The Husk hit the ground running, a snarl tearing out of its throat before its teeth ever found the hare. -27!
At level one, base attack sat at twelve. Buffed by the class passive, it came out closer to eighteen more than enough to punch straight through a squishy, high-attack, low-defense monster like a Thornback Hare.
The hare’s eyes went from red to something closer to burning. It lunged back, claws raking across purple hide. -6.
Barely a scratch. Between the Husk’s raw defense and its Hardened Hide passive, the hit didn’t even register as a threat.
Kael scooped a fallen branch off the ground, darted in from the flank, and cracked it across the hare’s skull. -7.
Small, next to what the Husk was putting out but it added up. And more importantly, the damage gap meant the hare’s aggro never so much as flickered toward him.
He could keep swinging from the blind side all day and never worry about it turning on him.
This was the real edge of a Beastlord in the early game. Two bodies, one target, zero downside.
The hare’s health bar cratered fast. It was down under forty when the Husk let out a roar and lunged, jaws unhinging wide enough to swallow the whole animal in a single bite.
Wet crunching followed. Blood at the corners of its mouth.
"Ravenous Husk used [Feast] and killed Thornback Hare (Lv. 3). +5 EXP, +5 Max HP."
The Husk’s frame swelled barely noticeable, but there.Kael watched, grinning. It was like watching something grow up in fast-forward, and he already knew exactly how big he wanted this thing to get.
Under normal rules, kill exp split by damage contribution. Beastlords broke that rule Kael could route the split however he wanted between himself and his companion, since both of them leveled independently.
Powerful Beastlords ran whole packs at once, stacking numbers on their side of every fight.
But every extra mouth meant less exp per kill for everyone, beast included and a weak companion was worse than useless, just dead weight eating into growth that should’ve gone somewhere productive.
Most players in this class spent years learning to balance that math.
Kael didn’t have to.
His class passive cut companion leveling costs in half across the board. So he dumped everything every scrap of exp from every kill straight into the Husk.
Get the beast strong first. Let the beast carry him up after.
He led it deeper into the woods, and the pattern repeated. Roar, lunge, crunch. Hare after hare disappeared down that gullet.
Ten minutes in, gold light spilled over the Husk’s frame.
Level 2.
That same kill dropped Kael’s first Evolution Point.
He checked the upgrade costs. Hardened Hide F-rank, 1 point to upgrade. Feast E-rank, 5 points.
He dumped the point into Hardened Hide without hesitation.
"1 Evolution Point spent. [Hardened Hide] upgraded: F-rank → E-rank."
Hardened Hide: Permanent dual-resistance +2 → +4 per level.
The jump was immediate. Level 3 hares could barely dent it now the Husk had gone from tough to borderline immovable.
At this point it could probably tank something two or three levels above its own without blinking.
Kael didn’t bother chasing higher-level targets, though. Leveling fast wasn’t the goal right now.
He was farming something else: max HP, one bite at a time.Thornback Hares were weak individually, but the forest was crawling with them practically one every ten steps.
Low level meant low health, which meant the Husk only needed two or three hits before a target dropped under the Feast execute threshold. Every time the cooldown cleared, there was another one waiting.
Perfect grinding fodder.
Better still, the Husk didn’t need his help anymore. It hunted on its own now, and Kael’s job shrank down to trailing behind, scooping up the copper each hare dropped.
Gold mattered. Beyond the obvious potions, gear, consumables word was that once the merge hit, real-world extraction of in-game skills and items would run on gold, and a lot of it.
So Kael didn’t leave a single coin behind. Every drop got picked up, even the ones that rolled under a rock.
Every copper counts when the bill comes due.Even so, the grind left him plenty of downtime. Between fights, he pulled up the game forums to kill time.
The first thing that greeted him on the front page was a headline plastered across the top of the board in bold letters.