As was perhaps a natural consequence of existing in a world populated by monsters that often ranged from the size of the average vehicle to potentially buildings in scale, most of the global population wasn’t prone to living in places that would be hard to defend.
The march of technology though did mean it was much safer to make settlements further into the wilds of the world, or in some cases the people of a certain group had the fortune to be situated in a locale that came with easy natural defenses.
But, the threat of magical beasts wasn’t ever forgotten, and even a simple farming town with acres of fields to maintain would no doubt be found within the borders of some region or another that would provide ease-of-defense, or in the case of massive cities like Clearharbor, would have a defensive wall constructed in order to keep more troublesome types from busting in unannounced and making a mess of things.
Of course though, one also had to take into account the Frontiers.
Regions of the world that were dense in strong flows of aether, enough that any attempts to actually settle the regions had proven impossible, as the dense aether meant nature would simply overtake any attempts at settling in any serious attempts to be had.
And it was in these aether-dense regions that one would find the majority of Magic Beasts, though thinner populations were spread across the continents wherever they may have found themselves migrating too.
These Frontiers were more often than not utterly massive, dominating massive swathes of land that could contain everything from dense forests, storming mountains, harsh deserts, and even stretches of the ocean and its island chains.
And each and every one was, sans the intrepid types who made their living monitoring such regions and keeping the populations in check, homed only by the various species of magic beasts that made their territory within them.
It created something of a balance in the world as a result, one in which would occasionally tip as a Magic Beast population settled itself in a region outside of a Frontier, or as those outside of it found new ways to break further ground within one and establish more permanent bases within.
So, it was when the populations outside of the Frontiers started becoming an issue that things had to be managed.
For the number of Magic Beasts, that were seen as a normal part of a non-Frontier ecosystem, some of which had even been domesticated to a degree and saw use as livestock or even guard animals, many more were impossible to do such with, and so had to have their populations kept in check or be routed from environments that weren’t the usual for them. Get faster updates on novelping(.)com.
Quite naturally then, these jobs usually found themselves falling into the laps of the Freelancers, running the gamut of the danger scale and what kind of Freelancer would be needed to deal with the issue.
Of course though, it also came with the benefit of study.
Magic Beasts were so varied in nature and attitude that any chance to study them in depth through specimens – living or dead – was seen as a welcome opportunity by those engaged in ecological fields, hence why such jobs also often ended up paying quite well.
The short of it, the rarer the Beast one could get a job for, the better it would pay, and the better materials one could likely make use of from it.
Over time, Magic Beasts had, aside from their taxidermic classifications such as Bird Wyvern and Drake, been classified into their own ranking method to categorize and classify their effective levels of danger and what kind of force would be needed to deal with one.
It was rather simple compared to the split nature of the Freelancer system, and rather than numerical, Magic Beasts were ranked off a color scale.
The weakest of monsters, in short the ones effectively harmless to the average person unless sufficiently aggravated – at which point many agreed the poor sap probably deserved it – were rated as White Beasts.
The strongest ones, those that edged into the territory of a being like a Dragon in power and scale, were the Black Beasts, which as far as modern knowledge went, were all exclusively within the special Wyrm classification, and all nigh-unique instances so rarely seen it was unsure if multiple specimens existed.
As it were, the Plains Raptors that Syr’s contract were targeted for fell into an interesting niche.
Beasts in the Raptor family fell into two sorts: Lesser and Greater.
Lesser Raptors were smaller and easier to deal with, though were also pack hunters and could be sufficient trouble for an unprepared hunter.
But individually they were only rated as Green Tier monsters.
Dangerous sure, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with if one had the proper equipment. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Greater Raptors though, were the far more dangerous pack leaders.
Larger, fiercer in nature, and all too likely to have some of their Lessers in two to cause more trouble.
The Greater Plains Raptor was in particular rated as a Blue Tier Beast.
Need for more preparation, skill of the hunter, and general knowledge of how to deal with its methods, but nothing someone with the proper training couldn’t handle on a good day.
And it was one of these Raptors that was the prime suspect of Syr’s hunting contract, meaning there wasn’t any doubt it would have some Lessers in tow.
But, what did stand out as odd was one of the notes she had seen on the contract when she had found it: Recon has noted odd behavior in the present pack.
Request raising threat tier of mission from Blue to Red Tier.
Whatever that request had been for, she certainly hoped she and Soren would find more details about it once they arrived at the hunting location.
But… it definitely raised questions about what was going on that a threat increase would even be requested for a Beast type considered quite easy to handle to begin with.