Countdown until level collapse: 7 days 05 hours 59 minutes

“Soooooo……~” Ben asked.

“So?” Elise raised an eyebrow.

“We’re leaving this village, right?” Ben said.

“Yes.” Thomas said.

“And we never have to come back, right?” Ben asked.

“That’s correct.” Thomas said.

“Does that mean I can I go pickpocketing?” Ben asked. “Even if I aggro the guards, we can just run away!”

“Hell yeah! I wanna get rich! Let’s do it!” Alexa said.

It didn’t sound very smart, but none of us wanted to deny Ben this. It was his class after all. And he was right, we could just run away. The others in our mass party already confirmed it when they broke the law: The guards were ridiculously tough and strong, but very slow. We wouldn’t actually be in peril, unless we got cornered. As long as you didn’t retreat to a Safe Zone to find the guards indefinitely camping at the door when you tried to leave, you’d be fine. And even then you were only stuck until nightfall.

“Go ahead.” I said.

Ben cheered and ran off, quickly becoming one with the shadow and creepily touching unaware people’s backs and butts before disappearing in shadows again. It was probably because these were low-level commoners, but he didn’t get caught once. A huge improvement from his 30%-ish success rate when he was practising the skill on the second floor.

Ben: just got achievement for stealing from kids, because ofc theres one

As we continued to stroll leisurely out of town with our party rogue filling his pockets all around us, I stretched and looked at a crudely made signpost giving us very vague and general directions.

“West Creek Town is the nearest big settlement, that’s probably where the better quests are.” Elise said. “The Silver Quest we found here is probably the only good village quest in this region, so no reason to comb through the other hamlets around here.”

“Agreed. Volos also told us that the bigger settlements are where we can find better shops and places like the Tutorial Guilds.” Thomas said. “And Livia said that the ruins of the old city make for a much better grinding spot than the empty farmlands around here.”

Elise: Careful, Ben. Guard ahead.

I looked at where she was pointing, and indeed saw a guard standing there. If it wasn’t for the way I’d seen them all simultaneously jump into action to go to sleep last night, I might’ve thought that the guy was daydreaming or just an empty suit of armour.

Ben appeared behind the guard, and carefully snuck closer.

Darryl: Ben, no.

Ben: ben yes!!!

Darryl: Seriously, Ben. Don’t. You’ll be within sword radius if you’re caught.

Ben reached the guard and carefully touched their back to get access to their inventory. He froze for a moment. A tense moment where everyone froze with him, waiting for all hell to break loose.

Ben: guys!

Ben: GUYS!!!

Ben: your not goignt o believe this!

Elise: Get out of there!

Darryl: Leave him before he attacks you!

Ben: guys. watch this

I was about to step forwards and drag Ben away by force if need be, when Ben did a thing. The guard disappeared in front of our eyes, startled civilians looking up in fright as the greatsword suddenly clattered onto the ground.

As Ben crouched over and picked up the sword, a dot turned red on the minimap and a different guard started to slowly march towards us from the right. I zoomed out as far as I could, and I could see three other dots had turned red as well.

They weren’t moving though. The chat already told us that all the guards would somehow know we were criminals to be executed on sight by some means of telepathy, but they wouldn’t converge on our location without line of sight. Their helmets didn’t actually obscure their view and they didn’t need to turn their neck to see sideways, but there were claims that it was actually quite easy to avoid their detection as long as you didn’t let the NPCs scream out to summon the guards to your location.

“Ben! What the hell did you just do!?” I said, running towards Ben with the others in tow.

“Did you see that!? This. Is. Awesome!” Ben cheered.

“Yeah, it is!” Alexa agreed. “What did you do?”

“The guards are items!” Ben said. “Like literally, they are items! The guard was in their own inventory labelled as a Construct owned by something called a ‘Soul Crystal’.”

“They count as equipped, so most thieves can’t just steal them even if they could handle the item’s weight that my class mostly ignores. And we can’t lift them up for four seconds without them growing aggressive, of course. But my subclass allows me to ignore the equipped status when pickpocketing, so I actually had a 60% chance to steal the guard!” Ben continued explaining.

“That’s so awesome!” Alexa said.

“Sounds like a bug. Should we report this?” Miho asked.

“No!” Ben and Alexa said in unison.

“There’s actually quite a few issues like this, if you know where to look for them.” I told her. “They usually get fixed soon enough, but we keep the gains from when they still worked.”

I glanced at the other guard, still slowly lumbering towards us. They would need a good ten seconds still.

“How’s the sword?” I asked.

“Trash, I’m afraid. The guards are really high-level, but the stuff they’re carrying is just cheap cast iron. The sword’s description even says it’s more a cudgel than a blade.”

We started to jog away from the guard at a brisk but easily maintained pace to stay ahead of them indefinitely.

“What about the guard themselves?” Elise asked.

“Level 75 and slowly dying in my inventory, but it seems like they don’t need to breathe so it’s going to take a while.” Ben shrugged. “I’ll just have to take them out before that happens, and we’ll be fine.”

Right, when Borant fixed the instant-kill inventory bug on the first day, they changed it to a slow death traumatizing the target and at times turning them Feral according to some people. Something about being thrown into the vast ether between floors, at least that was the in-game story reason for it.

This patch was to prevent us crawlers from putting each other in our inventories to indefinitely stabilize dying party members or travel faster, the company having enough foresight to know what would’ve happened if they just removed the lethality of the inventory and left it at that. But if something died in your inventory, the mob would give negative experience to dissuade us from using the inventory system to kill, even if it happened slowly.

Ben: hey danny, can you do something with this sword?

Danny: It’s not skin, so no. But shit, you killed one of those guards? Nice!

Alania: WHUT!?

Alania: How!? How didya kill it!?

Alania: I asked if anyone wanted to kill the guards with me like a thousand times, and you did it without me?!? :’(

Alania: I can’t believe someone beat me to it… D’:<

Mr. Geruet: Please don’t spam emoji’s in the chat. It’s really annoying for those with enabled auto-narration.

Mr. Geruet: The AI knows what you mean, he just says it as it’s written to be an ass.

Ben: didnt kil em, just stole them

Alania: YOU CAN DO THAT? SO AWESOME!

Alania: WITHOUT THEIR SWORD IT BECOMES SO MUCH EASIER TO KILL THEM!!! WE CAN TOTALLY DO THIS NOW!!! LET ME HELP YOU, I WANNA KILL ONE SO BADLY!!!

Mr. Geruet: Please don’t shout in all caps in the chat. Auto-narration.

Alania: Where are you!? I’m coming over as fast as I can! >;D

Darryl: We don’t actually intend to fight and kill any of these guards.

“Really?” Ben said. “But they’re level 75 and no longer have a sword. We can even pick where to fight it and make a kill-zone like a slippery hole or a pit that’s on fire, before dropping the guard in there! We’d get so much experience!”

“Yeah, Darryl. Think of the experience!” Alexa landed on Ben’s shoulder and doubled the amount of puppy eye pleading.

“It’s risky, but I would get a ridiculous amount of experience thanks to my tattoo.” Thomas said. “But they’re level 75. They’re not going to be a joke. As Darryl would be the one having to tank this guy, I’d say it’s up to him.”

I sighed and looked over my shoulder. The guard wasn’t picking up speed or doing something dangerous like throwing stuff at us. They would start doing stuff like that once you damaged them, but right now the animated suit of armour was just slowly chasing us.

“Not yet.” I said. “If at all. These guys are clearly meant to be unbeatable for most people. Even if we’re just fighting one of them without a sword when they’re meant to swarm us in groups, it’s too risky.”

Darryl: We’re not going to do it.

Alania: D’:

Ben: Sorry, too risky. For now.

Alexa: We’re near West Creek Town!

I glared at Alexa, and she smiled cheekily for a moment but then averted her eyes abashed.

Alania: On my way!

Darryl: We’re not going to do it!

Alania: But the guards recharge in a room with a big crystal at night. Extremely valuable! (; But we cannot take it during the day and the energy cords singe your hands at night, so we’d have to defeat all the guards before we can grab it! >:O It’s like a super-battery, super useful too!

Alania: Pretty please? Pretty pretty batting eyelashes prettily please?

I just closed the chat and kept jogging away from the guard behind us. Ben and Alexa were looking at me with hopeful eyes while Thomas, Elise and Miho were wisely staying out of this discussion entirely. Damn them and their wisdom.

Time to shove off the burden of responsibility and blame to someone else.

Darryl: Livia, the others want to kill a guard, and someone’s talking about a power crystal of some sort? Any input?

Livia: ALEXA VALENCIS GEMENETZIS, YOU ARE NOT GOING TO FIGHT A TOWN GUARD AT YOUR LEVEL! YOU STAY FAR AWAY FROM THOSE INSTANT-KILLERS AND IMMEDIATELY SKIP TOWN IF THEY GROW HOSTILE TOWARDS YOU!

Alexa threw me a betrayed look. “Did you just snitch on me?”

Livia: Even trying this at your level is suicide, young lady! Those guards may look slow and dumb, but they are level 75! LEVEL SEVENTY FUDGING FIVE! And they’ve put EVERYTHING in Strength and Constitution, so they are well above 100 in BOTH stats! Do you have any idea how big of a deal 100 strength is!? A glancing hit can kill you twice over!

Ben: but achevements n experience!!!!

Livia: Would you stop typing so badly and start using the think speech like everyone else, young man? It’s annoying!

Ben: teh what?

Livia: Concentrate on the chat and just think what you want to say. The AI will add the proper spelling and punctuation that you’re not adding yourself.

Ben: Wait what?

Ben: This is a thing?

Ben: THIS HAS BEEN A THING ALL ALONG?!

Ben: This is amazing! This is so much faster and easier!

“Wait. You guys all knew of this?” Ben asked, looking at the rest of us.

“Yeah? We figured it out pretty quickly.” Elise said.

“Even you?”

Alexa nodded solemnly.

“And none of you told me.” Ben sulked.

“Well, but now you kn-”

I got interrupted by Livia as she resumed her all caps lecture on why we shouldn’t attack a guard.