After dealing with the monster's corpse, Knight Stine immediately sent someone back to the camp to report their encounter with the regenerating monster to Baron Raymond.
Roger, taking advantage of the moment right after the battle when the wounded were still lying scattered across the ashes, began casting Heal on them one by one to farm experience points.
Once all the wounded had been treated, Knight Stine walked over to Roger and said in a low voice,
“I plan to take some men to search other areas. I'm afraid this monster isn't the only one.”
Roger indicated he didn't mind. He never turned down an opportunity to earn points anyway.
After ordering a few conscripts to carry back the severely wounded whom Heal couldn't fully cure, Stine took the remaining retainers who were still fit to fight and headed to other areas.
Over the next few hours, they encountered several other search-and-destroy parties.
These parties had also run into similar monsters, suffering varying degrees of casualties.
However, by the time Roger's group arrived at these scenes, the battles were already over, leaving behind only the corpses of the monsters and soldiers bandaging their wounds. Roger didn't manage to leech any points, only able to silently lament the missed opportunities.
Afterward, they searched the entire scorched earth from end to end, but they found no more surviving goblins or new regenerating monsters.
Once Knight Stine confirmed there were no further discoveries, he declared the search-and-destroy mission over and ordered everyone to head back to camp.
“Did those massive fireballs really burn all the green-skins in the forest to death?”
Roger walked back behind the group, but he couldn't shake a lingering sense of unease.
As soon as he returned to the camp, he went to find Irene.
During the forest fire last night, Irene had been responsible for guarding the eastern defense line. If any goblins had broken out from that direction, she would be the one who knew best.
When he saw Irene, Roger got straight to the point. “Did any goblins break through your side last night?”
“Only a few scattered ones,” Irene replied.
“That's it?”
“That's it.”
Roger didn't press further, but he didn't entirely let go of his doubts either.
He tried a different approach. During dinner, he deliberately chose a spot close to the soldiers. As he chewed on his dry rations, he kept his ears open, eavesdropping on the nearby chatter. He would occasionally chime in, steering the conversation toward last night's fire attack and the whereabouts of the goblins.
However, everyone's accounts were consistent with what Irene had said. Only scattered, broken remnants had escaped the sea of fire, far from enough to form a proper breakthrough.
No matter how he looked at it, the goblins in the forest indeed seemed to have perished in the great fire. No teleportation arrays, secret tunnels, or other facilities that could have allowed a large number of goblins to vanish into thin air were found during the search.
After mulling it over, Roger had no choice but to accept this conclusion for now, though he kept it in the back of his mind in case he stumbled upon new clues in the future.
Just as he finished washing down his dry rations with some vegetable soup, Knight Stine sat down beside him in a very natural manner.
Seeing this, the surrounding soldiers tactfully got up and left.
Stine didn't get straight to the point. Instead, he struck up a casual conversation with Roger in a chatting-about-the-weather tone.
Roger gave half-hearted responses, knowing full well that the man hadn't come over just for small talk.
He had seen this “talk about the weather before getting to business” routine far too many times. But since the other party wasn't in a hurry, he was in even less of one.
Although he didn't know Stine's exact intentions, Roger guessed that the knight wanted to use this method to close the distance between them.
After chatting for a while, Stine naturally shifted the topic:
“Even though I've asked this before, I still want to know—just how many skills do you actually have?”
In less than a second, Roger came up with an excuse. “I've always known these skills. I just didn't have the opportunity to show them before.”
“Then why didn't you before...” Stine paused, catching himself, and changed his wording. “I wonder, before you became a mercenary, who did you learn your magic from?”
As he spoke, the names of several well-known mages flashed through Knight Stine's mind.
Although the Raymond family was not a grand noble house, as a house knight, he had heard of most of the somewhat famous mages within the kingdom's borders.
If Roger named one, he could immediately match it up and at least get a general idea of the young man's background.
Roger shook his head. He then adapted a classic plot point from a famous classical novel of his previous life, spinning a lie with a completely straight face:
“Before I completed my apprenticeship, my master specifically instructed me not to reveal his name to anyone, lest I get into trouble in the future and implicate him.”
“You know how mages are—they all have their eccentricities. Since I promised him, I can't break my word.”
Stine was silent for a couple of seconds before giving up on pressing further. “Fair enough.”
Earlier, Roger had claimed his family was too poor to afford magic lessons, and now he was talking about having a master. A fool could see he was hiding the truth.
But Stine knew which was more important: digging into someone's privacy or building a relationship.
Offending an Awakened of immeasurable potential who possessed talent in both magic and martial arts just to satisfy his own curiosity was a losing bargain no matter how he looked at it.
Rather than endlessly prying into Roger's background, it was better to maintain their current good cooperative relationship.
“Whenever you're ready to talk about it, we'll have a good chat.”
Stine stood up, gave Roger a casual wave, and turned to walk back to his tent.
...
After resting in place for a few days, the troops set out once more.
This time, Baron Raymond no longer served as the vanguard. Instead, he followed closely behind Count Nigel, taking on the role of the rearguard and support.
During the march, Roger continued to squeeze out every bit of his free time to furiously practice his skills, occasionally sparring in swordsmanship with Knight Stine and Irene.
Over the course of the nearly month-long march, 【Windwalk】 steadily rose to Lv3, and the experience growth of his other skills was also quite respectable.
However, the leveling speed of three of his skills remained painfully slow.
The training method for 【Mana Siphon】 required absorbing mana, but Roger couldn't find anyone suitable to practice with for the time being. The spellcasters here could be counted on one hand.
Matilda in the neighboring camp wasn't familiar with him. He had tried to coax her into helping him practice his skill, but she politely declined.
When Roger stepped out of her tent, he bumped right into Sargon, who persistently questioned him about what he was doing there.
He had also tried catching a few magical beasts in the wild to use as training tools, but they hadn't seen so much as a bird's shadow along the way.
After 【Iron Wall】 reached Lv3, the experience gained from simple practice also decreased visibly.
Thus, during his sparring matches with Stine and Irene, Roger would occasionally stand in place and deliberately let them land a few strikes on him, trying to bump up Iron Wall's experience bar this way.
But whether it was because the skill's leveling mechanism was designed to be strict, or because the experience required for each subsequent level grew exponentially, those few sparring sessions only raised the experience bar slightly. The road to leveling up was still very long.
【Danger Sense】 was a passive skill. Its experience would only increase when it was triggered by an undetected danger nearby.
Roger couldn't very well go out of his way to manufacture danger just to train this skill, so he could only let nature take its course.
Since he couldn't find any shortcuts to rapidly improve these three skills for now, he had no choice but to set them aside and focus his limited energy on the projects that showed steady progress.
Rate on N.U.
