It took me almost two days to recuperate from the battle. The physical wounds weren’t much of a problem, gluttony took care of it, but I needed some time to process how insane my encounter with the hunter was. I replayed the scene over and over again, wondering if I could have done anything differently.

I wondered if I could have taken out its legs with a few well-placed void javelins, or if I could have slowed it down with some concentrated poison. At the time I was just too panicked to really consider fighting back, especially when the target of its anger was me. All I could think about was surviving back then, nary a thought spent on offense. Now, though, I really wish that I at least threw one void javelin at it, just to see how effective it was.

As it stands, I gained little to no data on how effective my weapons were against it. All I knew was that it was strong, and I probably shouldn’t enter a prolonged fight with it, ever. Well, and the fact that it was able to fire a massive laser of destruction, I guess.

I was comforted a bit by all the gains I’d gotten over the night. The most obvious one being DP. I had killed a hundred monsters, and while I couldn’t gain XP anymore, I did gain upwards of 7k DP, putting me at 9.1k. Absolutely bonkers. I could potentially buy myself a new A-tier skill from the shop now, but since buying a skill was limited to a single purchase per traveler-tier, I really, really wanted to go for an EX-tier skill. Everything else was too expensive for now, so I guess I would just continue to save up for now.

Another thing was my attributes. I’d eaten quite a bit during the night in order to restore my HP and MP, so of course, gluttony provided me with some attribute points, netting me another seven evenly spread attribute points. Which also still left me with a whopping seventy-eight monsters in my inventory.

I was seriously starting to doubt whether there was an actual limit to my inventory at this point.

Both poison needle and poison mist were level nine, and I was pretty sure they were this close to evolving. The bomb I’d gotten from spear evolving was incredibly useful, so I was looking forward to what else the poison spell family had in store for me.

Void cloak was already level three, while void javelin remained at level two for now, and my defensive skills gained a few levels as well. All in all, the night had been a full-blown success, if a bit traumatizing.

Anyway, a whole day and night had passed since the battle and it was currently morning. Time to finally emerge from the safety of my little hidey-hole and face reality again. I pulled myself out of the tunnel, idly noting just how much better my control over my tentacles had gotten. After taking a moment to orient myself I made my way towards the lake.

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I arrived there in short order and let my eyes wander over the opposite shore, where the hunter tried to kill me. The aftermath of the laser was still there, a good third of the oasis left as a charred mess. Somehow I wanted to go over there and take a closer look, so I started my journey around the lake.

I relished in the calm of not having to constantly battle and enjoyed the warm sun washing over my body. The cool breeze of my speedy movement provided a nice contrast to the heat. I really did come a long way, didn’t I?

Eventually, I stood back at the point of origin. Right at the spot where the laser was fired.

I stood there, taking in the scene of destruction in front of me. Everything was burnt, not a speck of green was to be seen, and a decent portion of the ground was carved out. In the distance, I could see glass twinkling in the sunlight where the laster had hit a dune. The hole in said dune was hard to miss since it left a huge gap between the mounds of sand on either side.

The destructive power wielded by the hunter was nothing to scoff at, and I don’t think I’d ever seen anything with comparable might before. Not even the tier-four reaper snake I’d encountered on the first floor could come close to doing something like this. Well, maybe it just didn’t have to since all the monsters up there were chumps to it anyway.

I really, really hoped that that spell cost so much of its MP that it could only use it once. Or maybe it was like my poison mist and got bigger the more MP it pumped into the spell. Thinking about it, spells that had no limit to how much mana you used to cast them were crazy strong, if you had enough mana to exploit them.

I started crawling, opting to not use my tentacles for once. I just wanted to take this in slowly, really hammer into my head just how strong the hunter was, and how close I’d come to kicking the bucket. I’d come pretty close to zeroing out my HP several times before, but somehow this felt different.

After some time crawling along the charred earth, I came across a half-buried rock statue that was somehow still partially intact. It was one of the weird face sculptures I encountered during my exploration. I briefly wondered about their purpose again, before using the fact that this was where the faces were, to figure out where I was in the oasis.

I sighed as I came to a realization and hurried along the destroyed oasis to confirm my suspicions. Sure enough, No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find the weird tree that maybe had something to do with the fruit of evolution. The laser must have completely evaporated it and with it my chances of completing my other bonus objective.

I considered going to another oasis to see if I could find one there but dismissed it almost instantly. I had no idea where the next oasis was and didn’t want to risk spending weeks in the desert with no payoff. Sure, I could hold my own against the monsters now, and could probably survive in the long run, but I felt this sense of urgency now. The hunter was out there, and if I encountered it again I might not get so lucky.

Since my chances of completing the second objective were close to zero, I gave up on it. Might as well evolve and get stronger instead of roaming around aimlessly for weeks or months while stagnating. Having made up my mind, I went to look for another of my holes. It hadn’t been that long since I evolved to the second tier, but it was already time again.

Let me see what the third tier has in store for me.