The group walks carefully through the forest, trying to minimize the sound their footsteps make, but the crunching of leaves still regularly breaks the silence. It isn’t long until they find the next group of mobs, which is, to no surprise, a group of hobgoblins. They huddle around to plan, as the monsters haven’t noticed the group with all the grunting they’ve been making. Sen gives a short rundown on hobgoblins to the group.

“Okay, hobgoblin bones are a hell of a lot tougher than goblins, so with your small swords you’re probably going to have trouble getting through them, so focus on their necks, or try to get in between their ribs. Other than that, they’re basically the same as goblins. Stay together and we’ll be fine.”

Everyone nods, and they rush the hobgoblins, trying to get a few kills from surprise. The hobgoblins don’t notice them until they’re within a few meters, and start turning around just as the group reaches them. Swords start lancing towards their necks, and four of them go down instantly before they’ve gotten themselves together. Sen swings his sword in a wide arc as the hobgoblins start to charge back, catching two of them in the neck, feeling quite a bit of resistance, his body enhancement barely allowing him to cleave through the spine of one, getting caught on the other.

Sen continues to use wide sweeps, keeping the hobgoblins with their small clubs from getting within a good range of him. Every now and then one will get brave enough to try and charge him, and he either catches it in one of the sweeps, or knocks it back with the pommel of his sword, making it easy prey for the next blow. Everyone else is doing quite well for themselves as well.

Xue is almost dancing, her sword flashing in and out, intercepting the ironwood clubs and slipping out to spill blood, most often from their necks. Every now and then she uses some skill that seems to make her sword twist in an unnatural manner, and each time she uses it she reaps a life. Lynna and Jennifer are working together, taking turns having one defend and the other attack, picking off a hobgoblin whenever one of them commits to striking at one of them. Their skill seems to be footwork based, as they seem to slide from side to side in order to cover each other.

It isn’t long until the hobgoblin’s morale breaks, but Sen and the others don’t let a single one get away, using body enhancement to chase them down, Lynna and Jennifer using their footwork ability to chase them down far faster than Xue and Sen.

At this point, Sen’s really interested in learning some of those skills, and makes a determination to pick some out from his school as soon as he gets back. They finish the fight with only one wound where Lynna had been barely clipped with a club, and wait a while for their breath to calm down before continuing.

“So how exactly are we supposed to be able to take a break in this forest? We never know when we’re going to be attacked.”

To Sen’s surprise, it’s Tir that answers his question. “It’s normal to have at least one array master to put up an illusion array where you can rest.” Sen tilts his head, maybe he shouldn’t have dismissed arrays so quickly after all.

Apparently, everyone’s guide has informed them about arrays, as Lynna decides to ask about it. “So who wants to learn arrays?”

Sen thinks for a moment, then decides he is going to try and drag Julie into joining the group. She seems to be very interested in the array class, and with her intelligence, she’ll likely understand arrays far faster than Sen will. He mentions the thought to the group, and Lynna seems to be quite happy. She’d enjoyed talking with Julie whenever she came over, even if the three of them spent most of their time together playing games.

Xue is the first one to notice the sounds, or rather, the lack of sounds all of a sudden. The next thing they hear is a slight crunching of leaves, and something speeds towards them fast enough that it’s a blur rather than a clear image. It charges at Sen, and he only has time to interpose his sword’s handle between them as it bites down. It’s jaws close down on his sword handle, its teeth tearing at the edges of his fingers. Sen will have winced if he wasn’t forced to have the pain setting at ten percent, but as is it barely tickles him.

The rest of the group reacts in unison, turning towards what they could now see was a larger spine panther with jagged ridges on each of the spines sticking from its back. It twists around as the swords stab towards it, taking only glancing blows. It lets go of the sword handle as it dodges, and dives away into the speckled light of the forest.

The group forms up as a square, their backs to each other, and wait for it to come to them. The unnaturally silent forest remains, showing it is still there, and it is a tense few minutes before it speeds towards Xue, launching itself from the trunk of one of the trees. Xue notices it in time, and uses her odd sword skill, as her blade seems to twist towards the large spine panther of its own volition.

The large spine panther is caught by surprise, twisting its body in midair to avoid it, but still taking a deep cut in its flank. The twist knocks it off target, and it lands in front of Jennifer, who slashes forward with her sword, catching it with another glancing blow. The spine panther seems to be enraged at this point, as rather than trying for another ambush, it simply charges towards Jennifer, who is taking steps back as fast as she can with her movement skill, struggling to keep her sword in between the two of them.

Xue and Sen arrive to the sides of the panther at the same time, her lunging with her sword, and Sen attacking with an overhead chop so as to not hit Jennifer. The panther, paying more attention to Xue than Sen, dodges her pierce, but puts itself squarely in his swing, which cuts in about a quarter of the way into its body before being stopped by the tough flesh.

The blow leaves a blue line through where its spine is, and as Sen rips his sword from the monster with a kick to it, the light fades from its eyes. It starts to dissolve into blue motes of light not long after.

“Tir, what the hell was that thing?”

“A mature spine panther, ranked E”

“That was only a rank E? I can’t wait to see how tough the higher rank monsters are going to be.” Sen has a grin slowly spreading across his face.

“Well we know we can fight above our rank together, we were just lucky it was alone,” Lynna chips in.

“I’m just glad you guys got it before it got me,” Jennifer says.

The group takes another short break, then continues on their hunt, making sure to hang in the edges of the forest, as they don’t want to start running into too many higher level monsters. They run into a few more groups of hobgoblins, then something that Sen really is hoping won’t exist appears. The first sign of them is a webbing covered area, white, thick strands of it appearing between the trees in beautiful patterns. They’re forced to cut through in order to continue, ruining the beautiful patterns, and they start regretting not bringing some fire to burn through the webs.

The webbing gets thicker and thicker as they approach, and their swords start to get sticky from the constant cutting of the webbing. Eventually, they come across a group of the denizens of the web filled world.

The’re giant spiders, if spiders had ten legs, each tipped with a sharp spike, and had a maw full of sharp teeth. They stand about a meter high, their fuzz covered bodies making disturbing movements, almost like their limbs are twisting as they walk. Sen shivers. Gore he can handle, but bugs should never get that big.

The others give him a funny look as he takes a step back, seeing as he’s always the first to charge into the fight, but the group charges towards the spiders regardless, Sen lagging a bit behind. The spiders let loose an unnatural scream as they come, and scatter around before starting to spit some green liquid at them.

As the group dodges, the green liquid lands on the ground and trees, making a hissing sound and bubbling as it starts to dissolve anything it hits. Sen shudders as he reaches his first spider and cleaves his sword towards the connection of the two halves of its body. The spider reacts quickly, pushing away, and only losing two legs, which dissolve into blue motes of light not long after.

For once, Sen is grateful that he has the content filter on, as he doesn’t want to see what color these monstrosities bleed. He steps forward as the wounded spider thing retreats, swinging his sword in a wide arc, his body strengthening accelerating his sword to beyond humanly possible.

The spider tries to jump above the swing, but is a half beat too slow, losing most of its remaining legs, and Sen stabs downwards with his sword, piercing it where its brain should be. As he pulls his sword from the horror movie reject, he looks around, seeing that his hesitation has cost him in the kill count area, only Lynna not having killed two of them.

His competitive nature starts to override his disgust, and he rushes towards another of the spiders, which makes that disturbing scream just before spitting another glob of acid at him. He takes a step to the side, dodging the liquid, and lunges forward, spitting the spider onto his sword, but only halfway, making him annoyed again at how tough even level F mobs are without body strengthening. Normally, fighting up ten levels is simple enough for him in most games, but here, he probably wouldn’t even be able to fight anything higher than rank E with his current stats and skills.

They finish the slaughter of the spiders, and Sen takes as much distance as he can between the dissolving bodies of spiders and his resting spot as he can. Xue is giving him a funny look, as if she can’t believe someone who had fought so aggressively in Gladiator can be disturbed by spiders.

Sen considers defending himself for a bit, but gives up the thought when he realizes it would just sound like he is making excuses. The group rests for a while, then continues their trek deeper into the web filled area, much to Sen’s disapproval. They come across a couple more groups of spiders, all smaller than the first, and after each fight Sen unhappily swallows their energy crystals, trying to not be disgusted by the sweet lemony flavor, repeating a mantra of ‘It’s only an item drop, it isn’t connected to the spider’. He is a bit mollified that after eating two of them his speed stat goes up to E, matching his strength. The only one left to raise is energy.

After a bit, they run into a large group of maybe twelve players. Sen and his group are planning on ignoring them, until one of them recognizes Sen.

“Hey! You’re that asshole that killed us!”

Sen groans. It’s those idiots from King again. The two groups back away from each other, each raising their weapons.

“This is the guy you killed you earlier?” The man in the front who looks like the leader asks. He’s tall, with boring brown hair and eyes, and is wearing leather armor, unlike the rest of the group who waers only in plain clothing, along with an armband with an image of a crown on it. He turns to Sen. “So I heard you randomly attacked them.”

Sen snorts. “Why would I bother? They asked me to hand over all my crystals, then surrounded me. Should I have just acted like a dog and rolled over?”

The man looks back at the person who had recognized Sen, who has turned a little red. Apparently he hadn’t told the truth to his superior. “Well I’m afraid that this area is controlled by King, I’ll have to ask you to hunt somewhere else.”

Sen is almost tempted to agree, simply because he would definitely not mind leaving the spider infested forest, but he would never back down from something like this, one of the reasons that had lead to him clashing with King so often in other games. Looking to Lynna, she nods, an angry look on her face. She’d been harassed pretty badly in one of her games after she hadn’t agreed to be their sub-leader’s girlfriend, and she and Sen have an absolute loathing for the guild because of it.

Looking over to Xue and Jennifer, Xue has her usual cold expression on her face, but seems plenty up for a fight, while Jennifer seems to share Lynna’s distaste for the guild.

“I’m afraid that we’re going to keep hunting here, feel free to try and stop us.”

The man shrugs, then raises his sword and the two groups start to slowly approach each other. Once they get closer, Sen stamps down on the ground as hard as he can with his body enhanced by energy, launching himself at one of the enemies who is using a longsword. Sen swings his sword down in a brutal chop, which knocks them completely off balance, and Sen capitalizes on as his sword bounces off the opponent’s blade, reversing the force with a short turn of the blade and cleaving downward again. This strike isn’t as forceful as his previous, but with nothing between him and the opponent, it still chops deep into their skull.

He dodges backwards, his sword easily slipping from the skull he’s just chopped into as he avoids the clumsy blows from the left and right. Swinging his sword to the right, he cuts through an arm before his short strike is stopped by the man in armor. The man waves off the ones who attacked him, squaring up to face Sen.

Sen takes up his sword stance, his blade held overhead as he sizes up the man in armor. He’s holding his sword with one hand, the other holding a wooden shield, and his eyes are focused on the fight to come. Sen cleaves downward as they both step forward, and the man raises his shield to block the blow. He clearly underestimates the force behind it though, likely only having F rank strength while Sen has gotten his to E, and he staggers under the force, his shield hitting him in the head.

Sen uses the recoil from the blow to twist his sword off to the side before twisting it again towards his chest, and the man barely interposes his sword to parry, jumping backwards to reduce the force. Sen follows closely, and his next chop goes towards the man’s ankles. The man moves his shield, but not quickly enough, and loses one of his feet, at which point Sen finishes him off, not one to showboat or gloat.

Looking around, he sees that all the other enemies have been finished off. While they may have outnumbered his group, they were getting in each others way more than actually helping each other, and the only one who isn’t completely useless is the one Sen has killed.

Lynna has a big grin on her face from the slaughter, while Xue is sporting her usual cold expression as she wipes her sword off. Jennifer’s smile is small, but noticeably there, but the girls all frown when they find out that one doesn’t get anything from killing other players.

After a short discussion, they decide to keep hunting for a while, and continue into the web infested forest. They run into a couple other groups of King, and sometimes they’re ignored, but whenever they’re challenged they wipe the group out. They get a couple of light wounds, but gamers with no skills aren’t even a challenge for them in most cases.

Eventually, they’re all quite worn out, and they fast travel back to Falan.