"You learned cooking or something. You will have to teach me after we get back," Elowen said.

"Uh... My parents showed me how to cook proper meat. So I can only teach what my parents taught me."

"Your parents must be very wealthy to even teach you cooking at such an early age," Roderic poked and asked.

"Uh... They are not that rich. I just love cooking and asked my mother to teach me," Aric said.

"That is the best thing one could learn at such an early age. Good food will always make warriors and mages powerful alike."

"And archers too," Lyria reminded him.

"Yes... Them too... Hahaha..." Roderic was laughing and having a jolly time, and so did the others.

After the hearty lunch, Aric started to gather the things around carefully and put them in the bag. He had also helped Roderic before with the eyeballs, and he gave him some good advice surrounding their physiology.

Or any physiology of a magical animal in general. He also spoke of the mana cores these animals might have. Some have them and some not, it all depended on luck. Only the ones who had crossed the Acolyte stage would have mana cores for sure.

"Roderic, let's start finding our supposed treasure," Lyria said after everything was done and dusted. Aric was confused, and this was where Roderic explained the reason for undertaking this mission. They had been adventuring for quite some time, and thus by now they were experienced. They speculated that since these hyenas were out of their 'comfort' zone, it must mean that these animals had found something worth protecting.

Remember when I said that these animals were intelligent? Yes, that.

They started looking for any treasure that could be nearby, most probably some kind of plant. Aric was fascinated by this theory and he too joined them in the search. Since they had a lot of ground to cover, each of them separated.

Roderic wanted Aric to be with Elowen, but Aric refused, saying that he wanted to contribute. Roderic in the end reluctantly agreed even though he was a bit iffy about it.

"Here is your whistle. If you find yourself in a dangerous situation, blow on it. Most of the time the whistle scares many magical animals away, but the hungry and carnivorous ones won't, so don't think you can be brave and fight them. This whistle is also for any treasure if you find it," Roderic warned Aric heavily, and Aric seemed to put everything in his ears and mind and nodded.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

After separating, Aric walked off in one of the directions searching for the treasure. They weren't that far from the slaughtered hyenas, and thus the treasure shouldn't be far. Once Aric was far away from them, he checked his communicator.

A holographic 3D image showed up. The 3D real-time image was of the terrain he was standing on. His body was shown in purple, while he could also see three red images of humans moving. One image was a bit cold, but it was a human for sure.

This was the thermal vision that was taken in real-time, thanks to four deadly drones high up in the air. Yup, Aric wasn't here like a man without any weapon. The previous night he had bought four drones that could shoot from high up in the air and could automatically follow the controller without any sort of prompts.

These drones were made to safeguard the controller and were quite common for adventurers in the universe. These drones were deadly with 200 plasma rounds that could shoot up to a kilometer. These drones were silent, and one could never see them either because these drones were made with reflective and refractive panels.

These drones had been following him and monitoring around Aric since the time he had got out of his home, and that was the reason why he was never stressed about the fact that he was in a dangerous situation.

Though he did feel it might be dangerous if he came across an Acolyte-level magical animal, but according to Gopher, there were very few of them and they lived much deeper into the forest. So Aric was safe, and if he was really in danger, he could always move away.

He climbed up a tree and sat on a thick branch, thanks to his nano armor giving him grip like no other, and just started to look at everything around. The camera could pick all kinds of lights, including ultraviolet and infrared, so the drones were great for reconnaissance and scouting.

Leaving two drones, he ordered the three drones to search for anything unusual. He wasn't very hopeful of finding anything and thus just enjoyed the fresh air and started reading one of the books he had downloaded from the internet.

But as he was reading, he suddenly got a notification.

"... Found a cave on the small mountain 850 meters away in the southeast direction. The ultraviolet camera picked up activity... Proceed with caution..."

"What the..." Aric was surprised that there had been a response and thus he ordered the drone to do a more close survey and soon the camera picked up thermal imaging. From what he could see from the thermal image, there was an animal inside.

It was a hyena from what he could figure out, but from the size of it in his hologram, Aric was willing to bet that this hyena wasn't just an ordinary one. The hyena's ears suddenly became erect and it opened its mouth.

Without any sort of warning, it attacked the drone with a wind blade. The drone's defensive mechanism came into action and it swirled away, dodging the attack.

"Fuck. That drone cost me 150,000 Sora credits," Aric thought and ordered the drone to fly high again. Surprisingly, the hyena didn't come out, not even growled at what just happened. Aric didn't waste time as he ran towards the cave while asking the other drone to converge on his location.

The game was far from over.