“Drops have rarity, right? Common items have a 1 star ranking, artifacts have 5 stars. Getting an artifact out of some randomly spawned treasure chest at level 5. Holy crap, man. Your luck stat has got to be 4 digits.”

That explained why the text box with Nibelus’s stats was orange instead of the standard white he’d seen on everything else he’d picked up. Just like Spiral said, there were five little stars across the bottom of the box in the lower right corner.

“Worth 40,000 drol at least,” Valit said. “What are the stats again?”

“+50 agility, +30 stamina, +10% lightning damage, +30% lightning resistance, -5 seconds to Arc Lance’s recharge time, and it has a chance to create an attack called Ball Lightning which generates a sphere of electricity for three seconds, damaging all nearby enemies.”

“So op,” Valit said.

“Kind of ruins the experience,” Spiral added. “Maybe you shouldn’t use it.”

Kana shrugged. “I’ll try it out and make a decision later.”

He equipped Nibelus and the party retreated from the ship. Once they’d made their way back to land, they started the return journey to the blacksmith’s home. On the way, Kana made sure to keep an eye out for a target dummy. The game didn’t seem to support a large population of random monsters though, and only once did he see a lone wolf that fled from the group rather than attack.

Now that he thought about it, probably as much as half of his XP gain had come from completing the quests, and almost all the rest had been gained as a direct result of fighting with monsters he’d been specifically targeting for the quest. Except for the wolf pack spawn that had almost killed him, he couldn’t think of any random spawns he’d run across. Everything had been scripted.

When he voiced that thought though, Spiral just said, “It’s because we’re low level. Once we get out of this starter area, the world gets a bit more hostile.”

That made sense, but it was still frustrating when he wanted to try out Nibelus and nothing presented itself as a target. They made it all the way back to Bertrin’s smithy completely unopposed by man, wolf, or pig. Kana was tempted to smite Valit with Nibelus just because she wouldn’t stop talking about the player-run bazaar and her plans to make tons of money once she got into crafting.

Eventually though, blessedly, they returned to the quest giver. They found him in his workshop, hammering away. Several of the empty spots on his tool wall had been filled, and when they approached him, he stopped his work and said, “What’s that you’ve got there?”

“Why don’t you do the honors?” Kana said to Valit. “This was your quest first.”

She opened up her menus and went into her inventory to produce the toolbox and handed it over. Bertrin took it from her and placed it on his workbench. He opened it and paused for a second. “I didn’t think I’d ever see these again. I don’t know how I could ever thank you.”

He pulled out the tools and looked through them, then pulled down the replacements he’d crafted off the wall. “Maybe you could find a use for them. I could teach you if you wanted to learn.”

Bertrin held out the tools to Valit, who took them. A window popped up in front of Kana that told him a party member was completing a quest he had finished and asking if he wanted to turn it in as well. He selected yes and got a hefty XP reward in addition to an item called blacksmith’s basic tool set. Further examination told him that it allowed him to craft apprentice level blacksmith patterns.

“Up to you if you want to take up the profession,” Spiral said. “It’s expensive and time consuming to progress in it, but if that’s your thing.”

There was no question that Valit was going to take up the profession. Kana wasn’t particularly interested though. Professions generally took up a lot of time and didn’t involve a lot of exploring, and he was far more interested in playing the actual game than he was in sinking a ton of effort into what was essentially a side job.

“I can come back later if I don’t take it up now?” he asked.

“Yeah, just got to talk to the guy whenever you’re ready.”

“I think I’ll pass for now. I’d like to poke around the game a bit more before I settle down on a day job.”

“Alright. Want to start another quest chain? We’ve got this midnight swarm lead in to turn in still, or there’s the Thulnar the Repentant quests. Players usually break that into two pieces because there’s an abrupt difficulty spike in the middle of the quest line, but with your incredibly lucky drop, we might just be able to do it all in one go.”

“What’s that one about?” Kana asked.

“An old man who used to be a warlord retires and spends his last years helping a small village, some kind of atonement thing I guess. Enemies from his past catch up with him and start terrorizing the villagers. Thulnar has gotten too old to fight them off, so he needs help. The first few quests are simple enough, but then this NPC who’s running the bad guys’ crew catches wind of you and they make a concentrated effort to kill you.”

“That quest line was designed to be done in a group,” Valit added. She paused to think about it. “I bet you the difficulty doesn’t scale with more people like the blacksmithing quests did.”

“Do you want to give it a try?” Spiral asked.

“Sure, it couldn’t hurt. Worst case, we stop at the difficulty spike.”

Valit asked, “Do you guys mind if I tag along? I never got past the spike and I’d kind of like to see how it ends.”

“What about your crafting? It’s all you’ve been talking about for the last twenty minutes,” Spiral said dryly. “I thought you’d be all fired up to start grinding out mats.”

“Eh, heh, I kind of already did. Remember when I said I had to grind a few levels because I was having problems with those marauders? I went out of my way to find the mobs I needed to grind to get apprentice blacksmithing mats.”

“Speaking of, what level are you?”

“Oh. Um. Eight.”

Spiral’s eyebrows shot up, but all he said was, “That high, huh.”

Valit’s face flushed and she mumbled something that Kana couldn’t quite make out. He slapped Spiral’s shoulder and hissed, “Stop that.”

“What?”

“You know what.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“You do not know how to talk to girls at all, do you?”

Truth be told, Spiral had never been that sociable. It didn’t surprise Kana that he’d stick his foot in his mouth, though it was impressive in an awkward kind of way that he could do it with so few words. Kana was sure he must have gotten that particular talent from his mother.

“It’s ok,” Valit said. “Really. I know I’m not very good at the game. Thanks for helping me finish the blacksmith quests. I’ll drop group now so you can move on.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’d be happy to keep running with you.” Kana shot a pointed look at Spiral, who mutely nodded. No doubt, that was his most intelligent contribution to the conversation yet.

“Are you sure? It’s ok, really.”

“Aw, shut up and come on,” Spiral told her. “I didn’t mean anything by it, really.”

Valit finally smiled and nodded. “Ok, I will. Thanks.”

Now it was Spiral whose face was flushing. Kana just snickered quietly to himself.

-----

Thulnar the Repentant turned out to be on the south side of the Shrine of Numa, which meant a bit of a walk. On the bright side, it seemed like that side of the zone was more densely populated, because they found a lot of randomly spawned monsters.

“That is not even fair,” Spiral observed after watching Kana execute his fourth one-hit kill on a snapbulb prowler. Admittedly, the sentient flower monsters were only level two compared to Kana’s five, but they weren’t even living long enough for him to start his combo.

“How is this weapon even in the game? I was doing maybe 8 damage on a melee swing before. Arc lance did 20, once. Now I’m doing 37-40 for off basic attacks. I can’t even find something with enough hp to live long enough to combo into an arc lance, and that’s not even looking at this ball lightning ability.”

“I’m going to pull them all,” Valit declared. “Ready or not, here we go!”

She started firing off her modified frost beams as fast as possible, targeting various snapbulb prowlers at the edge of her range. She shot the fifth one just as the first reached her. Before it could attack, Kana skewered it with Nibelus. A second prowler was close enough for him to chain into that with another attack, and then the remaining three were all clumped close enough together that he pulled off an arc lance, instantly vaporizing all of them.

Ignoring the XP gain of 10 that popped up, he reported on his damage. “58, 51, and 55. Completely smoked them.”

“I hate you,” Spiral said. “Let’s go kill more shit.”

The trio carved their way across the wetlands, heading generally southward and going out of their way to kill as many monsters as they could. The XP was low and none of them needed the trash loot they got, but it was just plain fun to mow through them like they weren’t even there.

“Oh, hey, detour! I totally forgot until just now. Over here,” Spiral said, pointing toward a cave entrance half concealed behind a curtain of soggy looking moss.

“What’s in there?” Valit said. “I don’t remember that when I did these quests on my ranger.”

“You’ll see.”

Spiral grinned and rushed in. Kana followed him, feeling reckless and not caring in the slightest. The cave dipped sharply down and bent into a U-turn. “Ok, it’s pitch black in here.”

“Valit?”

“Hmm? Oh! Right!”

An orb of brilliant light flared into existence overhead, revealing a monstrous looking snapbulb. It was easily twice the height of a person, with leafy, jagged edged fronds that ground against the stone as it flinched away from the light. The bulb on top of its stalk, a bright yellow thing made of constantly shifting petals, split open to reveal a circular maw of serrated teeth.

“That. Is. Ugly. Gonna be seeing that in my nightmares tonight,” Valit announced. “Now, let’s kill it.”

Kana hadn’t gotten a good chance to see how the lesser snapbulbs fought on account of them instantly keeling over whenever he poked them with his spear, so it was a bit of a surprise when the fronds snapped out on long, prehensile vines to slash at them. There were enough that it could attack all three of them at once, and Valit definitely got the worst of it.

Spiral blocked with his shield and his heavy armor soaked a lot of the damage he couldn’t deflect. Kana was agile enough to straight up dodge all but one of the attacks. Valit was neither armored or fast. She took three leaf blade attacks head on and lost a third of her HP in less than a second.

“Oh screw that,” Spiral said, rushing forward to slam his shield into it. Kana didn’t know if plant-type monsters were immune to stuns, or if Spiral just didn’t execute the attack properly, but either way, it didn’t slow what the game was calling the snapbulb progenitor down.

Kana struck it. Then he hit it again. Then he unleashed arc lance into it. The first two hits shaved off about 10% of its health, and he was expecting arc lance to bring it down to half, but when the lightning hit it, it only did a quarter of what he’d figured it out. The progenitor was apparently resistant to lightning attacks.

That didn’t mean it was going to live much longer though. With each attack carving off 5% of its total health, Kana could probably have killed the boss monster on his own. Spiral was soaking almost all of its damage and giving Kana free shots at it, and while it might not have been taking much damage from the electrical discharge of Nibelus, it turned out that plants were weak to the fire component of Valit’s flashburn beams.

It was little more than a burnt husk bleeding out some sort of sap all over the cave floor in seconds. The XP window popped up and awarded him 100 XP for the kill, and the loot window added another item to his inventory.

“I’m almost afraid to ask what the area boss dropped for you. The way it’s going, it’ll be a Valkyrie’s Rise,” Spiral said.

“Hah. I don’t know what that is, but no. It’s garbage, I think.”

“What is it?”

“Blood Drinker’s Token. Looks like it’s for some in-game event.”

“Dude. Seriously? Get out. Just. Get out of my game.”