I woke up from my dream.

After having eaten a stupid amount of monsters, I needed some sleep. Of course, Dreams of the void had other ideas than giving me a restful night, but at least I wasn’t assaulted or anything. In fact, I spent most of my dream just floating around the void. I did try to figure out how to travel in the void, but nothing seemed to work.

I really had a stupid amount of monsters in my inventory, just over a hundred in fact. I was beginning to believe that my inventory was truly bottomless, just as the name implied. I did leave twenty in my inventory, just in case, and ate the rest. So I ate eighty-six monsters! Gluttony was really putting in the work here, even if I lost the bonus chance of getting attributes from eating monsters above my tier.

I got a whopping forty-six attribute points out of this meal! FORTY-SIX! A truly stupid number of attribute points got added to my status, proving once again why Gluttony deserved its SSS rating. Now, my attributes looked a bit more balanced out, especially since only three of those points went into wisdom. Maybe the system did this on purpose, maybe it was just a coincidence, but still, it was nice.

Strength

21

Agility

35

Intelligence

70

Wisdom (C)

103

Constitution

61

Luck

43

At this point, I’d done everything that I could, really, so the only thing left before evolving again was to figure out whether or not I wanted to fight the hunter. In order to know, I needed more information about my target. And since the system refused to help me out on this, the only thing left for me was some old-fashioned espionage. Which meant I needed to find the hunter.

I wasn’t entirely certain whether the hunter was even active during the day since I’d only seen it at night so far. Which meant this was the first piece of information I needed. If I could stage a battle during the day, the chances of being interrupted by other bloodthirsty monsters plummeted. Then again, I wondered whether regular monsters would even willingly approach that behemoth.

Another thing I needed to figure out.

So I left my bunker and headed toward the desert. I had absolutely zero clue about where to find the hunter, so all I could do was just wander around aimlessly until I found it. I had a feeling that it roamed around the oasis, staying at least somewhat close to it. Though, I had never seen it come by to have a drink. It must either not need water, or drink somewhere else… or maybe it sustained itself by drinking the blood of its victims.

From what little I could gather from the quest descriptions, I assumed that there were multiple hunters scattered over the third layer. It would make sense that the system forced them to sort of “patrol” certain areas in order for them to not take each other out. So I really hoped that my theory of the area around the oasis being this hunter's assigned area was correct.

I quickly made my way out of the oasis and up the first dune I could see. The sand was still uncomfortable to me, but the discomfort was mitigated somewhat because I didn’t need as much contact with the ground as before. My agility suffered quite a bit, still, since the ground was giving way when I tried to launch myself off it.

If I could somehow lure the hunter to the oasis I wouldn’t need to deal with this malus, so I would need to try and plan that somehow. I could maybe try to trigger the hunting event again by killing a ton of monsters, but I’d only use that as a last option. Not only would it leave me exhausted once the hunter showed up, but it would also know exactly where I am, getting rid of the element of surprise.

The hunter was incredibly powerful, so I needed to hit it hard and fast. Preferably with a surprise attack. Maybe sprinkle in some traps as well, although I didn’t have any ideas for creating traps with my current abilities.

I let my eyes wander across the desert, trying to spot any signs of the hunter. Be it its hulking figure in the distance, or signs of an incredibly violent battle. Alas, I couldn’t see anything. Figured that it wouldn’t be that easy. So I started going to the next dune. And then the next. And again and again, trying to find a sign of my target.

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The day passed without me finding any trace of the hunter.

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I was a bit bummed out, but the situation wasn’t entirely unexpected. One of my theories was that the hunter was only active during the night, after all. Which meant I needed to continue my efforts throughout the night. Doing so shouldn’t be much of an issue, since this slug body of mine could go without sleep for several days. I usually just slept daily out of habit, provided my situation allowed for it.

Scouting for the hunter during the night is probably going to be troublesome with the whole slaughter-fest going on, but it should also make it easy to locate if it's in the vicinity. After all, its mighty attacks sent strong tremors throughout the ground, and if it used its laser, it’d be like a huge marker. I just needed to hope to not randomly get hit by the laser, seeing how much range that thing had.

I shuddered thinking of the sheer power that skill, or spell, had and wondered if I’d ever get something crazy like that. Sure, void javelin was a crazy good spell, but it paled when compared to the laser I saw that night.

The more I thought about it, the more it felt like the hunter really wasn’t supposed to be defeated.

I don’t think any of the regular monsters of this layer could ever hope to dream of defeating this thing. So why did it even exist? To thin the masses? Probably not, they already took each other out in droves. As a test to see how strong monsters fare against weaker ones? Maybe, but that seemed kind of pointless.

Then… Were they here solely as obstacles for stray travelers passing through? An obstacle that doubled as an opportunity for a traveler to prove themselves? That made a scary amount of sense. But still, the hunter was too strong. I doubt many travelers could take it on. I barely stood a chance thanks to some crazy skills I received early on and because I was technically already a tier-four monster.

I shook my head. Thinking about this would get me nowhere. I didn’t need to know about the reasons the system did the things it did. The facts are: It’s here. I get rewards if I defeat it. I can just not fight if I think it’s not doable. That’s all there is to it.

As the first monsters emerged from the sand, I prepared myself to survive another hellish night and activated void cloak to hide myself from the initial brawl.

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This was the first time I completely witnessed the night out in the desert. Sure I spent a lot of time traveling to the oasis, but I spent most nights buried in the sand. And while the oasis saw its fair share of action, it paled next to what was happening in the desert. Monsters emerged from the sand everywhere, immediately rushing into the battle.

I watched the proceedings, for the first time without feeling any real threat to my safety since I was just too strong at this point. After watching them going at each other, I had a suspicion and once the fighters had thinned out a bit, I decided to join the brawl for a bit to confirm.

Sure enough, every monster I killed was level three or lower. Which meant these monsters weren’t hiding in the sand during the day, they spawned at level one once night began!

I’d always assumed that the monsters were just avoiding the heat during the day except for a few that didn’t need to. Instead, the ones I’d seen during the day were most likely survivors of the night. Monsters spawned during the night on mass, fought each other the whole time, leveled up, and gained skills until eventually, daybreak left only the strongest monsters to survive another day. They’d start with an advantage during the next night repeating the process until they earned the right to descend.

Now that I thought about it, I never really saw any monsters spawn in the first two layers. How did it work up there?

Satisfied with my little experiment, I left the competitors to their own devices. I had a hunter to find, after all.

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Turns out finding the hunter wasn’t as hard as I feared it would be.

Just as I’d hoped, the hunter was causing a huge commotion, making it pretty easy to locate. I thought that I’d most likely feel the tremors first, but with all the fighting going on around me, the ones pointing me toward the hunter drowned in a sea of vibrations. The first sign of it was actually a huge amount of sand exploding everywhere.

As soon as I saw that, I immediately changed directions, and immediately came face to face with the hunter. Well, more like, I observed from really far away. The hunter was rampaging through the masses, leaving only a sea of blood and body parts behind.

The existence of the hunter became stranger the more I learned. Like, why was this powerhouse happily stomping down the masses of low-level monsters? They neither provided a challenge to it nor did they pose a threat. I had to assume that the hunter was also at the highest level possible, so they wouldn’t even give XP for it to level up.

Maybe it was just a dick by nature.

Now that I finally found it, though, I could finally start my scouting mission properly. It was time to find out everything I could about this monster, and whether or not I should risk fighting it.

I made sure to keep enough distance so that I wouldn’t enter its radar. The fact that it was so big helped a lot with that. So for the entire night, I followed it around, watching it dispatch monster after monster with playful ease. Most of the time it just punched and kicked its way forward, the simple attacks more than enough to deal with the weaker beings. Occasionally, it used the howl attack I saw it use when I saw it for the first time. All of the monsters froze in place, unable to move each time it did.

Thankfully, my lack of ears protected me from this attack.

It never used the laser, a spell or skill most likely reserved for dicey situations. What I did see, though, were several other skills. Once, the hunter's arm bulged up to almost twice its size, a crimson glow enveloping the whole thing. After it brought it down in a mighty smash, a tsunami of sand radiated out from the impact, burying everything in its path. None of the affected monsters ever came back up, so I assumed it not only buried them but also did some damage somehow.

Just one more reason to try and fight in the oasis.

Other skills included it going on all fours and charging ahead, using the massive horns on its head to spear through the masses. Leaping a huge distance, the landing impact unbalancing everything near it. An unnaturally fast flurry of blows, and using monsters as a projectile to hit other monsters with.

For that last one, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was a skill or just something it liked to do.

All of its skills seemed to be physical in nature, so as long as I could dodge them, I should be fine. Of course, there was the laser, which I knew woefully little about. If it was anything like my poison mist and it could adjust the strength of the laser by changing the amount of mana used to cast it, I could be in trouble. If so, the laser could be a terrifying ranged option that would take away my only advantage.

Or there could be even more skills that I didn’t know about. I might just have to observe the hunter for a while longer until I could be mostly sure about just what its capabilities were. For now, it cut a swath of destruction through the desert with the skills that I’d already seen. All I could really do was follow along and make sure I didn’t miss anything.

I wanted that reward.