“Something a matter, hun?”

“Yeah," Henry replied, his voice flat and despondent, "I don't see any Earthfriend trainers.”

“Oh, that...” The woman's expression darkened as she summoned a page.

Henry caught the forming notice out of the air and read.

'To all prospective Earthfriends,

Training is temporarily postponed, as all members of The Society of Suchi Earthfriends have succumbed to a mysterious curse. As for now, there is no ETA for when trainers will be able to return to their regularly scheduled services. We encourage all willing Offworlders to meet us at the Suchi Earthfriend Habitat to assist in finding the cure.

Signed, Jazmin Nagy, Society Archfriend.'

Quest Title: The Sickness of The Soil

Description: Hark, Scholar of The Speaking Heart, Son of The Three! A curse lays waste to the Earthfriends of this ailing realm. Your Many-Ears detect a note in their malady of more ominous machinations. Investigate. Bring to them to The Starscribe's reprieve.

Henry groaned. "How unlucky..."

Usually, he ignored the quests the game spammed his overlevelled character. Alas, this issue couldn't be dismissed so easily. Of the game's 12 base Classes, the one he'd picked for the duelling tournament happened have been an Earthfriend.

His first Class choice for the wager would've been a Cutthroat, what he'd played during his days as The Cripple. The only problem was that the Cutthroat martial art he'd practised couldn't be replicated in a noob tournament.

Back then, he'd created his own style after a vagabond adventure studying under an eclectic mix of experts. It'd been called The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo.

Komodo dragons, before they went extinct, had had a fascinating way of hunting their prey. To defeat their prey, the much larger and much stronger water buffalo, they would bite the beast, then back off and wait for weeks while the wound festered from a toxic milieu of bacteria harboured in the komodo's mouth. Following this ethos, Henry would dart in and out of fights, shooting his more mechanically-gifted opponents with poison darts, then retreating while his poisons ravaged their health bar.

In addition to poisons, he also exploited a medley of overpowered Legendary items - hence, 'Resourceful'. The final 'Strategy' component of the title alluded to Twenty Tools, an in-game martial art based around intricate multi-weapon juggling techniques that served as the keystone of Henry's own martial art, connecting his poisons and Legendary items together.

Unfortunately, The Strategy wouldn't work in Henry's recruitment tournament because Tier-0 Cutthroats didn't have poison-dart abilities and gear standardisation ruled out the use of Legendaries.

Thus, Henry, while brainstorming how to win the wager, had looked elsewhere. After careful consideration, he'd settled on the Earthfriend Class, druidic shapeshifters who used a mixture of forest, bestial, elemental, and cosmic magic.

They had a hippy, vegan aesthetic that irritated him to no end. From a duelling standpoint, though, Earthfriends had the varied, complex kind of skillset that suited his talents. While most classes had 5 skills at tier-0, Earthfriends had 13. Mixing these with their animal transformations, one could produce thousands of strategic possibilities. This flexibility should allow him to partially replicate his old style and, coupled with Henry cheating by anonymously documenting the capability and playstyle of all the tournament competitors, he could tailor-make counters to his opponents as he had in the past. Tentatively, he'd given this new Earthfriend style the rather snazzy name of The Strategy of The Informed Swiss Army Knife.

But none of that grand plan would be possible if he couldn't unlock the Class because all its trainers were decommissioned by some magical illness.

Reading the notice on the curse, Henry immediately thought back on how the three private trainers he'd arranged earlier had been decommissioned by the same curse. His mind also turned upon the other odd events packed into this morning, the weapon-smuggling merchant, the corrupt official, the cannibals.

Something smelled funky, and it wasn't just the unwashed noobs huddling behind him, shouting at him to move along. Even in this awfully-designed game, this level of coincidence inconvenience was abnormal.

His carefully-plotted plans hindered, his chosen Class barred from access, was Saana itself conspiring against him? Was it trying to stop history's greatest duellist from placing top 10 in an amateur tournament?

Possibly...

The administrator, not seeing him respond and guessing he was disappointed, tried to offer some consolation. “Shamans are pretty similar."

Henry's face contorted in disgust.

Shamans...they were almost as horrible as Earthfriends. Only turbo-noobs and writers of plebian swill would pick that Class.

“Let's not even talk about Shamans," said Henry with a profound prejudice. "Do you know how the Earthfriends picked up the curse, specifically?”

The administrator shook her head. “Not a clue."

Another NPC registering players one-table down piped up. “The Society’s dungeon team were exploring a tomb to the north. From them, it’s spread to the others.”

Henry questioned them further, noting how quickly the curse had been transmitted and the symptoms of lethargy and fever. Thanking the two for the information, he then dragged the donkey away while concocting a solution in his Mental Library.

He didn't give one grain of shit about these hippies, who probably got sick due to poor hygiene, and he could have revised his plans and switched Classes. However, it just offended him that such a trivial nuisance would dare to step in the way of his duelling plans.

A curse in a Starting Zone...what an absolute joke.

His class specialised in researching bizarre phenomena, discovering their causes, inventing fixes. With the tools available to a Tier-5 Scholar, a Tier-0 Starting Zone quest presented no more challenge to him than a child's multiplication table. The single price was his time - which was, admittedly, quite precious, no one in this zone being able to afford his hourly consulting fee.

Solving this quest should be straightforward enough. Henry would gather a bit more information on the curse along with samples for testing, he'd formulate a treatment using his knowledge in Alchemy, and, in all his charity, he'd have the cure manufactured and distributed without even demanding a single copper, the expenses trivial for someone as filthy rich as himself.

The majority of this labour wouldn't need to be performed directly by himself, all but forty minutes or so being delegatable to assistants he would hire. Thus, to maximise time-efficiency, while others did the bulk of grunt work, he could simultaneously complete the tutorial with a non-Earthfriend trainer. For the first five levels, all players were technically a generic Adventurer class before they picked a specialisation, and it shouldn't be a problem for him to switch after the Earthfriends were healthy and back in training shape.

Easy. His plans had barely been disrupted.

At the corner of the plaza, an old NPC was selling savoury pancakes. Amongst the crowd, his attire stood out, with dozens of colourful bead-necklaces and a patchwork blanket for a robe. Dreadlocks hanging down to his waist were interlaced with shells that chimed when his head shifted.

Henry approached the man and asked him a question in an in-game language. “Aadan?”

The pancake seller cracked a smile, a surge of pleasure at hearing his native tongue spoken so far from Volefa. “Haa.”

“Iskuday, iskuday!” Henry clasped the seller's hands in a warm greeting. “Jiran haddii...”

He continued to chatter in this foreign language for a bit.

Officially, his role in his guild had been a linguist. Having 'wasted' so many hours in the game reading imported novels as Tomes of Rapid Language Absorption, his character had come to comprehend all of the major tongues and a couple hundred minor ones. The skill helped when asking NPCs for favours.

Following a quick exchange of friendly words, Henry's tone took on a sour edge and he began tugging his blood-stained clothes away from himself in annoyance as though a malevolent barber had dumped the itchy remnants of a haircut down his collar. When he came to a sudden pause, the seller squinted at him for a moment. Then, with a casual shrug, the man stripped, trading his clothes for a pouch of jingling coins.

Next, to establish a base of operations, Henry rode west from the newbie spawnpoint towards the tutorial area.

With the donkey pumping its stumpy legs at a surprisingly speedy gallop, The Slums soon disappeared behind him. The run-down shacks gave way to an open area of yellow grass interspersed with acacias too undernourished and small for any practical use. Ahead, the land sloped down towards Suchi's single river. The river's eastern bank was approached by a gradient of lightly-wooded forest thickening into jungle; since the region lacked the rainfall to support this much foliage, artificial irrigation sustained the habitat, which housed the monsters farmed in the tutorial. The western bank was similarly forested but, in stark contrast to The Slums, dotted with clay structures; that side qualified as an autonomous exclave for Central City, where players and NPCs were permitted to construct permanent buildings, every dwelling in The Slums needing to be flammable by law. To the north, poking the tip of its tongue between the forested riverbank and The Slums, was the miles of savannah nothingness, the yawning sea of dry grass.

He followed a dirt road dividing the forest and the plains, connecting the sub-sections of the tutorial area. Eventually, a suitable spot appeared, an isolated tree growing about a hundred metres on the savannah side. He hitched the donkey by the side of the road, unafraid of any passers-by stealing the decrepit-looking beast. Henry then stealthed over to the solitary tree.

Hiding behind its trunk, he waited for a group of trainees in the middle of the tutorial to pass along the road.

Once they were out of sight, he squatted and, removing a glove from his hand, placed his palm flat on the bloodred dirt, whose sunbaked heat was scalding to the touch.

He closed his eyes. His hand suddenly began to glow, and a swarm of tiny translucent motes engulfed his fingers like a colony of ants emerging to protect their nest. A close examination of these glittering motes would reveal them to be shaped like hatchets and pickaxes, tools for shaping the land.

Their shape represented the magic of Landworkers, another of the game's Civilian Classes, with spells for terrain manipulation, land exploration, and natural resource collection.

Henry, in addition to being a Tier-5 Scholar, was also a Tier-4 Landworker.

Saana's multi-classing system was somewhat convoluted.

For players like himself, who'd selected for his primary profession a Civilian Class, he could level the others as secondary professions until they were one Tier lower. Thus, as a Tier 5-2 or level 110 Scholar, Henry was additionally a Tier 4-2 Peopleworker, a Tier 4-1 Farmer, a Tier 4-2 Woodworker, etc. All in all, he'd levelled all of the game's other 15 Civilian classes to either Tier 4-1 or Tier 4-2, since having these allowed him to create more believable false identities, and sometimes the skills proved useful, like now.

But even with these levels, he wouldn't compare to someone who'd properly trained in those other Classes. Levels could be gained as long as one had the money to afford materials to burn, but all Civilian classes had aspects that were dependent on raw player skill. A Metalworker who could design more beautiful weapons would 'please the gods' and their swords would be granted extra stats for the same material tier. Likewise, a less experienced Scholar, without Henry's insider knowledge, might have spent five times the Universal Productivity to identify that the driver had been a cultist. Saana's Civilian classes were as deep and skill-based as its Martial classes; mastering any one would take longer than a lifetime.

This current Landworker technique was used by sappers to build underground bunkers during battle. During Henry's battle against this random noob curse, this covert space would serve as a drop-off point for materials later.

As the axe-shaped motes were transmitted between the earth and the skin of his palm, his vision slowly filled with a 3-dimensional image of the ground radiating under his hand, from the red-clay topsoil infiltrated by the network of the tree's roots, to the harder sediments beneath.

In one thought, he carved into the replicated image the layout of an underground chamber. The next second, a torrent of motes flooded down his arm into the soil, conveying the design to the earth, which began to groan in pain like an overfed stomach. Keeping his palm pressed to the ground, Henry, with the serene boredom of one who'd done this too many times to count, shuffled back four steps, right in time to avoid his head being torn off by a blood-red geyser, the soil belching out several tons of clay and stone. The geyser, ripping towards the sky, changed its trajectory suddenly in sync with a flick of Henry's free-hand, twisting like a dragon. It swooped in the direction of the road, over the head of the spooked donkey on the other side, and into the forest, where it discarded its contents in an explosion of dust.

As soon as the geyser's tail finished flying out of the newly formed hole in the ground, Henry sighed and leapt straight into the darkness.