Seven days had passed since the battle with the Razorwing Mantis. Seven days that Reidar and the others spent grinding, and that blurred the line between day and night.

The forest around Ashwick had become a graveyard of high-tier monsters, but that wasn't just because of them but also because of the church.

Regardless, the group had slept little, nor had they stopped to eat properly, subsisting on the food they stored in their inventories. It wasn't awful, but eating ready-to-eat food wasn't the same as resting in front of a fire. It was a brutal regimen, but the results were undeniable.

—[Reidar Miller—Level 379]—

He had climbed twenty-one levels in a week—an absurd pace. He also brought many skills up to 100% proficiency and was almost at tier 38.

He looked at his companions.

—[Lena Merridon—Level 367]—

—[Jake Roberts—Level 352]—

Lena had pushed past the Level 360 barrier. Jake was at a lower level, but it was enough to fight this battle. His level combined with his Augmentation trait meant he could tank hits that would have pulverized him a week ago.

They were ready. Or at least, as ready as they were going to get.

"I found them," Reidar said.

Perched on a high branch of a mutated pine, he processed the information his Vorathid Sky-Hunters were relaying to him. The hunting party was approximately 3 kilometers away from where they were. In just a few minutes, they would arrive at the location.

"Where?" Lena asked.

"To the east from here," Reidar said, opening his eyes. "They're hunting with the rest of the Zealots. It is a large group, but nothing we can't take care of. Drecht is there, and so are Isadora and Lucius. All three of them, out in the open."

This was the opportunity they had been waiting for. Attacking Ashwick directly would be risky; the walls were mana-dampened, and the defensive grid was too dense to pierce with no kind of magic support.

But out here in the wild, the Church members were exposed. Reidar, Lena, and Jake had waited for the leadership to leave the safety of the fortress to power-level their elites, exactly as Reidar said they would have done.

They had been out hunting since the beginning of the week, but rarely had all three leaders ventured out together.

Drecht was desperate to get his troops ready for the assault on Highmont, and that desperation had brought them all out into the open.

"Let's move," Reidar said. "We keep our distance for the time being and observe them. We engage on our terms, not theirs. We don't get sloppy now."

They quickly reached the place and positioned themselves on a ridge overlooking the hunting grounds.

Below, the Church's hunting party was fighting a massive beast—a Thunder-Hide Tiger, or so it appeared. It was a Level 360 quadrupedal nightmare of muscle and electrified fur, thrashing in the center of a kill zone.

Reidar watched, but he wasn't interested in the monster, but rather in those hunting it. Their formation was flawless.

<I might be able to learn a thing or two from them.>

It hurt him even to think about that.

Captain Lucius Grey was at the front. At Level 355, he was a mountain of steel wielding a great shield that looked like a slab of fortress wall.

A thunderous crash rang out, followed by a shower of blue sparks. The impact rippled through the air, yet the figure behind the shield remained an immovable statue. The earth beneath his feet fractured as a light washed over his armor, dispersing the power behind the strike into the ground before the Tiger could even retract its electrified claws.

Behind him, Battle Priestess Isadora Thane (Level 340) was chanting buffs. Streams of light connected her to the zealots surrounding the beast, accelerating their movements and making their strikes hit harder than their attributes would have allowed.

Overseeing it all was Deacon Cornelius Drecht.

Level 365.

He stood back, but that didn't mean he wasn't ready to join the fight in case one of the zealots found himself or herself in danger.

Occasionally, he would point a finger, and a bolt of mana would lance out to strike the Tiger in a joint or a weak point, interrupting its attacks.

Surrounding the main trio were at least forty Elite Zealots, ranging from Level 300 to 320, cycling in and out of melee range to pepper the monster with spells and arrows.

"They're strong," Jake said in a low voice.

Reidar heard the disbelief in the kid's voice and saw his eyes go wide as he watched Lucius tank the Tiger.

"That guy... he took a direct hit from a Level 360 monster and didn't even slide back. How is that possible?"

"He's a Captain for a reason," Reidar said. "He is a lot of things, but weak is not among them. Besides, he is very good at aggro generation."

"And Isadora is the one who keeps them all running at peak efficiency," Lena observed. "If we launch an attack, she'll immediately buff their defense to absorb the damage. If we focus our efforts on taking down Lucius, she'll heal him and keep him in the fight. If we try to go for her directly, Lucius will peel off to protect her before we can land a killing blow. They're covering each other's weaknesses perfectly. It's a classic trinity setup—tank, healer, damage dealer—but they've scaled it up to coordinate an entire hunting party. We can't just brute-force our way through that kind of coordination. We need to be extremely careful about how we approach this because they don't seem to have trouble fighting a level 360 monster."

Reidar nodded. He was stronger than these guys, and killing them should have posed no problem, but Reidar still had to increase his proficiencies, so swarming these guys with summons was a no-go. Besides, fighting a tier 36 monster this way meant that flooding these guys with tier 29, albeit at high levels, was not going to do much.

Lena and Jake had to level up.

The plan was for them to sneak inside the city and destroy it while he dealt with Silas, but Mara was in town, and even if she wasn't, the two might get overwhelmed by the enemy, and without him being there to eventually cover for them, he didn't want to take the risk of them being under leveled.

After all, he knew better than anyone that flooding a single enemy and winning despite the strength disparity was possible, and with the church using summons too.

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