[Maybetasty]

After all, a proper monster would devour their enemies, and Chan Si thought Maybetasty had a nice ring to it.

A visual change that was part of the mini evolution that Maybetasty selected was an increase in eye size, becoming larger and more bulbous, looking cuter, goofier, or more intimidating depending on one's personal aesthetic opinion.

Maybetasty looked up towards the sky. It was quite a ways to exit from the bottom of the pit to the top, intended as a tutorial area for monstrous characters that would take them from level 1 to 10 as they climbed up ramps, though most monstrous characters would only bother becoming powerful enough to survive sprinting out of the pit, which would be about level 5.

Chan Si, however, had her own plan to extract Maybetasty at level 1.

Right on time, Pickapart arrived. She unequipped her shield and threw it down into the pit, landing directly in front of Maybetasty.

Maybetasty opened their mouth wide and added the shield to their inventory, which was to say, their stomach.

Then she had Gearme re-equip his gloves of climbing and Pickapart began scaling down a safe wall of the cliff without monsters. Below her Maybetasty spat out the shield into a crack in the wall and then climbed on top - it was possible for any given character to maintain a single ‘physics’ item as a time, allowing them to use it to interact with the game world according to something closer to real physics than game logic, but they could not attack or use any [Skills] while doing so.

It was not something that had a practical use in most cases and was mostly added to the game to allow players a greater range of self-expression.

There were limitations, however, that made it less exploitable than one might imagine.

First, only the player who was maintaining the item's physics would be able to interact with it as a physics items, meaning that doing things like having one player pull another with rope wasn't possible, and that while one could use the item to interact with the environment, permanent changes to the environment as a result wouldn't be possible.

Second, the physics simulation stopped at a very shallow level, one could not even break items into pieces or otherwise alter their form during the simulation.

Finally, the instance the simulation stopped, if a player did not do so by adding it to their inventory, it would immediately drop as loot. There were some other niche limitations as well, but they boiled down to not being able to simulate the physics of objects if they were outside certain variable ranges, e.g. size.

From atop the shield, Maybetasty could ascend ass first, albeit very slowly, eating the shield and re-depositing in other wall cracks whenever they needed to adjust their angle to continue ascending. The bottom of the pit was slightly curved which made this possible for the handless Maybetasty. This was was also possible due to both the contribution from the gloves of climbing and Pickapart using her enhanced sight to spot for Maybetasty.

Once they were close enough together and Pickapart was next to another wall crack, she cast Grasping Shadow on Maybetasty!

Maybetasty shot up next to Pickapart and slotted the shield into the crack, holding on for dear life.

At this point of the pit, the wall was too steep for the demonic larva body of Maybetasty to scale up this unintended route, only the humanoid Pickapart could do so. Thus she climbed back up, casting Grasping Shadow two more times before they both reached the top.

Maybetasty vomited out the shield one last time and Pickapart added it to her own inventory, though she no longer equipped it by default because Maybetasty would be her tank now.

Had Chan Si tried this without having Maybetasty complete the mini evolution quest first, an invisible wall would have messed up the attempt.

The current plan was to have Pickapart and Maybetasty level together in another, more efficient area so they could be at least level 6, which Chan Si calculated was the minimal level they could safely cross through a certain area together on their way to meet up with the whole group.

Meanwhile, the plan for Gearme, Sunshine, and Ulna was to also meet up before the group met as a whole, simply so Gearme could powerlevel the other two to 6 prior to the group meet, thus minimizing inefficiency of group experience gain due to level imbalance.

Of course, first Gearme would need to finish killing the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen, and then would level Provisioner some more while he waited for Sunshine to make her long journey. Ulna would continue crafting arrows until Sunshine was closer as well, then level to 2 on her way to meet up in order to match Sunshine's current level.

The area that Pickapart and Maybetasty wanted to farm in was close by, but it would still take a little time to get there during which Gearme could face off against the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen.

===

Before the fight, Gearme restored his small amount of lost health from fall damage with a health potion. He would need to be full health for the coming fight.

As a level 16 enemy, the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen was worth 6000 experience as a base. Since it was 8 levels higher than Gearme, it would be worth 6480 experience.

But what Gearme had come here for was the loot.

A Rare Loot Pile guarded by this enemy, there could be great valuables inside.

From atop a new location, and complete with the Toxic resistance gear, Gearme activated the Gooey Grabbers for extra damage as he let loose his first arrow followed by a second Quick Shot.

The Toxic Mountain Lion Queen, who had until that moment been resting peacefully, woke up with great remorse and fury.

She immediately began sprinting towards Gearme, but he was so far away due to the extra range on attacks that she could not even used her own ranged attack yet.

The next shot was Gearme's Hobbling Shot.

Hobbling Shot had a visual effect of the arrow sticking out of one of the target's legs. With oversized arrows, often it would be larger than the target's leg, causing a visual effect equivalent to the target receiving a sudden peg leg surgery.

With how slow the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen was now, Gearme managed one more shot before she got close enough to begin Spitting Venom.

It dealt a base damage of 142 Toxic Damage per second! Even with Gearme's damage reducing gear, he was taking 103 damage per second. His current health was 5550, so he could last a combined total of 54 seconds worth of damage. This seemed like it was a lot, but the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen could apply another stack of Toxic damage every three seconds, which would also refresh the duration!

Eight seconds later and Gearme had managed to get off two more shots, but had already taken 1545 damage. The Toxic Mountain Lion Queen, meanwhile, had slightly less than a fourth of her health remaining. As a rare enemy, it had a lot more effective health than most enemies for its level.

Gearme would need two more shots.

By the time he got off the next, he had taken 1545 more damage!

As his final shot flew threw the air, 2163 more damage was his and it would take slightly more than a second land. During this time Gearme would take 618 damage, but he only had 297 health left.

Did he die?

Potions required one second to drink, and Gearme had prepared a small stack of common health potions.

He drank one and was instantly restored 1% of his maximum health, or 55, plus the flat restoration of 300, surviving the final tick of damage with only 29 health.

As his arrow skewered the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen, the DoT effect she had applied to him ended.

Of course, Chan Si knew the outcome in advance and had not been worried in the slightest.

Gearme downed the rest of his potions to regain his health as he went down to loot the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen. When he got there, he found a good item he could use.

It was an uncommon ring, [Toxic Royalty]. It would allow the user to infuse a single attack with Toxic damage, dealing an additional 100 Toxic damage per second for ten seconds, and had a cooldown of thirty seconds. The ring required level 10 to wear, so Gearme could not equip it right away, but this also meant it would continue scale in damage until he was level 35!

More DPS was always appreciated.

There were a few more items, and some of them could fetch a decent price, but there was nothing else Gearme felt would be useful to keep. However, this was only the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen's loot from her body, and the real prize for Gearme was the Rare Loot Pile. It was inside of a cave which the Toxic Mountain Lion Queen had been sleeping at the mouth of.

Loot Piles were like Treasure Cases, but exchanged the ability to be moved for having more overall items. Most players preferred finding treasure cases because they could grab-and-go quickly, allowing them to collect a large number of them while potentially avoiding combat altogether, whereas grabbing a Loot Pile without first killing whatever was guarding it was unlikely. Plus treasure cases were simply more inventory efficient.

There were other formats treasure could be found in as well, but Loot Piles and Treasure Cases were simply the two that would be encountered the most often, outside of whatever could be looted directly from monsters' corpses.

It appeared to be a pile of both monster and humanoid bones. This hinted towards the type of loot that would be weighted towards, which in this case would be armor. As a Rare Loot Pile, it emanated a blue glow. Furthermore, it was guaranteed to have at least one Rare item in it. Finally, the number [16] floated above it, indicating the maximum level of loot that could be found within.

Gearme ran into the loot pile!

Inside, he found not just one, but two Rare armor pieces he would be able to use!

[Firedrake Firewalkers] and [Branching Circlet], respectively boots and a head slot item. The prior provided an amazing 99 Reflexes and a fire resistance of 112 - the overall stat gain was about average for level 16 rare boots, but that it was concentrated all into a single statistic was what made it so good. 100 Reflexes was equivalent to 5% faster attack speed, though the minimum reduction in attack speed possible was in 0.01 second blocks.

At level 16, Gearme's natural Reflexes growth would put him at 26 Reflexes, so when adding in the item he would be at 125, which was a 0.25 attack speed improvement, meaning Gearme would be able to fire his oversized bow every 3.75 seconds!

And it would continue to scale with him up until level 66! Even though he would need to wait eight more levels to equip them, he did not mind one bit carrying them around until then.

The fire resistance was merely a bonus, nothing to get excited about.

The other item was a level 13 head item that, while not as great as the boots, was still good. It granted 15 Acuity, 10 Force, and 5 Stability, plus a passive [Skill], Natural Adaptation. This [Skill] allowed one to ignore the first 40 points of enemy damage reduction against elemental attacks. It was more of a caster item and would normally be a useless [Skill] for Gearme, but since he had just acquired the Toxic Royalty ring, it would allow its full power to shine, especially due to the unique properties of Toxic damage reduction.

It would also be useful if he later acquired other gear that helped him deal elemental damage, making such items more viable for him to equip. Gear could plug a lot of missing pieces in even hyper-focused classes like the Ballista, it was part of why Chan Si's strategy of concentrating her gear to a single character was so good.

As for the other items in the loot pile, some were worth enough to drop other items for so Gearme could maximize his income, but were not otherwise useful or notable.

Though that was the case, Gearme estimated that after selling everything, he would have enough money to buy a very important item.

===

Sunshine had already lost her pursuers, but still sold the logs at the nearby settlement to be on the safe side, plus set her new spawn point.

She considered there were two main possibilities as to why the players had been following her. In both cases, it would be due to the events with Koko in the elven starting area.

Possibility one was they wanted information from her about a potential secret quest. Even if they weren't hostile and were willing to pay for the information instead of threaten her, she had no information to give, so the best case was that it would be a waste of her time to talk with them. Lying wasn't an option, as anyone with even a hundredth of Chan Si's intelligence would be smart enough to request a system-verified copy of the quest information.

Possibility two was they were the type of players that had fun at others' expense. Griefers. Merely on the basis she had stood out a little, they could desire to kill her. Griefing other players was entirely allowed in GTO so long as one did not make harassing remarks or gestures, as determined by the moderation subsystem of the AI. If someone was truly dedicated to spawn camping you, and you had no friends to help you out, your only option besides death would be logging out.

Hidden levels and vigilantism made griefing relatively risky in GTO, so griefers would either exclusively target players they thought had few levels and connections, or get creative enough in their griefing methods that they wouldn't be discovered.

That being the case, Sunshine felt the possibility they were griefers was much lower than the first possibility.

Since she was no longer at risk of losing anything valuable if she died, Sunshine did not plan to continue taking longer routes to her destination and would simply accept the situation if they truly were griefers. The time loss if she died, multiplied what she estimated her risks of dying were, was less than the time lost by continuing to take cliff-based detours.

Sunshine carried on.

===

Ulna, through the constant dedicated crafting of bone arrows, had already managed to reach level 31 in fletching. It would have been more had she higher quality materials to work with rather than the pile of old bones, and it was starting to become too inefficient.

It would be some time before Sunshine arrived however, so even if Ulna jumped towards leveling to 2 now, there would be too much free time she would be unable to use. What she needed was a better source of bones that wouldn't cost her money and didn't require her to kill monsters. However, due to the relative lack of alts in the game, it was highly unlikely for there to be other players nearby farming enemies which she could use the bones of.

It was not important for Ulna to resolve this issue, but that did not mean she would give up on an opportunity to gain greater benefits!

Ulna would steal bones from the fortress. It was, after all, made from them. She would need to steal as many as she could and then book it before any npcs or guards caught her. Even uncaught this would cause a massive favor drop and she would pay for it later, but the additional fletching levels earlier would help her compound economic advantages, meaning Ulna was willing to do so.

Stealing the fortress bones was straightforward. She would just need to find a spot where there weren't npcs watching and begin filling her inventory. Her only limitation was that the bones would need to be of level 31 or lower for her to be able to craft them into bone arrows through fletching. To that point she had been crafting level 1 bones into arrows, so level 31 bones would provide a much greater fletching experience gain boost.

However, stealing the bones would be slow, and she would need to be on constant lookout for any wandering guards, because if she did not begin running the second they saw her, she would definitely be killed.

But, she had two advantages!

First, by using her climbing skills she could find a lone perch on the fortress with few patrols. By then analyzing the patrol routes before dedicating to her plan, she could time it optimally. Unfortunately she could not simply stop stealing before guards arrived and then continue after they left, as the guards would notice the missing bones and investigate.

Second, her improved sight would allow her to spot guards from afar before they spotted her, meaning her actual reaction window to escape would be about a second longer, enough for the plan to be practical, rather than suicidal.

Thus, she got to work finding a spot and analyzing the patrols.