“Plans For the Former Mountain Cat Bandit Group”

Rare was over the moon. She did it. At this moment in time, she was the only player in the game to discover the [Subordinate] skill.

In order to get it, you needed a whopping 390 XP, nearly four times the starting XP. No sane player would use all that XP on crap like [Summon] and [Discipline]. And she only realized it after the fact, but the skills that she learned all happened to be only the exact ones that she needed.

[Subordinate] required [Discipline] and [Contract].[Contract] required [Summon] and [Bind Soul].[Bind Soul] required [Necromancy] and [Control].

[Discipline], [Summon], and [Necromancy] were all prerequisites, but getting [Mental Magic] first was truly the hand of fate. Or wait, conversely, if she had gotten the three trash skills first, once she got [Control], she would still have discovered the same skills anyway.

She was lucky. She really felt like she had used up all the fortune she'd ever have just now. But well, she did spend a lot of time thinking about it. This wasn't only due to luck, it was also a result of her own resourcefulness. Rare's adventure was only just begi—

Ack, right as she thought that, she remembered that she hadn't actually learned [Subordinate] yet. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. After buying it, next was to check its effects.

[Tame the target, making them your follower. If the target successfully resists, [Subordinate] fails. Souls contracted via [Summon: Contract] cannot resist. Undead created via [Necromancy: Bind Soul] cannot resist. Targets under the influence of [Mental Magic: Control] have reduced resistance to [Subordinate]. Experience is shared with all followers. You may now choose to summon a follower when using [Summon]. If a follower dies, they cannot be summoned for one hour.]

Truly an ultimate skill that incorporated all the previous skills required to unlock it.

With perfect timing, just as she finished verifying the skill details, she received a notification for a system message.

<<Deferred action will now resume. [Kerry] can be tamed.>>

Apparently, Kerry's request earlier had been paused. If the required skills and conditions were not met, then stuff could be deferred. It would probably be silly to assume that the deferment would last indefinitely, though; there was probably a time limit, but it seemed like the system waited throughout their preparing meals and cleaning up and whatnot.

She could tame Kerry now. She apparently didn't even need to use the skill; maybe when the target actively wanted to be tamed, there was no need to cast [Subordinate] since they wouldn't resist.

As soon as the tame went through, Kerry's head shot up and she looked at me.

"I apologize, that took a long time. I believe you already understand, but you just now became my follower. I have become your leader, in more than just name."

"Yes, Boss! Thank you so much!"

She checked, and Kerry's stats and skills could now be viewed in the same way she could view her own. Kerry's XP had dropped to zero, but that made sense since it was now shared with Rare's. The reason why Rare's XP had increased was probably because all of Kerry's unused XP had been consolidated with Rare's when the tame occurred.

Kerry's build was focused on melee combat, and this was reflected in both her available skills and how much XP had been used to raise her stats. Or rather, more XP had been spent on just her stats than all the XP Rare had earned. If there had been an actual fight, it would have been impossible for someone who had just finished creating their character to have ever won.

"Haaah… I've never felt anything like this before… I can sense the Boss, and… I just feel so safe…"

She looked like she had just snuffed some catnip. Well, she'll get used to it… or so Rare had no choice but to believe. The other three girls looked at her enviously. She urged them to quickly declare their loyalty as well, and they did so right away and all became tamed. Immediately after that:

<<Named Enemy [Mountain Cat Bandit Group] has been defeated.>>

<<Unlocked personal area [Mountain Cat Bandit Group's Hideout].>>

<<Register [Mountain Cat Bandit Group's Hideout] as primary home?>>

—There's a housing system?!

That wasn't the first thing she should've reacted to. Kerry's group had apparently been some kind of unique boss.

In other words, Rare had spawned right next to that unique boss. It was true that the recommended starting areas for the monster races were caves, volcanos, or ruins, and it wouldn't be weird for such an area to include an early boss, but it was a bit unreasonable to spawn literally on top of a boss.

She was beginning to feel that the monster races' starting areas were unusually difficult. Choosing a monster race did result in getting extra XP, after all—or actually, since Rare was unlucky enough to spawn near a boss, if she hadn't gotten so much XP right off the bat, she might've been royally screwed. The weakest race, goblin, starts with 220 XP, and copying Rare's choices, they'd barely be unable to get [Bind Soul]. If they went straight for [Control] then dumped the rest of their XP into MND, factoring in a goblin's base stats, it was hard to imagine [Control] working on an opponent like Kerry.

Rare had tried to maximize her new character's potential by going for a super economical build, she attempted to offset her weaknesses by starting in monster territory, was extra careful due to starting in monster territory, because of that somehow beat a boss by catching it off guard, purposely chose not to finish them off, by some strange coincidence learned about the ability to tame, and just barely had enough XP to tame that boss.

If anything had gone wrong in this long chain of events, things wouldn't have turned out this way; this all had to have been planned by some higher being.

In that case, no need to look a gift horse in the mouth. This place was fine to use as a home. Even though it was a gloomy cave. Actually, for a near-sighted albino like her, it was actually a perfect fit. Indeed, praise be to the gods.

There was a housing menu for designating a place as your home. While verifying all the details, it appeared that even the underground lake was included as part of this home. She had thought this was an unnaturally large location, but actually the path was extremely tight, wasn't it…

Anyway, a new chapter in the legend of the [Mountain Cat Bandit Group] was about to—

"Er, huh? By the by, you named yourselves the [Mountain Cats]?"

"No, aren't we cat beastkin, not mountain cats?"

"That's not what I meant."

"?"

Looks like they didn't give themselves that name.

Then where exactly did this [Mountain Cat Bandit Group] name come from? She should keep this discrepancy in the back of her mind. The girls themselves may not have realized it, but it was possible one of the towns had put out a bounty on the [Mountain Cat Bandit Group].

In any case, the fact that these girls were considered a unique boss cleared up a number of questions that Rare had, including why she had earned so much XP from them, why they were so much stronger than she expected after becoming her followers, and finally why she had gotten so much XP just now.

The explanation for the last was that it was a reward for successfully taming a boss. Rare now had 320 XP. She didn't want to increase any physical stats like STR or VIT, so her options were to boost other stats, learn new skills, or spend them on strengthening the catkin girls.

Even if she were to use it on the girls, she still wanted to know how earning experience with followers worked. Also, while she wouldn't test it proactively, she also wanted to find out whether followers got the death penalty when they died. In any case, even if she used all 320 XP to buff herself up, Kerry would still be stronger than her.

Since her build synergized so much with MND right now, she'd throw 200 XP into MND, then use another 40 XP to learn the [Mental Magic] skills [Confuse] and [Sleep].

She reasoned that this was technically a boss encounter, so this was her reward.

Now then, this home base needed to become more home-like. Because the avatar goes to sleep when the player logs out, it would be nice to log out in comfort, so a place to sleep was necessary. She wouldn't demand a bed, but she did at least want something to offset the cold, hard ground. If she had to, she could just bear with it, but she shouldn't neglect furnishing this place properly. If that could be arranged now, then she could test logging out right away; she needed to know what happened to her followers while she wasn't online.

It had been nearly eight hours since she had initially logged in, but she didn't really have any plans in the real world, so she didn't mind pulling an all-nighter. Either way, her body here would be sleeping. Although for her testing, she'd be logging out then back in immediately.

As far as a makeshift bed went, animal fur or monster fur would be fine. She didn't know what things lived outside the cave, but there must be some kind of furry animal. Maybe one lived in the forest.