What was left of the party finally made it back to the dungeon entrance. During the return trip Locke took it upon himself to clear all wildlife that confronted them on his own. He felt noticeably faster than before but it wasn't due to gaining any levels. It was because of the new passive skills present on his character screen.

He examined his character sheet closely to see the changes. The only reasonable explanation as to why he acquired both the Sword Mastery and Footwork Mastery passives was due to actually fighting seriously. During the previous encounters with wildlife Locke never fought seriously, but against the hobgoblin's that was not the case. He had used everything he had learned over the years playing VR games.

Does the system evaluate a players skills real time and give some sort of grade? If that is the case would my actual skill with the sword be only slightly below average? What the hell is that? I was one of the top swordsman in Odyssey. Maybe I didn't actually give it my all? Or maybe I relied too much on my attributes and gear in Odyssey to make up for my lack of skill? No no, maybe the game cannot give out high level masteries too early for balance reasons.

All these thoughts went through his head until finally settling on an answer. The game's standards must be extremely high. The reason he came to the conclusion was due to the fact that he never acquired any sort of brawler passive from fighting with his fists and kicks so far. So if the system doesn't even think he has a basic mastery of unarmed combat, then getting a high ranking sword passive might be extremely difficult. It was a crazy thought though, if the system believes his current skills are slightly below average what would a master swordsman look like? Do they even exist?

There also seemed to be another way to train masteries. Locke gained the Ice Mastery passive even though he felt like he never really did anything different when casting Ice Element spells. This most likely meant that repetitive actions also train your passives. The gains seemed slow when learning masteries this way though.

The Ice Mastery passive increased his maximum mana capacity for ice element spells by 20%. This meant right now his Ice spear went from 80 to 96 and Ice Javelin went from 100 to 120. This passive was amazing, but the issue was it didn't help Locke right now. His Second Brain has not been trained to cast spells at the mana cost yet, meaning he couldn't use the benefits at all.

“Thanks for bringing us back here Locke, I think we're going to take your advice and train in the first tutorial for a while.” Rae spoke up.

The group barely spoke on their way back from the journey at all.

“It was an eye opening adventure that is for sure, I'm sorry for taking it lightly.” Locke apologized.

“No it's not your fault...... shall we get going?” She looked towards the portal.

“After you two.” Locke motioned them to go forward. Once they were finally through the portal he breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

Finally I can be done with babysitting and can now get through this tutorial my own way. Losing an arm to cover their escape honestly wasn't worthwhile. I shouldn't think like this, it wasn't their fault. Losing an arm was due to my overconfidence. No matter how good my skills with a sword are, it will never overcome an enemy with far superior attributes.

Locke waited a few moments before opening his party interface and set himself to offline mode. This meant that if people wanted to get a hold of him, it would act as if he was not logged into the game at all. He figured Rae and Jason would be confused why he didn't return with them and try to message him. Maybe they will think he returned and logged out instead. This was to spare them from unnecessary negative thoughts.

He had absolutely no intention of returning to the previous tutorial. Especially after noticing the experience gained when killing monsters was slightly increased while they traveled back. This was most likely due to the fact that there were only three people in the party now instead of five. The increase was not very large though, if his thoughts were correct it should be closer to double experience gained now that he was alone. This in most situations would not be efficient because it would certainly be more than twice as fast to kill monsters in a five man group. Especially if the composition of that party worked well together.

Locke had an internal debate whether it would be worthwhile to go back, but decided not to for multiple reasons. He could return to the previous tutorial to see if he could regrow his arm. The problem was there was no guarantee that regrowing his arm was possible even if he went back. He could ask Rae and Jason, but the other reasons stopped him from bothering.

Leaving and coming back ran the risk of being stuck with a weak party like he did just now as the game doesn't let you join this tutorial alone. Thomas was useful and Sheila's hearing was far better than his but they were still holding him back. Jason was beyond useless and Rae wasn't much better. Locke would never tell this to their faces though, there were no benefits for doing so. Who knows, maybe if they met down the line he would get something out of it since he treated them well.

The benefits to not having a party in this current situation was a major factor towards making his final decision. He could go into fights with his small physical boost running because the party wasn't stealthy enough before. After a lot of practice the casting time for the buff was roughly fifteen seconds, which meant sitting out of sight for a little bit while casting the spell shouldn't be a problem. Locke now knew about an optional objective he wanted to complete, the next party might not be willing to complete it. He could join the other group and immediately separate from them, that would just screw them over. The optional objective might not even be there next run, it could be random. There could be some benefits to lose out on for not completing it the first try. Last the experience gain for being solo was too hard to pass up.

Locke spent the next few hours practicing magic at the entrance as he needed to test a theory. So far it looked like that theory might hold some weight as not a single enemy approached the area. This was important as he needed a place to sleep without worry since there was nobody to keep watch. He still wasn't positive so he created a small camouflaged camp and spread a bunch of small sticks around. If the wildlife stepped on one of the random sticks they should break and create a sound that would hopefully wake him up. With all the preparations complete Locke decided to rest to get this stamina back to max. There was a long day a head of him tomorrow and was very excited to get started.

Waking up the next day Locke assumed nothing out of the ordinary happened. There were no tracks found anywhere around the campsite either which was good. This area could be used as a central resting place while completing his goals. The first goal was to kill the bears and wolves around this area until he hit level 8, this would allow him to run the small physical boost permanently. The second was to find a good way to acquire more passive skills as they are basically providing him quite a few attributes on their own. The third goal was to find out what was going on with those hobgoblin's they found before.

On the spot he could only come up with two reasons why there are enemies of that power in this tutorial. They could be an optional objective or a way to prevent players from wondering off too much in this giant place. Either way the hobgoblin he killed earlier gave a ton of experience points so that was as good a reason as any to pursue them.

Without delay Locke went about the forest killing any wildlife throughout the forest that still gained him experience points. This meant he avoided all boars but killed the wolves/bears/bobcats etc. It took roughly two days to accomplish his goals of reaching level 8 but decided to push another day for level 9. Currently he was investigating his gains back at the campsite.

Locke added 8 points to wisdom and 7 points to agility to balance himself out a bit. The idea was that he will use Small Physical boost for strength or endurance in combat and perception outside of it. There were small changes to the passive list like the lightning and fire mastery as well as the slight increases to others. Though the biggest change being the added passive for enhancements reducing their mana cost by 5% which he received shortly after leveling up. This was a benefit he wanted but was not expecting, especially now when this allows him to have some mana regeneration while the enhancement is running. Also along with acquiring the Basic Enhancement Mastery he got a world first popup. The bonus attribute gain was an additional 3 wisdom. There was a slight tinge of regret that because of this bonus he passed his goal of 40 wisdom stopping him from allocating 3 stat points elsewhere.

He thought it was interesting that he didn't get any world firsts for ice/lightning/fire mastery or even his high ranking sword and footwork passives. This meant there were most likely players that are already ahead of him in those areas. Of course Locke wasn't arrogant to the point where he thought that the number one player position was held by him. It was just nice to know that others are taking advantage of the games systems.

Guess I need to stop slacking off, these early world first rewards help a ton and missing out on them is not ideal if I want to make a name of myself in this game.

The other thing he confirmed was that until a mastery reached the next level from there will be no change in the bonuses it provides. Based on his testing Locke did not notice any change in the spell capacities when going from 1/10 to 3/10. This means that to obtain stronger benefits from his passives skills the rank would have to be increased to the next tier. The tiers he seen so far is basic, below average, and slightly below average.

As for why Locke stopped leveling up and sitting at zero experience was due to the fact that any wildlife he killed now gave zero experience. It looked like he was too high level to gain anything from the weaker creatures of this forest. This meant it was time to move on bigger fish such as the hobgoblins. There was one thing to test first though which he debated doing before now but didn't want to get sidetracked during his leveling grind.