Chapter XXIII - Grinding

Marcus departed from the twins and returned to the Dwarf brothers, he had to dismantle 12 wolves in the dungeon to receive the pelts he needed to complete the quest.

"Greetings master smiths, I have brought the pelts you had requested!" Marcus said greeting the two.

"Aboot time laddie! Was wondering if ya had ran off and forgot about our request!" The elder brother replied.

"Have ye brought the hides we need?" The younger brother asked.

Marcus nodded as he pulled the 4 Pristine Wolf Hides out of his inventory and placed them on the counter.

"Come back in an hour!" The elder brother said as the younger brother grabbed the 4 hides and they began to work.

During this time Marcus went around and completed all the basic gathering profession quests, unlocking the first aid skill, the herbalism skill, the fishing skill, and the mining and woodcutting skills.

The World had an ever expansive crafting system that was as intricate as the skills were on Earth. One could only be locked into one crafting profession but all the gathering professions were free real estate.

One could level all gathering professions up to the Artisan rank and only 2 could increase beyond to Master and one of those to the rank of Grand Master.

The two he planned to take were Butchery and First Aid. Butchery would forever be useful as monster materials were always going to be in the highest demand and behind that, first aid to increase the effectiveness of the multitude of potions that would eventually become available.

A duration boost or a potency boost was one such bonus, but a lot of potions had negative effects that alchemists could not remove. This is where first aid truly shined being able to negate those effects to a small degree at first up to completely ignoring them all together.

***

After the hour Marcus had returned back to the dwarves and received an item beyond his wildest imagination.

<Golden Beetle Gauntlets>

Rank: Gold

No Level Restriction

No Class Restriction

Durability: -/-

Damage dealt while equipped increased by 10%.

Damage taken while equipped decreased by 10%

"This is our finest work ta date laddie, ye 'ave fulfilled our longest dream of creating a work better than our ****** of a drunkard father." The elder brother said.

"We want ye to have this laddie as well." The younger brother replied, holding out a small slip of enclosed papers. "Take this to Dwargon, the city of Dwarves, find our older sister, she runs a smithy in the upper levels."

As Marcus took the slip announcements appeared before him.

<Quest Completed>

Invitation Slip

Fame +5

"Thank you both for your diligent work, as soon as I enter the city I'll seek out your sister immediately." Marcus replied as he equipped the gauntlets.

With all his preparations completed he exited Vhul and was headed west towards the mountain ridge encircling the village. The forest was not a dungeon but the drop rate for any runes was so low that unless one spent a long time killing the monsters in the area, or was extremely lucky, one may never come across a rune.

There were over a dozen such hidden forests across Gaia, the planet of The World, and another dozen on the separate continent that made up the Agents of Chaos.

After traversing towards the forest Marcus was able to talk with his chat, he would become unusually quiet while fighting as he struggled with talking and fighting at the same time. His stats didn't reflect his previous abilities and he found it difficult as his body just couldn't pull off the moves in his mind. He needed to level up, and fast.

As he got to the forest's edge, he made up an excuse to log off and grab some food to stop his stream from revealing the existence of the runes too soon to the outside world. This would be his first hidden Ace in the game and he needed to keep it a closely guarded secret for as long as possible and something only his guild had access to later on.

***

Marcus had logged out of The World and signed off from Flutter before logging back in. He entered the forest and pulled out his sword. He wasn't going to need his shield and he preferred to fight without it. His class path was not one that used a shield and he didn't want to have to become overly reliant on it only to have to break that habit as he had in the past.

Marcus saw the his prey fluttering between the trees examining the various bushes.

<Forest Fairy>

Level 20

???/??? HP

Marcus knew these things were glass cannons. They were a tricky foe if you didn't know their ultimate weakness that made them the easiest monster in the game to kill.

They loved and collected flowers. If no flowers were nearby they would be extremely aggressive. They would attack with their incredible speed and would blitz unsuspecting players back to the Adventurer's Hall.

Flowers would pacify their aggression and would actually slowly float towards the flower as if nothing else existed. This was their Achilles Heel and with their paper thin defenses and low HP, they were easy targets.

Marcus walked with a white daisy in one hand and Replica in the other and began walking around and approaching the fairies one after another and swiping them Replica and dismantling their corpses. The runes came from inside them and was essentially their life force.

Forest Fairy slain!

2 EXP

"Dismantle!"

This was Marcus' life for the following 15 hours as he spent his time casually massacring the whole forest. Their respawn time was good enough and there were far more fairies around that allowed him to continually kill them as they respawned with no downtime.

The experience wasn't the greatest but that wasn't the purpose of farming them. Taking roughly 5 seconds to kill one, it took him roughly 6 hours to go from level 10 to level 15 and had killed over 21,000 of the fairies and even though he had received around 100 runes, he still didn't have enough to slot in every piece of gear. The drop rate was roughly 0.005%….