[NR] Why The Don't Care - Chapter 437 (Patreon)

And the answer was yes, the other ostriches were using the bodies Jason left behind. More specifically, they stripped the two he had been examining of the talons and feathers. A little close to some taboos, but they didn’t actually eat the meat so he just shrugged it off. Besides, they’re monsters.

After that though, Jason is more than happy to help the other birds gain a bit of a leg up on their act of bioaccumulation. Sure, he was taking the choicest feathers, but compared to the entire bulk of feathers that little bit hardly counted for anything. Maybe if the other birds had more of a mind they would care.

Still, that left Jason with the problem of actually fighting the large groups. Well, it would have if he actually cared about that. Before he had been trying to figure things out, only for a realization to strike him as he watched the other birds strip the corpses. Why bother?

What was the point of trying to fight the larger groups? If all Jason wanted was to grind some levels and pump his strength, group fights are pointless. Sure, if he was using AoE style attacks, gathering up a large group to make the most of his attacks would make sense. He isn’t doing that though, instead his style is more of a one at a time, in your face, melee fighter.

There was no point! Maybe if there was a limited number of monsters, targeting the larger groups would become necessary. That wasn’t happening though, so Jason just ignored them and fought only against the pairs. Combined with his movement technique, he was making a lot of progress along the outside of the monster nest.

The only thing that wasn’t going fast was his levels. It wasn’t like the last time he needed to grind for them. All the monsters he was fighting this time were around if not below his own level and that only got worse once he hit level 17.

On the other hand, his Strength training was doing quite well. Though that was likely from his varied and odd ways of dealing with the second ostrich in a pair. The first just died, no ifs ands or buts about. One assassin's strike to the neck dropped them.

Not that Jason was relying too heavily on getting use out of his assassin title for this. The actual level suppression didn’t apply anymore since he matched their levels, so all that was left was the insta-kill prevention. Though from his perspective, that was actually the worst of the two.

Monsters being more damage spongy? Easy enough to fix if you can target a weak point. So of course the System would be holding him back. Which brings us to his methods of killing the second bird. So many methods.

Jason was basically just trying one thing after another, as long as it kept the pace up. Though in one of the earlier fights he did spend some time with his legs clamped to the side of the second bird, riding it around. He had wanted to go for longer, but was forced to finish the fight when the bird tried to run deeper into the nest.

Oh, and speaking of nests, Jason had actually seen a few actual nests. Not that impressive as they’re just holes in the ground. Also not a situation he was going to stick his neck into since one thing the monsters certainly followed their irl equivalents on was communal nesting. For some reason Jason suspected they wouldn’t be so laizefair about him attacking others if he attempted it around one of them.

Not that he needed to, as just like with the groups, the nests were easy enough to bypass. What was more dangerous was the advanced birds that would show up around once a day. They were easy enough to tell apart from the others as their wings were a deep royal purple.

Jason was mostly certain that black bronze didn’t actually end up looking that purple. Not that he was going to take it up with the birds. They had clearly come from much deeper into the nest and were likely only second to the nest's ruler, if they weren’t actually the rulers themselves.

It was hard to tell as while the other ostriches in the area certainly deferred to them, Jason wasn’t able to get a good feel for their level of power. He wasn’t even certain if they were an evolved form or if that is just what they look like when they’ve gathered sufficient metal. There was a not too small chance that the entire nest had only a single monster in it and they just got stronger through mechanics outside of the usual.

Not that Jason could really say much. His current path is basically writing the book on being outside the norm. Anyway, those purple winged birds looked like a threat and certainly had their head on a swivel, so not wanting to tempt fate, Jason made sure to be sufficiently far from them before continuing his hunt.

This generally took a good fifteen to twenty minutes of travel once spotted even with his movement speed. So suffice it to say, Jason was less than pleased anytime he saw one. Still, compared to the amount of time he spent around the monster nest, their interference was negligible.

In the end it took Jason just over two weeks to star his Strength. It might have taken longer, except the other stats just refused to give any points at all so his growth went to being stronger. As for what his starred Strength was? Well, Jason was willing to bet that his body might have hit some kind of System enforced barrier as it capped out at 99 points of Strength. Though with his boost from understanding [Ascendance], he managed to hit an even 100.

Not that this was the end of his grindfest. He still needed to get to level 24 and cap the experience gain. This took a further week and a half of time. At the end of which, Jason was somewhat unhappy with how this affected Lily’s growth. First was the fact she hadn’t really been gaining that many stat points and second because the points she gained from leveling canceled out all the work they had done to convert System points into base points.