[Congratulations! You have now upgraded to the Toughened (Tier 1) Rank!]

After a short rest, Finn recovered remarkably quickly.

It really felt different. If he felt refreshed after awakening back then, feeling like he could carry someone his weight easily, he could now probably carry two large cows on each arm without breaking a sweat.

It was amazing.

He stood up and stretched his body, feeling the extra flexibility and power despite the fact that he was dead tired.

Speaking of this, he went to look at his stats. He hadn't checked it in a while.

[Status]

Name: Finnick Altheus Solthar

Race: Human

Rank: Toughened Tier 1

VITALS

HP: 518/1000

Mana: 515/1000

Stamina: 502/1000

Wallet: 2702 Gold

Hearth Points: 6832 Points

Active Skills: [Ingredient Scan] [Dish Analysis] [Heated Arc] [Farming] [Assessment] [Feather Step] [Sticky Soil] [Tracker][Blade of Fire] [Thunder Clash] [Stone Guard]

Passive Skill: [Blade Proficiency - Growth Type (Lv 3)] [Monster Instinct]

[Strong Stomach] [Improved Palate] [Foraging] [Fire Resistance] Preserver's Touch]

Condition: Normal]

Plus 500. What a jump in stats. Very nice.

That said, without the +500 point in stats, didn't that mean his stats were left to a few digits again?

He shivered a bit at the thought. He really seemed to walk in line with death every time he did a major upgrade.

He turned to check on his sister-egg by habit. He blinked, and he narrowed his eyes. He snapped his finger and turned on the lights, leaning down to look closer.

"Did you get prettier or did my sight just get better?" he wondered, overlapping his hands to compare it to his memory before. "You got bigger, though just a little."

Still, there was finally a change!

He used his [Appraisal] Skill to check.

[Mysterious Egg]

[Information: Egg with a creature inside. Status: Gestating]

He wished there were a percentage of progress or something. Regardless, he knew that he must be doing something right.

So he decided to continue doing whatever and let the egg rest in its comfy throne amongst the remainder of his core pond. Anyway, now that he was at the toughened stage, he had little use for the remaining hundreds of awakened cores he still had. She could have it all.

He looked out the window and saw it was the middle of the night, but he still had a bit of stamina left, and it felt like a waste to rest now, especially since he'd only need a few hours to recover now that he had upgraded.

The place was relatively quiet except for the handful of monsters pounding at the barrier. They didn't really mind them much anymore, especially after finding out that the next upgrade depended on defense points recovered.

To recover, it naturally had to go down, so he never forced his staff to clear the monsters when they didn't feel like it. They had their own jobs, and the clearing was just a bonus, especially now that they had a consistent flow of guests who might want to do the honors instead.

He walked over to the beasts with his weapon in hand. He stabbed and parried, attacking their weakspots, and he could defeat them in one shot!

Confident, he headed beyond the barrier, no longer afraid to be mobbed by awakened monsters.

His emergence from the barrier made the monsters agitated, suddenly fully smelling the scent of fresh meat.

Because the monsters were all awakened ones for now (he assumed Durgan had taken care of the toughened ones before this), he didn't even have to use a single skill.

He just had to push them with the pole or block their attacks with it, then he'd stab them with the tip, slice them with the axe, or displace them with the hook.

He had long mastered their movements and knew their patterns as well, so he just had to hide or jump behind one monster, and the other would accidentally hurt it. When those monsters fought, he'd let them be and head back to the barrier, killing whoever was the winner among them.

Like this, in less than an hour, he defeated more than a dozen awakened-level monsters on his own, using his ability to determine the two monsters with cores, stabbing and pulling out their small cores with one movement each.

He did not notice that he had strayed quite far away from the barrier during the fight, though he wasn't too worried when he did notice it.

That was, of course, until he heard a loud sound of a bigger monster.

CCCAAAWAWWW!

It arrived within eyesight a moment later, immediately lunging at him. His eyes widened a bit.

It was a toughened stage monster! Since the Inn had upgraded, the number of toughened monsters had increased a bit.

The toughened monster—a monster called a Cradlebeak—was a bird-type monster twice the size of an ostrich and probably ten times as deadly and a hundred times as ugly as one.

He had encountered one before in one of his excursions with the guests. It was also one of the toughened monsters that appeared relatively frequently in the area after the inn was upgraded.

Its beak was sharp and serrated, almost as if it had teeth. It also had a weird tongue that darted to stab, and it had incredibly sharp claws.

It was only one, but its mouth and neck were bloody, and he could see an arm between its sharp, creepy beak. For a moment, he feared it was his, but when he touched each of his arms and felt they were there, he breathed a sigh of relief.

He used the [Feather Step] to increase his speed, matching the bird's somehow, but only barely. This breed was one of the fastest ones of this level, so it was naturally difficult to handle.

He was pushed to avoid and run for a while, and he made sure to head in the direction of the inn so he had a fall back in case things didn't turn out well. He wasn't able to go too far, though, because the bird's movement was really erratic.

Despite the many close calls, Finn kept his cool. At some point, he used [Sticky Soil] at a spot, luring the monster to step there at the right moment.

CAWWW!

It was immediately imbalanced, and Finn jumped up, waving his spear, not giving it a chance to recover.

SLICE!

It wasn't a one-shot thing. Same leveled monsters had much stronger defense than humans of the same level, so he had to swing his weapon a few times before its head finally got detached from its body.

[Killed! Cradlebeak (Toughened)!]

He smiled. That felt amazing.

Unfortunately, it did not have a core. It also reminded him that, from this point forward, he'd be battling monsters of this caliber instead of the usual awakened ones. That was, of course, only if he wanted to grow.

He took a deep breath, killing the few awakened monsters that their fight attracted, no longer feeling the same sense of pride.

He arrived at the stream as he headed back to the inn. He blinked when he saw someone lying there. "Hey!" he yelled, except he almost tripped when he stepped on something soft and hard.

…it was half a body. Then, he turned to look at the 'person' he saw, and he realized it was the other half. And then its arm socket was empty, as well.

It was the owner of the arm that had been on the monster's beak.

"..."

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