Bacon sizzled beautifully on my frying pan. I absentmindedly moved them around as they fried. Bacon would certainly take a bit of the annoyance I was feeling. Nothing like grease and cholesterol to brighten your day. Or night. What time was it anyway? Maybe it was a good thing that I was killed in the game.

“I didn’t even know how that fucker killed me.” I sighed and flipped the pieces of bacon. I got killed so fast that I didn't even have time to read the details that my skill [Hunter's Instinct] provided for that monster. Did Norman and the others know about the Lord Mirdabon? It seemed that Norman has encountered it before. So running away was not a bright idea, but rather it was more prudent to log out and wait for it to go away. It was very dangerous that it looked like a normal Mirdabon. Guess I should be more careful with pulling Mirdabon mobs. Maybe there's a nasty surprise among them.

I logged out instead of waiting to be resurrected in the village. It was better to simply wait out the stat penalty and use my time for work. I grunted as I remembered that I lost a lot of rings and that I would need to use more rings to repair all my gear.

At least I have bacons.

And eggs. I loved eggs that were fried till their sides were crispy and the yolk was cooked halfway through. My sisters always wanted soft and slightly runny eggs. We always got into a fight back when we were kids on how to cook egg. I wonder what they're doing now? Maybe I should visit them sometime. But they were outside the country so it was not going to be a quick visit.

I inhaled deeply the wonderful scent of bacon.

“Why the fuck am I cooking bacon and eggs for dinner?” I shrugged. It wasn’t like it was illegal. I should know. I was a lawyer. Pretty sure bacon and eggs for dinner was not punishable by law.

Grinning, I picked up the bacons from the frying pan. Bacons? Is that the plural form of bacon? I stared intently at the bacon or bacons. I might as well refer to them as pieces of bacon to be safe.

I went to my living room, activated the holo-projector, leaned back on my chair and started to munch on my dinner. I was already feeling better from the taste of bacon, bacons, or pieces of bacon.

The Mardukryon skill tree was displayed in the middle of my living room. I smiled as I glanced around. It was as if I was in some kind of control center in a sci-fi movie. What would my younger self say when he could see me lounging around in my unit with a giant holo-projector, showing the skills of my character in a game while eating bacon? He would be proud.

I chuckled. “Okay, what should I be doing here.” I waved my hand to zoom in on the skill tree. “The placement of the attack skills and the defense skills were so annoying. I guess they made it that way to bring out the importance of the other classes? Or so that one can’t easily make a Mardukryon that’s good at defense and offense at the same time. Or maybe, to make people more creative.”

Defensive skills; support skills during battle, including healing; offensive skills; and lastly profession related skills, that were also sort of supportive, like the stat buffs of food cooked, for example. Given that the groups of skills were arranged clockwise in that order, I couldn’t easily pick defensive and offensive skills because I would be going both ways from the center. Or I could pick progress up the defensive skill tree then travel along the curve of the circle to reach the offensive cluster, but that would take too much skill points.

Progressing both of them from the center would also take a lot of skill points because, technically, I would be leveling two skill trees.

My original plan was to spend all my skill points in defensive skills in my skill tree while picking up jobs or professions or skills that would make up for my weak offensive aspect. The first choice was, of course, picking the Hunter-Warrior class and go for the sub-class that Norman was using. I would be hard while hitting hard. But that’s already compromising. I wouldn’t be a tank, in the strict sense of the word. I would be a hybrid of sorts. As with everything, someone specialized in something would be better at doing that thing compared to someone who does a little bit of everything.

Then my next choice would be the Urus sub-class of the Hunter-Warriors. Obviously tanky. But they were the tanky support type. The ones who tanked bosses while their whole team killed the boss. That would be nearest to my goal of being unkillable, except for one aspect, I won’t be able to kill people effectively. I would be travelling alone as well. If I had a group of friends travelling with me, then I could go with pure defense while others would kill the monsters. I could actually do that if I just stayed in a main city full of players and join parties looking for a tank. However, to increase my strength as a Mardukryon, I needed to travel and find the other villages. And, I still won't be able to kill someone in PvP unless they were dumb.

“So it’s a dilemma, huh?” I looked at my food. Picking up my spoon, I sliced off the egg white. I always eat those first, then leave the yolk for last, which I eat in one bite. I don’t know if this was the normal way to eat eggs.

Well, that was how I analyzed the situation at first. But watching Norman fight made me think of something. I waved my hand and a table rose up from the floor. I set down my plate and went to my bedroom to get the notebook where I had written down my goals in life.

The goals were written in the last few pages of the notebook, but the rest of the notebook had notes when I used to play games.

I sat back down in front of my holo-projector and flipped through the yellowed pages of the notebook. Aw, my handwriting looked so bad. At least now, I write in an illegible way that looked professional.

I shouldn’t get narrowed down in my thinking that the only way to go was purely defensive skills. There were many mechanics I did not know yet in the game. Some creativity and imagination could produce something that sounded stupid but actually worked. If people limited their thinking to what was “normal” many advances in human history wouldn’t have been made. For example, we wouldn’t have milk from cows if the guy who discovered it didn’t think about grabbing a cow’s tits. The real discovery of cow milk as food for humans probably didn’t go like that…but I made my point.

Tanks didn't have to be heavy armored meat bags.

I smiled as I came upon my notes on an evasion tank. Most of the computations were done by Arise. He was one of the people I used to play with a long time ago. I couldn’t even remember his character or what his real name was. That was kind of sad. I wondered what happened to all of them after I stopped playing. I was working part time jobs at that time so I never hang out with them anymore after my dad died.

Anyway, Arise, whatever his real name was, was one of those people who tried to discover the formulas of certain skills in a game. In every game, there would be people like that, figuring out the mechanics of skills, figuring out how accurate skills were. Companies rarely make known the formulas for the skills in their games. It was up to these kind of people to figure it out, through actual tests, using the same skills in the same environment hundreds of times, compiling data submitted by the community; you’ve got to admire these people. I mean, no one was paying them to do those things.

As far as I could decipher from my abhorrent handwriting, we were figuring out the best ratio for evasion and shield block. This showed that tanks don’t have to be hard. An evasion tank was also feasible.

There was also a leech tank from my notes. It was from a different game we played, apparently. I ran my finger down the computations, trying to make sense of them. It looked like we were trying to figure out how high a life should go so that I won’t get one shotted by a boss but low enough that I could instantly leech back all the damage I took so that as long I don’t get killed in one shot, I would be able to stay alive. Trading off gear that gave health to gear that added leech.

What made me rethink my mindset of simply going for purely the defensive skill tree was the skill Norman used to tank the Mirdabullys.

I closed my notebook and looked for the skill Norman used. I didn’t know if it was a Hunter-Warrior skill or something in the racial skill tree.

“Ah, found it,” I said. “Berserker’s Last Stand…getting low health, blah blah. If I remembered correctly, Balasi also used this skill. Doubles armor and regeneration, ah, so it’s like that. That’s it?”

I zoomed out and then looked for other skills connected to it. There appeared to be smaller clusters within the offensive skills cluster. Near [Bersker’s Last Stand] were other skills that were connected to having low health. Things like increased magic resistance and added damage. Which was probably why Norman was so strong and so tanky when he faced the Mirdabullys. Plus skills from his class.

Checking the [Berseker’s Last Stand] once again, I found that it has attack speed and movement speed penalty. But that would be cancelled out by having faster attacks because of [Critical Frenzy]. You could have good synergies of skills depending on your strategy. It was stupid of me to restrict my thinking to one aspect of being a tank. Maybe I should review my notes when I was a kid just to have that feel again of imaginative thinking when it came to builds. It has been so long when I played games that I was getting rusty.

"I should probably watch videos of people playing," I said, chuckling. "That would give me ideas." I checked the skill tree again if I could get inspired to do some builds.

There was another path in the offensive skill tree that leaned towards leeching life. Obviously, a leeching sort of playstyle does not work well with the strategy of getting your life low to get insane bonuses.

“I really shouldn’t think inside the box of what a conventional tank should be.” My notebook was already full. I should buy a new one. For now, I should just have a clear goal of what I wanted to achieve.

I snapped my hand and a holo-pen appeared. With a wave, a notepad materialized in front of me. “Hmmm. So, first things first. I want to be able to stand for…uh…ten minutes? Maybe ten minutes. I think that’s enough to laugh at everyone’s face for not being able to kill me.” I wrote down ‘tank everything for ten minutes.’ And I used ‘everything’ because I knew that I should be able to prepare for all kinds of skills in Nornyr. "And second would be able to kill other people in PvP after laughing at them. That's about it, I guess? All other things would flow from those goals."

This goal alone would not allow me to become certain types of tanks. An evasion tank would suck because you simply couldn't stand and let people hit you. Once something goes through your evasion, you're dead. And there might be skills that increase accuracy. I also couldn't be a leech tank. If I was to stand and laugh at people hitting me, obviously, I couldn't run around to chase them to lifesteal. And what if I couldn't leech life from anyone, if for example I was disabled by skills?

For now, I should join other parties to get more ideas. I still didn't choose a class because I don't want to foreclose the possibility of getting other skills from other classes using some hidden way. If I already picked a Hunter-Warrior with the same sub-class as Norman, would Zaido have taught me [Pyro Shell]? I don't know, but I'd rather have that window of opportunity open.

What was important was I wrote down my goals. For what was written by Herald Stone, would in time be fulfilled.

My head jerked as my phone rang. I always set my phone on vibrate except if a certain number called.

I walked to the room where my phone was located with a frown on my face. “So Eclairs is using the phone I gave her,” I said. If Eclairs used her WeeCee to call me, my phone would vibrate. I gave her a phone to call me if there was something extremely important matter that needed my immediate attention. “What is it now?” I said, picking up the phone and pressing the answer button.

“Is this the residence of Mr. Stone? Sir, would you like to avail of our promo—,” Eclairs said.

“Is it bad?”

“I wasn’t finished with my joke…but yeah, it’s bad. I'm sending a video.”

“Wait, I’ll go to my HP.”

She sent over a video to my holo-projector over the internet. “Is it there yet?”

“Yeah,” I said, pressing the play button. I paced around the room as a news clip played. From the time stamp, it was news from a couple of hours before. A breaking news, one of those things that doesn’t show during their time slot but rather take the time of some ads in between shows.

“Police have found the body of a forty-year-old reporter for the Daily Informer, Andrey Matthews, inside his apartment early this morning.” It was a news report from a local news station in Mervell City. A quaint little city on the tip of our country. “Burnt marks were found on the back of his neck, around his spinal port. Authorities are still not sure if it was an accident or foul play was—”

I stopped the video. “He was using JYE’s VR pod?” I asked her.

“Yep. They’re not saying it’s the cause because it looks like the spinal port was the one that snuffed him. Burning the brain stem probably. But he was indeed using JYE’s pod. SmartEngine filtered this off the internet. That AI is good at finding stuff.”

“Well, we’re paying good money for it. This is probably going nationwide on the national news later and maybe even international news.” I continued playing the video. "People love to watch death because of gadgets."

The reporter on the news was reporting in front of a suburban house with police in the background. There was also an ambulance in the background. “—here is his neighbor who found his body.” The reporter turned to a man beside her.

The man said, “I just came home from walking my dog when I heard screams from Andrey’s house. I quickly rushed to his house. The door’s unlocked and all, so I was able to enter no problem. When I saw him, he was already lifeless on the floor with the back of his neck smoking.”

“What device was he connected to?"

"Uh, he's not connected to anything. But he has that fancy JYE pod turned on. But he wasn't near it. He was out of his room where he collapsed."

I closed the video and inhaled. Even if it’s most likely not the fault of JYE, some twisting of words could make it look bad. Several years ago, there was a huge recall over a certain brand of WeeCees that malfunctioned once implanted. It caused several arms to get infected and even had to be amputated. The company offered bionic arms as replacement...but obviously, that doesn't look good any way you look at it in an advertisement stand point. People might panic over this if it was insinuated that the JYE pod caused it. "I'm going to Mervell," I said over the phone to Eclairs.

“Already got you a ticket. In two hours. I booked you for the cargo hold, because it’s more spacious. I thought you would appreciate being kept with all the cargo so that you could lord over them.”

“Thanks, Eclairs,” I said dryly. “Maybe we should start doing that employee of the month thing that other companies do. I’ll post your picture in the lobby because you’re such a model employee.” I turned the phone on loud speaker and proceeded to look for a suitcase. How long would I stay in Mervell? Maybe three or four days just to make sure.

“Sir, please don’t. I know you’ll edit my background. You’ll put hell or demons or something.”

“Employee of the month will get parking space for their chariot of fire and brimstone. Are you sure you don’t want that? Think about it and tell me when I get back from Mervell.”

“I’ll think about it sir,” Eclairs said in a mocking serious tone. “And I’ve sent you e-ticket over.”

“Thank you, maidservant,” I said, ending the call.

Mervell here I come. I sincerely hope that JYE's pod didn't kill that guy.