Velin withdrew his gaze. His calm was a world apart from the terror frozen on the faces of the surrounding expedition members.

"Gentlemen," he said, turning around. His voice wasn’t loud, but it reached everyone’s ears clearly.

"The scene this swamp presents is indeed enough to make even the bravest Warrior feel fear." His words offered no comfort; instead, they made a few of the guards tighten their grip on their sword hilts.

Velin ignored these reactions, continuing in a matter-of-fact tone.

"But you must understand, they are Magical Beasts. This means they are bound by instinct—territory, reproduction, feeding... Their behavioral patterns haven’t changed significantly in thousands of years. They are predictable. Calculable."

"A lair occupied by Level 3 Magical Beasts, if it held enough profit, would have long since been contested over and over by Knight Orders and adventurers who’d heard the news, had it been in any prosperous province of the Duchy. They would fight until the land was stripped bare."

He paused, his gaze sweeping over the crowd.

"The only reason it has been able to thrive undisturbed until now is that it’s remote enough, and unknown enough."

"Now, what we need to do is pay a certain cost, and then reap an excessive return."

This analysis loosened the great stone of fear that had been weighing on everyone’s hearts.

They had never thought about the problem from this perspective.

In their eyes, it was a deathtrap. In Velin’s eyes, it was merely an untapped resource point waiting to be developed.

However, there was always a voice of dissent.

"Easy for you to say!" Ola Stonebeard’s hoarse voice broke the brief silence. "Cost? I swear on my old man’s battle-axe, the dozen or so of us here wouldn’t even be a mouthful for that biggest one. *We’re* the cost!"

Even unarmed, the Half-Dwarf’s temper was no less explosive.

The few Knights behind him said nothing, but their gazes toward Velin were also filled with suspicion.

Velin didn’t look at him. He simply snapped his fingers—a silent command.

RUSTLE, RUSTLE, RUSTLE.

A faint scraping sound arose as the ground around Ola and his men suddenly began to shift.

Fifty black beetles the size of millstones emerged silently from the soil, their jet-black carapaces gleaming coldly under the dim sky.

These Bader Dung Beetles formed a perfect circle, trapping all the former members of the Rock Breaker Knight Order inside.

They made no hissing sounds, merely standing there in silence, like fifty cold tombstones.

The curse on the tip of Ola’s tongue died in his throat. He couldn’t feel any killing intent, but the sensation of being targeted by an absolute power was more suffocating than a direct threat.

Only then did Velin turn his gaze to him.

"Ola Stonebeard, your battle-axe is not here. And while I’ve only brought a portion of my subordinates, they may be hard-pressed to attack, but they are more than sufficient to guard a camp."

Ola’s arms began to tremble—not from fear, but from the rage and helplessness of his situation.

Finally, he slowly lowered his fists. "What do you want to do?"

He practically ground the words out of his throat.

"Simple," Velin said, straightening up. "From now on, twenty-four-hour rotating shifts to monitor the giant crocodile nest. I want to know how many times each croc rolls over a day, when they eat, when they excrete, how many patrol routes they have, which routes overlap..."

"I want to turn all of their behaviors into quantifiable data."

He pulled a small jar of ointment from his coat and tossed it on the ground.

"Wash off that fragrant insect-repelling herb you’re all wearing and use this instead. From now on, mosquitoes and leeches are your closest comrades. The field trip is over. Welcome to the real swamp, gentlemen."

Ola Stonebeard stared intently at the jar on the ground. After a few seconds, he bent down and, with great effort, pinched it between two fingers, as if he were picking up his own dignity.

For Ola Stonebeard, the next two days were a form of torture even more unbearable than the "experiment" before.

He lay prone like a rotten log at a muddy observation point, his every breath filled with the nauseating stench of the ointment.

Swarms of mosquitoes were a persistent black veil, buzzing in his ears.

Even more terrifying were the leeches. He watched one of his men pull a leech as thick as a baby’s arm from his inner thigh, only to immediately go into shock and pass out. After waking up, the man still had to continue observing the behemoths in the distance.

On the first day, everything he recorded was a chaotic mess.

"Target A, rolled over once."

"Target C, feeding. Subject: Four-Eyed Swamp Cow."

"Target F, mating(?)"

To him, these records seemed meaningless, just another one of Velin’s ideas to torture them.

But on the afternoon of the second day, when he followed Velin’s instructions and drew the patrol routes from both days on a single animal hide using charcoal pencils of different thicknesses, his hand froze.

The seven seemingly chaotic patrol routes actually had points of high convergence in three specific areas!

And every single one of those three points was a location with a wide field of view, perfect for an ambush.

The "Target C feeding" he had recorded yesterday had occurred near one of those intersections.

They weren’t just wandering randomly. They were guarding their dinner table!

A chill shot up Ola’s spine to the back of his head.

He suddenly understood what Velin had meant by "quantifiable."

When he looked up again at the behemoths in the distance, for the first time, his eyes held something other than fear: understanding.

Besides Ola and the others on "field duty," the remaining two weren’t idle either.

Ryo was lost in his own world, a charcoal pencil flying across a dry animal hide as he sketched something. He was captivated by the immense flow of ether in the depression, completely oblivious to the mosquito bites.

As for Velin, he stood motionless on a temporarily erected wooden platform, a spyglass in hand, observing the distant crocodile kingdom.

He was just like his past self again, participating in a field survey of native fauna. He recorded all his observations in a notebook wrapped in oilcloth, using concise symbols.

In two days, this nest—chaotic and deadly in the eyes of others—had, in Velin’s eyes, become a research report supported by countless data points.

Velin discovered that their social structure was strictly hierarchical.

The sentinels on the outermost perimeter were the lowest-ranked and the most easily startled. They relied on a low-pitched roar to sound the alarm, but this sound wave didn’t travel more than a hundred meters underwater.

Some of the giant crocodiles would even periodically maintain the nest and carefully move newly hatched young to safer, hidden waters. Their level of cooperation far exceeded simple animal instinct.

In the absence of the scent of blood, the vast majority of adult giant crocodiles spent over twenty hours a day in a semi-dormant state to conserve energy.

They were perfect ambush predators, but not excellent pursuers.

On the morning of the third day, when Ola dragged his mud-and-wound-covered body back to change shifts, Velin finally put down his pen. He didn’t look at the summary report he had written. Instead, he raised his head, his gaze passing over Ola to the men behind him, who had been tormented to the point of being unrecognizable.

"We have enough data."

Velin closed his notebook and clapped his hands lightly to get everyone’s attention.

He looked at Ola and gave him a smile that made his blood run cold.

"Next, we’re going to go catch one and bring it back alive."