Chapter 232 Reaching Hobha

Inter-City Freeway

Unnamed Abandoned Village Outskirts, Hobha

March 14th

Year 1052

"So that's how it works..."

Evan's voice rang out as he stared at the Hobgoblin king that was twitching on the ground in front of him while nodding to himself.

His right palm was covered in a dark red ominous aura that made even Pride take a step back as he silently poked the chest of the half-dead monster.

Such a small poke normally would not do anything to the tough skin of the nearly level 200 creature, but Evan's finger effortlessly pierced through its skin and drilled a hole in its bone as he pushed his finger deeper into the monster's chest.

"GUAAAAAA!!!!!!"

It screamed out and attempted to trash around, but its arms and legs were held to the ground by two dark shadowy arms that stretched out from the shadow its body cast on the ground.

Besides its head was a small black cat that poked the cheek of the screaming monster with a hint of curiosity in his eyes.

"I see, it requires a great amount of soul damage to be dealt at once in order to cause the target to lose a skill, huh?"

Evan's eyes flashed with the light of appraisal as he studied the monster's status board and noted that its Unique skill was not present anymore.

All that was in the unique skill tab was a bunch of jumbled letters and symbols, similar to where the monster's 'Kin Command' skill formerly was.

? "Sadly, I don't seem to be able to select what skill I want to cause the target to lose. Makes sense though."

'

He grabbed the hobgoblin king's neck and snapped it before getting to his feet, the dark red aura on his palm dissipating as he looked at the system time and counted how long it had been since he activated said aura.

"Fifteen minutes and no side effects. Energy consumption is also triple that of the original five-minute test.

Everything is within calculations."

He stretched his hands and yawned lightly before walking towards Pride who was seated on a tree branch with a book in her hand, occasionally stepping over the corpses of goblins and hobgoblins that were scattered around.

The sheer number of goblins on the ground was enough to raze a small town to the ground if they were caught off guard, even more so, considering that they were led by a level 175 Hobgoblin king.

However, they were all now corpses, courtesy of the young hero and his companions who they came across on the way towards the nearest town.

As for the now-deceased hobgoblin kind, it had ended up becoming a test subject for Evan to experiment with his blessing of destruction's first activation.

This was more than a month when the party departed from the City state of Magic Kasteblum, beginning their journey to the Dungeon city Osto.

They spent about two weeks travelling to Shad Glua, where they spent an additional week dungeon diving and dealing with other trivial issues before continuing their journey towards Osto.

The carriage that the Grand Magus arranged for them returned to Kasteblum after they reached Uswil's capital city, so the group ended up using other means to move from city to city, finally exiting Uswil and arriving at Hobha after passing the free lands in between the two countries.

After Arriving at Hobha, they took a short one-week break at the border city to rest a bit before continuing towards Osto.

Now, they were finally about a day and a half's journey away from Osto, when they encountered the group of goblins that were very obviously up to no good.

The goblins attacked the trio and ended up scaring their travel horses, something that pissed Evan off greatly.

Eliza barely managed to calm the horses down before Evan and Pride jumped off and ended the hundreds of goblins. After this, Evan experimented on the king and killed it off shortly after.

"The skill doesn't seem to have any obvious side effects so far, so I'm guessing that the restrictions spoken about in the skill description are the only downsides to it."

"That so?"

"Yep."

'Visit (No ve (l)B i n) to read, pls!',

Evan replied to the High demon who placed a bookmark on the page she was reading before snapping the book shut and tossing it towards Evan.

The young hero just opened up his inventory where the book was going to land and let it fall into his inventory as he walked over to Eliza as he continued.

"Let's get the magic stones from the stronger hobgoblins and feed the horses before carrying on. From the map I bought at the last town, we aren't far from Osto."

"Yeah, but let us move away from here, the horses are still slightly unsettled."

Eliza replied as she scratched the throat of one of the horses that snuggled against her, with her hands glowing green as she used magic to abate the horse's fatigue.

They did as she suggested, and ended up moving a few hundred meters from the scene of the battle after turning all the goblin corpses to ashes.

"Still, it is weird how there are this many goblins lurking around Osto.

Even if it is not a major one, Osto is still a dungeon city. It should definitely have dozens of upper-level C- Ranked adventurers in it and hundreds of D- Rank adventurers who would be given scouting missions to check out the surrounding areas at least once a month.

It's impossible for them to have missed such a large number of goblins in a nearby abandoned village."

Evan spoke as he downed the glass of juice in his hands, before rinsing it with basic water magic and tossing it back into his inventory.

"True, the appearance of these monsters here is weird."

Pride added in as she added more meat to her sandwich before taking a bite out of it.

If anyone was to pass the freeway now and look to the right, they would be met with a scene that would leave them more than just 'surprised'.

There were five small tables and chairs, along with a portable magic stone cooker and a few boxes containing multiple things ranging from cutlery and plates to food ingredients and pots for cooking.

Naturally, all these were usually inside Evan's inventory, but when it was the time for them to take a break or have a meal during their journey, these items were brought out and the group properly prepared their meals and ate comfortably, not having to resort to eating preserved foods like majority of adventurers who travelled long distances like them did.

"What if these monsters showed up here after they did their routine scouting?"