Cast Out (Book 1 Done; Book 2 In-Progress)

Chapter 3: Part 2

For a split second, everything was still. Time itself seemed to stop.

In the first outer layer of the Boundary Forest, there were two people which faced off against more than 30 monkeys. These creatures made up the entire 3rd branch of the Martial Art Monkeys, and were the rarest. No Adventurer sought them out, because they were the Iron Sh*t Monkeys.

With long arms and a hard, flexible tail, these monkeys ate the armor and weapons of any fallen traveler, wanderer, adventurer and passerby that they could find. True to their name, their attacks were only limited by the amount of food that they had eaten beforehand, and all of their weaponry was stored in a special organ that contained spatial magic. This made it so that they could store their attacks almost indefinitely, and this was the reason why none fought them.

After all, who want to go into a fight with which you had a large chance of dying, only to come out with all of your possessions devalued with sh*t? Even if you happened to be a Traveler and had an almost unending number of lives, most people would still not seek them out and would just pay no attention to them at all.

But these two people had done the unthinkable and decided to fight against the monkeys!

At first it had only been a few of them that had turned up. The monkeys were hard to spot because of their natural camouflage, true, but this was nothing against a party with a rogue with a high enough level. After increasing their DEXTERITY to 50, rogues automatically got a skill called [sense presence]. This let them feel the presences of certain beings around them, after becoming familiar with them. The range on this ability varied based on the rogue's skill level, but generally most rogues would have trained this skill enough to be able to know if there were monsters around themselves and their party.

Martial Art Monkeys had a high survival instinct. They wouldn't attack strong people for no reason. But they also had a high sense of pride in themselves and their school!

Alexa had let them know by [whisper] that there were three of the Iron Sh*t Monkeys nearby. She should've known better though! After almost being defeated by them once, Zhang and Misa were both up for getting payback for all the trouble from before. The fact that they sent most of them running the last time wasn't enough as far as they were concerned.

Alexa tried to be the voice of reason, but it was a lost cause. Whenever those two agreed on anything, she could never muster up enough will to go against them. But after Zhang, Misa and Alexa had killed these three monkeys, the entire school came! Right before the last monkey had died, it had let out a shriek, letting all the other members of the school know that it was in trouble.

All of the monkeys had a close bond with each other. After all, where else would they go? They were looked down upon by the other two schools, and this had helped to bring them all together. Which is why when the first three monkeys were killed, the rest of the school came to avenge them.

Plus, it was SPRING MATING SEASON!! If they didn't do something about these people that tried to trample on them, how could they even think about showing their faces to the women they admired? Even if they normally would leave one or two of their brothers behind to ensure their school's survival, even if they were normally smart enough to value their own lives highly, this time they didn't and went all out.

All of this led to the current situation.

Zhang stood next to Misa, his mouth slightly open as he tried to suppress a scream of pain from a bolt of lightning coming from one of the pieces of armor which flew around them, as it struck the symbol of lightning on his chest. He was charred in several places, with dark smoke wafting up from his body.