After ten minutes of nonstop devouring, the only things that remained of the streamer stag were its antlers, and a red starcore, both of which were immediately added to Arden’s inventory. Even the antler that he used to impale the Celestial was made into a meal for him.

  Arden leaned back on the grass and exhaled in satisfaction. Ever since he used the last of his biomass to heal before fighting the thugs several days earlier, he felt anxious. He needed that safety net.

  He felt Vera press herself against his back and throw her arms around him. He smiled and placed a hand on her arm.

  “You did good,” she said.

  “Only because you taught me. I wouldn't have been able to use that antler like that if I hadn't practiced with a spear.”

  Arden chuckled.

  “I would have been screwed if the antler hardened into a scythe.”

  “How would that even work?” She asked with a smile.

  He thought for a moment.

  “Maybe it would be segmented. It'd be kind of like a whip sword that folds into a scythe.”

  “Quite the imagination you have there. And by the way, if there's any weapon less practical than a great scythe, it's a whip sword.”

  “I could see that. The amount of training it would take to get proficient with it would probably outweigh any perks of using one.”

  Arden looked at his hands, thinking of that strange technique he used to grab the antler that went flying. He wondered how he did that, and naturally wondered if he could do it again.

  “You're wondering how you did that, aren't you?” Vera asked.

  “Yeah. For the first time, I feel like I made some headway with my power. I always figured that it could be used for more than just healing, and this proved it. Now I just need to know what was different.”

  “Now you just have to experiment with it. Try grappling onto that tree right there.”

  He did as he was told. He imagined the tendrils emerging from him and coiling around the large tree, and retracting, pulling Arden upwards. But nothing happened.

  ‘Was it because I was desperate?’ He pondered.

  After a few seconds he laughed and shook his head.

  “I'm an idiot.”

  He pulled one of the antlers from his inventory and lobbed it towards the tree. This time, he imagined grabbing onto the antler and pulling back to him.

  At his command, the tendrils burst from his right hand and wrapped tightly around the antler. He smiled when the antler came flying back to him landing in his hand.

  “It should have been obvious. It's a part of Devour. Of course it can only react to biomass.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Arden turned the antler in his hand. From the looks of it, the extendo tendril did more than just pull back whatever he wanted. There were markings left along the bone from the where the tendril had connected and subsequently devoured in the small time that Arden pulled the antler back.

  They made conversation for a few more minutes before Savish and Sya returned. The returning group looked at the couple with flat expressions.

  “Really?” Sya asked. “Out in the open?”

  “We weren’t doing anything,” Vera denied, getting up alongside Arden. “Did you find something?”

  Savish rubbed her hands together with a smile. She looked like a mischievous child seeing the first Christmas presents placed beneath the tree.

  “Oh yeah. Come on.”

  *****

  The group were gathered around blackened imprints along the ground both toward and away from where they found them. Arden was reminded of the Helios Saint by the scorch marks left by something walking around.

  “That's a cow hoof print,” Savish said. “The Celestial that left this is something that I hunt every chance I get. A red-tier main sequence ember bull.”

  Arden furrowed his brow at the mention of its rank.

  “Main sequence? I could barely fight a protostar on my own. I just got some healing back. I'd rather not waste it on a horny cow.”

  “Who said you'd do it alone? You three should be able to defeat it if you work together. I'll even let you keep the star cores and a Satellite if it drops one. All I want is its meat.”

  Arden, Vera, and Sya all glanced at each other in thought. The last time they fought a main sequence Celestial was in the Mausoleum of the Maverick, where the titular Maverick nearly killed them all.

  They had all come a long way since then, having actually received training alongside being granted powers. They were experienced now.

  But they also had no more emergency show stoppers. Arden no longer had the Legacy of Beyond to back him up. The only reason they survived the Maverick was because of that.

  They all smiled confidently. Arden spoke, representing his party.

  “You want the meat of the ember bull for your restaurant, right?”

  “That's right,” Savish responded.

  Arden gave a sinister chuckle, like his evil plan had just been revealed to the hero in a grand monologue, and there was nothing the hero could do about it.

  “Sweeten the deal.”

  “What?” Savish asked.

  “What?” Vera and Sya echoed.

  Arden gave a lecherous smile to the orange-tier restauranteur.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “We’ll hunt the bull, but only if you prepare a dish for us for free using its meat.”

  Before he said that, Vera was preparing to hit him for making a demand. She thought that he was returning to the Arden from the registration. She was pleasantly surprised by Arden demanding a meal, instead a Satellite or something like that.

  “That's it?” Savish asked, thrown. “I thought you were going to make me give you some star coins or something. Yeah, I'll cook for you guys. I'll do it when you return from your field assessment.”

  “Deal,” Arden replied.

  *****

  They followed the trail of black prints deeper into the wilds. So far, the area had been rather ubiquitous, with the forest giving way to more forest.

  About 15 minutes into their search for the ember boar, they found another clue. It was when the tracks deviated from their steadfast path and became more sporadic. They began to have either more spacing or less between them.

  Separate tracks belonging to a different animal appeared here as well. Savish pointed out that the ember bull likely encountered another Celestial, and they must have had a turf war.

  Arden glanced down at a bush that was still burning. He then glanced around the area to see no less than ten other environmental objects that were still burning, threatening to die out.

  “What gave you that idea?”

  A few meters away from the mess of tracks, her theory was proven correct, as a streamer stag laid on its side dead with a crushed chest cavity. Most of its ribs looked broken, but that wasn't what drew the group's attention.

  What caused Arden to grin in both nervousness and anticipation were the charred black streamer-like antlers, half of which were reduced to ash.

  “So this ember bull is looking pretty strong,” Arden said.

  “Getting cold feet?” Savish asked.

  “I’m getting a bit nervous," he admitted. “By the looks of it, the streamer stag didn't stand a chance.”

  “Bad match up,” Vera said, pointing to the antlers that were already gone. “The stag must have tried to grab it and restrain it, but those were likely set ablaze first.”

  Sya grinned and patted her brother's shoulder.

  “You are a good match for the bull then. Your armor has a heat resistance aspect right?”

  “I'd like to point out that heat resistance does not mean the same thing as fire resistance,” Arden shot back.

  “It does in this case,” Vera said. “It helped against Yaan.”

  “Did it? I remember that going much differently. I remember the Stoneflesh Shroud melting into me as I fought him.”

  “The fact that it wasn't destroyed outright shows that it helped. Yaan’s flames were main-sequence, remember? You were a protostar. In a sane world, you would have been killed trying to put out his flames or his hellfire stigmata.”

  “Yeah, and my armor is supergiant.”

  Arden grumbled and knelt down to begin devouring the stag. All of this talk about being set on fire made him want the extra biomass.

  This one took less than five minutes to completely devour, thanks to the extensive damage already caused by the ember bull. It didn’t yield him as much biomass as Arden wanted, but it was enough to slightly advance his progress to the next rank. It seemed it didn’t matter if the creature was already damaged. So long as it was an individual being, he would advance.

  “That’s real interesting,” Arden muttered, seeing no more of the stag on the ground.

  The two experienced hunters frowned, while Arden and Sya merely wrinkled their brows in confusion, seeing what was there. Or rather, what wasn’t there.

  “Where’s its core?” Sya asked.

  “Taken by the ember bull,” Savish said. “It must be close to ranking up. The reason why Celestials take star cores is to evolve. At the top of their ranks, it becomes almost instinctual to seek out cores to move up to the next rank.”

  “Sounds like we gotta hunt this thing before it does,” Arden said.

  They continued following the prints of the ember bull. Along the way, they found several other dead Celestials. They found four in total, two lesser thagomizards, a streamer stag, and a new celestial that looked like a big chicken. Just like the previous streamer stag, none of them had a star core.

  There was a large gap between finding the chicken and the next celestial, another streamer stag. This one wasn’t dead, but it was definitely dying. It was heavily burnt, with its brown fur charred black and flaky. It looked up at the group of Starborn with a dull look in its eyes.

  Savish was about to put it out of its misery, when Sya stopped her.

  “Hold up,” she said.

  “Please don’t tell me you want to nurse this thing back to health.” Savish said incredulously. “It's a Celestial. They can’t be tamed. They exist only to kill people.”

  Sya knelt next to the dying Celestial. She rubbed the nearly departed streamer stag's nose, which caused it to flare its nostrils with a puff of air.

  It looked at her with confusion, and then panic when it realized the blood from her still wounded hand entered its nose, poisoning it. It made a few last death rattles and thrashed around momentarily before it went still.

  You have slain red-tier protostar Streamer Stag.

  “That was cold,” Arden said. “Was that necessary?”

  Sya stood up, pressing a leaf to her hand.

  “I'm just trying something,” she said while turning to Savish. “Poisoned meat is no good, right? I'm checking to see if there's a way I can make it palletable.”

  Sya opened her uninjured hand towards the deer's corpse. The sickly silver light that was synonymous with the Blight flowed from the corpse back to Sya.

  “Nice,” she said, pleased with the results of her experiment. “I pulled the poison out.”

  “Oh?”

  “I control the spread of my Blight. My corrupted blood is poisonous because it contains blight essence. I assumed it before, but because I was able to pull it out, my hypothesis was proven correct.”

  She looked at Savish.

  “That means I can poison the ember bull as much as I want when we fight it, and we'll still be able to eat it.”

  “I’m getting hungry just thinking about it,” Arden said with a grin.

  Already, this journey into the wilds had proven successful. The whole point was to learn how to better use their powers, and both Arden and Sya had done exactly that. Arden learned that he could summon an extra long tendrils, and Sya learned that her blood was diluted with blight essence, and thus subject to her control.

  Competitive spirit burned inside of Arden. Yes, it was nice to know that he had another facet of power, he didn't yet know how to control it like Sya could.

  He wanted to get stronger.

  His thoughts of competition were pushed out of his mind when an explosion resounded through the forest from a couple hundred meters south of them.

  It wasn't like a gas explosion where it could be mistaken for an earthquake from hundreds of kilometers away. This one was much smaller, much more contained.

  It was loud, but it wasn't deafening. The forest shook with the shockwave, but beyond the tree branches and bushes being blown slightly, they weren't affected.

  Everyone only looked in the direction of the explosion for a few seconds. They all broke into a sprint at the same time towards their soon-to-be prey.

  Arriving at the crater where the explosion came from, they saw two things.

  They saw a party of three Starborn facing down against the Celestial. The party consisted of an unconscious woman with blonde hair laying on the ground with heavy injuries behind the two men defending her. Arden realized that this was the party just ahead of them in the warp station.

  Across from them was the ember bull. It had the appearance of a large bull, naturally. Its coat of fur was black like gunpowder, and its horns were angled out, facing the two Starborn remaining on their feet. The horns were the color of steel and glowed orange at the tip, dripping droplets of molten metal onto the barren dirt beneath it.

  With its white skull covering its head like a horrific mask, it looked closer to a cryptid than a Celestial. Cinders flew from its nose as it huffed in irritation. It was a good thing that the crater it stood in was already void of any flora, because a wildfire would have surely taken place if it was still lush.

  Its enormous muscular body rippled with rage as it stamped its smoke-obscured hoof on the ground repeatedly. Its tail flicked behind it in anger, with the end of it shooting cascades of sparks like a sparkler.

  The newcomers all felt the bull’s aura. It was significantly stronger than the streamer stag, but still weaker than an orange-tier aura.

  It was no longer main-sequence. It evolved.

  It was now a red-tier supergiant.