After we finished talking to Ren and getting Stars order sorted out we asked the grey haired girl, who Star had said was apparently a ghoul, to point us to a place to buy some solid beginner gear. By this point Erin had struck up a conversation with her and somehow convinced her to follow us on our shopping trip, even closing down her booth to take us to see a friend of hers who she knew had good prices. I couldn’t help but sigh at my sisters people skills. Everyone in the family besides Nick had great people skills but Erin was almost freakishly charismatic. Only Alex was better at making friends.

We followed the row of tables for about five minutes before turning off onto an even more dimly lit side path, coming to a small shack with two dim green torches bracketing the doors. Unlike the earlier shops, this one was alone, and quite a ways off into the darkness from the aisle of booths and tables. The walls of the ramshackle little place were a dark timeworn wood and the door was a rich mahogany with an aged gold lion head knocker right in the middle. For a second I thought the eyes on the knocker were rubies, but on closer inspection, tiny red flames flickered in the little gold sockets.

Ren stepped up to the door and paused looking and the lion head. The flickering red lights glared back for a second before it opened its mouth, releasing the small hoop of the knocker. Ren took the hoop and pressed it to the middle of the door near the frame on the right side where it stuck fast an old fashioned gold doorknob faded into existence within the perimeter of the hoop and Ren turned it and pushed open the sturdy dark door. After stepping through she pulled on the hoop which popped free, the knob dissolving into smoke. She took a piece of jerky from her pocket and slipped it to the knocker before returning the hoop to its mouth.

An amused chuckle rang through the small dimly lit shop “So that’s why he always lets you in so quickly. I’m not sure how you found out about Linus’s preference for Dark Elf meat but I suppose I’ll allow it since you figured it out on your own. Don’t tell anyone else though, or I’ll make him stop taking bribes altogether.” A slender blue figure melted from the shadows behind the counter flashing an indulgent smile at Ren. “It’s good to see you Renalie dear, we so rarely get visitors of substance these days. The clientele at the Goblin Market has certainly declined since my day.”

Ren beamed back at the man, scratching the gold lion under the chin before shutting the door behind us “Everyone likes Dark Elf meat, their taste is their only redeeming quality, the pretentious bastards. And good too see you too Ronnus, sorry its been so long since I’ve been through, dads had me helping out at the restaurant, he still wants me to take over when he retires, despite Cerren being desperate to run the place. I brought some friends to look around, they’re newbies but I have a good feeling about them, thought you might enjoy some repeat business.”

She gave us a friendly smile and gestured us forward to the counter. I smiled back at the girl and turned to regard the cerulean shopkeeper “Yeah, we’re pretty low level but our team composition is rock solid, Ren seems like good people and if she says you’re alright we’re happy to take a chance. Can you recommend some relatively inexpensive starter gear?” I wasn’t sure why but the ghoul gave me a good vibe, and this guy seemed alright too. Sadly even my S class observation skill couldn’t tell me if someone was on the level, but given how heavily my class involved perception I was willing to take a chance on my instincts.

We all dumped out our stones on the counter to get a total, with the half full orange, the twenty reds I’d filled and the almost thirty reds the others had managed to scrounge up from drops and fill off the boss when we killed it, we had about nine hundred and eighty XP. Almost an entire orange. I was pretty proud of our haul from our first run, and even Ronnus raised an eyebrow at the efficiency. With my passive I imagined we were miles ahead of the average team of our levels.

The blue shopkeeper reached down and unlocked the back of the counter slowly taking things out and setting them on top of the dark wooden surface. I was incredibly curious as to what he was, but Ren had informed us on the way over that it was considered impolite to use observation skills outside a combat situation, and most people could tell when you were doing it. Even if they couldn’t stop you from seeing anything, their reactions could be unpredictable.

After setting a few things on the countertop Ronnus smiled over at us “So, since you seem to be pretty impressive people for your level and Ren says you’re good folks, im willing to offer you the chance to buy a piece of orange grade gear and call the extra twenty XP a good faith investment in future business. Normally I wouldn’t sell anything of strange quality to anyone under level ten, but you’re close enough for horseshoes, and I get the feeling being in your good books will benefit us both. You only have enough to buy one piece of gear mind you, but a strange quality item will be a game changer. Levels are all well and good, but gear talks.”

I could see the light of avarice mirrored in my friends eyes and knew it was shining in mine too. This guy could be blowing smoke up our ass, but there would be no point, we were going to inspect the items in a second anyway, if one of these things could really up our game that much this could give us a huge edge over the other teams, even the ones in higher years, especially in combination with my passive. I licked my lips, looked down at one of the items on the counter, and triggered Revelation

Staff of minor miracles(Strange): twenty percent boost in all healing and buff effects including crits. Construction was slightly rushed, produces lousy miracles.

The white wood staff was covered in a gold tracery of runes that spiraled over the nearly glasslike surface. Next to it lay an large black iron axe. The head was double sided and each side was squared off like a cleaver. The blades each had an eye engraved on them and each eye was set with a blazing ruby. The last object was a black short bow with a dull grey string. The arrow rest was in the shape of a black skull with two shining black diamonds for eyes, glaring out hatefully from the front of the toward its targets.

Eye of the mountain demon (Strange): Apply all physical single target damage as an aoe in a radius of a hundred feet, does not discriminate between friend and foe. Do you think we dropped that mountain from high enough?

Black River Bow (Strange): Attacks deal triple damage when they crit on an opponent, non critical hits deal no damage. Why not take a shot in the dark?

I noticed that of all of them the staff was the most stable but also had the least amazing effect. I looked down at it and up at Ronnus questioningly. The azure skinned shop keeper smiled at my questioning glance, as if I had caught onto a secret “You may have noticed that the staff has a basic percent based ability which while nice enough is pretty lackluster compared to the others. There are two things that can raise the quality of an item. One is just having a higher percentage of benefit, basic common gear has about a five percent benefit for instance.”

He reached out with a grin and tapped the bow “The other is an ability that has a profound effect on the outcome of a battle. However, lower level gear is still lower level, the bow has an ability that can effect higher tier items or enemies so its balanced with a penalty. The axe is pretty interesting but the downside is less extreme because its less likely to unbalance things. This kind of gear is called weighted gear, its less reliable but if you use it properly can produce much better results for its level. Remember, the more terrible the penalty the more powerful the effect.”

I suspected based on that speech weighted gear was usually on the higher end of the price range and Ronnus was taking a chance on us even more than he had let on. I gave him a meaningful smile letting him know I got what he was doing and tried to decide which weapon to pick. The staff was out aside from Ronnus’ good intentions, Sarah’s heals already more than covered us in battle being as overpowered as she was, unless we started fighting outside our level she would be able to cover us, and I was going to hold off on that until we were a bit more seamless.

The axe was pretty amazing for someone like Magnus, but the splash damage would be so obscenely high with his insane strength that even Sarah might not be able to keep the rest of us alive. The bow wasn’t exactly sustainable but triple damage stacked with Abby’s passive ability to ignore armor (which I suspected might not affect gear too many tiers above hers, we would have to test that) much like every other weapon, damage was calculated based on the base stat and the skill plus the power of the weapon it was used with, so with Abby’s high dexterity the damage would be absurd.

Critical hits were calculated with a flat percentage based on gear and skills and the base one percent chance but those percentages counted double if the strike landed in a vulnerable area. If we could get Abby some crit boosting gear, with her passive ability to pierce armor uninterrupted shots to critical areas would be easy for her. Granted finding specialized gear would be a pain, and I doubted anything close to our level would get her anywhere close to a hundred percent, but even a one in ten chance to triple crit with a strange level item would, combined with Sarahs OP heals, put us at a level where we might be able to start grinding in the areas aimed at level tens within a month or two, and make some serious XP.

The level ten areas were on a whole other level of difficulty, since everything there was at the next tier. Every ten levels was something of a watershed, because damage and armor were calculated with tier as a multiplier, monsters also got commensurately more terrifying every ten or so levels. Hitting a new tier was massively dangerous, because trying to fight, say, a level twenty monster with level ten gear, was while possible, exceptionally difficult, which meant gathering enough XP to upgrade to the next tier, or grinding for drops was either very risky or very time consuming.

I handed Abby her new bow and laughed as she lost her shit over the weapon, oohing and aahing like a kid in a candy store. She grabbed Sarah and Sebastian (those two weapon nuts hung out sometimes) and started to lovingly describe the exact draw weight, the tensile strength and the material strength, which she had apparently been able to glean entirely from picking the damn thing up.