Dungeon Prowler : One Man Army

Chapter 191: Hunting down Lucian

Having dealt with the princesses, Yunan returned to the city carved in a reef, there he found an underground storage room with chests stacked inside without many places left, Yunan picked every single one and searched for the throne room and found the original chest. The chests on this floor were full of magic items with many different types, shapes, sizes.

Yunan spent the next week sorting out the items before taking Fortuna to honey week in the outside world, although she had been tailed by Venus and could not help but fail to try to evade her until Yunan used spatial shift to throw Venus off their tracks.

After a week of passion, Yunan returned to the dungeon, he visited the restaurant chef Ro made and sold him some crabs and clam meat that was overpopulating the aquarium, and got himself a 5-star meal, he even got a few lessons in cooking after the meal as thanks for the meat delivery.

Afterwards Yunan looked into the mercenary jobs in the 30th floors and the only mission available was to provide different kinds of clams and pearls but it seemed the pay was too low to be worth the hustle and no one even cared about it, and Yunan did not think that doing a quest with underpayment would benefit him in any way especially one without any challenge in it. So he decided to speed up the exploration to reach the 40th floors and maybe get some mercenary work done. He contacted Debauchery about some training and they sent him Lucian who took him to the twentieth floor for their lesson.

"You are to stop using all spells and your armour and all the skill you learned so far, you have only one objective, finding me using only your natural senses, as in sight, smell and hearing, maybe a sixth sense if you had one" as always Lucian was straightforward, he was giving Yunan an almost impassable task of finding a ranger in a forest.

Yunan had to identify the route Lucian took by using anything he knew how to, he looked for the tiniest signs that were deliberately left behind by Lucian as a small aid for Yunan. The trail was found and lost many times, but Yunan was getting better at following such trails and was getting better at handling the heightened senses that were now capturing too much information simply because he has never been in such a heightened awareness state.

Lucian was always watching Yunan, and he would send corrections to make Yunan better, although Yunan knew that Lucian was a stone's throw away he did not use his spells or skills to find him and relied on his senses and awareness but soon found something was wrong, his senses were not reliable and could be tricked, especially when he found contradictions within the trail.

That was the second part of the lesson, if you trust blindly in something, no matter how reliable it was it can be used against you someday when Yunan was finally stuck he broke the rules and started using his other spells and skills to try and successfully find Lucian. He was praised for changing his modus operandi when he was stuck and was also berated for waiting until he was stuck to change his way.

"In this game you are the hunter, and your objective was to find your prey with all means at hand, if your prey knew what methods you are using, they would build traps designed to slow you down and throw you off the trail, but if they didn't know, they would keep changing hiding methods making easier for you to find them and flush them out and eventually capture your prey without losing too much time or effort"

"The second objective of the training was to elevate the use of your natural senses, your constitution should allow dark sight and enhanced hearing as well as other sensitivities that were not possible 4 years ago, they are now possible with just a bit of focus, so spare some of your mental faculties to your natural senses and don't fully rely on them. Use your natural senses to find the clues I leave behind unconsciously, no matter how good a person is at hiding and controlling their bodies, there are things beyond their control, for example shedding hair or fur, leaving a trace of scent while having unintended contact with foliage, a crushed leaf or a broken blade of grass"

"No matter how careful one can be they must leave a trace, least of all is scent and most obscure is mana, there are ways to detect a person simply by the natural mana they ooze out, however that method is still too far away from you, for now, continue trying to find me, however, this time use everything that you can, it's not cheating if you use your own power to its fullest". The lecture Lucian gave Yunan opened his eyes and led him to a new way of thinking and planning, he used his communication ring to find where Lucian was but did not expose him immediately instead he practised all gis tracking methods to find the way, although he still failed miserably for a month, he left the usage of the ring as a last resources simply because not everyone could have a communication ring so he tried locating storage spaces, something that everyone used after a certain level.

Unfortunately Yunan needed better scanning features and detection to be added to the scanning ability of the armour, if he could track someone because they had magic items or storage artefacts or something along those lines, it was possible to find any person in this world but only with mana tracking could he find everything in this world.

After a two month long hunting session that ended with expected failure, Yunan returned to the portable home to take a rest and get pampered a bit before heading to the 35th floor, he wanted to reach the 40th floor fast so that he could get some work as a mercenary and join parties temporarily, for now at least the current floors were not very conducive to growth.