Controlling Destiny - 22 Adventure Association Assessment Task

Ultrix was walking back from the mess hall when he noticed the sign that was posted on the billboard.

Task Description: need combustion affinity wielders who are willing to assist in hunting wild stag beasts.

Payment: 2 silver coins per stag caught in mint condition, no burnt ones allowed!

Further Information: combustion wielders will be creating fires to corner the stags. However, be careful not to burn the meat! These stags must be killed cleanly. Anyone caught misconducting will have their earnings and contracts revoked instantly.

[Sheesh,] Ultrix thought to himself. [these requirements sure are strict.] However, after looking at his wallet, he decided that he should probably take a side job anyways. He was currently running low on funds, and he preferred to not starve.

Looking at the contact information, Ultrix took a mental note of the registry number and headed to the Academy’s adventurer’s association.

Walking into the marble building, it suddenly dawned on Ultrix that he had never actually visited the association before. After all, he never needed to visit them before considering he was never good at anything combat-related.

Heading straight for the information desk, Ultrix asked the secretary politely: “Excuse me ma’am, but where can I register for the quests?

The young girl turned to look at Ultrix and checked him up and down quickly before asking, “You don’t seem to have the association’s token on you, are you a registered user?”

[Ah,] Ultrix thought awkwardly, [I guess I need to register with them first?] Feeling slightly dumb, Ultrix shook his head. “Sorry, this is my first time, I didn’t know I had to register.”

The young secretary shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not a super big deal,” she said nonchalantly. “All I need to access is your token and we can get you to do an assessment right away.”

“Ah, is there an assessment for this kind of thing?” Ultrix asked curiously.

“Of course there is,” the girl replied with a slight hint of frustration. “Everything in this Academy has an assessment protocol for first-time registrees.”

“This way, we can place you into a specific category based on talent and skill level.”

“I see, that’s reasonable,” Ultrix replied. “How does the assessment work?”

The young girl was tempted to slap the young man’s face out of frustration. [Are you an idiot?] she wanted to yell at him. [You come in trying to get a quest and you don’t even know that there is an assessment and much less how it even works?]

Calming herself down, the young secretary slowly went through the details of the assessment with Ultrix.

“Ah, so it’s not super difficult,” Ultrix said calmly after the girl explained everything.

In actuality, the assessment itself was quite simple. It was similar to how the assessment for affinity was tested as well. The only major difference was the task that an adventurer would have to do to qualify for the ranks.

For the starter copper ranks, the jobs would be quite simple like hunting small animals or simply foraging different herbs and other vegetation. However, as the tasks became more difficult, the foraging locations would become more treacherous or the hunting objectives would become stronger.

“Taking a look at your token, it appears that you have a high affinity with the combustion department,” the young girl replied.

Handing Ultrix’s card back to him the girl took out an artifact from her desk and started writing some things down on it.

[Huh, that’s interesting,] Ultrix thought to himself. [everyone who has seen my token thus far has seemed to freak out somewhat, I wonder what gives?]

Looking back at his token, Ultrix realized that the information the girl had accessed had simply been his identification number and his combustion affinity number.

So, in other words, the girl did not know who Ultrix was, and she only had an affinity number, which classifies the pupils into 10 percentile categories.

As such, although she knew he was in the top 10 percent, she was not extremely fazed by such information. After all, the Academy had hundreds of pupils, and getting into the top 10 percent was not a super big achievement.

Thinking about the ranking and information system though, Ultrix realized that this made a lot of sense. The school would probably want to refrain from exposing their pupil’s information to outside sources or even to each other, and as such would choose to keep a pretty loose tab on each pupil’s cultivation talent.

[However, this contradicts why headmaster Magmus chose to expose me like that so blatantly during the announcement session the other day.] Ultrix thought to himself.

His brows knit together in frustration as he tried to figure out just what would have caused headmaster Magmus to make such a choice that contradicted the school’s mission.

Suddenly, the voice of the young girl brought Ultrix back from his thoughts.

“Ah yes, we are all done now and the artifact is finishing calculating what your task should be.”

Discreetly handing Ultrix a small disk, the girl started to explain to him how to use the disk.

“Simply hold this disk over your identification token and it will give you your task instructions. You are not allowed to share this task’s information with anyone else, and if caught trying to cheat the system, you will be automatically expelled from our association and never allowed back, is that understood?”

“Yes ma’am, I understand,” Ultrix replied formally.

“Well then, best of luck, I guess.” the young secretary said without sparing Ultrix another glance.

As Ultrix walked out of the building the young girl sitting behind the counter sighed ruefully to herself.

[Ah, well, that’s too bad,] she thought to herself. [I doubt he can finish his task before the time-limit is up. He should have done his homework and research before coming here. I suppose he can try again another day, but I hope he doesn’t die on his quest.]

Chuckling sadly to herself, the young secretary turned back to her paperwork and started working again, forgetting about the young man altogether.

Meanwhile, Ultrix at this point had nearly reached the Academy’s gates. Looking at the time, Ultrix realized that he only had a few hours before the gates closed for the day.

[Aw, heck, I’ll save the task for tomorrow then, I suppose] Ultrix thought to himself. [Besides, I should probably check to see what the task even is before I go anywhere.]

Sliding the disk over his token, Ultrix glanced at the information displayed.

Assessment Task: subdue a magical beast of silver standard tier and bring back a vial of its blood.

Time Limit: 24 hours upon accepting the terms.

Additional Information: Only a vial of blood is necessary for completion, the user is free to do whatever they would like with the rest of the beast.

[So, I only need to subdue it to draw out a vial of blood?] Ultrix thought to himself.

[Well, hopefully, this shouldn’t be that difficult, I’ll have to pay a visit to the library again though first to do some research on how to tell the tiers of magical beasts.]

With those thoughts in mind, Ultrix made his way towards the central library yet again.