[Elite Path unlocking.]
[Current Stage: 1.]
[Special Skill Earned: 'Brute Force.']
[Brute Force – When actively triggered, the user's Strength increases, granting greater destructive power. Stamina consumption, however, multiplies, and prolonged use risks bodily harm.]
[Stage 2 Unlock Condition: Slay 5 distinct types of elite monsters (2/5). Reward: Randomly draw one elite-monster racial trait.]
[New Title Earned: 'Giant Hunter.' This title upgrades with kill count.]
[Current Effect: Weakpoint Strike – When fighting half-ogres, ogres, and related giant-kin, weak points are easier to discern; striking them deals additional damage.]
Lines of text flashed rapidly before Gauss's eyes.
Fortunately Ulfen the gray wolf was guarding his flank, and with the Omni-Armor still sheathing him in protection, the scattered swipes from nearby small fry weren't landing any meaningful blows.
Brute force… Stage 2 needs five elite types… title effect is Weakpoint Strike. Gauss digested the alerts in a heartbeat.
This was no time to stand around thinking.
He hauled his focus back to the field.
The half-ogre leader's sudden death threw the rabble into mixed reactions—most of them sheer bewilderment. For bottom-tier monsters, the authority of an elite runs bone-deep, almost taboo; even if that elite is a bully who sometimes eats its own, in this horde the ogre shaman had called together, not a single grunt dared challenge a half-ogre's place.
Plenty of dull little brains just couldn't process how something "untouchable" had dropped dead in an instant.
A moment of dazed silence later, their morale cratered.
The naturally craven kobolds had already started edging backward.
"Kobolds, goblins, craven fiends, mosquito bats…"
Gauss hadn't forgotten his other goal for Winter Hunt: use these mixed, sprawling monster bands to push his Common Monster Index to twenty entries.
He swept the camp with his gaze.
This half-ogre's unit alone had four trash-tier species—and to his satisfaction, half of them were things he hadn't yet encountered.
"Craven fiends and mosquito bats."
Their dossiers flickered through his mind.
Craven fiends were among the weakest demons of the Abyss—just over a meter tall, bloated little humanoids with twisted limbs and sagging, pustule-blistered skin, reeking of rot. In the infernal pecking order, they were playthings or menial fodder for higher demons; only a rare few ever "evolved" into so-called Craven Fiend Lords by devouring their own kind.
They were poor fighters and timid by nature—bully the weak, fear the strong—and quick to break and run.
Strictly speaking they shouldn't appear on the material plane at all, but given that this horde's boss was an ogre shaman, they were almost certainly just summoned filler troops.
Mosquito bats, meanwhile, were low-threat fliers that hunted in swarms, favoring swamps and caves. As their name suggested—and like the ones circling overhead—they were a hybrid of bat and giant mosquito, wingspan about half a meter, with needlelike proboscises and pincer-toed feet.
Their sense of smell was sharp; blood-scent drew them like a beacon. They hunted and fed by stabbing that spike into a victim's blood vessels until the prey died—or they'd had their fill.
Alone they were feeble; a larger foe could stand there and let one drink itself stupid without dying. In a flock, though, constant harrying could wear down big targets—but they paid for it with bodies, because they were fragile as paper; a slightly solid hit popped them like fruit.
Gauss leveled the bone staff at the spiraling cloud of mosquito bats.
They were aerial targets—weak, yes, but if they bolted, once they got beyond his range they'd be hard to stop.
Tag one now, light the index, sort out the rest later.
Boom.
A depowered Magic Missile blossomed from his staff's tip.
Thwip!
A blue flash split the air—
—and a puff of blood mist burst in the sky.
[Mosquito Bat Slain ×1.]
[New Title Earned: Mosquito Bat Hunter.]
[Title Effect: Precision – Against mosquito bats and their advanced variants, ranged attacks gain accuracy and lock-on becomes easier.]
With a casual snipe, he'd added the fourteenth entry to his index.
His mana pool was still comfortably full.
He eyed the twenty-odd bats still flitting above. He had no intention of letting them go.
And as if worried he might miss the runners, the dead bat had even "dropped" a handy temporary title effect: Precision.
Under its boost, those shapes climbing higher into the sky suddenly snapped into crisp relief for him—like some sixth sense had keyed in.
He slipped past a few goblins who'd screwed up the courage to rush him, giving them a single cool side-glance.
Who'd have thought that among these four bottom-feeder mobs, the goblins would show the most "fight"—even facing someone like him, whose long goblin-killing spree practically radiated a pressure they could feel, more than a few still grit their teeth and charged.
The other three species, with their leader gone, were even sorrier sights.
Thwip. Thwip. Thwip.
Ignoring the goblins, Gauss kept his eyes on the sky. He didn't want the bats to escape, so he skipped Firebolt and stuck with rapid-cycling, depowered Magic Missiles—faster volleys, and, with Precision against mosquito bats, ideal for plinking them one by one.
The flock realized they were being singled out and beat their thin wings, clawing for altitude, but under Gauss's point-shoot rhythm they kept popping into little red clouds.
The rest of the rabble had already started to run.
A mixed detachment of nearly a hundred bottom-tier creatures—and before Gauss they scattered in panic.
That's the beauty of a decapitation strike.
And anyway, "a hundred" sounds like a lot until you remember this was a mash-up of four unrelated species. There was no trust or cohesion; in practice you treated them as a handful of loose clumps, two or three dozen apiece.
Without a leader's pressure and direction, they were nowhere near as troublesome as they looked.