25 (25) Should I get more friends?

The next day went quite smoothly, Kraton hid at the back corner of the room the whole day, busy trying to forge new weapons and armour, and by the end of the day, Kraton revieved the offical sub-title 'Forger'. Titles basically had no use, except telling others that they had learnt, or can understand the fundamentals of something. It was mainly used by humans to show that they weren't lying about being a 'Forger', 'Gatherer', 'Brewer' etc, And thus reducing the probability of getting scammed, if they were above level 5 and had 'Analysis' that was.

By the end of the day, Kraton had melted down most of the scrap metal that Lysine had not discarded when she moved in. First of, he then made a crude mould in two blocks of stones, stuck his mace in one, poured closed the mold and poured in molten metal through a hole on the top of the mould. During the time this cooled down, Kraton took the labourous duty of hammering out sheets of metal, slightly melting it, then cooling it back down and adding more layers. Eventually he made a few sets of armour, though they all looked mismatched and baggy, not that it mattered much because Kraton designed them as consumables.

When his weapon had cooled down, he cracked the mold open, refined the shape, added a few petrified thorns and coiled a rope made of the Giant Spider's silk around the base. Kraton held up his weapon, weighing it in his hand, if he wasn't satisfied, he would make ammendments, thinning, or adding more metal, changing the shape, centre of mass and fixing other small problems. Eventually Kraton sttod back and admired his handicraft.

The mace that was made of a cleric staff was now totally altered, only half of the silver ball stuck out at the end of the weapon, and below that the metal smoothly ran down to the handle, it was no longer feasible to call this weapon a mace, it was now more like a simple, yet shiny club, with almost useless thorns winding around it.

Kraton used 'Analysis' on his new weapon, it gave a short and blunt description:

There was no level, rank or stats on this weapon, the reason was because it was made by a monster, the actual weapon won't be dropped when Kraton died, so players didn't need to see any stats, furthermore, Kraton's 'Analysis' level was probably too weak, only Stage 1 of 3. A third reason was, that the weapon had no value to be given a level or rank, similar to how using a tree log as a weapon won't have a level or stat either, even though it could also do some damage.

During the day, Kraton had offered to forge, or upgrade Lysine's weapon, however after being shown his crafts, She immediately refused and clung onto her weapon. To be truthful, her short, curved dagger was probably multiple times better than Kraton's club. It was one of the few possesions she still had from her Pack, even though it was around 30 years old, it's quality hadn't degraded that much from when she first got given it, so there was no need to have it 'upgraded' by Kraton.

The day was also pretty successful for Lysine, because of yesterday, a few rumours spread in the human community about an elite monster, this attracted attention and so many more parties raided the dungeon today, the party levels never exceeded level 6, as the dungeon was still regarded as a level 4, 2 star dungeon, so even if their was an elite, the drops would still be redundant for higher levelled players.

Lysine had beat the majority of the parties that entered, even though she was now level 7, she still lost a few battles as she still hadn't grasped the battle taactics entirely yet. The day without Kraton's help had helped her improve tremendously, by finding out her own technique flaws, how to disrupt formations and how to identify the different classes and roles in different parties. All in all, Lysine was very happy and didn't even mind the mess Kraton had made by melting metal on the floor. She would force him to clean it up later anyway.

When the last party had exited the dungeon, Lysine went up to the third floor, telling Kraton that she was going to talk to the Nagas for a while. Kraton rejected her invitation to go up for several reasons, the first being that it would be awkward, seeing how he had beat them up previously. And the second reason was that he had other stuff to do, and didn't really care too much about the other monsters. When it was just Kraton and the Goblins, he never really went up to them at all, and in turn, the Goblins didn't care about Kraton either, that's why they ripped up the sign in fron of his door. They couldn't read so they couldn't care less, unfortunately this led to the Goblins being kicked out as Lysine thought the sign said: "Boss has left".

This reminded Kraton of what Hato had said, although he couldn't remember it word for word, he still recalled Hato telling all the Bosses that they should either focus on levelling their minions and themselves at similar rate, or buy levelling themselves up solely. The former would raise the Dungeons's level, attracting higher levelled raiders, whilst the latter would only increase the rank. This is because the humans would see low levelled monsters in the previous floors, and would determine that low levelled players can grind there, but they should just avoid the Boss Room. High-rank but low-level Dungeons would attract humans that wanted to improve skills or to beat records as they can quickly sweep the lesser monsters easily. But these types of dungeons also meant that higher levelled players would sweep the dungeon and present themselves on a silver platter to the Boss.

Kraton belonged to the group of Bosses that would prioritize themself, and Lysine would be in the other group, she cared about her minions much more than levelling up and replacing them. Maybe he should make more friends, it could benefit him long term. Kraton quickly dispelled this thought, he had enough friends for now, who knew if having more friends would lead to more chances of betrayal.

Kraton lumbered over to the stone chair, there was now also a stone block in front of the chair, the Gargoyles had been ordered to bring it down in the morning. It was inconvenient to use the chair to display the data rock, therefore the rock 'table' was here.

"How was I meant to do it again?"

*Punch* *Punch* *Punch*

"I thought I was meant to punch Psychi's name..."

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