Calamity Upon This World

A lush and pretty green forest, with beautiful sunlight shining and weather that would even make the gloomiest person smile.

And in such a pretty environment, Jasmine was engaged in a fight using her gigantified arms to contest a humongous brown bear with a massive rock on his back in strength.

After getting her licence, Jasmine formed a party with two other relatively experienced B-ranked adventurers.

The first one was a girl named Raya who excelled with a bow and was an archer, and the second one was Max, a charismatic and well-spoken guy who used a hammer.

Right now, their party is undertaking their first ever mission after being created in Mutterak Forest, which involved them capturing two brown stone bears alive so they can be used in future adventurer rank evaluation tests and a baby so it can be groomed into a companion of an adventurer in the future.

Right now, Jasmine was fighting the male brownback bear and trying to knock him out before the female brownback bear, who had gone out to hunt, could come out.

Jasmine had trouble knocking the monster out without fatally injuring it.

If she wanted, she could've easily killed the bear, but since the mission required her to keep him alive, trying to restrict a father who was fighting to protect his child and home was proving to be harder, even despite possessing higher stats and skills.

Thankfully she wasn't alone, and just when things were starting to get tough for her, Max jumped in and, reinforcing his hammer with the element of earth, hit the bear forcefully, separating it from Jasmine and sending it flying away.

"Took you long enough," Jasmine snickered while trying to take a breather before engaging the bear again.

"Sorry about that; I was busy sealing the cub inside the cave so it couldn't escape," Max replied.

While Jasmine was keeping the father busy, Max used the chance to use earth magic to create a wall and seal the baby bear they were supposed to capture inside the cave they lived in so that it couldn't escape.

Seeing his baby get trapped inside the cave, the father bear tried to break the wall, but he was quickly stopped by Max, who appeared in front of him and used his hammer to hit the bear.

But this time, instead of flying again like last time, the bear used earth magic to reinforce his arms and held back the hammer.

And not only was it just holding back the nearly two-tonne hammer, but he was also pushing it back, but sadly for him, humans don't like to have fair 1V1s.

Seeing her party member get overpowered, Jasmine fired a [Wind Slash], forcing it to jump back to try and dodge the attack, giving Max a chance to disengage and make distance.

"Trying to capture this monster without killing or critically injuring it is proving to be harder than expected," Max said as he stood near Jasmine.

Both he and Raya had been adventurers for 4 months now, and they had experienced multiple missions involving capturing monsters alive.

Which gave them confidence to attempt this mission, but the only problem was that unlike all their previous missions, the brown bear was actually strong and also highly aggressive in nature, with expertise in earth magic, a magic notorious for its defensive capabilities.

And while both he and Raya combined could probably kill it trying to take on not just one but two of them, that too while they were protecting their cub, resulting in higher-than-usual aggressive behaviour.

While trying to keep all of them alive was too much of a task for the two of them, and they almost skipped it.

That is, until they saw the newly registered B-rank adventurer Jasmine and teamed with her.

Jasmine's talent was overshadowed by Edge Lord, the monstrous adventurer who had appeared out of nowhere, and one shotted a B-rank monster before fighting the guild leader for 5 whole minutes.

While yes, he was just fighting a version of Michael who was holding back all of his abilities and most of his stats and only playing around for most of the spar before brutally beating up the masked adventurer near the end.

The performance of Edge Lord was far more impressive than what most of them could do and managed to win the hearts of everyone who saw the duel.

And to top it all off, he had done the impossible by being promoted to A-rank right away.

Honestly, Max found the masked man scary, and he didn't think that he could win against the him despite being older than him.

But he was getting sidetracked by Edge Lord, who had managed to steal the spotlight from Jasmine with his debut, which gave him the perfect opportunity to recruit her with relative ease.

And with the added might of her added to their team, they were confident enough to attempt the mission they had previously avoided.

But it seems like they had overestimated their combined abilities, as Raya, who was in charge of keeping an eye out on the female bear who had gone out to hunt earlier, came back and said.

"Guys, wrap up the male bear; the female one is rushing back after hearing all the noise."

'Well, shit' was the only thought that flowed through the heads of both Jasmine and Max.

They were having trouble with just one of the bears trying to fight two of them at once while holding back, which would just be suicidal.

"Fuck it," Jasmine said before rushing towards the enraged male bear to try and quickly knock him out.

She wasn't using a sword, as it would fatally injure the bear, and was instead resorting to her bare fists, which were stronger and sturdier than most weapons.

~BAMM~

The punches of both Jasmine and the bear collided, causing the ground under them to break from their combined weight.

~BAMM~

Another exchange of fists caused the ground to break even further.

They continued to exchange blows for a few minutes before a sharp spike of rocks emerged from the ground beneath Jasmine and attempted to stab her.

But before it could, she used her size manipulation ability to enlarge her legs and jump back, allowing her to dodge the surprise attack.

While she had dodged the attack, it had left her vulnerable in the air for a few seconds, and while this normally wouldn't matter,.

Out of seemingly nowhere, the female bear from earlier appeared and jumped at the vulnerable Jasmine in the air, attempting to rip her apart.

'This is going to hurt,' Jasmine thought as she held her arms up, covering her face, to prevent any fatal injury.

However, the attack she was expecting never came, and she just fell on her buttocks.

"Oww." She winced in pain, but once she opened her eyes, she saw two completely frozen figures of the two monsters her party had been struggling against as she heard a voice.

"Younglings these days are too suicidal to take on missions beyond their ability."