I encountered the first horned rabbits about a mile out from the city. They were about twice the size of normal rabbits and had little nubs of horns in the center of their foreheads. The appeared to be omnivores, as while several of them were nibbling on the grass, there were also around a half dozen rabbits tearing into an unfortunate wolf that appeared to have stumbled onto them last night.

I pulled up the quests that I had received from the craftsmen I had encountered on the way out of the city.

Quest:

Collect 5 Horned Rabbit Skins

Difficulty:

D

Quest Information:

Thomas, the Leatherworker, has asked you to collect the skins of 5 horned rabbits, Repeatable

Rewards:

15 XP, 3 silver for every 5 skins delivered intact to Thomas

Quest:

Collect 5 Horned Rabbits

Difficulty:

D

Quest Information:

Jason, the butcher, has asked you to bring him the bodies of 5 horned rabbits, Repeatable

Rewards:

15 XP, 5 silver for every 5 whole rabbits turned into Jason

They were both relatively easy* quests, plus I would be able to continue working on them until I ran out of time. And had to return to the arena.

*here is the chart for the difficulty levels of quests and monsters. I meant to add it earlier, actually in the story, and I forgot.

Difficulty

Label

Description

F

Effortless

E

Near Effortless

D

Easy

C

On Level

B

Mildly Difficult

A

Hard

S

Heroic

SS

Nightmare

SSS

Legendary

SSSS

Legendary Nightmare

I charged in, using the knife to stab the rabbits at the base of the skull, in an attempt to preserve the skins. With my high agility, I effortlessly killed 5 of them before they had even noticed me. When they did, they turned towards me, letting out what sounded like a high pitched squeal of rage. Wincing at the sound assaulting my feline ears, I distractedly noticed that the ones that had been eating the wolf had fangs in their mouths as they charged at me, clearly intending to bite me. The other rabbits were charging with their heads down, intending to ram me.

I was in the center of the clearing, so they were coming at me from all sides, and so I decided to try something that I’d always thought would look really cool. I waited until they were about to reach me then I did my best standing long jump to the edge of the clearing. Now, let me explain. While I was never a long jumper in my life before then, I was now tigerkin. As a tigerkin, I was able to nearly effortlessly jump six feet vertically and twenty feet horizontally.

I landed at the edge of the clearing and immediately turned around, just in time to see the rabbits charge into each other, followed immediately by a kind of general melee as they attacked the ones that hit them, or they thought had hit them, causing the others to join as they tried to get revenge. There were around 40 rabbits in the fight, so to speed things up I started picking off the ones at the edges of the battle. After about half an hour, there was only one rabbit left. When I approached it, a identifier tag showed up above its head, something that only happened if a creature was an elite mob or greater (as compared to the other creature nearby).

[Bloody Bunnicorn, lvl 8 elite mob]

As an elite mob, it was 50 percent more powerful than a regular creature. As I watched, its fur changed from white soaked with red blood to solid red. Meanwhile, its horn turned black and extended to be around five inches long while its body increased in size till it was just over a yard long and three-quarters yards tall. This was a creature that I felt I should leave alone because while I could most certainly defeat it, it likely wouldn’t be worth the effort, though there was a potential bonus to it due to the elite part.

I ultimately decided to capture it and sent it to my general area, after putting it in stasis in order to allow me to study it in the future, so that I could send more of them to populate the forests, so that rabbits wouldn’t be quite so easy to defeat in the future.

I spent the rest of the time before I had to go to the arena fighting, skinning and collecting rabbits, though there weren’t any more incidents like the first one.

At around two o’clock, I turned in the quests, getting 150 silver from the leatherworker and 300 from the butcher, as I wasn’t able to salvage many of the skins after the melee early in the day. I had also leveled up, putting the points into strength and agility. After turning in the quests, I went to the arena to wait for the free-for-all that was happening in an hour.