Chương 9: Leveling up in the night

Finally, the last skeleton dead, I check on the notification I got before the battle started. And I see that it's more than one notification. Including the one at the end of the battle, I have four. Interesting. You have gained Tracking 3. You have completed secret quest: Classy. Fully qualify for four basic classes (Hunter, Fighter, Rogue, Mage). Reward: 2000 XP. You have defeated Skeleton Warrior x6. You gain (2400/5) 480 experience. You have gained multiple levels! You are now level 9.

You have 10 stat points to distribute. I want to put half the points into Agility, bringing it up to 20. The other points I'm going to spread out between Vigor, Presence, Willpower, Charisma, and Awareness, putting one point into each. Looking at my cahracter sheet, that changes quite a lot of things. Caleb Strong, level 9 human rogue. XP 915/2000. HP: 144 MP: 117 Stamina: 153 Defense: 39 Magic Resist: 11% Strength: 16 Agility: 20 Vigor: 16 Manipulation: 10 Presence: 13 Willpower: 17 Charisma: 11 Awareness: 11.

Skills: Animal Harvesting 4, Alertness 3, Dodge 4, Pick Lock 3, Meditation 3, Scrounge 4, Sneak 7, Spellcraft 3, Sword 5, Throwing 4, Tracking 3. Secondary skills: Armorer 3, Smithing 3 That means that my magic resistance is tied to either charisma or awareness; probably awareness, as that makes more sense. My stamina seems to be equal to my willpower times my level, my mana points equal to my presence times my level, and my hit points equal to my vigor times level.

The higher agility means higher defense, and also means more damage with my thrown weapons. That's good. You'd think there'd be something that would explain all of these things. Some kind of tutor. It is a tutorial level, after all. The tutorial is still going for another 9 hours, but I've yet to have anything explain anything to me. I wonder if that's indicative of anything. Maybe there's something out there that's supposed to be giving me hints and clues, and I'm just not listening to it.

Or maybe it's just not out there. There doesn't seem to be any kind of system prompts to explain anything, and when I try to bring up a help menu, nothing shows up. I don't even know if there's somewhere we're supposed to go to get out of the tutorial. I'd think that there would be, but I've yet to get any kind of message about it.

You'd think the system would tell us about things like if there is a death penalty (other than, you know, death) or a level cap or even something explaining how many points I'm going to get each level to deal with my stats. Or how to improve my spell levels and my ability levels. I like that shell will now cover 28 points of damage, but I'd love to know what happens if I upgrade it to level two or three, and how to do that.

It isn't coming with leveling; nothing seems to come with leveling as far as abilities are concerned. Do I get more class abilities as time goes by? The only way I've been able to see that so far is through experience. No one is here to explain these things to me. No one is here to tutor me.

"This is a pretty shitty tutorial level," I say, looking around at the group.

"Anyone here get any messages explaining anything? Any notifications that tell you what your stats mean, or how to handle quests, or anything like that?" Everyone shakes their heads. It's good to know it's not just me, but it seems particularly weird. There should really be someone, something, that's giving us this information. You're not supposed to just learn through trial and error. If that's all it was, there would be no need for a tutorial period. You could call it an adjustment period.

Tutorial suggests that you can screw up, that bad things can happen without ruining your game. That suggests that there is a penalty for dying, but it's not permanent. Like that we would respawn. And if there had been more of the skeletons, we might've had to. I don't know if we could've taken much more than the six we were fighting. Even that seemed closer than I'd like it to be. At least the skeletons have treasure, in the form of their own swords and axes.

El puts her chipped long sword away and picks up one of the axes, swinging it around and getting a good feel for it. She seems satisfied, even pleased, with it. And when I look at the swords, I can understand why. Bone Blade. Uncommon weapon level 4/10. Damage: 4-14. It's not as good as my skull blade, but it's a lower level. I think it will be as good as soon as I upgrade it, and might get better as I upgrade it past level five. I definitely want to take a few of these swords with me to experiment with.

There are a total of four swords and two axes. No one seems to complain when I wrap up the four swords in a roll of lynxith fur and strap them to my back, and no one complains when El takes the second axe and sticks it behind her back, held in place with her backpack.

"Do we want to keep going?" I ask.

"Or should we retire back to the occult shop and get some sleep?"

"Fuck sleep," El says.

"I want to play with my new axe. Let's find some more of those shadow wolves. Besides, I want more levels." I look at her and see that she's level 6 now. Seems like all four of them are. So I'm not three levels ahead. That's the difference that secret quests will make, I suppose. I could tell them how to do it, but none of them seem all that surprised that I'm level nine already, and they don't ask me how it's done, so I don't want to waste their time.

I don't want it to sound like I'm mansplaining or trying to tell them how to play the game. Game. Is this a game? It's our lives now, but I'm still thinking of it in terms of a game. Maybe the next fight will make things feel more real. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. So we go hunting for something else to fight. More skeletons would be acceptable, but I'd prefer the shadow wolves. They bleed. I don't like things that don't bleed. They make my only real ability useless.

We don't find shadow wolves or skeletons. Instead, we find a group of giant spiders skittering over a building like they are planning to build a web around it and suck it dry for food. When they spot us, they screech and start crawling down the building towards us, murder in all eight of their eyes. Giant spider, Advanced Rare monster, level 7. HP: 700/700. Even bigger and nastier than the skeletons, but they at least bleed. And there are only four of them.

Vinny and I stay back at first, him shooting little spikes of ice at them and me throwing knives while the girls defend El and let her swing away at spider legs, laughing maniacally as she does. The throwing knives look like they should bounce of the carapaces of the spiders, but thanks to my agility they seem to puncture through, doing 24 damage with each strike. I throw all twelve of my throwing knives into one spider, leaving it hurting but nowhere near dead.

Then I charge towards it with my sword, and use the fact that it's engaged with Gigi to flank it and do my bleeding sneak attack, combining Bleeding Strike with sneak attack, dealing 69 damage, along with bleed. The spider spins around and bites me for 18 points of damage, well within the threshold of my new shell spell, and I stab it again, for another 63 damage, this time without bleed. I still get the benefit of the flanking even if I'm not the one behind the spider.

It still has 212/700 hit points, and it bites me again for another 18 damage, 8 of it getting through the shell. I feel it burning where the bite landed, and wonder if I've been poisoned. Nothing happens immediately, but that doesn't mean I'm in the clear. Even if I am, I should remember that poison is always a possibility, and be more careful to avoid getting hit in the first place. I stab it for another 63 damage, taking care to aim and cut through several of its eyes on the way in.

I'm trying to get at the brain, hoping that maybe that'll do more damage. If things are realistic, hit points won't matter. Destroy the brain, destroy the living creature. I think that's a law somewhere. And it seems to apply here, because that stab should've only brought it down to about 160 health, but instead it kills the thing, leaving it a heavy weight trying to pull my sword out of my hand rather than a wriggling thing that is trying to stab me with two giant fangs.

I get my sword out from its head and turn to see El step to the side and chop her axe right into the joint between the body and the head, severing the spider's head entirely, killing it. Two more to go. One of them is limping around on six legs instead of eight, and the other is fighting with only one fang, the other one having been severed by Ashley's long sword. You have slain Giant Spider x4. You gain (2800/5) 560 experience. Wow. Another fight like that and I'm going to level up again.

Everyone else is up to level seven now. They're catching up, sort of. We're all getting experience at the same rate, but the gap between levels just gets bigger every level. So they're catching up in the sense of levels, but not in the sense of total XP. I still have them beat by about thirty five hundred points, near as I can figure. We need to take a bit of a break after that fight, to let things recharge.

I reactivate Shell as soon as the time limit for cooldown is over, giving me more time for my MP to recharge. It seems like we heal one point a minute of each of the three main categories. So one hit point, one stamina, and one MP every sixty seconds. That's a way better rate of healing than I've ever had in my life, but it still feels so incredibly slow. I mean, if I got in a fight that left me near death, I'd need more than two hours to heal from it. Okay, still super fast.

But I don't want to have to wait for an hour and a half just to catch my breath, or to recharge my spells.

"My MP recharges a lot faster," Vinny says.

"It's one of the perks of the mage class. My MP regeneration is measured in seconds, not minutes."

"Same for my stamina," El tells me.

"I get one stamina back per second, even during combat." Well that seems unfair. I ask if Gigi and El get anything back that fast, but neither of them do. So the three of us are stuck with the slow speed. Then again, none of them have an ability that triples the damage as long as you're flanking someone. So maybe it is fair.

"I want something like that," I say.

"I want to regenerate everything in terms of seconds. I don't want to wait around for an hour after combat just to be ready to go again."

"Do you expect to fight that constantly?" Gigi asks.

"Like, do you think we're going to be doing nothing but fighting all the time?" That's a good question, and a great point. If we're not going to fight one after another, then this regeneration is faster than anything I could ever expect. One fight a day, even two, and I'd probably have plenty of time to refill my pools without any trouble at all. I'd always be at full. But if I'm expecting constant combat, we're going to need faster regeneration.

"I don't think so," I say.

"I did get offered the class of craftsman, and I know there are secondary skills. So it's entirely possible that there are non-combat roles we could take up. I guess I wouldn't need regeneration if I was avoiding combat entirely. But I'm not sure that's what I want to do. It kind of depends on what the world is like."

"Do we know anything about the world we're going to?" Ashley asks.

"I was hoping they'd tell us something about it, but it doesn't seem like anyone is doing the tutor part of the tutorial."

"You think someone dropped the ball?" El asks.

"I think that we've been left to our own devices," I say.

"Maybe there's no one who was supposed to tell us anything; maybe we're supposed to just figure things out and the tutorial period is just a time for us to do that. But maybe there's someone who was supposed to tell us things or send us messages, and something happened to them."

"How are we supposed to find out which?" Gigi asks.

"And do we really care about what the answer might actually be? I mean, why not assume that there isn't anyone that's supposed to have said anything, and that we just learned things on our own? Isn't it better to assume we're alone than to believe in a being that could have told us stuff but didn't?"

"I don't know," I say.

"I'm not sure it matters. It's just something I wanted to keep in mind."

"Weird," El says. She rolls her shoulders.

"Everyone good enough to keep going?" she asks.

"I want to get one more level before dawn, if at all possible."

"We find more spiders, it'll be more than possible," I say.

"Those things are worth a lot." Suddenly the ground starts to shake. Not in an earthquake kind of way, but in a something-really-big-is-coming kind of way. We all look in the direction that the sound is coming from, and after a few seconds, we see it. By which I mean it starts to block out the sky as it comes towards us. Giant. Elite Uncommon monster, level 10. HP 1000/1000.

"You had to say it, didn't you?" El asks me, slapping her axe against her open palm.

"I didn't say anything," I insist, watching as another shadow, just as big, steps towards us. There are two giants and five of us.

"Go for the legs!" I shout.

"Just like the spiders," El says, chuckling as she starts to move to the side, looking to flank the creatures. If only she were right.