Chapter 336

The monsters stopped coming on the sixteenth day.

At first, Rudra didn't even notice. He had thoroughly adapted to the mind-numbing grind of the Gloamhorn Wilds by now: walk, smash, walk, smash, cook, sleep, repeat. It took him almost the entire morning to realize the "smash" part of the schedule had quietly vanished.

No Direwolves lunging out of the mist. No Ravagers bulldozing through the brush. No overgrown insects pretending to be dead trees.

It was just the two of them, walking through a forest that was getting quieter with every step.

"Iris," Rudra called out quietly.

"I know."

"When was the last time we got jumped?"

She thought back for a second. "Yesterday. Mid-afternoon."

They slowed their pace. Rudra used his [Legendary Sage's Eyes], probing the mist for any hidden hostility or shifting mana.

Nothing. Not even the chirp of a bird.

The weird thing was, the forest didn't feel dead. The canopy was lush and green, the moss was thick under their boots, and the air smelled rich with damp soil and growing plants. It was just... completely empty.

And frankly, that bothered Rudra way more than an ambush.

Because his Super Sensitivity hadn't pinged him a single time all morning. Not once. For two straight weeks in this hellhole, the transcendent stat had been working overtime, screaming warnings at the back of his skull a second before fangs or claws tore out of the fog.

Now? Radio silence. And in a Level 350+ forbidden zone, that kind of silence meant something he didn't like at all.

"Something's keeping the monsters out," Rudra muttered.

"Or scaring them away."

"Yeah. That's the part I'm worried about."

Chak-!

Iris drew one pistol and kept it low at her side. Rudra shifted Extortion into a looser grip.

Another hour ticked by. Nothing happened.

Gradually, the massive, twisted trees began spacing further apart. The suffocating grey mist thinned out, allowing actual shafts of golden sunlight to pierce through the canopy and paint long, warm bars across the forest floor.

Suddenly, Iris halted in her tracks.

She crouched down, laid her palm flat on the ground, and stayed there for a long moment.

"What is it?" Rudra asked, scanning the treeline.

"This ground has been worked."

Rudra looked down at her hand. To him, it just looked like dirt. Dark, soft dirt—maybe a little looser than the root-choked, rock-hard mud they'd been marching over for the last fortnight, sure. But still just dirt.

"Worked?"

"Turned over. Broken up deliberately, and very recently." Iris scooped up a handful of the dark earth, letting it crumble cleanly between her fingers. "Someone is cultivating this land."

Rudra blinked, staring down at her. "How on earth can you tell that just by touching mud?"

Iris stood up and calmly brushed the dirt off her palms. "In my previous line of work, I had to learn how to read the ground. Where people walked. Where they dug. Where they lived." She stated it in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. "It was a useful skill."

Rudra opened his mouth to ask what kind of terrifying job required forensic soil analysis. Then he looked at her unnaturally calm face and decided, very wisely, not to.

"Cultivating," he repeated instead, looking around. "Right in the middle of the Gloamhorn Wilds, a high-level hunting zone?"

"Right in the middle of the Gloamhorn Wilds."

Rudra shook his head and took a step forward.

Flinch!

He froze mid-stride, his right boot hovering in the air, before his leg automatically swerved and planted his foot four inches to the left.

Right where his heel would have crushed the dirt, a tiny green sprout was poking up out of the dark soil. Two delicate little leaves, barely the length of his pinky finger.

Rudra stared down at the sprout. Then he stared at his own foot, which had moved on its own, without him deciding anything at all.

Iris was staring at him.

"...What was that?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"You stepped around a weed."

"It's not a weed," Rudra said, before he could stop himself. "It's a seedling. Piaro made me learn the difference. If it were a weed, the stem would be—"

Rudra cut himself off. He squeezed his eyes shut and let out a long, defeated groan.

"Oh, no."

"What?"

"He's gotten into my head."

Iris waited patiently.

"Piaro," Rudra said bitterly, rubbing his temples. "Back in Stormbreak, every single time I cut across his fields, he would magically know if I stepped on something. I don't even know how! He'll be miles away on the other side of the territory, busy as hell. Yet somehow, that exact same evening, he tracks me down, forces me to sit at a table, and lectures me for an hour straight on why every sprout is sacred."

He opened his eyes, staring hollowly into the middle distance. "The last time, he talked for an hour. Over a single trampled carrot. I genuinely thought my ears were going to bleed."

Iris looked down at the sprout. Then up at Rudra.

The corner of her eye was twitching again.

"So now my body just dodges them," Rudra muttered darkly. "On pure muscle memory. Even here, in a forest full of monsters, a thousand kilometers from the man. He's trained me, Iris. I've been pavlov'd."

"A well-behaved dog," Iris said.

Rudra decided not to dignify that with an answer.

They resumed walking. Now that he was actually paying attention to the dirt, Rudra started spotting the signs everywhere.

Rows. Faint, but there. Lines of soft dark earth running between the trees, where something had been planted and carefully tended. A low wall of stacked stones, too neat to be natural. A shallow ditch running alongside it, carrying a trickle of clear water.

Someone was genuinely farming the border of this hunting zone.

And the closer they got to this mysterious farmer's home base, the clearer the air became.

The terrain began sloping upward. The dense canopy finally broke apart, the sunlight grew hot and bright on their shoulders, and just ahead through the final line of trees, Rudra spotted a grassy ridge backed by open, clear blue sky.

Actual sky. He hadn't seen an unobstructed horizon in over two weeks in the game.

Side by side, they hiked up the final incline and came to a stop at the crest of the ridge.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

Below them, the forest simply ended. The trees stopped in a clean line, as if someone had drawn a border around the land and told the Wilds not to cross it. And beyond that line lay a wide, hidden plain, a great bowl of open land ringed on every side by the dark green wall of the forest, bright and warm under a clear sky.

And all of it was farmland.

Fields of wheat, so heavy with grain that the stalks bent in the breeze, rippling gold from one end of the plain to the other. Neat green rows of vegetables. Long orchards of fruit trees, their branches bowed under red and yellow fruit. Vineyards climbing the lower slopes in careful terraces, dark with grapes. Narrow canals of clear water ran between the fields in perfectly straight lines, crossed by small stone bridges, and far off at the very center of the plain, on a low hill, stood what looked like a village. Rooftops. Chimneys. A thin thread of smoke rising straight up into the still air.

It was beautiful. It was the most peaceful thing Rudra had seen since leaving Stormbreak.

And in the fields, working, were the Minotaurs.

There were dozens—no, hundreds of them scattered across the plain. Each one stood two and a half meters tall, with broad shoulders and powerful arms and thick golden fur that shone in the sunlight. Their curved horns were gold as well, and polished.

Yet they were all dressed, every single one of them, in a country grandpa style: loose shirts with the sleeves rolled up, long aprons, wide-brimmed straw hats.

They were farming.

Right near the base of their ridge, a massive Minotaur was kneeling carefully in the dirt between rows of young greens, using his thick, sausage-like fingers to gently pat the soil around a tiny seedling. A hundred metres away, another Minotaur was guiding a wooden plough behind a pair of regular oxen, happily humming a tune under his breath. Over in the orchard, a female Minotaur was balanced atop a wooden ladder, plucking apples one by one and laying them into a wicker basket so delicately you'd think the fruit was made of blown glass.

Rudra stood frozen as the Minotaur nearest to them—a mythical labyrinth monster famous across every RPG and fantasy novel for ripping adventurers in half and eating their raw flesh—crouched down, squinted with deep concern at a cabbage leaf, and very, very gently pinched a tiny caterpillar off it to relocate it to the grass.

Rudra slowly turned his head toward Iris.

Iris was staring down at the valley, her lips slightly parted. Her eye wasn't even twitching anymore. Her brain seemed to have completely short-circuited past that stage.

"Iris," Rudra said.

"Yes."

"Are those Minotaurs?"

"Yes."

"The man-eating berserker monsters. Just like every other Minotaur in Satisfy."

Iris watched one of the golden giants set down a watering can and wipe its brow with a neatly folded handkerchief.

"Apparently not," she said.

Rudra looked down at the plain for a long moment more. He thought about the coordinates Mellory had given him. He thought about the vain, oiled-up Ogres who had wanted to wrestle him, and the narcissistic Centaurs who had wanted to race him. He had spent the whole walk through the Wilds bracing himself for what kind of contest these ones would want.

Never, in his wildest dreams, had he prepared himself for competitive farming.

"I honestly don't know what I was expecting," Rudra muttered. "But it definitely wasn't this."

Shaking his head, he started walking down the grassy slope toward the fields, Iris following close behind.

They had made it about halfway when the Minotaur kneeling in the vegetable row looked up.

Even by Minotaur standards, this guy was an absolute unit, wearing a woven straw hat pushed back on his golden horns and a cute smudge of potting soil on his snout.

He locked eyes with them. Two humans, armed, walking down out of the forbidden forest.

The giant froze like a statue.

Rudra put on his best smile and raised a hand in a friendly wave, counting on his Charm and various titles to help him. "Hey there! We're—"

"KYAAAAAH!"

The two-and-a-half-metre muscle monster let out an ear-splitting, high-pitched squeal of pure terror.

Clang!

He dropped his garden trowel, scrambled wildly to his hooves, and bolted.

Not charging at them. Rather running away from them.

The giant tore straight across the field toward the village on the hill, his straw hat flying off in the wind, his massive golden frame bounding over the vegetable rows with absurd, tip-toeing agility just to make sure he didn't crush a single cabbage on his way out.

That high-pitched squeal echoed across the entire valley.

All across the farmlands, golden-horned heads snapped up. Dozens of Minotaurs turned. They spotted the two humans standing on the hillside.

And then, in absolute unison, every single Minotaur in the valley dropped their tools and lost their minds.

Uwaaaah!

Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo!

The plough was instantly abandoned mid-furrow, leaving the two regular oxen blinking in confusion. Wicker baskets of apples tumbled across the grass. The female Minotaur on the ladder slid all the way down the rungs in a single panicked zip and sprinted after the herd, her canvas apron flapping wildly in the breeze.

Watering cans, hoes, rakes, and straw hats littered the dirt like debris behind a hurricane as a literal stampede of terrified, two-ton golden bodybuilders thundered down the dirt paths, screaming their heads off as they retreated into the village.

Kwaang!

The whole evacuation took less than sixty seconds.

Now, the vast plain was completely empty.

Halfway down the slope, Rudra was still standing in place, his right hand raised in his friendly little wave. Slowly, awkwardly, he lowered his arm to his side.

Whoooosh...

A gentle breeze rustled through the golden wheat. Down by the ditch, one of the abandoned oxen let out a confused, questioning moo.

A single woven straw hat tumbled lazily down the dirt path and rolled to a stop right against the toe of Rudra's boot.

Rudra looked down at the hat. Then he looked over at Iris.

Iris looked back at him.

For a long moment, the two of them simply stood there, alone in an empty field in the middle of a high level hunting zone, surrounded by the dropped tools of a hundred terrified monsters.

"Well," Rudra said finally. "That's a new reaction."