"WHAT THE HECK!?” Caramel stared in shock at Henry in the field of massacred monkeys.

This...this wasn't normal even at their level...the lightning arcs had a 1.5-metre max jump range...they jumped to one target at a...so the monsters had all been arranged...but some of them were still moving...what the?

Henry, noticing her reaction, rubbed his chin as if he’d received the answer to a long-standing experiment. “Interesting, it seems that the extra challenge of guiding teams remotely based on theoretical data has indeed stretched my spatial reasoning skills to their limits. Very well, perhaps this will do as a training method for the raiding teams.”

He hadn’t really been thinking about it. After dealing with the horde of wolves, this sort of mass-farming had become as mindless for him as a toddler’s connect-the-dot puzzle. It was just geometry.

Caramel clutched her head, blown away further by a sudden realisation. “YOU’RE LEVEL 4!”

“Nope. I’m level 5.”

Henry'd dinged instantly, having performed all that to save absorbing XP from them one by one.

“D-do," Caramel stuttered, "D-do you...have you got a Legendary equipped that...that replicates ?”

Henry snapped his fingers in irritation. “Damn, you caught me. The Supreme Cheat Magnet is exposed yet again.”

He hadn't. Why would he bring that Legendary to Suchi? It couldn’t be used in the tournament and completing the tutorial should never, reasonably, have been this difficult.

But after so long in isolation, his ability to deceive had turned to garbage.

Caramel was in disbelief.

To pull that off with was one thing, but at the normal game speed...

“Commander abilities for timing?” she asked.

Henry hadn't used those either; he'd just been listening to music.

“Hahaha. Of course not,” he tried lying with the truth, “but I guess I did have the help of a song. You don't need any of those fancy augmentation gizmos when you reach my level, the level of an Ultrapatrician. This is what it means to be the best of the best of the best.”

Caramel ran her hand down her tiger mask, her head shaking back and forth, as she felt a cold chill shoot down her spine.

In her state of bewilderment, she uploaded a clip of the fight to their inner circle's chatroom.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Dudes, look at this...what the...this is how he farmed to Level 5...TO Level 5...someone explain please.

Henry, seeing the message pop up, swore. “Kara, are you still drunk? Delete it!”

But it was too late.

He received three private messages in an instant trying to blackmail a set of Legendaries out of him, the smarter members having worked out the supreme cheat magnet implication upon recognising the rapier.

And so it had begun.

Caramel apologised. “Sorry...but let me...stop and think and...huh?”

Henry sighed.

But those were problems to deal with later. For now, he mass blocked the inner circle.

Moving around the area to different groups of Psychic Shadow Monkeys, he tested several methods for triggering a warp-portal, showing none of his reluctance from earlier in the tutorial.

Shouting, clicking threats, and mass slaughter - all these failed.

Wondering how he might scare a monster that had no emotions, he cast fear-inducing spells, like , , and , but, as he’d known from his research, the monsters were immune.

Finding no solution, he and the dazed Caramel split up to search the territory for anomalies.

Simultaneously, he reviewed materials in his Mental Library about the creatures, from histories to poetry. When that produced zilch, he browsed the game’s forums. There were no mentions of a monkey equivalent to the wolf invasion, only posts from noobs who’d logged back in and were wondering where the wolves had gone.

Time passed, the sunrise prophesying the end of this quest drew ever closer, and yet he found no way to activate the next step.

With minutes left till dawn, he messaged Caramel asking what she was up to.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Checking out the Spawning Cave. It's creepy as heck.

His guildmate had come to terms with his rapid progress by marking it as another of his inexplicable miracles, Henry being a mutant.

-Bob From San Francisco: What led you there?

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Shrug. Instinct? Boredom?

Henry pulled out a coin and flipped it, then ordered the donkey to speed to her location.

Outside the cave, her horse was tethered to a pylon inscribed with magenta runes. These Spawning Caves, built through a joint effort from several Civilian Classes, used magic to speed up the birth and growth rates of monsters, bolstering their numbers to the size necessary to sustain the player base. It was this practice that The Wolf Empress had raged at in her rant.

At the entrance, the donkey, looking back at Henry, flicked its nose towards the horse to indicate its reluctance to enter.

He sneered. “Your highness's legs aren't that long. You can run around the cave. Continue!”

They ventured inwards, the inside having a musty smell of animal sweat and mould.

He messaged Caramel for her coordinates.

As he received her reply, the walls of the cave suddenly began to shake violently.

A hole opened up beneath him and the donkey.

The pair plummeting, Henry quickly ripped a stat scroll, saving the donkey from splattering a moment later as they struck ground.

They'd landed in a pitch-black chamber with hundreds of rose-pink dots surrounding them.

He brought out a Lightstone, its glow lighting up rows upon rows of the female-type Psychic Shadow Monkeys. Their bellies were as swollen as their brains, and through the translucent skin, one could make out the pink forms of foetuses.

Henry wore a disgusted look.

Did this quest want him to massacre a bunch of pregnant monkeys? That was a bit...

Hoping it wouldn't come to that, he rode the donkey around the chamber, inspecting the pregnant monkeys for clues as to how to progress. On close observation, their bodies and faces varied in shape and design, just as a human's did.

At the clip-clopping of hooves, a foetus in the belly of one monkey awakened. The little creature squirmed around and, seeing a figure moving amongst its kind, watched it curiously.

Henry, noticing the tiny, glowing eyes following him unlike the rest of the inert monsters, trotted over to the foetus. "Are you psychic, too, little bud? Don't worry, I'm not seriously going to murder you or your mum. If that's the price, I choose failure."

The foetus staring up at him blinked a few times, then it extended its little hand, stretching its mother's belly further.

Henry dismounted and reached out.

As his palm made contact with the tiny monkey's, a click rang in his head, followed by a confusing, rambling message.

"The Tunnelways of The Blueskins were marvellously convenient. Using them for transport, it was only two steps to travel from Lifa to Cavalry, three to go on to Halford. Four and a half more and you’d end up at the scar on the second moon. Up there, it was as empty as it was cold. I don’t recommend it."

And with that, a portal swallowed him and the donkey, sending them off to fight the final boss.