Chapter 42: Dangerous Woman

The armored shield dragon is over ten meters in length, yet weighs two to three times as much as dragons of the same size. With its wings having atrophied, it belongs to the traditional Black Dragon species.

Melina’s confusion was simple:
"Aren't the three of us all marksmen? Materials from an armored shield dragon can't even be used to make marksman gear, right?"

Actually, they could.

However, the resulting weapon was a piece of armory known as an "antitank rifle"—essentially a long sniper rifle nearly three meters in length, featuring a heavy armor-shield design integrated into its bipod. It was a favorite weapon among ratman explorers. And why did the ratmen love it? Because of its sheer explosive firepower.

As is well known, an optimal squad generally consists of three members. Exceeding three isn't strictly impossible, but once the spoils are diluted, hunting a single dragon might leave everyone unable to craft enough equipment... Yet ratman squads typically numbered over five. A coordinated fire net formed by five antitank rifles could literally snipe a dragon into a state of utter helplessness.

Furthermore, the front of the antitank rifle could absorb a certain amount of ranged damage.

But what did that have to do with the senior student?
Weren't you a normal ranged fighter?

Sonia chuckled and said:
"Sister, among the three of us ranged fighters, someone has to act as the vanguard! I'm planning to craft a set of bright silver shield-armor alpha, which comes with [Defense Rating: 2], energy shields, and other heavy-duty perks!"

"Senior..."
Just as Melina was starting to feel touched, she heard her senior mutter under her breath:
"Based on my understanding of our squad's positioning, we should adopt the rule [Whoever retreats the slowest becomes the vanguard]. Now, Old Ma uses a gun-lance and has a move called [Fearless Charge], which lets her instantly create distance the moment she charges backward. And you—oh my god, Mel, I'm afraid even Old Ma's fearless charge wouldn't be able to match your retreat speed."

"So by that calculation, the vanguard will most likely be me! I need to invest in some mobility and defense, and that shield-armor set looks pretty good."

Then, she cast a suspicious glance at Melina:
"Little Mel, it's not that I don't trust you, but I'm a little worried. Can you handle an armored shield dragon? This thing is tier 4..."

Melina’s expression darkened rapidly.
"How dare you!"

She let out a slow breath and said without a hint of politeness:
"It's just a tier 4 dragon. Bring me the guns!"

The flintlock maidens unfolded instantly around her, and Melina puffed out her cheeks as she charged forward.

Sonia breathed a sigh of relief behind her: Little Mel is getting easier and easier to handle!

Meanwhile, Melina was secretly jubilant: As expected, acting like this grants me the right to snipe from the shadows!

Over the past few days, Melina had figured one thing out.
It seemed that her emotional state was being taken quite seriously by her two seniors. By keenly altering her outward expressions, she could indeed feel the benefits of this "compromised approach."

This mission was supposed to be about investigation and sampling. If she had directly proposed hunting a dragon, Senior Sonia probably wouldn't have agreed.

But if she phrasing it like...
"Let's hunt a red-feathered dragon for fun!"—then her senior would definitely compromise. Sure enough, to balance her emotional state, her senior had chosen an armored shield dragon for her to slaughter.

Since she was with her senior, ammunition expenses would definitely be reimbursed. This time, Melina went all out, and the ten flintlocks hovering around her instantly unleashed a barrage of bullets.

The staggering output of firepower brought the armored shield dragon into a state of stagger in a single instant.

Melina emptied her magazines at an astonishing speed. Ten flintlocks simultaneously spewed out a massive number of empty cartridges, while a vast quantity of bullets sprayed from the ammunition replenisher at Melina's waist to reload mid-air.

Yet, Melina's firepower output did not stop there.

She used her right hand to draw the Book of Envy, gripping it tightly as she triggered the rune [My Love is Like Blood], simultaneously activating [Quintuple Shot].

While reloading, the flintlocks unscientifically sprayed yet another wave of blood-red bullets.

The potency of this barrage far exceeded live ammunition, producing explosive results.

Amplified by her high magic power scaling, Melina's output firepower was now equivalent to four fully staffed squads—and those full squads would have to be just as bizarrely ranged-heavy as their own!

The dragon scales on the armored shield dragon's body had already been blasted into countless fragments, but strangely enough, some of the scales were glowing brightly, as if protected by magic.

Having suffered two rounds of heavy blows, the giant dragon with its long snout finally let out a roar. Sweeping its tail—which was tipped with a heavy bone club—across the ground, it hurled chunks of earth like machine-gun fire toward Melina.

Melina triggered the steam thrusters built into her gear to gain upward propulsion, using the magic spell [Flying Devil] in mid-air to attain a brief capacity for flight. She smoothly evaded the armored shield dragon's counterattack, while her reloaded flintlocks unleashed another simultaneous volley.

Projectiles enhanced with [Rifling] and [Shooting Firepower] struck the armored shield dragon's body, inflicting injuries that nearly tore its back apart.

An explorer equipped with flexible mobility and firepower equivalent to ten musketeers was simply an absolute bug in the hunting grounds.

The armored shield dragon made a frenzied counterattack, only to be easily toyed with by Melina using [Flying Devil] once again.

The dragon charge launched across the ground was likewise kited backward by Melina at a speed that did not fall short of the charge itself.

Even the desperate mud-and-stone dragon breath it spewed in despair was knocked off course. Melina used ten flintlocks aimed precisely at the same convergence point, firing with recoil-less locked shooting to shove the dragon's head aside, causing it to empty its breath harmlessly into the air.

And so, it swiftly kicked the bucket.

Its demise was so rapid that even the red-feathered dragon, currently healing its wounds in the nearby lake, never expected it. Before this red dragon species had time to do anything to avenge its good brother (the armored shield dragon and the red-feathered dragon shared a certain symbiotic relationship), it caught sight of a little figure clad in bright silver armor darting out from the side, proficiently grabbing the dragon by the head with both hands and dragging the corpse toward the forest!

As for the black-dressed little figure who had actually slain the dragon, she leaped onto the carcass, expertly stripping scales, carving bones, and extracting factors.

Such bandit behavior instantly infuriated the red-feathered dragon.

As the saying goes, [Grab root help dragon]. Seeing its dragon brother murdered for no apparent reason, its tendons pulled and bones stripped, the red-feathered dragon naturally threw a tantrum.

It shook its wings, soared into the sky, and searched in the direction of those two little figures.

Before long, it located the remains of its dragon brother.

What a miserable sight it was.

The dragon scales had practically been completely plucked, its back had been ruthlessly split open, several internal organs had been excavated, and what about its dragon claws and its most famous heavy armored shield tail? Naturally, those had been stripped away as well.

Thinking of the days when it and its armored shield dragon brother used to eat roasted sheep together, grief welled up within the red-feathered dragon. Compounded by the fact that it had recently been driven out of its own nest, it felt utterly heartbroken.

Then, it looked down at its dragon brother's corpse—at the healthy red flesh no longer wrapped in dragon scales.

Why does it smell a little delicious?
I'm sorry, dragon brother!

...

Healing the injuries caused by dragon combat had consumed a massive amount of magical factors for the red-feathered dragon, and there were three ways dragons replenished their magical factors: sleep, rest, and eating.

Behind Melina floated materials still reeking of fresh blood, along with a small canister of extracted armored shield dragon magical factors.

She watched as Sonia raised an eyebrow:
"Is this what you called a symbiotic relationship?"

"That's right, salvation itself."
Melina pointed at the red-feathered dragon, which was currently launching into a gluttonous feast, burying its good brother in its stomach: "This is also a symbiotic relationship. Regardless of anything else, you tell me if they're symbiotic or not!"

"...It really is."
Sonia was left speechless.

As the two walked back toward the peninsula, Sonia could no longer hold back the words in her heart:
"Little Mel."
"Hmm?"
"How come your magic power scaling looks so wrong? You turned the armored shield dragon into that state with just two spells. Did you use cheats or hacks? Share some with me!"

"I didn't use any cheats!" Melina glared at her.

Sonia let out a hearty laugh, and seeing Melina turn her head away, she pressed her lips into a smile and fell into deep thought.

She had been utterly startled by Melina's output capability.

An explorer's hunting prowess relied primarily on their armory.
Why did explorers still rely mainly on equipment rather than magic for their damage output against dragons? Because dragons possessed exceptionally strong resistance to magic, alongside a fixed damage reduction of very high priority. Furthermore, when magic spells were cast without chanting, their potency was further reduced. Under the weight of these various debuffs, magic had long since exited the main stage of hunting methods, relegated instead to a supporting role.

Yet Melina's magical damage output was terrifyingly high.

No matter what, the armored shield dragon was still a tier 4 dragon—a level where novice equipment could inflict damage, but typically only manage scratch-like effects.

Novice explorers corresponded to tiers 1 through 5, hunting dragons ranging from tiers 1 to 3.
Veteran explorers spanned tiers 6 through 15, hunting dragons from tiers 4 to 12.

Before the Aether Revival Era, explorers had very few reliable methods for dealing with dragons above tier 20. But following the Aether Revival Era, the Age of Magic Scaling returned. Explorers relied on armory and fire magic to strip armor and inflict stagger before pouring in output—only then could they dare to knife a tier 20 dragon.

By the same token,
Novice-geared explorers hunting dragons above tier 3 during the Aether Revival Era followed the exact same workflow: using armory and magic to break defenses, and then unleashing every possible offensive means at their disposal.

Even so, achieving a fast-kill was extremely difficult.

Killing enemies above your level and killing the hardest enemies of your current level were two vastly different tiers of difficulty.
And securing a fast-kill versus merely managing to kill them represented yet another entirely different tier of challenge.

The Flintlock Maiden Alpha was undeniably strong, and undeniably expensive, but surely it shouldn't possess such ferocious output capability?

Sonia was utterly baffled. In the end, she could only attribute it to [Maybe a healthy Melina is just this wild], and [Some people debut and win runner-up, others debut and win the championship—there's nothing wrong with Mel-Mel instantly killing a tier 4 dragon on her debut, right?].

As a pragmatist, the senior student quickly cast the matter aside and enthusiastically declared:
"Little Mel, do you think I should go for energy shields, or defense rating?"

The armored shield dragon was one of the starting points for defensive gear, boasting two very famous schools of thought:
The energy shield school and the defense rating school.

The energy shield provided a magical factor force field that, when an enemy attacked, cushioned and dispersed the opponent's strike across a thin film of magical factors, achieving maximum reduction of bodily stagger and comprehensive body protection.

The defense rating injected magical factors into the body to form protection, layering a protective factor film over the skin's surface so that incoming attacks were blunted upon impact.

"Hmm, the minor super-armor effect and pseudo-health are probably better, right?"
Melina said.

Energy shields reduced crowd-control duration and provided a pseudo-health shield, meaning that when attacked, the shield had to be completely depleted before one took actual damage. Defense rating was different; it was merely a fixed damage reduction, meaning one still took solid, unmitigated damage when struck.

"True, true."
As a time-traveler, Sonia instantly conjured a standard shield-building mindset in her mind, raising her damage output through the prerequisite condition of "having a shield on one's body."

The advantage was retaining the possibility of dealing damage.
The disadvantage was "shield broken, person ruined"—once the shield was blasted away, you were essentially erased from existence.

Sonia remembered that a certain famous shield-building master from her first playthrough had been exactly like that. During a three-person group raid, he had misfortune have his shield shattered first. Once the raid was over and damage statistics were queried, his contribution was listed directly as [Presence Suspected].

"Then I'll ask Old Li to craft the energy set for me!"

As long as the possibility of dealing damage was retained, that was the best outcome!
At worst, she would just have to let Little Mel carry the heavy burdens ahead...

...

Returning to Hamlet, Melina and Sonia unloaded their materials and magical factors at the Gatherers' Guild. After instructing the staff to exchange them for the corresponding magical factors, they headed to the post office at the station to order a cup of coffee—yes, the post office also doubled as a coffee shop.

Sipping their coffee, they waited for Melina's friend to arrive.

At midday,
A carriage appeared on Hamlet's meager dirt road, coming to a halt beside the station.

A young lady with chestnut-brown hair, azure eyes, and a large-brimmed bonnet stepped down from the carriage, several pieces of luggage floating behind her in a manner that immediately reminded Melina of herself.

She stepped forward with a smile:
"Long time no see, Louisa."

Looking at her, the young lady suddenly rushed forward into an embrace:
"I've missed you so much."