[NR] They Don't Care - Chapter 436 (Patreon)

Despite everything being in his favor, Jason still required a good four and a half days to find his groove. The pairs were easy enough, of course. All he had to do was sneak up on them. If he managed that then the first bird would fall to a neck shot, then the second was by itself and so a quick fight. An important factor when trying to grind out levels.

It was the larger groups that were a hassle. Not that he couldn’t kill a full group of ten ostriches. The fight just took too long. In the time Jason needed to finish off a big group, he could have gone through six to eight pairs. Though that number depends more on how much distance there was between the pairs.

This did however bring up a low key problem with the area. The monsters shouldn’t be okay with this. It isn’t like they’re so far apart that one group can’t see the previous. It felt like one of those original video games they talked about in history class. They simply didn’t seem to respond as long as Jason wasn’t literally on top of them.

Some might see this as a good thing, easier grinding after all. Jason had a different opinion, mainly focused on there being no free meal, something must be going on. Though it could be on the ostriches themselves. After all, while he is just calling them by the irl bird’s name, they’re monsters so something could be different. If nothing else, they apparently lost a few IQ points.

Jason frowns and shakes his head. The concept of IQ really was a persistent meme in irl culture. It got twisted and tweaked to try to represent how “smart” a person was and yet even at the end it was still a terrible system. Even if you ignore the fact that the whole idea was originally created so racists could prove they were inherently better than others, there are just too many ways a person can be “smart” in the first place.

That firmly out of mind, Jason turns back to the ostriches. None of them had anything of value on them so he hadn’t really gotten hands on with the bodies, but that wasn’t an option anymore. So with a goal in mind, he moves onto the next group, a pair, and takes them down. Of course he isn’t going to trust that the other birds are going to ignore him if he sticks around, so Jason grabs both bodies and retreats out of the monster nest.

Once out of the nest and as safe as possible given the circumstances, Jason begins to examine the two bodies, starting with the feet of course. Though that was mostly because the difference was kind of obvious and easily proven. All it takes is tapping one of his throwing daggers against the talongs and the metallic ring says everything he needs to know.

After that expected reveal, talons tend not to be that shiny green of oxidized copper without reason, Jason turns to the legs proper. Of course there are strong muscles, much too tough to be used as food by anyone close in level to them, but besides that the legs are normal enough. Then came the main body, which had something up with it.

Jason just couldn’t put his finger on what was different, so moved onto the neck. It was a neck. Tough like the legs and quite bony. Then the head didn’t exactly reveal any secrets either. The eyes seemed like a bird's eyes and didn’t have any obvious marks of being blind. Same with the ears, though those were harder as they aren’t like a human’s ear, sticking out from the head all obvious like.

Not seeing an answer, he moves back to the body and the final thing to check, the wings. There was something up with the body, Jason could feel it. On the other hand, the wings had another obvious difference. Well, it was obvious once you got close to the wings.

They weren’t green like the talons, instead the black feathers had a certain purple luster. This was only on the wings and only the blacks feathers, which also meant it was only on the male ostrich since the females instead have a brown coloration. As for the source of the strange coloration?

That was more copper of course, except with a couple of additions to make the alloy, black bronze. As for what is added to get the alloy? A bit of gold and silver. Not a lot, but historically it was highly valued. That meant there was a decent chance something like this was half worth it.

However, this revelation did not reveal why the birds were just so bird brained. Jason sighed and then went about finding the best wing feathers. While the claws had a higher quantity of metal, even a small amount of natural black bronze would be worth more. Though this wasn’t as restrictive as some of the other collections tasks he had done.

Instead, Jason just grabbed the most metallic looking feathers. There weren’t too many as it isn’t like there was a gold or silver mine nearby. Not that a lack of the material is necessarily enough to stop monsters from having absurd amounts of it, but the ostriches seemed to be more of the type to extract the stuff from the environment.

Jason frowns, this might actually be the reason the other monsters don’t care about him killing the others. Until this point, he had been leaving the bodies behind. Which, if the minerals were scarce, would be important. After all, these feathers and the talons are probably the highest concentration of the metals around.

A quick look back to the last place he fought doesn’t reveal anything, but it had been a while so the bodies might have already been dragged off by now. Though it was easy enough to prove since he had a couple of bodies right here to test the theory.