“I can’t tell if you’re a genius or if you’re just a damn good gambler.”

“I just like to do my research from time to time, especially when I am going to need to make a decent active investment in something. I learned that habit the hard way.”

As Axton and Sally walked out of the Class Selection Building, the two of them engaged in light discussion about the reasons behind Axton’s choice to choose to be a pure Rounder. Sally, for her part, was astonished that the Class was that unbalanced, although to make it so required far more effort than for other Classes.

“Anyway, we need to start getting regular quests done. Or at least I need to.”

Axton was right, of course. He had essentially only completed one quest up till now. Despite all that such a monumental hidden quest had given him, he still needed to get some decent gear and finish some entry-level quests. You could not truly play an MMO without first doing the more mundane and low-level quests upon your first entry into the game. It was simply not how you play such a game!

With that fact stated and determined to be the correct course of action, Axton and Sally began to search for quests for the Player to engage in.

…

It was now around 3:00 PM the next in-game day. It had taken Axton roughly 10 hours to gather a large number of beginner quests and complete a few of them. Most were simple enough; find a lost pet, complete the Class Tutorials, dispose of some undisclosed documents that may or may not be the unaltered records of a business's monetary transactions. You know, simple stuff.

The remained of the quests were the kind that were more... well… ‘combat focused’. These were what Axton was really looking forward to, as he had been deprived of combat for far too long and the quests that he had finished up till now were, to put it mildly, rather dull. An MMO player lived and breathed combat, or at least most of them did, and any psychologist and sociologist worth their salt would tell you just how poorly humans do when not properly stimulated. Humans, for the most part, craved action, change, and movement, all to one degree or another, and an MMO player who is without action for long enough is one who is bound to drop the game sooner rather than later.

And Axton, who had been grinding through the less interesting quests for hours, was far from stimulated. The tedious and dull nature of some of those quests made him wonder whether or not there was even any action to be found beyond some rare random encounters, but these final ones promised to break him out of his boredom. Hoping for the best despite having been disappointed more often than not, Axton approached a zone that was highlighted on his HUD’s minimap.

As soon as he entered that zone, he felt the air subtly shift. It was something only a seasoned gamer or someone with live combat experience would detect, that telltale tension building right before a hostile entity began their attack. Axton switched his gaze between the virtual world in front of him and the radar-like minimap just in is peripheral vision multiple times in a row as he quickly took a more defensible position. He ducked behind a concrete divider and the high-level NPC that had decided to be his student immediately followed suit.

Almost as soon as Sally had taken up a position beside Axton, several bullets whizzed by their hiding spot.

“Kill ‘em and take their shit!” cried a low-level mook. This battle cry was followed shortly thereafter by several other voices whooping and hollering and the sound of footsteps impacting the stone and shattered pavement that made up the ground.

“Watch your step!” Sally replied as she peeked over the divider and swung an open hand. She had used an Infantry Tactician skill 「Poisoned Caltrops 」 and a roughly 3 wide circular field of four-pronged spiked obstacles that were just over an inch tall spread out in front of a few of the advancing mobs. They did not stop in time, and a group of three had the spiked and poisoned irritants puncture their shoes and dig into their feet.

The poison took effect immediately (it is a game, after all) and the three people began to take damage over time. Normally the skill would not have caused much of a problem, but Sally was much, much more powerful than the mooks before her. The three mobs each took just a single step out of the field before collapsing to the ground with foam pouring from their mouths. That was the power of having a high level, and with those three dealt with there were only four nameless mooks left in the zone.

“I appreciate the help, but I won’t earn anything of my own with that kind of assistance. I can’t expect to ride the bus forever, you know.”

“Fine, but it’s dangerous to go alone; take this.”

Sally applied a buff to Axton and then let him take things from there. The Player then dashed from his original cover to another concrete divider while shooting in the general direction of his foe. None of the shots hit their target, but Axton wasn’t intending to actually hit anyone, just keep their heads down so he could swap cover in relative peace.

Now that he had a different position, the mobs were now forced to shoot at two different places instead of being able to concentrate on a singular piece of cover. Using his minimap as a guide Axton peeked from cover a few times to get a relative lock on his foe’s position relative to himself before letting his gun do some talking. His small 30 round submachine gun sent a stream of metal slugs downrange and one of the blips on his minimap vanished and was replaced with an icon that showed where the loot drop was.

Loading another magazine, Axton did the same as he had done moments before and emptied another full magazine of 9mm bullets into the rough direction of another mook. This did not kill the goon immediately, but as the blip vanished shortly afterward it was clear that enough of the bullets had hit properly to induce large-scale hemorrhaging. Axton was loading another magazine when Sally yelled out for him to move quickly. Axton didn’t need to be told why he needed to move, as a circular ring of red appeared around him and clued him in that a grenade was about to be thrown.

Axton vaulted the divider and ran towards an abandoned vehicle. He quickly opened one of the doors and dove in, slamming the car door behind himself. Merely a half-second after he had shut himself in, their grenade that he had escaped from detonated, and the glass windows of the car shattered under the residual shockwave. Thankfully, Axton was unharmed, but he was a bit dazed.

Scolding himself for underestimating his foe, Axton exited the car in the same manner that he had entered it in, but reversed, and let the steel machine act as his new cover. There were only two mooks left, and now Axton had all the more reason to take them down as fast as possible. He lined up another shot and let his gun empty itself. The two remaining mobs vanished from the minimap, and Axton let himself catch his breath.

The entire battle had taken less than 4 minutes in total, but it had seemed to be over and done with both far more quickly and far slower than that at the same time. The stress was immense, and Axton wondered if he was really cut out for infantry fighting to begin with. Well, it wasn’t like he could fix Franken II (new name pending) just yet, and even if he could, there was no way he would be able to use it in situations like these.

Besides, using a War Suit to kill weaklings like these was beyond overkill.