Chapter 25 - Interaction with the Top 10

Who would have thought that my trip to the city would bring such surprises? It seems to me that the two of them are quite close to each other. The other people seem to be unsurprised by their interaction as well, is the whole group close? After a short argument between Elves_or_Nothin and Sabrina the whole group moves towards the back of the store. I follow them as they walk towards the back but they start going inside a private room.

"Hey, are you also a Settlement player?"

One of the other people noticed me following them and called out to me.

"Ah, yeah I am but I'm not doing too well."

"That's fine come in with us half of us are here for some help anyways."

It seems my luck stat from inside the game has followed me to the real world. I quickly move to catch up with the rest of the players and enter the room.

The room looks like a private booth for gaming. It had computers on the sides of the wall and a couch at the far end. There were only 7 people in the room including me and they had already sat down at the computers looking towards the front where Sabrina and Elves_or_Nothin were standing. I chose to sit at the chair furthest from the front and waited.

"Ok, since there are no more people here let me introduce myself. My name is Evan, I am also Elves_or_Nothin and this is Sabrina, Scarlet Witch Sabrina. We usually play MMORPGs or VRMMORPGs and usually, we create a guild called ScarletElves you may or may not have heard of us before. However, Settlement is different from traditional games and there has been no confirmed contact between players even though it has been a week since the game has been released. I reached out on the forum to see if there were any willing players that wanted to meet up and here we are today. Thank you for coming."

Evan steps to the side and Sabrina walks forward.

"Now that Evan had gotten the introductions through I want to talk about what we have found out about the game. The game is a big sandbox, whatever you do will impact the game in some sort of way. Upgrading your own character is extremely difficult. Knowing the next step to proceed with the game is also difficult. So what do we have? A game that gives you almost no direction other than the events."

Nods occurred here and there as Sabrina talked to everyone and I too agreed. The game was very loose in its gameplay allowing a lot of different gameplay styles.

"From the information in the forum as well as our own experiences we have been able to make some findings. Each player is slowly creating a village and establishing their own territory. Players can be found in any biome. The NPCs are stronger than the players and they also gain stats. The NPCs seem to obtain stats by doing certain activities that would benefit them. For example, a player has found that one of his NPCs goes for a run every day and after a week his vitality increased by 1 and his agility increased by 2. There are wild monsters in the world and they do not have a set spawn however, certain biomes like forests have an increased chance of encountering a wild monster. We also found out that monsters can evolve into a stronger version of their selves however we do not know the condition or reason for the evolution. Does anyone else have anything they want to add?"

After speaking, Sabrina looks up at everyone in the room. She looked relaxed but at the same time, she looked anxious. Nobody spoke for a while and as she was about to speak one of the guys spoke first.

"What is the objective of gathering us here?"

"The objective is to share information so we can flesh out more of the game. Eventually, there will be interactions between other players and then there will be conflicts in territories. Forming an alliance early will benefit all of us."

Evan talked back to the guy that spoke. The guy did not have a response so he kept quiet. I saw Evan sigh before allowing Sabrina to continue.

"Both Evan and I are in the top 10 and while we haven't told the forum about the reason there is some speculation between us. The first event was survival and to obtain a higher ranking you would need to kill more monsters or kill the mini-boss. I was unable to kill the mini-boss however the monsters I fought were slimes and they were very easy to kill. I had 5 NPCs with me and one of them was able to make spears which we used to kill a lot of slimes. Whereas Evan was unable to kill a lot of wolves but managed to kill the mini-boss. In the second event, both of us were able to defeat the boss of the encampment. Despite this, I went up in ranking but Evan went down. This means the number of monsters you kill also correlates to the ranking and since I was able to kill lots of slimes in the encampment I went up in ranking."

"I have also spoken to SAMurai and he told me the reason he came first was that he was killing lots of weak monsters. The biome also mattered in which monsters we met. I met slimes in the plains, Evan met wolves in the forest and SAMurai said he was located near a river and grassland."

Sabrina and Evan took turns in talking about their experiences and by listening to them I gained a lot of information. Everyone started to open up about their experiences through the first week of gameplay and until it was my turn to speak.

"Hey bro, you haven't really spoken this whole time. Want to tell us about your game experience?"

I didn't know what to say. Should I lie about my experience? Or should I say the truth?

"Sorry, I have just been listening to everyone talk about Settlement. Umm, most of the things I experienced have been said by one of you guys already. I spawned in a wasteland biome and walked with my NPCs towards a canyon. There we have created simple structures and survived both nights. Nothing too special happened during the game."

I told part of the truth and sprinkled some lies in between in order to make it less suspicious. I did not feel right about lying to everyone since they were so nice in sharing their information but at the same time, I did not want to reveal my identity to random people. However, if it was just Evan and Sabrina I would tell them my identity and form a three-way alliance.

The talk ended after a bit more discussion and people started to leave one by one in order to go home and rest before entering the game. The last people to leave were me, Evan and Sabrina. After I check to make sure there was no one outside eavesdropping on us I turn around to the pair.

"Evan and Sabrina I have something to tell you."

"Go ahead."

Both of them spoke at the same time and both had curious expressions.

"I lied before about my experiences with the game. I'm actually Ian, part of the top 10."