Frostfire Legacy

"Done! You three are in a party now!" Ms. Zena announced, clapping her hands.

As soon as their registration was done, Kali began to walk out of the guild, causing Aster to call out to her in panic. "Wait, Kali! Won\'t you introduce yourself to us first?"

"..."

The cat girl stopped in her tracks, turning toward Aster with an irate gaze, and answered a big, fat "no." before continuing on her way.

Aster and Cassy watched as her back left the guild before turning to each other and shrugging their shoulders.

"Wait for us, Kali!"

---

After the two caught up with Kali, she turned to them and spoke. "K. Call me K while in the dungeon."

Although Kali was just two syllables, saying it in full could still delay their coordination by a few milliseconds. Furthermore, "Kali" and "Cassy" sounded similar, which can confuse them in the middle of a messy fight.

"Oh, it\'s you two again!"

As they approached the gate, the same old man, the Oni uncle, smiled at them while greeting them.

"Are you gonna bring out another Field Boss? Hahaha! Oh, you even have a new member!"

"That\'s right, uncle! We\'ll be taking home another Boss!" Cassy joked, but Aster felt his blood run cold upon hearing it.

"No, nuh uh! One deadly fight is enough; I don\'t want to do it again!"

"Really? What a waste... Anyway, your ID, please."

At his urging, the three gave him their Adventurer\'s cards. He checked them with the machine in his hand and let out a soft whistle. "Nice. So you have a level 3 with you. The first floor should be a breeze!"

"Level 3?" Cassy asked, tilting her head.

"Your new companion! She\'s a level 3 Swashbuckler! Didn\'t you know?" The uncle scratched his cheek, seeming a little worried. "You\'re entering the dungeon together. You should grasp each other\'s abilities to a certain extent... Well, I\'ve extracted your entrance fees.

Go on!"

As soon as their cards were returned, Kali went ahead and entered, leaving the two behind. Aster and Cassy looked at her and sighed. "Her attitude needs working on." Aster sighed.

As they entered, the two quickly realized that Kali was nowhere to be found. They got worried at first, until they saw her running around and slashing across the tall grasses, cutting them away together with a few slimes hidden within using her twin daggers.

"Woah...!"

Cassy exclaimed in surprise, seeing her performance.

"Ah! Oh no! The extraction!" But she quickly started to panic. "Star, I\'ll go gather the corpses over there! You start the extraction of those close by!"

"On it!"

The two moved with synergy, with Aster picking up the corpses nearby and using his Legacy Level Carved Seal to dry them off, leaving only the core behind. "That went smoothly," he mused, wondering why his control suddenly got better.

However, he wasn\'t able to dwell on it, as Cassy soon came with five corpses of slimes with her. "Star, quick! They have large wounds; I\'m not sure if we can still extract their cores!"

Slimes are so weak that a single puncture wound was enough to "kill" them. Of course, destroying their core kills them too. As such, of the over 20 slimes that Cassy saw, only the seven within her arms were the ones with a barely intact core.

Aster moved quickly, drying the slimes and extracting their cores. However, of the seven, only three of them yielded a flawless core. The others were broken or cracked, which lowered their value.

"What are you doing?"

And after a few minutes of running around, which wasn\'t enough to even make her sweat, Kali suddenly came back and asked the two.

"What do you mean, what? We\'re gathering loot!" Cassy answered with a smile. "Though, can you keep the cores unharmed? Their price drops if it\'s damaged, after all."

"Stupid rabbit," Kali answered with a scoff. "I know that at a glance. I mean, what is he doing?"

"Me?" Aster raised his head and wiped away the cold sweat forming on his forehead. "I\'m drying the slimes to extract the cores."

"Extract... the cores?"

Kali tilted her head, confused.

"Slime cores melt down after death; there\'s no way to reliably—!"

"Here, you see?"

Before she could finish voicing her doubt, Cassy had already opened the backpack beside her and shown Kali its contents. There were already dozens of fist-sized blue spheres inside it, looking like little gems or orbs.

"... What? Impossible!" But Kali doubted her eyes. "The cores should be near-impossible to extract like this!" She exclaimed.

"Yes, but I can do it. So, please keep the cores intact." Aster smiled as he moved to activate his carved seal once more, drying the next batch of slimes and extracting 4 out of the 12 cores.

Kali looked unconvinced at first, but after seeing the extraction in person, she couldn\'t help but stare with her mouth agape. What she saw was something that goes against her common sense!

"See?" Cassy smiled while tilting her head. "So please keep the cores intact as much as possible!"

"Right. Collecting as many loots as we can should be prioritized over leveling up." Aster added.

"... I\'ll try."

With Kali coming to terms with what was supposedly impossible, she continued her hunting at an unbelievable pace.

"As expected of a real melee class." Aster mused, watching her move around with awe. "Though I wish I could hunt a few. I should be close to leveling up, after all."

In just half an hour of hunting, the backpack was already filled to the brim with slime cores. After counting, there should be over 50 cores inside, all perfectly intact.

"That\'s roughly 250,000 Tels! Amazing!"

"Right. It\'s a huge haul for just an hour of hunting!"

"..."

Only Kali had a bitter expression. After all, she knew that the amount they managed to get was simply impossible for a "real" newbie party. The only way they could reach over 100k Tels in a short time should be by hunting stronger monsters, or the Field Boss, and not by simply hunting weak slimes!

\'That damned mayor, what sort of party did he dump me off to?\' She thought with a hint of worry and fear.

Since their bag was filled to the brim, they decided to return once first and empty their loots, before returning to hunt some more.

"This time, let me hunt too!" Aster exclaimed.

He could no longer wait to level up!