Heaven's Greatest Professor

A couple of the minion drakes came to obstruct Warden in his actions. They were fast, and fiery with their sharp claws and maws. He put his best defence to deal with them as fast as he could.

A dozen Lesser Drakes were remaining, and with the matriarch's call, most of them focused on Warden. Even the ones that had been hindering the healer's work shot back to protect their mother. Warden had killed eight of them, while Jason might not even make it to half that number yet.

It did not mean Jason was inept; his class simply was not efficient in killing, as its function seemed to revolve around protection. He was your typical knight in shining armour, though he had a broke-ass ragtag for now.

As the empowerment of essences was still taking its effect within his body, he was able to rejuvenate his energy in no time, not to mention he was able to gain lost spiritual energy from absorbing the fire breath with [Mystic Ward]. Honestly, the fiery power was superior to June's Starfire, though that was because the drake's flames were twisted through the corrupted taint.

The fire matriarch was a strong iron rank creature, with attributes probably over 100 marks, but the number did not do justice. Essentially, it was way more considering attribute points did not work linearly. It was more exponential with each round of figures of 10, 50, and 100, adding more power to the attributes.

A 10-point difference already makes one almost twice as strong in attribute, but here the drake had about 20 points on Warden, though it likely did not have all the attributes he had access to.

Warden had high efficiency in his attributes, and his destructive power was like no other. He attacked at the same spot again and again whenever he got a chance. Drakes were dying around them in quick succession. The lower the number had gone, the easier it had become to kill them.

Even the fire-breathing matriarch was unable to shoot fire without restraint. It had to take some cooldown time in between, and in those times, Warden capitalized.

He had already gained over 15 points in strength and dexterity, his power rising ferociously as he left the leftover drakes to Jason and focused only on the matriarch.

He jumped on top of her back as the matriarch began to wiggle. Unfortunately, its laggard agility made it almost impossible for it to protect itself.

With almost no resistance, Warden plunged his sword into the long neck of the drake before she could turn her head towards him to shoot fire. He pushed both his void energy and the semi-mastered intent. As they were not working in perfect synchronization, he divided them into two sides of the blade and drilled it in.

The blade dug out from the other side of its neck as Warden twisted it. The Drake matriarch was not dead yet, the wound was already healing, as Warden withdrew the blade. He made sure to pry the wound open while withdrawing. It squeezed horrifyingly in protest, but Warden only used energy to restrict what he was hearing and pulled the blade and plunged it again.

A fiery, hot blood flooded out from the wound. Her defence weakened further, but he still had to plant his sword multiple times to finally create a deep hole in its neck to kill it.

[You have slain a Cursed Drake Matriarch (Iron)]

[+1.7 Spirit.]

[+1.3 Strength.]

For most people, a single point in spirit is considered more valuable than a dozen points in strength. This was mostly because not all creatures give spirit essence, and those that do were vastly harder to kill. Take this matriarch, for example. Although it was slow, it had dozens of offspring to protect itself from possible dangers and attacks.

"I don't know what kind of dungeon you thought would be ideal," Warden said, letting out a breath, "but this is working fine for me."

Although the short fight had needed him to use all his power, he had gained over 10 points in Strength, 5 in Dexterity, and finally Spirit.

Jason winced, wiping the blood from his face. It was not his blood, obviously. "Then you would be delighted to know what we can get out of these corpses," Jason said.

"Hey, I know I have already signed the contract," Nina said hesitantly, "and you have paid half of my pay. But can I still exchange some of the hearts of these drakes for my money?"

Jason frowned. "Would the regular ones do, or do you want the heart of the matriarch?" he asked. Before she could answer, he continued, "We would be hunting drakes for the remainder of the next four days. I am sure there will be hundreds of hearts from regular drakes. I have no problem with exchanging them. But it is a different story if you want the Matriarch's heart.

We'd be lucky if we get half a dozen of them."

As Warden was mostly unaware of what was so different about the Matriarch's heart, Jason explained to him that it was one of the main ingredients to make a potion that could boost the spirit attribute by 4 whole points.

Of course, other potions could be made, such as those boosting fire elemental energy, but those were not highly in need, considering fire-attributed rankers are low in quantity compared to rankers who need more points in spirit.

"Can I take these potions more than once?" Warden asked as he calculated how much he could gain from this. The raw number was looking staggering like he would reach the peak of iron in no time. But, of course, it was not that easy.

"As the Drake Matriarch was iron rank, only iron rankers would get the most benefit out of it," Jason explained. "But you can take them more than once, though the boost in spirit would decrease with each ingestion."

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