Chapter 40: Rowan's background
Surprised that the 5 F+ ranks didn't die, Alex closed in with his fists ready to finish them off, but Rowan held him back.
"Don't. They're already out of the fight, let this be a valuable lesson to choose who they follow wisely." Rowan saved the five from dying to Alex's fist, but in his own hands lay Crimson who was barely grasping to life.
The battle was already over.
Crimson and his gang had vastly overestimated themselves, or maybe they just underestimated their enemies.
Either way, they were now at the mercy of Rowan and Alex, and thankfully for them Rowan was in a good mood due to all the loot he was looking forward to, so he let them live.
"I know you were confident in your ability to kill these guys even in a 1v5, but if you underestimate your enemies like these guys did, then you'll end up like them one day." This was a valuable lesson for Alex, and he knew Rowan was right.
Just like how he was surprised that his attack that one shot Joanne, didn't one shot those five guys, although some of them were close to death.
"Should we check the bear for a beast core then?" Now that the nuisances were dealt with, Alex was eager to find out whether this beast had a beast core.
"Gladly!"
Grabbing his sword and plunging it deep into the bear's skull, Rowan used his strength to pry its skull in half and a shining white light came through the gaps, which only meant one thing.
"We're in luck!" Rowan exclaimed excitedly and Alex, just as excited from the side, spoke.
"So uhh, continuing from earlier before we were rudely interrupted, how do we split the loot." Alex asked awkwardly. He knew Rowan was the strongest out of the both of them, by far, and since he contributed the most to the E rank fights so he had the right to decide who gets what.
"How about this, since we both contributed equally to killing the E rank bear, if we are lucky enough to get E- rank cores from both the raccoons we killed, you can have those." Rowan was being very generous with Alex, which was almost suspicious to him.
Alex looked at him with a questioning gaze, "I don't get it. First you hold yourself back in those fights, which I presume is to test me on how I'll do. And now you're being so generous with the distribution of loot when you don't have to be."
"It took you long enough to ask." Rowan said with a smirk.
"I'm from the federation, just like you. Right now I'm on a mission my Professor gave me and I just so happened to cross paths with you.
"..."
There was silence throughout the area from this point.
Rowan looked so dejected he didn't even want to speak to Alex anymore.
'He reached F+ rank in a little over 6 weeks, I can't believe it... He'll surpass me soon enough. I have to work harder!'
***
After the duo dealt with the bear corpse and extracted anything remotely useful, they next went over to the two raccoon corpses.
Thankfully there hadn't been another situation like the one with the Crimson gang, but the way they dealt with them probably deterred anyone from trying anything anyway.
As it turned out, the duo were getting suspiciously lucky with their loot, both of the raccoon corpses had an E- rank beast core buried in their skulls, much to Alex's delight.
Unfortunately though, the two F+ rank beasts that Alex had killed earlier on had nothing. But Alex was satisfied with what he had anyway.
'2 E- rank beast cores, and 4 soul orbs. I'm eating good tonight.'
Alex had always been a foodie. Just thinking about the delicious and exotic meals he could buy with those beast cores made him drool, but he knew better than to use them for that.
He would only waste gold coins on such luxuries.
"So, what's the name of this University you go to." Both Alex and Rowan had smiles on their faces as they eyed their loot with glee.
"It's called Capital Prime University. It's actually the number 1 uni-"
BOOOOOM!
Before Rowan could trail off into how great and powerful his university is, he was cut off by a sudden loud noise and an explosion far off into the distance.
Just as sudden as the explosion came, the barrier surrounding the city fell.