Slave Company Chapter 16 Encircled
Known as one of the worst blessings in the world, it suffered from the fact that the user’s growth direction was solely focused on charisma and barely anything else while the requirement of taming a monster for the [Monster Tamer] was that the user had to be stronger then the monster he was trying to tame, because of this almost everyone at the beginning was limited to taming monsters weaker than a horned rabbit which was so weak that any combat blessing and even those who had crafting blessings could simply punch it to kill it.
Living as a [Monster Tamer] was almost impossibly hard, because of this many abandoned this road and chose to instead make use of their high charisma to do misdeeds for personal benefits.
Conmen, cheats and swindlers they were called, using their high charisma to fool people out of their wealth, the publics opinion of [Monster Tamers] plummeted so far to the bottom that a public outcry of putting them on the universal blacklist was formed.
The blacklist served to push away people who possessed blessings dangerous to the public or are thought of as inherently evil, people who possess these blessings while not actively hunted down or publicly prosecuted are all denied basic services such as the use of the guilds, government protection and or official citizenship, some countries even deny these people who have these blessings entrance to their cities or towns in fear of what they may do if they are allowed to enter forcing them to stay in the wilderness most of their lives trying their best to survive, which is why people with the [Monster Tamer] blessing started to get worried about what would happen if their blessing was put on the blacklist as those people who have these blessings were considered less than human and were treated horribly.
But unfortunately for the public or fortunately for the [Monster Tamers] it was always declined as the people who decided that simply didn’t think that the problem was in the blessing itself but the people who possessed the blessing, any blessing put on the blacklist always had inherent evil in it that made it deserving of being put on the blacklist in the first place, the blessing of the [Serial Killer], [Arsonist] and [Torturer] to name a few.
This is the reason why Avian decided that he would never reveal his [Monster Tamer] blessing if he absolutely didn’t need to, revealing his [Hemomancer] blessing was also out of the question much more so compared to his [Monster Tamer] blessing as that could earn him being hunted down by the king and his men putting Avian in a very awkward situation as he knew that he would eventually need to reveal his [Monster Tamer] blessing once he started working for a guild.
Avian understood that once people knew that he had the [Monster Tamer] blessing people would completely change their view on him and treat him differently just like a pile of garbage, his time in the guild would be extremely difficult and would be like starting a game on the hardest difficulty, to change that and overcome it Avian decided that the one thing he would do was to train his [Monster Tamer] blessing until nobody could ignore him.
Unfortunately, even he knew that the path ahead would be an extremely difficult one even with his [Hemomancer] blessing as it was this blessing that made him choose this path in the first place, but Avian was determined, he always pushed through no matter the times.
After all for past 2 weeks, it wasn’t only the [Hemomancer] blessing he had been practicing he was also putting just as much time in the [Monster Tamer] blessing documenting his understanding into his book, in fact ever since Avian awakened to the [Monster Tamer] blessing, it could be said that he had more understanding towards it compared to his other blessing as he could freely practice it since everyone already knew he had that blessing and no one cared.
And just like every blessing the [Monster Tamer] blessing gets 2 starting abilities which are.
[Control Monster] and [Train Monster].
Very disappointing 2 abilities compared to the abilities of the [Hemomancer] by just like the starting abilities of the [Hemomancer] these were the base of the blessing from which you would build your strength.
[Control Monster] is exactly what it sounds like, you attempt to put a monster under your control, to do this there are a few requirements, the requirements of which are what made the [Monster Tamer] blessing infamous for being such as a bad blessing.
The first requirement was that the user had to be stronger than the monster he was trying to put under his control.
How this was determined in detail whether a monster was stronger or weaker than the user was not actually precisely known by the public other than [Monster Tamers] themselves, but monsters or all creatures for this matter actually possessed a inner value called the Monster Rank.
This Monster Rank was something all [Monster Tamers] could instinctively feel upon looking at the monster, through this they can judge whether or not they can tame the monster or not, the Monster Rank just like the rank of blessings goes between unranked to rank 9, each Monster Rank is equivalent to the same rank as that of a person with a combat blessing of the same rank.
Making all monsters pretty strong as all combat blessings are inherently strong to begin with.
This means that an unranked [Monster Tamer] can’t even tame another unranked monster as that monster would have the strength of an unranked person with a combat blessing, though unranked is a pretty loose term and not literally all creatures could be tamed as bugs the size of a nail cannot be tamed even though they are considered unranked monsters, it is thought that creatures on that level simply have too little self-conscious to even understand they are being tamed, the smallest creature a [Monster Tamer] can tame are mice above that everything is clear.
Now with the first requirement out of the way, the second requirements comes in.
The second requirement is, making the creature submit to your strength.
This is a simple requirement, people often confused the first and second requirement as the same thing, but really it is different.
If the first requirement is cleared, the user then has to pass the hurdle of fighting the creature and defeat it without killing it, no external factors are allowed in this, once someone helps the [Monster Tamer] defeat the creature, uses traps or such things as poisons the creature will immediately be failed to be tamed with or without the creature’s knowledge.
Unadulterated pure strength was required to make a creature submit for this requirement, which is why the strength of the [Monster Tamer] is important unfortunately the growth of a [Monster Tamer] almost fully focused on charisma making it barely possible for a [Monster Tamer] to clobber a horned rabbit into submission while also getting heavily injured in return.
Finally, the third requirement was one that put the limit of how many monsters a [Monster Tamer] could control.
This is the reason why a [Monster Tamer] has high charisma as charisma determined how many monsters a [Monster Tamer] could have under his control.
Alvin who was thought to be the strongest [Monster Tamer] to be ever recorded was said to have tamed over hundreds of wolves when this physically could not have been possible as even 2 wolves which were unranked monsters were enough to completely fill the amount of charisma necessary to tame them for an unranked [Monster Tamer].
Alas no one knew what rank Alvin was able to get in his peak as a [Monster Tamer], but it was clear that even if he was a rank 4 [Monster Tamer] it still likely would barely be enough to tame 100 wolves, people say that what he likely did was tame the alpha of a wolf pack and trained to become stronger until no other wolf could challenge it gathering all the other wolves under the alpha while he himself was the real leader.
And in fact this was likely exactly what he did, while no one was able to replicate this feat ever since Alvin had died, many other creatures based blessing users had confirmed this such as [Beast Masters] who could control lesser wolves through their alpha wolf that they tamed.
But what many [Beast Masters] couldn’t understand was how Alvin had gathered so many wolves to even cause a tide, the power an Alpha would need to control such an enormous amount of wolves would be equally as enormous, the high-level adventurers in fact had fought said powerful alpha wolf which is said to have been 5 meters tall, 5 meters wide and 20 meters long in which they barely won the battle by losing 4 of their comrades before finally slaying the giant wolf who was the alpha.
People to this day tried to understand how Alvin was able to tame such as giant wolf, unfortunately no one had the answer to that, instead another more important question came along as many other [Beast Masters] wondered why the wolves which were under the control of the giant alpha wolf that was killed followed the orders of Alvin who shouldn’t have had any power over them from the beginning.
Too many things were simply unknown by many regarding [Monster Tamers] as there simply weren’t good enough [Monster Tamers] present to answer these questions, many that claimed to be great [Monster Tamers] were almost always charlatans spouting lies for personal gain while really being just unranked or rank 1 [Monster Tamers].
As of now no one really knew if there was a strong [Monster Tamer] out there as the bad stigma associated with the blessing made everyone who possessed it not inclined to reveal their blessing.
But ultimately none of that really mattered as Avian only cared about his own results.
The second ability a monster tamer got was called [Train Monster].
And just like the first ability it was very self-explanatory but also very deep.
Avian still was learning on how to exactly use this ability efficiently, first of all this ability only worked on creatures that were under the command of the [Monster Tamer], what it did was what it said, through giving the monster an order and showing it how it’s done, the monster could be trained to learn a certain command or action or it could also train to grow stronger itself, the last part was a bit ambiguous as Avian learned that how a monster grew stronger through training depended on both the trainers methods of training and the monsters own intelligence and understand what the trainer wanted from it.
Back when he was in the castle, Avian first time training a creature and training it happened in a single day.
Normally if people had the [Monster Tamer] blessing they would immediately want to tame the strongest creature they could tame, but that was a short-sighted view of the situation, since the requirements for the [Control Monster] ability were so harsh, the most a [Monster Tamer] could tame was a horned rabbit, horned rabbits were cowardly creatures like real rabbits being a prey animal and always avoided fights by running away through the use of their powerful legs, they possessed high agility, but nothing much else, what made them distinct from ordinary rabbits though was the horn on their head that allowed them to stab a creature by ramming at them through their high speed, horned rabbits used this technique whenever they were cornered or saw no other way out, making it a sort of last ditch effort.
Unranked [Monster Tamers] could also at most tame 6 of these horned rabbits, which all together couldn’t even defeat a single wolf.
Avian thought that it was a waste taming a creature like a horned rabbit at the beginning since [Monster Tamers] were extremely weak to begin with, trying to raise your overall power is still going to be useless if it can’t even match the average strength of a [Warrior].
Because of this Avian decided that instead of trying to tame strong creatures to raise his group strength, he would instead tame creatures that would support his own individual strength.
For this he also chose a creature that wasn’t land based making him choose birds more specifically crows as just like rabbits crows too existed in this world.
There were many reasons as to why Avian chose crows over any other animal, his first reason was the fact that crows were flying creatures, compared to land creatures it was easier to move them with him since they could fly to wherever he was going, secondly they were also independent and pack hunters.
Crows out of species of birds, excluding magical birds, were the most intelligent as well making training them much easier as they were capable of solving problems, make basic tools as well as both consider future events and other individuals state of mind, in addition to crows making custom tools, they understand causality, can reason, count up to five and remember human faces.
Avian vividly remembered back when he studied in university about economy and business practice within a library that he once saw a murder of crows sitting near a pond fishing for fish using bread crumbs as lure to catch the fish.
At the time even Avian couldn’t help but admit that these birds were incredibly smart, he never once considered keeping a pet since he always thought it was a waste of time, but if Avian had to choose a pet to keep then it would likely be a crow as they were the perfect assistants.
Then again Avian’s own birth name could have also influenced his liking towards birds, his mother did want him to be free as a bird after all, but was mere wishful thinking.
While training the crows was arguably easier, as a beginner [Monster Trainer] and limited amount of recorded knowledge regarding monster training, Avian was forced to largely rely on himself for through trial and error, he also didn’t just train a single crow deciding to go all in Avian used his entire charisma to tame as many crows as he possibly could.
Crows in comparison to horned rabbits only took ¼ of the charisma to be tamed, meaning Avian was capable of taming 24 crows plus 36 more crows as his innate charisma plus his second blessing, the blessing of the [Hemomancer], also gave him additional charisma even if only a little giving him a total of 60 crows under his command.
All these crows were also the finest the capital of Redria could offer, having bought them all secretly not even the king knew that Avian had bought over 60 crows and tamed them all, even though it was an impressive number the king would still likely not have cared as crows weren’t strong at all and could barely kill anything smaller than a rabbit or a rat.
Avian was completely fine with that as he never intended to use these crows expecting them to kill others, instead they had many other more convenient uses such as bringing you items from difficult to reach places, sending messages and most importantly.
Distracting your enemies.
-Wait what is that!?
-Are those crows?!
-Why are there so many!?
After hearing the whistle and making their way surrounding the carriage on both sides, the bandits couldn’t help but stop as they noticed the sky suddenly darken with shadows.
Looking up, everyone present looked surprised as they saw over 60 crows encircling them ominously.
Everyone looked wide eyed at this strange and scary phenomenon, especially since crows in this world just like Avian’s original world also possessed the same symbolic meaning being the messengers of death.
Seeing so many crows encircling them and crying at them, every person present felt a cold sweat run down their back as they felt extremely cold all of a sudden, fear was very evident, but the bandits were made out of some harder stuff as they weren’t immediately shaken by the crows.
-What are you looking at! Stop staring at those crows and go look for the sound! I am sure these guys just want to feast on the corpses so get a move on!
Still looking unconvinced the bandits still did as the other bandit ordered who seemed to be de-facto leader here, Avian observed the field with every bit of precision he could muster, seeing that everyone was now paying more attention to the crows compared to the whistling sound made Avian grin as he decided he would finally act after making sure everything was in place.
[Monster Tamers] we indeed weak, but human psyche was weaker.
Fear was powerful.
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