Veylin withdrew his gaze. His composure and the fear frozen on the expedition members' faces seemed to belong to two entirely different worlds.
"Everyone," he said, turning around. His voice was quiet, yet it reached every ear clearly.
"The sight of this swamp is indeed enough to strike fear into even the bravest warrior." His words offered no comfort. Instead, several Garrison members tightened their grips on their sword hilts.
Veylin ignored their reactions and continued in a matter-of-fact tone.
"But you must understand that they are magical beasts. That means they are firmly bound by instinct-territory, reproduction, feeding... Their behavior will undergo no significant change even over hundreds or thousands of years. They are predictable. They can be calculated."
"As long as a nest occupied by a Tier Three Magical Beast offered sufficient profit, in any prosperous province of the Duchy, knights' orders and adventurers would have long since flocked to fight over it again and again, until the land had been squeezed dry."
He paused, sweeping his gaze over the group.
"There is only one reason it has survived and continued to breed undisturbed-it is remote enough, and unknown enough."
"Now, all we need to do is bear certain costs, then reap outsized returns."
His analysis loosened the boulder of fear weighing on their hearts.
They had never considered the problem from this perspective.
To them, this was a death trap. To Veylin, it was merely a resource site waiting to be developed.
Yet there was always a dissenting voice.
"Easy for you to say!" Ora Stonebeard's coarse, hoarse voice shattered the brief silence. "Costs? I swear on my old man's battleaxe, the dozen or so of us wouldn't even fill the gaps between that biggest brute's teeth. We're the costs!"
Even unarmed, the mixed-blood Dwarf had lost