Trouble
He'd thrown out all the other meat. It did nothing but take up inventory space, so there had been no point in keeping it. The White Drake meat was the one thing he'd held on to, on the off chance it might prove useful later.
It hit the ground with a heavy thud. Bigger than I thought. He'd pulled out the smallest piece, and it still looked like a good twenty kilograms.
Chomp. Chomp. Leo set to work at once on a slab of White Drake meat many times the size of his own body.
"Huh?"
A creature that small shouldn't have been able to eat much. Half the slab vanished in a flash.
"Where is all of that even going?"
"I know. It's actually incredible."
Jinsoo and Shin Sua stared at the one-kitten eating show with their mouths hanging open. Before either of them quite registered it, Leo had polished off the entire enormous slab of White Drake meat.
Shadow Beast summon Leo is pleased with the food given by Summoner Lee Jinsoo.
Shadow Beast summon Leo's loyalty increases slightly.
Loyalty went up? Jinsoo's brow creased. A summon obeying its summoner is the foundation of the contract. What is loyalty even supposed to mean?
"Kyaauung!"
Leo trotted over and rubbed his head against him.
I know far too little about summoners. He knew summons divided into inanimate and living types. Dragon Tooth Soldiers, Shadow Summons, and the Ant Knight Colony were inanimate. They weren't living creatures, so they didn't need to be fed, and so long as their cores stayed intact they were all but immortal. Their strength was also decided by the grade of the materials that made them—the teeth of dragon-type monsters, or the carapace of an ant knight.
Leo was the other kind. A living summon, with a beating heart, blood in his veins, and a body of bone and flesh. Of course he ate, and of course he slept. And that's the whole of what I know. Jinsoo had almost no information on living summons. He could roughly guess what loyalty meant. He didn't actually know. I'll look into it properly later.
He'd already confirmed the power of his synthesized skills. Now it was time to test the combat strength of Leo, the shadow beast—though whether the kitten would be any real help was another question entirely.
Before his regression, most of the summoners Jinsoo had met commanded inanimate summons. Living-summon specialists had been vanishingly few to begin with, and among them only one had been strong enough for Jinsoo to remember: the Dragon Lord, a man who had kept no fewer than nine divine dragons as summons.
As Jinsoo and Shin Sua drew farther from the city, monsters began to show themselves.
"Attack."
He gave Leo the order.
"Myaong!"
Leo meowed, cute as anything. That was the whole of his response.
"Kyaauung!"
In the gap, a monster lunged. Steel flashed, and in the end it was Jinsoo who cut it down.
"Yaung!"
The moment the monster died, Leo darted over and twitched his nose. Looking for meat? There wasn't so much as an item drop, let alone meat.
"Grrrl!"
The corpse crumbled to dust and vanished. Leo, still sniffing, whipped his head aside as if personally offended.
A summon with no combat power? Watching him work his nose, Jinsoo wondered if he might hold a skill tied to scouting or tracking. For now, I'll call it a bonus.
Shadow beast. It sounded impressive, but in the end he was still nothing more than an overgrown kitten. Better not to expect much in a fight. I'll aim for the day the summon-contract cooldown ends, thirty days from now. Even if the next contract failed, or another weakling came out, there was no need to be too disappointed. He'd changed class to summoner and built his synthesis skills in the first place to strengthen the Shadow Summons, the Dragon Tooth Soldiers, and the Ant Knight Colony.
"Can you find a place with a lot of monsters?"
"Nyaaang!"
At Jinsoo's words Leo let out a short cry, twitched his nose, and padded ahead. A moment later he had found a pack.
"Nyang!"
He turned back with a thoroughly smug look. So his specialty isn't combat. It's scouting and pursuit. A talent like that would help with hunting. Time to do this properly.
Jinsoo released the Shadow Summons. The shadow assassin slipped out to drive the monsters in, and the ground drummed under the herd it brought back. Fire roared, then a blast—Jinsoo and the shadow mage struck first, and the shadow archer followed in a hiss of arrows and a string of detonations.
"They're already all dead."
The shadow knight never even got a look at them. Leo nosed through the drops again, found meat, and ate it with obvious delight.
Go again. At Jinsoo's command the shadow assassin shot off to herd another group.
"Nyaooong!"
Leo threw his head back in a long cry, and that cute little roar rolled out in every direction at once.
"What are you doing?"
Jinsoo frowned. Leo bared his tiny fangs in an arrogant smile, and a pulse of pure smugness came through the link.
Then the earth shuddered as if an earthquake had hit.
"Huh?"
Jinsoo's eyes widened. Monsters were pouring in from every side. The shadow assassin, still out driving them, halted and dropped into a fighting stance.
"Don't tell me that was you."
"Nyang!"
At the answer, Jinsoo's face lit up. Jackpot. A wide-area taunt that can pull aggro from monsters far off? Hunting would get absurdly easy like this.
"Jinsoo, doesn't this seem like a bit much?"
He had to agree with Shin Sua. The number swarming in was enormous.
"The more, the better."
To him they were nothing but lumps of experience, fuel for his level and his achievements. The monsters that charged the two of them died in a chain of blasts, gone almost as soon as they arrived.
"Nyaang!"
Leo watched Jinsoo with keen interest, tail swaying.
"You can keep doing that, right?"
"Nyang!"
When Jinsoo asked after the hunt, Leo answered as if to say of course. They kept moving, clearing monsters as they went, and with the kitten's taunt-cry pulling aggro properly the hunting became ridiculously easy.
Is it because he's a living type? He's nothing like the Shadow Summons. Those did nothing unless Jinsoo ordered it. They waited without moving, like statues. Leo ate on his own and gathered monsters without being told. Now I see why summoners don't prefer living summons.
They acted as they pleased, with no command from their master. It was lucky he'd eaten cheap meat. If he'd casually swallowed or destroyed an expensive job advancement book or skill book, the damage would have been serious. Pulling the monsters was the same story. It hadn't been a problem because Jinsoo was strong. If he'd been weak, he might have been surrounded and killed on the spot.
Too many variables. Not being able to control the sudden impulses was the real problem, and the system messages about rising loyalty kept nagging at him too. After the White Drake meat, Leo had gone on devouring whatever the hunted monsters dropped, and now and then a notice appeared that his loyalty had climbed. A few chunks of meat pushing loyalty up isn't something to celebrate. Put the other way, it meant the loyalty he'd started with was so pathetic that tossing him a little meat was enough to keep raising it.
There is a contract. Summoner Jinsoo supplied food and mana, and summon Leo obeyed commands. And it looks packed with subjective interpretation. Order a Shadow Summon to attack, and it would have charged even an opponent it had no hope of matching. Leo, by contrast, hadn't so much as pretended to attack until the moment Jinsoo himself was under attack.
I'll figure it out bit by bit. The kitten was pulling monsters in and helping the hunt a great deal, and for now that was enough. And he's ridiculously cute. A baby cat only a little bigger than a palm, soothing just to look at. And that wasn't all. Watching him inhale a hunk of meat bigger than his own body in a flash made it perfectly clear why eating shows were so popular.
If he keeps causing trouble and won't listen, I can just unsummon him. He was alive, but a summon all the same. Dismiss him, and he had no choice but to go back to wherever he'd come from—wherever that is. I don't know either. He'd heard spirits returned to the spirit realm, and the divine dragons the Dragon Lord had commanded went back to the divine dragon realm. He's a magic beast. There might be a magic beast realm of its own.
Sorting through his thoughts on Leo, Jinsoo went on hunting.
Late that evening, Jinsoo and Shin Sua stepped back into their lodgings.
"You're quite late."
Kim Han-ul addressed him with a smile tucked at the corner of his mouth.
"So we are."
"You didn't use the Rescue Stone, so I take it nothing dangerous happened. Then again, you must have come up empty, so that stands to reason."
At the word empty, Jinsoo thought of Leo. He drove in every monster in the area. Looked at the other way, that meant the players hunting nearby had no choice but to come back empty-handed in droves.
"And the cat on your shoulder—is that a summon, by any chance?"
Kim Han-ul studied Leo with open interest.
"Yes."
"If it isn't rude of me, might I ask your class?"
"Summoner."
"Ah. Just as I thought."
Kim Han-ul wore an I-knew-it look. He'd already had a rough idea. Fair enough. Two backliners said they were going out to hunt. For ordinary rear-line classes, a two-person hunt was far too dangerous. A summoner was a different story. Through summons, he could assemble a proper party.
"Do you intend to go hunting again tomorrow?"
"That's the plan."
"Please keep your Rescue Stone close. And if you can, carry it on you rather than storing it in your inventory. It'll be easier to answer a sudden danger that way."
"Thank you for the concern."
Jinsoo answered with a wry smile he kept to himself. Does he think I don't know what a Rescue Stone does? It wasn't only for sending a distress signal in a crisis. It tracks your location. The moment he'd left the city, he had stuffed the stone Kim Han-ul gave him into his inventory. Answer a sudden danger, my ass. He's only saying that because the tracking cut out.
He let the words go in one ear and out the other, then sat down to a late dinner with Shin Sua.
A tray hit the table beside him with a thump.
"So you're the rookie? That summon's ridiculously cute."
Mid-meal, a huge man with a rough face had come over, set his tray down next to Jinsoo, and started talking.
"Hey. A guy with a mug as mean as yours walks up and talks like that out of nowhere, you're gonna scare the rookies."
A woman with the air of a nimble warrior set her own tray down and sat beside Shin Sua as she said it. And the two of them weren't the end of it.
"That guy's way too impatient."
"Tell me about it."
A clean-cut man and a woman with a soft, puppyish face carried their trays over and took the empty seats on either side, hemming the two of them in. One moment they had been eating alone. The next, people filled both flanks. So this is the party Kim Han-ul said he'd introduce. Otherwise there was no reason for them to approach out of nowhere.
"You must be our seniors, then."
"Hahaha! Seniors? Please!"
At Jinsoo's words the huge man broke into a bright, booming laugh.
"We just got here a little earlier, that's all. We're not looking to be treated like seniors."
The warrior-like woman waved a hand as she said it. Dropping straight into casual speech on a first meeting. They'd treated him like a subordinate from the start, then said something like that. It was a little funny. He didn't bother letting the feeling show.
"You've had it rough, huh? We really suffered too. Especially when we lost the party member we'd been with for so long..."
The huge man and the warrior-like woman kept running their mouths as they ate, recounting the grief of comrades lost in battle, trying to build some common ground with Jinsoo and Shin Sua.
It was never going to land.
Jinsoo was beside the point. Even Shin Sua had never once lived through the death of a comrade.