The First Legendary Beast Master novel Chapter 17

Chapter 17: Proper Training Regimen

Hawk went straight for the Wind Stones again, once nobody was paying attention, and grabbed another. But this time, it didn't integrate into his body in the same sudden rush. Instead, there was a steady flow of Wind Magic from the stone to the bird, and its body seemed to be adapting to the excess energy at a much slower rate.

"Does it only work that well once? That was a pretty high-level resource, compared to Hawk, so perhaps it damages the body when it is used in such an abrupt manner." Rita suggested, while flipping her short black hair out of her eyes.

"That's possible, I can't really tell and Hawk doesn't understand either, he just wants the stones. I will ration them out for him, so he gets a new one when the old one is absorbed." Karl agreed.

That would be a while, as after he ate the second stone, Hawk was begging to be let back into the mental space to sleep off its overindulgence.

"Food Coma." Karl explained, when Rita gave the disappearing bird a confused look.

She sighed and shook her head. "That's not part of a proper training regimen. But today, we can forgive it, since he had such a large breakthrough. I approve of your diet plan, and the infused blood will be brought to you regularly, along with a new strength stone, in a few weeks. Hopefully, this one lasts because that's as fast as we can get another.

It looks like your abilities are very fast-growing, but equally resource intensive. Perhaps if you grew naturally at the rate of the contracted beast, you could do it with only food resources, but from what we know of the wild magical beasts, they also need to eat some rare objects, or absorb strange energies to reach the higher ranks naturally."

What Karl really needed was a way to improve the Hawk so it could beat other monsters at its level, and not just keep growing. They were likely to have to face beast packs and invasions in the future, and one monster on their side against ten on the other would mean very little to their chances of winning.

Being able to work together was a nice start, but not enough to be considered a truly powerful sort of existence on his own.

Hawk snorted in amusement in his mind. [What other Hawk of my level is so good with its magic or so majestic in flight?]

[I know you're the best, but I'm trying to think of ways to make us even better.] Karl countered.

Hawk went quiet as he thought about it. Hawks only needed one skill, the ability to kill their prey, but he supposed that more ways to kill his food wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Maybe if he watched other birds do it, he could find ways to do it better?

The Windspeed Hawk wasn't sure that was even possible, but it wanted to make Karl happy, so it was willing to try to use [Rend] in new ways.

"Can we go down to the training areas? I think that the more we see actual combat while we're training, the easier it will be to come up with ways to make ourselves better." Karl suggested.

Hawk wasn't going to be coming out for a while, so he might as well train himself while he had the chance.

Rita led him out of the dorms and out into the field on the opposite side from his balcony. There was a large training area there, with stone squares in the open field, and a large group of students were training unarmed combat techniques there.