-Vol 4: To The North Pole!-

-Into The Zone-

Vera drove the car towards a specific direction, and after half an hour, they finally reached a highly guarded place. This place was defended by Hunters of various guilds and the DCB. With is good eyesight, he was able to see a big gate which was guarded by hundreds of hunters and military.

The gate was big enough to let a military issued truck pass through and wide enough for two cars to move simultaneously. Considering how busy this place was, the gateway may seem to be small, but it was well within the reasons for doing so. Nobody knew the status beyond these walls, so who knew if monsters would rush at the moment they open a gate? That’s why the gate was so small.

“You see that gate? It took more than fifty hunters who are more than level 100 work tirelessly for 12 hours to make that hole. I don’t know who made this wall, but he/it must be powerful to make this possible.” Vera’s voice contains some wonder as well as dread. She was afraid of the fact that it was made by someone with bad intention towards humans.

“It might be a natural phenomenon!” Kenshin put forth his point. The appearance of a wall out of nowhere, that too naturally… it can be possible in the Era they were living in.

“That’s what we thought at first, but we took down that idea soon after. The area this wall covering is too uniform and calculated. Besides, no natural phenomenon can make such a thing possible. The only possible explanation would be the appearance of a dungeon.” Vera sounded very grim when she spoke about her speculations. She was afraid of this outcome as well. If a dungeon of such enormous proportion would take forever to clean once. If the dungeons were not cleaned regularly, a dungeon break would soon follow.

A dungeon break of such massive proportion has the potential to destroy half of the earth. It was one of the reasons why all the guilds, as well as DCB, were working together on this project. If things don’t go as planned, then higher-ups would step in. This informations didn’t make it to the public, but as a higher class official, vera knew about it.

The military and guild guards who guarded the opening nodded towards Vera and allowed them to move on. When Kenshin crossed the wall, he found the temperature to be a few degrees lower than outside. It was due to the mist covering the sky. It didn’t allow the sunlight to enter, making the place a few shades darker than outside. The weirdest thing was that the moment he entered this place, his phone stopped receiving signal, despite being full when outside the wall. It’s as if a signal jammer was placed on a massive scale.

“These mist acts as an all-purpose signal jammer. It can even stop high-frequency signals that were designed to bypass any other jammers. This place was similar to entering a dungeon.” Seeing Kenshin’s repeated action of checking out his phone and sky, she explained a bit further.

“I see. So that’s why travelling through land vehicle is the only way.” Kenshin now understood the point.

“So Kenshin, I read you just recently awakened your magic skill? How did you make it so strong in such little time?” Vera asked while driving. She found this point very suspicious. This Kenshin only awakened fifteen days ago, but reports claimed that he was able to cast level 7 fires. Even for a prodigy, this much small amount of time was impossible to upgrade a skill to level 7.

In history, there were only a few numbers of hunters who managed to do so, but they are too unique to be considered as a comparison material. Kenshin clearly didn’t exhibit that uniqueness as them. Then how was this possible? Logic says that Kenshin had awakened many years ago and hidden the fact but she didn’t think like that, and neither did his introducer, Mito branch’s director. Then how did he do it? Kenshin started to sweat when he heard the question. Thankfully he was fully prepared for it.

“I don’t know. It just grew stronger on its own.” Kenshin was nonchalant when he spoke, but in his heart, he was wiping away sweat endlessly.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Besides, I think the fight I had during dungeon break incident also helped.” Kenshin spoke with ease, the way he practised during these past few days.

“Is that so!” Vera clearly didn’t buy that, at least entirely. But she didn’t push it anymore. She knew during this mission, she would be able to find out more about this hunter named Kenshin who was the only hunter among the team who was under level 50.

She was also very curious about Kenshin’s WIL, the report told that he awakened it on his own even before knowing what it was. It was a common fact among the upper echelons that everyone’s WIL had a property to it, which influenced their overall battle prowess. She had a WIL, that aligned towards the intent of ‘cutting’ hence increasing her battle prowess with swords to grow exponentially. She also knew some people who had an intent ‘Sheild’ which increase their defence by a considerable margin.

Same thing with another hunter with ‘evade’ intent as his WIL, making his dodging speed phenomenal. She had a hunch that his WIL’s Intent might be related to his sudden speed of level up but she wouldn’t be sure until she sees it with her eyes.

After that, both did some small talks regarding various hunter stuff until they finally had to stop. There was a massive polar bear like a monster standing in their way. It was glaring at them as if they are intruding on its private property. But it might be as they had thought, bears had a strong sense of territory so they might have imposed on its private property.

*ROAR!!!* The bear roared loudly as if warning them to move back.

“Go kill it,” Vera ordered Kenshin while pointing at the bear. A monster at such a low level didn’t need her to move personally. Nodding his head, Kenshin got off the car and slowly walked towards the bear. He didn’t even take his sword as he didn’t need it to slay this monster. Suddenly a ball of fire appeared before him, after a few twists it morphed into a polished flaming knife.

The knife then started to rotate at a very high speed in midair, before Kenshin send it flashing towards the bear’s head region.

*Squelch* With a squelching sound, the flaming knife penetrated its skull and burned down half of its brain in an instant.

*RoaR* with a last painful roar, the bear fell to the ground, dead with black smoke coming off its head. After that Kenshin conjured another flaming knife and removed the bear’s pelt.

This time he controlled the heat so that it won’t burn the fur. He also collected its heart and some of its meat. There were no other drops, so he ignored the rest and went back to the car.

Killing this bear gave him a measly EXP of 200, not even enough to fill a fraction of his current EXP requirement. It also didn’t drop any unique items, making him frown in discontent and complain to it for being stingy.

While he was storing his collected stuff on the car, Vera had a thoughtful expression on her face. The battle power Kenshin showed him right now was indeed do not belong to a hunter of his level. It made her belief about his unique WIL even stronger than before.

Unaware of her thought process, Kenshin was happy because he was able to show his gracefulness in front of this beautiful captain of his.