They spent that one day resting and were out in the airship again right away, having enjoyed the suite and the use of the cafeteria, but finding it a bit dull. Besides, the airship had quite nice accommodations, so they weren't really living the rough life if they were using that as their mobile base. The flight to the mountains was a bit longer than the flight to the desert, passing over a moderate-sized forest that stretched a couple hundred miles between the mountains' foothills and the section of grassland the main city was situated in.

  They also encountered more than one flying beast on the way, but none of them were strong enough to threaten the airship. The armoring and weapons wouldn't be threatened by anything below at least level four hundred, so tearing through a few level one hundred to two hundred flying annoyances was just a chance for Sera to get some practice on the tactical station. The kills didn't count for anything, even money, but that was sort of the whole point; it would be a real pain in the ass to try to deal with flying beasts by having someone go out and fight. At least, before any of them could reliably fly, and Beth wasn't worried about losing the equivalent of a handful of silver coins and a single drop in the ocean of experience they needed to level.

  They found an area on the shoulder of one of the first mountains in the range to set the airship down, Beth folding it and socking it away after they had disembarked. They had started pretty high up on the mountain, and they went even higher from there, as they were looking for harpies. The beasts nested and roosted at the top of the tree lines, close to the peaks of mountains that they chose for their homes. They didn't always roost in the trees themselves, but would sometimes roost in rocky outcrops or on wide ledges partway up sheer rock faces.

  Their first encounter with the winged fiends was about as bad as Beth expected; the bestial version of the species were not particularly careful about their hygiene and the group, particularly Blood, were able to smell them long before they saw them. The beasts weren't exactly quiet, either, shrieking at the group when they were still a hundred or more feet away.

  As the first of the beasts started to get close, Sera took a half step forward and breathed in deeply, grunting at the smell, her massive chest swelling further. She then leaned forward and opened her jaws wide, breathing out a gout of flame that was compressed into a narrow stream. The red and golden fire shot forward incredibly quickly, crossing the distance to the lead harpy in the blink of an eye. The power of the breath was so great it was like the beast was kicked in the chest by Beth. The beast was covered in flames as it was knocked out of the air and slammed into the ground, kicking up a cloud of burning dust where it landed.

  "How often can you do that?" Beth asked, giving Sera an impressed look.

  "I gotta-urp!" Sera started before belching smoke. "I gotta wait a bit before I can do it again."

  "So, not taking out a huge group with that," Beth said calmly.

  "Nope," Sera said, striding forward with her spear ready.

  The harpies were a bit annoying to fight as they didn't enjoy landing on the ground, using a tactic of swarming an opponent and tearing at them with their talons as they circled them rapidly. Sera swayed back and forth to avoid the talons while stabbing and slashing with her spear, doing enough to make it difficult for the beasts to attack her without taking serious hits themselves. Beth waited a moment for the beasts to be wholly focused on Sera before joining the fun, darting in low and swinging her greatsword overhead with a huge amount of force, slamming into a harpy and knocking it down into the ground.

  The beasts were a bit tougher than Beth had expected, but they still died just the same once she had hammered them enough times. The half dozen beasts were cleared up in just a minute or so, with Blood tearing two apart with little help after Sera and Beth had them all good and distracted. Beth registered the kills with her own emblem this time, having returned Sera's emblem at some point when they were done with the sand slitherers. It had been more efficient for Sera to eat while Beth tabulated, but now they didn't need to worry about that, especially since it was Beth's mission anyway.

  "Nothing on the harpies?" Beth asked.

  "No loot worth it, if that's what you mean?" Sera replied with a small frown.

  "I meant, nothing tasty?" Beth answered with a slight smirk.

  "Eugh, no, they're fucking gross," Sera said hotly. "Besides, I control the skill, it doesn't control me. If it said these filthy vultures had something worth eating, I would say fuck no and that would be the end of it."

  "Good to know we haven't lost you to gluttony," Beth said, not having to translate the idea of overindulgent sin into Universal Standard as it had a very similar word.

  "Not for food, anyway," Sera said with a shake of her head. "If I had a sex skill, maybe…"

  "But that's lust, not gluttony," Blood pointed out, face stoic but ears twitching.

  "That's true," Sera said with a nod, finishing cleaning her spear as Beth finished registering the kills. "Shall we?"

  "I'm on it," Blood said, moving forward to scout.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  They didn't have much trouble with the harpies, despite their flying nature, as they all had ranged options to attack the smelly beasts before they even could get to the girls. Mana conservation was something to worry about, but Beth was putting some of her research into practice, trying to be far more precise with her mana utilization. Her reading had shown her she was being extremely wasteful with basically all of her skills, even counting that she didn't have a Mana Physique yet, and she used the fights against the harpies to try to refine her usage. She was trying to achieve the same level of damage while using ten percent less mana. Ten percent was pretty conservative for how much more efficient she could make her skills, but if she could get consistent with ten percent, she could work on twenty. It was made a bit harder by not having any kind of mana bar, but she had become used to sensing her remaining mana, so it wasn't that much more difficult.

  Despite her study and how easy it sounded, it was far more difficult to accomplish in practice. Skills, by default, operated in a specific way, though that operation was a lot broader than many people thought. Beth had experienced that from early on, learning to use more mana and infuse more of her body with the simple but effective Crush. Now, she was trying to get a skill to do the same thing, in the same way, while only using ninety percent of the mana. It wasn't impossible, but Beth had to understand how mana moved through the body, and how that mana was channeled through the skill in the body and in releasing from the body.

  "You're a bit slow today," Blood commented.

  "I'm trying to improve my skills," Beth replied.

  "We all are," Blood said with a look on her face that screamed 'obviously.'

  "No, I'm trying to improve my mana usage, which might or might not level my skills up, but will improve my combat overall," Beth explained.

  "Is this what you've been looking into?" Blood asked as they moved away from the area where they had just killed a small group of harpies.

  "Just some of my research, yeah," Beth answered, following the other two.

  They clashed with harpies again and again as they moved through the mountains, the range vast and full of towering peaks that scraped against the sky. The place was downright infested and, even keeping to the upper reaches and avoiding the higher mana density areas, they were constantly in battle with the beasts. Beth found her kill count climbing extremely quickly, figuring they'd be done with the whole task in only a couple days.

  It turned out that estimate was a bit too lenient, as they finished a thousand kills of the harpies, including quite a few in the high two hundreds in level, in just over thirty-six hours. Beth deployed the airship after registering the last kill and they pulled it up into the air and set the defense mode to autonomous before all piling in the captain's quarters bathroom. The shower wasn't quite big enough for all three of them to be washing at once, so they let Blood go first before Beth and Sera entered the cubicle. Beth loved taking time to wash Sera and the big dragon girl certainly didn't mind, so it took them quite a while to finish up.

  When they were all cleaned and had eaten a bit of food, they flew back to town, landing some distance from the gate before packing the ship away. They made their way to the northern gate, presenting their emblems to the guard, who took much more time checking them on the way in than the guard had on the way out. When they passed his scrutiny, they made their way across the city, walking quite quickly, as Beth found the drab buildings of concrete and heavy stone to be fairly depressing. They entered the CRA Hall to find a small group sitting around at a table in one corner, most of them looking fully human with one having distinctly elven ears and appearing tall even sitting, as well as two bored-looking workers at the main counter.

  "We'd like to report some missions," Beth said to the woman on the left as they walked up.

  "Whaddya got?" the woman asked.

  "Here," Beth replied, handing her both her and Sera's emblems. "Extermination missions."

  "Oh, good, let's get them registered," the woman said.

  "Sorry, I didn't get your name," Beth said.

  "Oh, right, I'm Idra," the woman replied. "I'm a Gold Emblem that's working this Hall for the next two years."

  "You have to be at least a Gold to work a Hall, right?" Beth asked casually as the woman scanned their emblems.

  "That's right," Idra replied. "We're all Golds and Platinums here."

  "Even the Hall Master?" Beth asked.

  "Yep, though she could probably get Diamond soon," Idra replied, handing them their emblems back. "Grats, you each have one Gold-level mission done. You need eight more to qualify for Gold."

  "Yeah, can we pick up two more?" Beth asked. She pointed her thumb at Blood, asking, "Can she get one of the two?"

  "Sure, we still have a couple," Idra replied, taking back Sera's emblem and grabbing Blood's. "I'll assign you each something from our small pool."

  After a minute of manipulating screens and working on their emblems, she handed them back, saying, "I've assigned you each a mission. The tall beauty has a mission for mapping an area far to the north past the grasslands; details are included in the brief. The wolf lady has our last extermination mission, at least for now. Depending on what you find on your mapping expedition, that could generate new missions, including extermination and hunting missions."

  "Thanks a lot, Idra," Beth said as the other two grabbed their emblems and put them in their stat screens.

  "Anything else you ladies need?" Idra asked.

  "No, that's everything. We'll take a bit of time off and then see about these two missions," Beth replied, giving her standard wave over the shoulder as she walked away with the others.

  They moved up to their room, still having plenty of time left on the rental, and took some time to rest. It was early night and they spent a few hours sleeping before taking the next day off, though Sera did go down to the arena to hunt up a fight or two. Beth would have joined her, but she was fully focused on her research still, working on understanding her efficiency issues and how mana worked at a basic level. She was entirely focused on the way mana moved through the physical body and how it exited from the surface of the body and changed as it did so.

  The day passed, Sera returned, they cleaned up, they ate, including Sera devouring a couple dozen pounds of food in a couple minutes, and then they relaxed for the remainder of the day and night. The next day they were up early and ready quite quickly before heading out of the suite, building, and city. They deployed the airship and headed out for the extermination mission first, flying to the southwest to an area to the west of the desert, where they found a thin forest trying to survive an expansion of the desert westward. The area had a mixture of different beasts and animals, with some of them being rather venomous. Beth just viewed it as a chance for resistance training, but the others weren't as thrilled with getting toxins pumped into the bloodstream.

  They were on the hunt for a kind of orc, a massive group of the beasts roaming the area to the south of the mountain range. They had to fly over quite a bit of the sparse forest before they found the orcs, but when they did find them, it was in enormous amounts. Beth supposed that was why the kill order was for five thousand of them and not just a thousand like the first two had been. It was going to take a lot more fighting and a lot more time to clear the area out to a decent degree than what they had done before. The sand slitherers and harpies had been a problem, but weren't quite as numerous; the orcs were a bit farther out than the other two species, but were more numerous and had a greater chance of breaking off into blocks and roaming far out to kill and eat.

  Beth and Sera led the attack the same way they had against the sand slitherers, leaping from the airship while Blood piloted it overhead. They landed in the center of the first massive group of orcs, Sera a bit ahead of Beth and slamming into an orc so hard she pulverized it. Beth did just the same, smashing her heel into an orc's chest so hard its left arm blew off and went flying into the larger group. The two slaughtered an area clear in the center before Blood put the ship in hover mode and joined them, darting around the small clearing they had made and killing anything that encroached on their territory. The fighting was fast, frenetic, and really intense, but the orcs simply lacked the skills to challenge the three girls.