Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 18: Chapter 18 — First Real Danger

The posting had been up for two days by the time Arlen worked up the resolve to actually take it.

Pest Subjugation — Den of Rank 1 forest jackals threatening livestock, Miller’s Bend farmstead (outer forest boundary). Suspected 4–5 individuals, low threat individually but persistent in numbers. Rank F–E suitable. Reward: 9 Silver plus any usable pelts.

It wasn’t his first combat-adjacent quest — he’d cleared rats from a grain cellar weeks ago, dispatched without much trouble — but jackals were a different matter entirely. Living creatures capable of biting back, hunting in a pack rather than scattering the way rats did. Rank 1 on the monster scale, the lowest rung of danger that still counted as danger at all, but Arlen had spent enough time listening to tavern talk to know that ”low threat individually” and ”persistent in numbers” was exactly the kind of quest that occasionally went wrong for careless rookies.

He didn’t take it carelessly.

He spent an evening at the guild library first, reading what little the bestiary notes had to say about forest jackals — pack hunters, quick but not especially strong individually, prone to circling prey rather than charging directly, most dangerous when they managed to separate a target from any defensible position. He spent another hour with Torv at the Smith’s District, asking careful questions about how a short sword actually performed against multiple fast-moving opponents rather than a single stationary target.

”Keep your back to something solid,” Torv told him, adjusting the fit of Arlen’s leather armor with a critical eye. ”A wall, a big rock, a tree wide enough they can’t get behind you easy. Jackals want to flank you. Don’t let them.”

”And if I can’t find something solid?”

”Then you keep moving, and you make sure you’re never standing still long enough for more than one of them to reach you at a time.” Torv shrugged. ”Rank 1 jackal’s not going to kill a prepared adventurer. It’s the unprepared ones it gets.”

Arlen thought about Bram’s old advice the whole walk back to the inn that night — ask questions before charging in — and found, for the first time since registering, that the advice felt less like an abstract lesson and more like something he was actually about to need.

He set out for Miller’s Bend at first light the next morning, the farmstead a modest half-day’s walk past the outer forest’s edge, close enough to the wilderness that its fields backed directly onto tree line. The farmer who’d posted the quest — a weathered, anxious man named Corwin — met him at the property’s edge with visible relief.

”Guild said someone’d come, wasn’t sure when.” Corwin gestured toward a stand of trees at the field’s northern boundary. ”They’ve taken two lambs already, this past week. Den’s somewhere in those trees, close as we can tell — heard them at night, plain as anything, right up close to the fence line.”

”How many have you actually seen?” Arlen asked, remembering the careful questioning that had saved him a full wasted day on the goat quest weeks ago.

”Four, maybe five. Never all at once. They circle, mostly — probing the fence at different points before pulling back.” Corwin wrung his hands. ”I’d have hired a proper party if the guild had one to spare for something this small. No offense meant.”

”None taken.” Arlen understood the concern well enough. ”I’ll take a look at the den site before I do anything else. Better to know what I’m dealing with than guess.”

He spent the better part of an hour scouting the tree line at a careful distance, the way Kaelis Swiftstep might have, he imagined, moving slow and quiet, reading the signs the way the guild library’s notes had described — disturbed undergrowth, a faint, musky scent carried on the wind, small tracks pressed into the softer ground near a shallow depression that looked promising as a den entrance.

He counted, over the course of his watching, exactly four distinct sets of tracks crossing and recrossing the same general area. Four jackals, likely, matching the lower end of Corwin’s estimate — manageable, if he was careful, dangerous if he wasn’t.

He found a rocky outcrop a short distance from the den site, solid stone at his back, clear sightlines in every direction the jackals might approach from. He settled into position there in the early afternoon, sword drawn, heart hammering with an adrenaline that felt entirely different from anything he’d experienced gathering herbs or hauling firewood.

He didn’t have to wait long.

The first jackal emerged from the tree line perhaps twenty minutes later — lean, russet-furred, low to the ground, moving with a quick, deliberate gait that reminded Arlen uncomfortably of a predator testing whether prey had noticed it yet. It stopped at the edge of the clearing, ears pricked forward, clearly aware of Arlen’s presence despite his stillness.

A second emerged moments later, circling wide toward his flank, exactly the kind of maneuver Torv had warned him about.

Arlen shifted his stance, keeping the rock solidly at his back, sword held the way he’d practiced — awkwardly, still, but with more confidence than he’d have managed a month ago.

”Not today,” he said aloud, mostly to steady his own nerves rather than to communicate anything meaningful to a pair of forest jackals. ”Not without a fight, anyway.”

The first jackal’s ears flattened. Somewhere behind the trees, a third voice joined the low, rising growl building in the clearing, and Arlen understood, with the particular clarity that came right before something irreversible happened, that Corwin’s estimate of four had very possibly been conservative.

The first jackal lunged.