, Juveniles, Pupa, Adult, and then finally, Catastrophe.

“As I said earlier, we will only be touching on the surface level knowledge of these walking calamities, and instead, for today's lesson, we will be focusing on the formation of Monster Hordes and how to spot, exterminate, or if you're not strong enough or are just a simple human, avoid them.” A brief pause came as my classmates wrote down the words that had been said, then the lesson continued, “Usually, one can tell when a Monster Horde is forming through 3 simple signs; the animals are starting to become scarce, the trees and plants start to wilt, or when it comes to expert Slayers, they get a sense of wrongness within the forest.”

“Of course, one could also use a Dragon to spot and clear out a Monster Horde before it could become a full threat but making a Pact with them is often rare, especially if they are no longer a newly hatched Dragon,” somehow, despite not everyone focusing at our teacher, it still felt like everyone's eyes were burning a hole through my head.

“Your majesty,”

I flinched and stood up- “Yes?!” I answered quickly.

“You have exterminated a Monster Horde by your lonesome before yes?” I nodded in confirmation, “Can I ask you questions?” I nodded again, of course you can! I don't mind really, just don't ask about how I'm strong enough to wipe it out all on my own…

And fortunately for me, out of all his questions, none of them involved asking me about my strength- “First question, how did you find out about the formation of the Horde?”

“Fafnir has life sense,” I answered, and then quickly realized that I didn’t find the monster horde through that method so I added, “but I also kind of had some sort of feeling that something wrong is going on underneath Everlast so I decided to check it out with my Dragon,”

“Good choice in doing that,” our teacher complimented, “now, for the next question, what was your method of wiping out the horde?”

“I kinda just slashed at the monsters until they died?” I answered honestly, losing a bit of confidence, I mean, when I say it like that, it makes me look like an idiot who doesn't know how to wield her Pledge or something…

“I see,” our teacher nodded twice before turning away from me, “as you can all see, her majesty did two of the things that I explained just now; she felt for the monster horde and then exterminated it with the standard method, which is to say, killing and hacking monsters until you get results.”

Our teacher wiped the blackboard- which didn't have much writing on it to begin with, - and wrote new things down, at the top is the underlined title written as Methods of Disposing Hordes, and at the bottom is a list of methods to exterminate hordes- Standard, Poison, and then finally, Denial.

“We've already talked a bit about the standard method of extermination but as with all things, there is more to it than just simply slashing at monsters until their numbers can no longer be considered a horde, and as for the other methods of disposal, these are outliers because usually, villages, towns, cities, and kingdoms would prepare an army of men to cull the forming horde before it reaches breaking point and the monsters run amok.”

Our teacher walked back to the blackboard and wrote down Armies right next to Standard and I decided to put a dash over the two just in case I get confused in the future and think that it’s a standard army or something…

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When I looked up from my notebook, Zathania called my name, “Neo?”

Hm?” I turned to her.

“Do you know how to properly manage armies?” She asked, I nodded, of course I do, armies were pretty involved with Everlast's gameplay back then so I kinda knew how to lead one, somewhat. “Can you teach me about them later?”

“Gladly!” I beamed at her, “you can just ask anytime okay? I'm here for you,” For some reason, my reply made her lips shake and Zath quickly looked away from me, “are you okay?”

“I am fine, mistress,”

“Yeah…” I trailed off.

She’s clearly not fine because she refused to look at me but I'm sure we'd have more time to talk about this later- for now, we need to not make our teacher die early from a heart attack because we're talking during lectures-

Do I sound old? I probably sound old don't I?

Before my thoughts could get any worse, I focused back on the lesson at hand-

“-and usually, these armies are dispatched in such a way that the leadership of the town knows will be effective against the horde because as I said; we have experienced this particular event throughout history, and because of that, we have familiarity on how hordes usually go,” was the part that I caught from our teacher’s explanation, “and there is a method to this but if you are merely starting and don’t know how to judge horde formations but still forced to confront them, then the best way cull them is by focusing on the fastest monsters because those would always reach villages first, you can deal with the slow monsters after the fact,”

“Of course, different monsters have different preferences for what kind of area they will attack and specific species target specific places but we won’t talk about any of those today, so let’s continue on with the rest of the lesson-”

“- now, for the poison method, there are usually special ingredients involved with the poison in order to quickly affect the ravenous monsters because otherwise, their irate and angry state would render the poison null,”

Sir Scrag wrote something down on the blackboard; the word, Prevention next to Poison, and then proceeded with an explanation; “this method however isn’t used to exterminate monster hordes but rather, to prevent them from forming to begin with,” I wrote that down because everyone else did, “and whenever this method is used, the horde is found out prematurely, allowing the local powers to prevent it before it could begin,”

Prevention had the word Premature written right next to it now, which again, I put a hyphen in between because I’m sure that I will actually get confused by this if I don't.

“And finally, there is Denial but this method is an outlier among outliers, and this can usually only be done by a Prophecy because of their personal power, and using it, they will cast a powerful Technique that washes light over the entire forest and prevents the monster horde from ever forming,” from the way our teacher nodded, I knew that this particular topic is now done.

And like I thought, our teacher's next words were about the closing of said topic- “Now that extermination is finished-” our teacher paused when a hand got raised, “yes?”

Korbinian stood up, “we never talked about how monster hordes formed,”

“I did that on purpose,” our teacher answered calmly, “because as I said earlier, we are only discussing how to spot when a monster horde is forming and not how it forms, I understand why you couldn’t distinguish it though, sometimes I make that mistake myself!” I smiled when he started laughing at his own joke.

When Korbinian sat back down, our lesson continued; “now, how do you avoid monster hordes?” Our teacher asked as he walked around the stage, “usually there are several options a regular person can do whenever a horde is descending on them and those are- running away and finding a place to hide, going to a territory of an Omegafauna Calf and waiting the horde out, then finally, they can attempt to kill one of the monsters and then bathe themselves in blood to mask their smell.”

So it’s either die while running, go to an even deadlier monster’s territory, or kill one, get bloody, and then hope for the best.

I’m starting to think that maybe the people of this world are a bit too defenseless against the standard monster commonly found across the world… but how do I do something about it?.. It’s not like I can help in this particular scenario right?..

I frowned, guess it’s just one of those things that Fafnir said I couldn’t do anything about- I mean, I can fight Demon Dukes and move valleys with the amount of workers I can hire but focusing on… hm, why would I be the one focusing everything I have on Monster Hordes? Amber can probably do it just fine but then I’ll have to ask her and she’ll probably say it’ll take a while- a few months or so, - to train proper soldiers, which even as Royalty, is pretty expensive to do…

Training soldiers takes a lot of money and as great as my funds are (both from my own stuff and from everything else,) I’m not exactly so rich that I can just raise a personal army meant to protect everything inside of Everlast’s borders all by myself…

Come to think of it, how many soldiers do I even need for that?

“Neo, what are you thinking about?” I faced Fafnir.

“Well I just thought how hard it would be for me to raise an entire army that can defend everything inside the borders from monster hordes,” I answered honestly, followed by a frown, “it’s kinda sad that everyone is dying from them all the time,”

“No, no- not everyone dies from monster hordes all the time,” Laceresta cut into the conversation and shook her head at me, “if you’ve been listening to our teacher, you’d know that the hordes rarely kill anyone since villages and kingdoms move before they can rush out of the forest and start doing actual damage to the surrounding settlements and the only time that the armies of those places fail is when the monster horde is bigger than they initially thought which… only happens twice a month, or at least it’s what our teacher said,”

“Kingdoms and villages have their own personal armies?” Huh, I did not know that, and from the way my seatmates are staring at me… I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to since… it was literally one of the first few things our teacher said at the start of our lesson, I sighed, “sorry,”

“It’s fine,” Laceresta waved me off, “just continue listening, we’re only one more subject away before our first day of school ends,”

“Right,” I nodded, “I guess we are,”

Hm. I'm feeling a bit stressed, should we go out into the city after this?

I turned to all my friends, feeling a bit excited but choosing not to tell them about it.

The rest of our lesson for Monster Hordes had been pretty standard all things considered, and since we still had (a bit) of time left after discussing the various ways a horde can be defeated, our teacher decided that we’d talk about the standard, typical monsters that can be found everywhere.

“It's to prepare you all for your hunts,” Sir Scrag said as he wrote down Iron Tusks, Dire Wolves, and Grisly Spiders on the blackboard, as I read through the names, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of monster would be considered as a “boss” in a more realistic Everlast.

Obviously, the Omegafaunas are a given and those ranged from mini-bosses to Raid Bosses that can wipe out entire parties back in the game, here though? I’m not so sure…

I mean, they are being treated as dangerous by everyone around me but I don't know just how dangerous they really are since I haven't fought one and compared my ingame experiences yet- I pressed my cheek against my palm and faced Fafnir and Laceresta, "say, do you guys want to hunt an Omegafauna calf and juvenile with me on the weekend?”

“No.” Laceresta immediately denied, “I'm gonna go hunt with Zathania and guide her on how to properly kill monsters, you've been teaching her how to fight but she lacks experience and since our personal strength is close to each other's, I'm gonna go hunt with her.”

“Good for you Zath,” I smiled at my maid, “you should get as much experience out of this as you can,” she nodded and focused back on the lesson, “Nir?” I eyed my Dragon.

She nodded, “I do need to stretch limbs,” she hummed, “and I guess this is a great way to do that,”

“Yay~~” I grinned, “we're gonna kill so many of them it's gonna be great!”