16 Hunting Time
A gaming pod opened, and a familiar figure stepped out. He sighed as he grabbed the towel nearby and wiped the sweat off his face. He looked around and saw his brother standing in front of the large window looking down on the city. It was the middle of the night, but this city never slept. Lights were bright with hundreds of vehicles driving around. The man took a sip of his drink and swished the ice around.
"Did you capture any information?" He asked without turning around.
"He was too decisive. Killed me even after I pleaded for mercy. I couldn't make eye contact. As for the others, I have their information. They are a new group under Universal Records. I'll get Pieter to investigate them." He explained while taking out his phone and sending a message.
"How many stacks did you lose?"
"Tch, don't remind me. I'm down to 8 stacks again. We'll need to hunt some more players down. I estimate that once I reach 100 stacks I'll be able to fight the boss."
"Sigh, really envious of you, bro, your talent has to be the strongest in the whole game." He walked away to get himself a drink and the man standing at the window smirked.
"Just wait until I figure out your identity, kid." He muttered.
…
Tenthousandfists: "Just up ahead, its coming."
Markus: "I see it."
He stood slightly from the blind he was hiding in and pulled back the bowstring. Once the boar came out from the underbrush, an arrow whizzed toward it. Halfway through the flight, the arrow suddenly ignited. Markus was already knocking a second arrow when the first landed true. The boar squealed as its eye was pierced, but once it suddenly caught fire it began to go crazy.
[Sneak Attack]!
Burn!
-8
-1
-3
-1
-3
…
Markus saw the bleed and burn damage stacking over the boar's head and pulled back the second shot. He activated [Vital Strike] for the second arrow and his arrow loosed. It did not trigger the flame effect, but he could tell the arrow had a sharpness to it that was not innate to the arrow. Once the arrow made contact with the boar's ribs, it penetrated through the thick hide.
[Vital Strike]!
-7
The bleed and burn damage were still throwing 3's and 1's over the boars head. As soon as the second arrow hit, Lloyd stepped out from behind a tree and started taunting the boar. Instead of trying to put out the flames, it turned frenzied and went straight toward her. The boar slammed into her shield as she let out a light yelp. The sound of glass shattering was heard as a light membrane broke from the impact. The two fighters moved in from the sides and began to stab at it.
Markus knocked a third arrow and waited for the cooldown of his ability. After finishing resting, the group decided they would go hunting. This night was wrought with danger, but it also contained ample opportunity. With the addition of a ranged damage dealer, the team of five was a balanced unit. The main goal for Markus was to level his skills, ones concerning the bow and his abilities were the most important. Therefore, he decided to stay out of direct combat for the remainder of the night.
His reasoning to the party was in case anyone or anything sneaks up on them he would be able to counter-attack. Also, he suggested that he wanted to share the loot with them since he could solo the monsters. The group readily agreed to having him carry them. It was the ideal situation for both parties. Once his cooldown came back up, he activated his ability and shot another arrow. Since it was only a 25% chance, the odds were against him to trigger it again, therefore another normal arrow pierced the boars hide.
[Vital Strike]!
-7
Eventually the boar died, and Markus went up to loot it. They had discussed previously that it would take too long to skin every enemy. After suggesting that he would get more from looting than others, they agreed. Meanwhile, Baby rapidly created new notes trying to figure out what exactly Markus's talent was. All the different things he could do made him come to the conclusion that it was some sort of 'jack of all trades' talent.
[Level 1 Berserk Boar (mortal). /Loot]
[Looting…
Thick Hide x3
Boar Meat x3
Sharp tusks x2]
[Level 1 Berserk Boar looted… 2 exp gained.]
Another mote of light flew over to Lloyd but the remaining three didn't get anything. Markus nodded and realized that the experience would likely be distributed based on contribution. Higher level monsters that gave more experience would have a higher chance of rewarded everyone with something. After this kill, he would slowly pull back how much damage he did to see where the split was.
[Name: Markus (mortal) Level 2
Status: 20/20 hp | No conditions
Experience: 30
…]
His satiated condition went away again. So, it was reasonable to conclude that it would only last for the first fight. Seeing his experience at 30 made him happy. However, he decided to hold back leveling up and would save it for a difficult situation. If he leveled up, his experience gain would be reduced from level 1 monsters. Although the enemies seemed to give bonus experience at nighttime, he didn't want to reduce the efficiency by so much. He also was certain that leveling would put him too far ahead on contribution in every fight.
Thus, their hunting montage began. The population of boars was significantly higher during the nighttime. Additionally, they were able to find more nocturnal critters. They killed everything ranging from rats to wolves. What shocked Markus was how few players they encountered. However, thinking about the massive number of complaints on the forums, it was likely that a lot of people experienced their first deaths early on. Although the timer for re-entering the game was 30 minutes after a death, many players didn't want to spawn in just to die again so they stayed out.
Because of this, the actual average player population per instanced world was less than 30! Previously there were between 80 to 100 people per server in such a giant open-world map. Markus only ran into a handful of people in his whole time there, so such a drastic decrease in players made a big difference. The flip side of this was that a lot of the prey was left for them. After hunting for an hour, the group successfully mapped out a large section of the map.
"So, it looks like the regions are level based. This outside ring is where we seemed to spawn in on and it contains level 1 enemies. This middle ring contains level 1-2 enemies including predators. Based on your information Markus, the inner ring should contain level 2-3 enemies and then of course the central area contains the final boss. However, we can't really confirm what it is like in the other slices of the world, just our little corner."
Baby brought his map up which had a lot of annotations and notes for them to see. He was quite good at record keeping and kept track of the location of every enemy they encountered.
"Okay, since everyone is level 2 now, lets move to the middle-ring." Lloyd said with confidence.
The group nodded and smiled. It only took them an hour to catch up to the top players. They internally gave the credit to Markus, but he had different thoughts. If not for their coordination and special talents, they would not be able to kill so many enemies in such a short time. This made him really appreciate the value of a team in this kind of game.
'Maybe reaching the top by myself is a fool's errand… But I guess I'm a fool in the end.' He lamented as he thought about his gaming organization ostracizing him. During the time between kills he spent some time reading up on his group chat and realized that team 1 occupied a single server and team 2 occupied another server. It was only Markus that spawned randomly on his own. 'Since they want to single me out, I won't help them later.'
He did consider joining the singing and gaming quartet but didn't want to put either of them in an awkward position. They were part of different organizations and companies. After tallying up the total loot, Markus was pleased with his haul after splitting. He checked his inventory that was almost completely full.
[Inventory:
[Thick Hide]x11 [Sharp tusks]x6 [Boar Meat]x12 [Black Feathers]x32 [Medium Fur]x2 [Normal Fur]x6 [Small Fur]x8 [Rodent Meat]x10 [Short Talon]x1 [Long Talon]x1 [Sharp Canine]x5 [Little Elysium]x10 [Mysterious Coin]x2 [Crude Arrow]x2 [Iron Sword]x1
Capacity: 51/60]
Seeing how few arrows he had left caused him to sigh. He already used up all the golden feathers from the eagle he killed. Fortunately, they did run into some other birds. Markus exchanged the meat with feathers since he had plenty of boar and rodent meat. He also passed the rest of his damaged hides and furs to Baby to practice on.
All together, they killed 16 level 1 animals netting a total of 48 experience. Markus claimed 12 of it, and the rest was distributed among the others. Unfortunately, he didn't level a single skill during the prolonged hunting. He also noticed his aim and damage were decreasing slowly overtime.
"Let's take a break first…" He suggested in response.
