Chapter 661: A few days later

Maya narrowed her eyes as she looked between Nora and Elion.

The former had been sticking a little too close to the latter for the last few days, and it was becoming rather difficult not to notice.

"Did something happen between you two?" she asked, glancing from one to the other.

Elion straightened, almost like a child who had been caught doing something terribly wrong. "Um, no. Nothing you need to worry about," he replied quickly.

Maya turned her attention to Nora, who was looking down at her feet as she walked, blushing lightly with her hands held in front of her. She studied the pair for a while longer, but neither offered anything else.

"Is that so?" Maya said at last, giving Elion another look. "Well, keep it to a minimum, at least. I don’t want you two losing focus, so stay sharp."

Elion narrowed his eyes at her. "What exactly are you insinuating?"

Maya smiled lightly before turning back toward the front. "Nothing you need to worry about."

Mayumi and the others gave the pair much the same look Maya had, though they didn’t say anything either.

They hadn’t noticed anything particularly unusual, apart from Nora acting a little clumsy and awkward around Elion and making sure to walk beside him whenever she could.

She kept about as much distance as everyone else, but somehow, she almost always ended up next to him.

Mayumi hadn’t paid much attention to it until Maya brought it up. Now, however, she wore a thoughtful expression, lightly stroking her smooth chin as she looked between them.

’Now that I think about it, she’s also been making sure to pitch her tent right next to his these past few days.’ Her eyes narrowed slightly. ’And she’s been giving him bigger portions of food as well. She hasn’t even been trying to make it less obvious.’

No one had complained, of course, since it hadn’t caused anyone any trouble, but Mayumi couldn’t help wondering when Nora had fallen for Elion. She clicked her tongue, looking away from the pair.

’Damned womaniser...’

She wasn’t particularly angry about it, but seeing Nora fall into his clutches made her feel as though she might somehow be next.

She hadn’t expected him to make a move on her that fast.

’But considering how many women I hear he has, including those I’ve met, I don’t know what I expected... If he ever decides he wants me, will I be able to say no?’

The thought came out of nowhere, but she had no clear answer.

She quickly shook her head, chasing the thought away as her cheeks grew oddly warm, while Yaana’s happy humming beside her helped put her mind at ease.

Meanwhile, Elion kept glancing around at his party members, mostly because he was trying to find a way to get Nora off his tail.

Five days had passed since that action-packed day, meaning they had been in the legacy world for a week already.

Other than the initial penetration, they hadn’t gone any further.

He had stopped Nora that night and scolded her for a while for tricking him, before sending her back to her own tent.

She had pouted, of course, but she still seemed rather pleased with the gains she had managed to achieve from him.

Judging by how she showed no sign of discomfort the following morning, she must have used her healing magic to fix herself up.

However, that hadn’t stopped her from making her affection clear for everyone to see. Other than that, she was yet to make another move.

Thankfully, she hadn’t done anything more troublesome yet, though Elion wasn’t counting on that lasting, so for now, he was more or less behaving as usual.

As for taking responsibility for what had happened, well, that was her problem as far as he was concerned. She had enacted the penetration without his consent, and he had no intention of accepting an obligation because of it.

The Nora matter aside, the cohort had travelled quite far by now, and the river they had been following had narrowed into a small stream, with the water splashing about in rapids across the rock outcroppings in the stream.

They hadn’t come across another find as fortunate as the cavern on the mountain, but monsters and beasts had been plentiful, allowing them to gather a decent collection of cores.

In fact, just the previous night, the group had been involved in a fierce battle against a calamity-class Nightcrawler, an entire class above the disaster-class undead mage they had fought beneath the tower.

It had been a mutated variant of a Black Forest Panther that wielded dark magic skillfully, and it had attacked them under the cover of night.

Elion had spotted it easily enough with his eyes, since he had been on watch duty at the time, and they had worked together to bring it down, though the battle had been anything but quiet.

Unfortunately, the noise had forced them to move their camp afterwards, and to date, it remained the strongest monster they had faced.

Its most troublesome ability had been the way it melded with the shadows, allowing it to disappear and approach from another direction.

Worse still, it could turn into a thin black mist when attacked, briefly becoming an incorporeal entity that drifted beyond the reach of their weapons.

Thankfully, it could only maintain that form for a short time, and it had been alone. Panthers were solitary creatures after all, choosing to hunt alone.

Its core had turned out to be incredibly tiny, but according to Maya, that didn’t make it any less valuable. They had encountered a few tyrant-class monsters as well, though those had been easy enough for the group to handle.

It was during this time that Elion finally learned the complete ranking system for monsters.

The letter classifications were familiar enough, generally used for the weaker creatures found on the upper floors of most dungeons and in the uninhabited outskirts of the kingdom.

Once you reached SSS rank, however, you were entering territory that most mages and warriors would be afraid to venture into.

Monsters were almost always stronger than humans of an equivalent rank, making even a seemingly equal match a dangerous prospect.

Above SSS rank was the tyrant class, followed by the disaster class and then the calamity class.

Beyond those were Sovereign Monsters and then Primordial Monsters, which were little more than myths at this point. Above even those were Divine Beasts, which... well, weren’t even spoken of in myths.

A bunch of Sovereign Monsters were known to dwell within the Great Forest, rarely leaving their abodes while commanding hundreds of calamity-class monsters and thousands of disaster-class creatures.

Even a single tyrant-class monster could easily destroy a small village on the outskirts if it wandered out of the forest, though they almost never did, so such incidents were few and far between.

Elion would never have imagined himself fighting a tyrant-class monster one day, much less a calamity-class one.

He understood better than most just how much damage even a relatively weak horde could cause, considering that his father had died fighting beasts ranging from C to A grade, all led by a single S-grade creature.

At his current strength, the thought of struggling against such a horde seemed almost laughable, but his father had been neither a mage nor a powerful warrior.

He had simply been a mercenary trying to earn a living.