Interlude: Bear and hunters
When Sigbjorn had spent most of his youth risking his life to gain levels, he had done so due to something he'd always been told.
"If you work hard now, you'll have an easier time later."
Something most kids hear from an adult at least once or twice and something he'd taken to heart. Really, it wasn't even that wrong a saying since he had, after all the suffering, been set up to have the good life.
It's just that his good morals had decided to bite him in the ass at the worst possible moment.
Because right as he'd hit the power level where he'd have gotten the title of protector, or an A-rank adventurer as the humans called it, something that led to his current situation happened.
As in old man Barend, who was the protector of the town, was repeatedly beaten with the "old age" stick until he couldn't do patrols for more than a handful of hours a week. So obviously the old man asked for volunteers to pick up the slack.
And he being a dumbass decided to volunteer without listening to the part where he said that the amount of time and number of people per patrol would depend on their actual strength.
Which was how he'd gotten stuck spending eight hours every day patrolling without anyone to talk to. To top that off was the fact that he hadn't really been able to quit either because old man Barend went and decided to die right after that, meaning that the town needed all the help it could get. He wasn't enough of an asshole to screw everyone in the town like that.
But the problem had been that he hadn't gotten laid in a little under a year, though if anyone asked him that was not the reason he'd presented the whole "lets reward non-hostile monsters with hostile monsters corpses to reduce load in the future."
Really though, the logic was pretty sound.
Like, it was a well known fact that monsters adapted rapidly and that when they did so they tended to carry traits through to their next evolutions. So, theoretically speaking, if they were to kill the ones that constantly attack them and give their bodies to the ones which don't to help them grow?
Then in a year or two they should have a way less hostile environment.
At least, that was the idea. An idea that the town leaders had fully, well not really fully, agreed with, seeing as they gave him permission to do so.
And hey, it was actually working and showing results after just a couple months into the process. Monsters weren't attacking as much, some monsters were ignoring their people out in the woods and he even managed to get an hour less on his shifts once or twice a week.
It was slow, yes. But he would eventually be able to go back to the bar and live the bachelor lifestyle he'd wanted.
But he'd be honest, with anyone that asked, about the fact that he'd never actually expected an intelligent monster to come up to it and try to make a deal of all things. It was such a novel thing actually that he'd decided to give it a deal for hunting ice silver deers, what with how fast it looked, and splitting the refined ice silver he got from it evenly.
After all, the whole point of this was to encourage these sort of actions!
Plus the ice silver should let the others upgrade their weapons and armour and thus decrease his shift time. He also added a deal for it to bring any lost demi-humans to the town, but he really doubted it'd do that. No matter how smart it was.
Regardless of that though, the deal had surprisingly turned out to be very good in the long run seeing as the intelligent monster had immediately gone and brought back a ice silver deer. Enough to let quite a few pieces of equipment be upgraded, so he'd held up his end of the deal.
Then he upheld it again, when the monster came back with a deer again.
It all went so well in fact that he was once again hit with an idea most would call dumb, but since you'd already done pretty stupid things it didn't really matter. After all, what was another bad idea on top of everything else you'd done.
Still, the plan was quite simple and could be summed in one sentence.
"Make the surprisingly reasonable and friendly monster the boss of the region."
Which also had a perfectly good reasoning behind it, mostly being that the friendlier monster should pacify other monsters as well, but it didn't really matter.
Because literally a day ago he'd had a gigantic creature drop six whole ice silver deer in front of him. Making it quite obvious that it was the evolved form of the same small lizard.
Admittedly, it'd taken him a while to realise that, what with how shocked, and definitely not fear as some less intelligent people may call it, but when he did he just decided to hand over the metals.
Then he went back to his house, his shift having ended, and pulled out the good stuff before chugging it right from the bottle.
-The hunter who drove off Zorah Magdaros -
"Okay, so hear me out."
Standing in front of the Paranoid hunter, Par to his friends, she took a long sip of the drink in her mug before gesturing with her head for him to continue. She was currently taking a break from her handler and could really use the entertainment this'll bring.
"Right so, you remember that monster that the research hunter saw kill the pink rathian in a turf war?"
Rolling her eyes, she nodded, "Literally everybody's heard of the new monster discovered Par, get on with it."
"Right, right, of course," and he's pulled out the board from his pouch, strings and all, "so as you can see, we've never seen anything like it before. Which means that it must've come from one of the unexplored lands."
She nodded along, seeing the logic behind that. Only to stop nodding when he unveiled a section of the board.
"Which must mean it comes from space!"
She put the mug down onto the table before sitting forward, "now, you gotta explain the thinking behind that."
"Okay, so hear me out. You know how some Valstrax's can go almost into space right?" he asks, pointing to a drawing of a Valstrax going into the stars, "well a crazy hunter did an experiment ages ago where he mounted one just as it shot off while wearing a fireproof mantle. He'd managed to ride it all the way up till the sky turned black, at which point he let go and used some jury rigged bowgun ammo to launch himself way higher."
"Wait… I think I remember that," she actually remembered reading about it, "didn't that guys fireproof mantle-"
"Crumble!" he interrupted her, slamming a hand on a newly revealed part of the board, "yes it did. Exactly like this pink rathian scale!"
"Where did you get that scale? I thought it was kept with the ecological researchers?" she couldn't help but ask, attempting to distract herself from how much sense he was making.
"Never mind that! What's more important is that this can act as proof that it came from space," once again he reveals a part of the board, this one showing a bunch of monsters linked to environments, "because it's a well known fact that monsters tend to share elements with the biome of their origin."
"And you think that means that, since it does the same damage as space, it's from space," he nodded excitedly at her as she picks up her mug again, "fine… I guess that makes sense. But what's that last part of the board?"
"Well I'm glad you asked," he revealed the last part of the board with a flourish, nearly causing her to choke as she read and saw what was on there, "it means that it's obviously the spearhead for a space invasion force! Why else woul-"
"Okay Par, stop," she slammed her mug down, "you can't just start spewing random shit after doing all that well reasoned stuff. It literally causes everything else you saw to seem stupid, which is actually really bad since I was actually agreeing with you before you started with the weird shit again. Seriously, you could be part of the ecological research team if you stopped doing that."
"…you can call me by my name you know, I don't mind," he replied, accepting her words with a sour look. But she'd suddenly stopped caring for a very specific reason.
"Err," because she had literally no idea what his name actually was, "sure Par."
"…wait, you do know my name, right?" she tried to stop herself, but the wince spread across her face before she could, "wait… seriously!"
"Uhh, hey. Would you look at that, it sounds like my handlers calling me for a hunt. Gotta go," and with that she began to casually jog, which was a full sprint for normal people, away from the sputtering Paranoid hunter.
"Wait just a minute! You can't just run away," unfortunately Paranoid hunter wasn't a normal number, "What's my name? Answer me!"
