The death of King Fujilin was a shock to the entire nation, yet a pleasant one. Rui was actually quite shocked at the positive reception he received from completing his mission.
('He must have been a real scumbag.') He mused.
He escaped wondering if he would get an angry message from Minister Riunge, before shrugging. What was done was done, there's nothing about it that could be changed. He simply hit mission completed button on his mission tracker before bolting out of the nation at top speed.
Of course, it wasn't as though he was particularly in trouble. The Kingdom of Dermile did not possess Martial Squires, so even if he was caught, there wasn't anything they could do about it.
He simply crossed the border and ran back to the Kandrian Empire.
"This has got to be my shortest mission so far." Rui thought out loud.
Travelling between the Kandrian Empire and the Kingdom of Dermile was rather trivial, trivially quick. The mission itself was wrapped up in around an hour.
"A little under two hours." Rui affirmed. "It's honestly not even worth going back home, might as well grind another mission."
He usually took a small break with his family in between missions, but it hadn't even been a quarter of a day since he last spoke with them.
He underwent the border transit process once he reached the Kandrian Empire, before entering and heading towards the Mantian Region and the town of Hajin.
The Kandrian Empire covered an area of thousands of several millions of square kilometers, it actually took him longer to travel through the country than it took him to travel to destinations in the geographical orbit for whenever he had foreign missions.
Once he arrived, he immediately headed right back to the mission library, pondering what class of missions he should pick this time. The default was offense-class, but it wasn't the only class that had a high propensity for conflict.
He glanced at the hunter class section.
It had been quite a while since he picked a hunter class mission. There was a degree of simplicity that came from tackling missions surrounding beasts. Of course, that didn't mean hunter class missions were particularly easy, they simply required a different skillset and mindset.
Offense class missions dealt with humans. Humans who were intelligent, relatively speaking, compared to most of the animal kingdom and thus needed to be tackled differently. While there were animals who possessed intelligence on par or perhaps even greater than that of normal humans, they were far scarcer.
This didn't necessarily make animals easier targets, because most hunting class missions operated in the wild and the natural environment. An environment that humans were quite unaccustomed to, compared to normal human civilization where most offense-class missions took place.
Understanding the best way to operate in these environments when dealing with beasts that were in their home court was an art in and of itself and one that took many years of experience to master. They were a challenge that was entirely different from that of the offense-class missions.
Rui shrugged. ('Why not?')
He was an all-rounder, limiting himself to offense-class missions may not be conducive to maintaining even proficiency across the board.
('Besides, I have a technique that's useful in this class of missions.') Rui mused.
The Fauna Flow technique was a technique that allowed him to engage in non-verbal communication with animals. Thus far, he hadn't yet used it to its greatest potential because he hadn't been in a position where he could employ the technique.
The only time he had used was when he communicated with a monkey like creature in the Serevian Dungeon. After that, he had immediately gone on to master a mental technique before undergoing the Squire evolution breakthrough process, Squire habilitation and the mastery of six more techniques. He obviously hadn't gotten to use the technique during this time period.
He nodded, having made up his mind.
He took his time scrolling through the several missions that the library had, noting how much lesser there were.
This wasn't particularly unique to hunter class missions, Squire-level missions were fewer than Apprentice-level missions simply because these missions were nearly an order of magnitude more expensive than Apprentice-level missions due to how much stronger Martial Squires were and how much more difficult Squire-level missions were. There were fewer Martial Squires than Martial Apprentices too, increasing the value of the supply of Martial Squires.
Rui saw some interesting missions in the library, taking his time to scour through all of them. His eyes ran into something interesting
[Hunter class mission: Capture mission
Client: Ministry of Environment and Ecology
Grade: 3
Elimination target: A frost hypogriff
Target location: Cravitz Mountain [2.1, 3.45]
Remuneration: 10,000 Martial credits
Mission summary: The elimination target is an adult frost hypogriff. The target is a quasi-Squire-level threat that is verging on Squire-level, with a remarkable top speed, powerful beaks and limbs. It's a normally passive species of the hypogriff family that can engage in rampages that are destructive to the environment and life surrounding it when they experience emotional distress. The target of the mission has destabilized the ecosystem and has terrorized a large proportion of the fauna population into migrating away from their habitat, causing them to encroach on human settlements and towns. The mission is to capture the target and deliver it to the Ministry of Environment and Ecology with as little damage to the target as possible.
...]
"Interesting..." Rui's eyes lit up in interest. A capture mission instead of an elimination mission meant that Rui had to exercise a certain degree of finesse. He couldn't just mindlessly go all out against it, otherwise it would just die at his hand, since this particular creature was below the Squire-Realm. It made for a much more interesting mission since he needed to exercise control over his power.
"Alright." Rui nodded. "I'll take it. Sounds like a fun challenge."
He immediately plucked the mission bill out of the slot before heading to read more about it.
