Turning in the bounty for the Attican Snapper turned out to be fairly straightforward.  Leon just had to bring its corpse and the remains of its victims back to the bounty manager, and he just had to accept it and Leon was a quarter million silvers richer for his trouble.  The petrified remains of the missing people were taken away to be buried, but he was allowed to keep the snapper’s corpse, to do with as he pleased.

He and Maia deliberated for a few seconds, but in the end, he took it back to the guest house and quickly dismantled it.  The biggest reason he was accepting these bounties was to help keep his hunting skills sharp, and part of that was practicing his skill in skinning and dressing the animals.

It had been a while since he’d had to do something like this, and the snapper’s hide suffered a bit as a result.  Most of its head was already unusable from Leon’s lightning bolt, and there were a few holes that Maia had made when she’d killed it, but Leon’s rusty skill with a skinning knife also lost him the hide covering the snapper’s rear legs.  Fortunately, he slowed down and took his time with the rest, leaving him with still quite a bit of scaled hide to work with.

Assuming he even wanted to work with it, of course.

The process of tanning hide was tedious, especially for something as tough as a scaled seventh-tier beast, and he didn’t much want to do it, so he passed off the hide to Heaven’s Eye.  For a few hundred silver, they’d have their own tanners see to it.

That left what to do with the rest of the snapper.

He immediately burned most of its organs.  He kept its heart for a moment, but nothing else.  All of the snapper’s meat he quickly pulled off its bones and passed to the guest house chefs to take care of, while collecting as much of its blood as he could into a bucket as he worked.  The snapper’s corpse hadn’t been as fresh as he would’ve hoped for, but he still managed to collect a good few buckets of blood, of which a significant portion was mana.  He wasn’t an alchemist, but he knew that even that much blood from a seventh-tier creature could sell for quite a bit of money, so he passed all of that off to Heaven’s Eye, as well.

That left him with the snapper’s bloody bones and heart.  Taking care of the bones was fairly easy—he had a vat of alchemical acid that he just had to dump the bones into, and in the morning, he’d just have to drain the vat and the bones would be squeaky clean.  The heart, meanwhile, he took great care in cutting apart.

In humans and many other beings, the connection to their soul realm in their heart was fragile and easily destroyed.  If a human died, that connection would be almost immediately severed, with almost no chance of letting any of their stored magic power return to the physical world.

Leon wasn’t sure where all of that stored power went, he only knew that it was essentially lost forever, along with everything that was in their soul realm at the time.

In beasts and other inhuman things, however, things were a little different.  Perhaps it was because of their magical powers being natural rather than a result of adaptation, but sometimes when a beast of sufficient power died, a goodly portion of their stored magic power would be shunted out of their soul realm and back into their body.  However, with the creature’s death and subsequent stilling of their heart, that magic would be unable to be fused with their blood and turned into mana, leaving it stuck in the beast’s body.

Most of the time that this happened, the magic power would simply dissipate into the environment, turning into ambient magic power.  But sometimes, it would crystallize, forming a small sphere of what was essentially physical magic power.  These objects were referred to as the cores of the creatures in question since the crystallized magic power would be affected by the magic power that remained in the creature’s body, and change.  If a beast with fire magic were to be killed, then the element-less magic power in their soul realm, if it were to form a core upon their death, would transform into fire magic power, resulting in a fire core.  For creatures with more than one element, their cores would contain magic power for both of those elements, making them much more versatile and valuable.

These objects stored an enormous amount of power relative to their size, outdoing even the highest quality of sapphires.  This, in turn, made them extremely valuable to enchanters, for such cores could be used as potent power sources for large enchantments, even if their specific element didn’t exactly match the enchantments or spells it was powering.

So, it was to Leon’s immense glee that as he cut the snapper’s heart open, he found a small orb within, perfectly spherical and about the size of a quail egg, glowing with soft, cloudy gray light, streaked with glittering pale blue.  Both earth and water magic were contained within the core, neither of which he had much immediate use for, but which made the core immensely valuable.  He wasn’t that knowledgeable about the value of beast cores, but if he didn’t want to use this one, he thought he could get at least two or three million silvers for it, at least.

But he could use it, so he didn’t immediately give it to Heaven’s Eye to sell.  The bones, however, he did.  He had no real use for the snapper bones aside from maybe using them as raw material after he learned more about smithing, but that was far enough in the future that he didn’t think the bones worth hanging onto.  Besides, he wasn’t that keen on the skeletal aesthetic that some might prefer, and since seventh-tier bones could be used by alchemists, he decided that selling them was the better option.

Handing the bones off to Heaven’s Eye after having them cleaned thus left him with only a few final things to deal with: the clutch of snapper eggs.

His first thought was to sell them, too.  What was he going to do with these eggs, anyway, aside from eating them?  And from what he understood after reading up on the snappers before the hunt, they made for rather unruly and unreliable war beasts, so getting the eggs to hatch wasn’t of much help, either…

However, he still had the bracelet he’d found in the transformation cave and six potential beasts he could ‘tame’ with it.  He refrained from using it before on a seventh-tier war mount descended from beasts brought here by his Ancestors in the interest of saving those slots for something more powerful, or with more potential, but raising something powerful enough to reach the seventh-tier on its own was something that he could definitely value highly enough to use one of his limited bracelet slots on.  He could mold it himself, learning about its powers as it did.  Perhaps even help it to grow strong enough to become an Ascended Beast.

Besides, Attican Snappers were primarily users of earth magic, and that was an area that Leon was woefully deficient in.  If he were to use his bracelet to dominate one of these young snappers, then it might help to make up for that deficiency.

With his mind made up, Leon arranged for Heaven’s Eye to sell nine of the ten eggs he’d acquired, but after getting them all evaluated by the local beastmasters, he kept the one that seemed the strongest and healthiest.  After that, though, he left the egg in the care of Emilie’s beastmasters, for he had no real idea how to care for it.  They indicated to him that the egg wouldn’t be ready to hatch for at least six months, though, so for the time being, he put it out of his mind.

Once all of that was finished, it was late into the night.  He and Maia had returned to the city early enough in the evening not to miss dinner, but now it was nearly midnight, and he felt appallingly disgusting.  So, he made his way back to the guest house where he spent half an hour relaxing in the baths, and then curled up in bed with Elise and Maia, tired yet satisfied with how the day had gone.

---

When Leon woke up, despite completing the bounty from the day before, he still felt a bit of an itch to practice his hunting skills.  So, he went back to the bounty manager to accept the other job.  Hunting down a basilisk sounded like exactly the thing he needed to calm down.

But unlike the day before, it wouldn’t just be him and Maia—Valeria would be joining them, for Leon could tell that she was keen on hunting down such a dangerous creature when Leon returned to the guest house to start preparing.  And she wasn’t the only one who’d be joining them, either…

---

“There she is…” Leon whispered, pointing to a young woman by the library.  Valeria and Maia followed his indication, both of them curious as to whom the bounty manager had arranged to join them on this hunt.

When Leon had accepted the bounty, the manager had told him again that the last mage he’d sent after the basilisk had disappeared, and she had been a strong sixth-tier mage who knew the Attican swamps like the back of her hand.  She’d been the woman he’d always turned to when powerful beasts that others couldn’t handle moved into the area—she’d never failed to bring in her bounty.

The hunter’s sister had been bothering the manager to accept the bounty herself, but the manager had always refused—the sister was only of the fifth-tier, and the basilisk was strong enough at the sixth-tier to threaten mages of the seventh.

The bounty manager had been hesitant to recommend her to Leon, but when Leon heard about her, he decided that he had to meet her.  Just because he passed on Santiago didn’t mean that he was no longer looking for strong, talented people to recruit, and from the sounds of it, the hunter’s sister—or even the hunter herself, on the off-chance that that she was still alive—sounded like fantastic candidates.

He and his people had to do a bit of research, first, to get a better grasp of just what kind of beast they were hunting, so the bounty manager had told Leon that he would send word to the sister and have her meet them at the library’s entrance, then gave Leon her physical description.  He didn’t give Leon many details, but those he did gave were enough.

The woman waiting for them outside of the small library was striking in a few different ways.  First, she was quite beautiful, being tall and athletically built, with strong, almost severe features that gave an immediate impression of cold aloofness that her slight frown and narrow glare emphasized.  Her hair, meanwhile, was a pale, unnatural blue.  It had been tied back in a tight bun, with only a few strands left loose to hang on one side of her face, looking both relaxed and professional at the same time.

Her equipment was rather less striking, being a tight, tailored brigandine, featuring some kind of dark green scaled leather that the steel plates on the inner layers were riveted to.  She didn’t have a helmet visible, but she had thick leather boots that were lightly enchanted, steel bracers that were a little more heavily enchanted, and a truly enormous hunting spear clutched in her right hand.  All-in-all, her armor and equipment seemed almost overkill for a hunter, but Leon knew from his own experiences in the Forest of Black and White, let alone the fact that they were going up against a sixth-tier basilisk, that such armor was likely to be needed.

What drew Leon’s curiosity the most, though, was her aura, and he was quite impressed.  It wasn’t quite as strong and stable as Valeria’s, but compared to nearly every other fifth-tier mage he’d seen, hers was still exceptional.  She was strong relative to her tier, and if the way she gracefully paced as she waited was any indication, she was highly trained, too.

She drew quite a few curious looks from passers-by going in and out of the library, but she seemed to hardly even notice, let alone care.  She only stopped to stare when her gaze fell upon Leon, Valeria, and Maia as they stared back at her.

“She looks like she knows how to handle that spear,” Valeria muttered appreciatively as the woman tightened her grip on the weapon just a bit and assumed an almost defensive stance, though refraining from brandishing the spear at anyone.

“She’s a fifth-tier mage,” Leon whispered back as he started walking in the woman’s direction.  “I would be willing to bet a big pile of money that she didn’t get that strong without using that thing on a few occasions…”

“Not a bet I’d want to take,” Valeria agreed.

“Hi, there,” Leon said as he and his two companions approached.  “I’m Leon Raime.  Might I assume you’re Helen?  The bounty manager with Heaven’s Eye told us to look for you…”

The woman nodded.  “That’s me,” she whispered, her pale blue eyes that matched her hair almost perfectly still narrow in suspicion.  “That cravenly shit didn’t tell me about your friends, though…”

Leon’s smile faltered just slightly at the venom that Helen had in her voice, though he supposed he could understand it.  Helen’s sister had been missing for weeks, and the bounty manager had refused to send others after her until this moment.  Given that the man seemed scared of sending others off to their deaths, Leon could understand his reluctance, but he could also understand Helen’s anger, too.

Leon made quick introductions, but it didn’t seem to alleviate Helen’s suspicion much.

After an awkward silence following their introductions, Leon said, “So, shall we head inside?  I think the four of us ought to have a quick sit-down and discuss what we’re doing together, as well as look into exactly what it is that we’re fighting.”

“There’s not much need for that,” Helen countered.  “I’ve been waiting for this for weeks.  I’ve done all the research, even gone out into the swamps a few times on my own to scout out the area where the basilisk’s lair has to be.  I’d have saved my sister myself if I weren’t so weak…”

Helen averted her gaze for a moment as if embarrassed that she’d let something like that slip out.  When she turned back toward the other three, her gaze had hardened, like she was daring any of them to ask her about it.

Deciding that it would be better for group cohesion to move on until such a time as she was more willing to say what was on her mind, Leon said as good-naturedly as he could, “If you already know everything that we need, then how about we head down to the docks, rent a boat, and then get underway?  You can let us in on the essentials on the way.”

Helen finally seemed to relax a fraction and nodded.  Without any further ado, Leon turned right around and led the way down to the lakefront, with Maia and Valeria hesitating only a moment before following him.  Helen walked a fair distance behind them—close enough to converse with them comfortably, but almost so far away that she might’ve seemed separate from the rest of the group to any onlookers.

Once at the docks, Leon rented another rowboat, though this one a little bigger to accommodate the two extra passengers, but it would move just as quickly with Leon, Maia, and Valeria, three mages skilled in water magic, on board.

With everything taken care of, the four set out onto the lake, and Leon finally turned back to the silent Helen.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Head to the east bank,” she directed.  “There’s a river that feeds into the lake.  We should be able to follow it into some marshes that’ll take us to where we need to go.”

Leon nodded, and Maia took control of the water beneath their boat and set them on their journey.

“What exactly is this creature that we’re dealing with?” Valeria asked.  “I would’ve looked into it a bit more, but we kind of left the library before I could get the chance…”

“I think it’s another one of those things we saw in the Screeching Desert,” Leon replied.  “Looks like a dragon-thing, but with feathers on its neck, only two legs, and wings like a bat.”

“They’re fucking big, too,” Helen grumbled.  “This one is a bit of a runt, which is probably why it’s here and not back in the desert.  Got run out by the bigger ones.”

“How big is it, exactly?” Valeria inquired.

“Big enough to swallow this entire boat whole, if it wanted,” Helen informed with an almost wicked smile.  “It’s been harassing some of the swamp folk for a while, now.  Stealing cattle and the like.  It’s gone and broke some of the levees protecting some of the waterways, too, complicating travel.  I think it might’ve even attacked a few trade ships as they passed through, but it’s hard to be certain—basilisks can fly pretty far, and they don’t always leave survivors, so it can be hard to definitively trace some of their movements.”

“How many people has it killed?” Leon asked.

“At least a few dozen…” Helen quietly replied.  “It, us… doesn’t seem to like actually eating humans, so a few remains have been found before they were taken by the swamp.”

“Makes sense,” Leon replied, sensing the direction Helen’s statement was going and wanting to head it off before she got too depressed.  “In my experience, most predators don’t really bother with humans.  We’re too threatening even when alone, especially for the amount of meat on our bones.”

“Yeah…” Helen murmured.

“So, what else?” Leon asked.  “Where is this thing’s lair, and what kind of dangers might we expect on the way?”

Helen bit her lip in muted frustration, then admitted, “I… never managed to find the lair.  I’ve looked, but the thing flies.  There’s not a lot of tracks that I can follow.”

Leon nodded again, though his lips turned downward slightly.

“Where we’re going is the thing’s hunting grounds,” Helen continued.  “Most of the attacks happened in these hundred square miles or so, so I’d imagine that it doesn’t rest its head too far away.”

“A reasonable assumption,” Leon said.  “What should we look for that it might use as a lair?  I can’t imagine there are many caves around here…”

“Probably some kind of pit on dry ground,” Helen explained.  “Basilisks are creatures of both air and earth, so creating a lair shouldn’t be too difficult in most places.  The problem here is where it’ll find dry land—most pits in the Wetlands will fill with water even if you only go a few feet down.  But it shouldn’t create a cave, they’re flying monsters and they prefer to come and go from their homes as they please.  That means it’ll be open to the sky.”

“And they’re big creatures,” Leon added as he thought the problem over out loud.  “That’ll mean some cleared ground, and they’re not likely to be able to hide their auras that well.”  With a meaningful look to Maia, they both took all of that information and projected their magic senses, looking for any sign of a lair, or the basilisk in flight.

They came up with nothing, but neither were discouraged.  There was an enormous amount of land to cover, and even though they could cover it with their magic senses, actually inspecting every square foot of that land took a long time.  Just because nothing immediately stood out didn’t mean much.

When they projected their magic senses, though, Helen almost reeled back like the force of their projected magic power had physically struck her.

“What in the shitting fuck was that?!” she shouted, her eyes going wide.  “How strong are all of you?!”

Valeria responded with an almost smug smile, “I’m only fifth, as you can probably tell, but Leon and Naiad are both eighth-tier.”

Helen stared back in disbelief.  “E-eighth-tier?!” she sputtered.  When Valeria nodded, she sat back up straight, her eyes turning back to Leon and Maia, both of whom wore proud smiles.  For the first time since they’d met, her pale blue eyes seemed to brighten with hope.

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