Fresh New Start II

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start II

”I told you guys the first time, I’ve tried every trick in the book and there’s no way I can hit the US servers without running into stupid amounts of lag. It’s not a problem with the proxy. I’ve tried ten of them already. Yeah…yeah…I get it, don’t worry. Have fun. I’ll see what I can figure out.”

Ryan gave an exasperated sigh as he slammed down on the red button within his voice chat application. Long distance calling was expensive, but the internet was convenient enough to provide several alternatives. If only Elder Tale’s servers were as hospitable as that. They had single handedly ruined his plans for this Saturday, making it impossible for him to be of any asset to the people he was supposed to help in a raid. Now all that he had to do was a small amount of mind-numbingly easy homework and a foreign alternate account to mess around on.

”Username…password…log in…”

The screen once more popped to life and the world of Elder Tale spread out before him, complete with a third-person perspective of Ryuuketsu, the little bloke – well, there goes his US citizenship – that he’d pieced together just to test his game connection before he tried to hop over to the US servers. It looked like they’d be stuck together for a while longer now. Maybe all those plans that he’d made about what he was going to do with Ryuuketsu were actually going to come to fruition now.

That’s what he got for making plans, Ryan supposed.

It wasn’t important right now anyways. He had a free day now, and he fully intended to blow all his free time on levelling Ryuuketsu more than he probably should in one play session. The Swashbuckler was about to hit boot camp, and if he didn’t like it then he’d just have to learn otherwise.

Where had he left off last time? One of the intro quests, probably. A quick glance at his log showed that he’d bothered to burn through a few of the more annoying running back and forth types and pretty much had free reign over what he wanted to kill in the coming hours. There were plenty of blank kill counts that needed to be added to and enough daily quests that burning off steam by smacking around a few of the world’s weakest creatures was actually advisable.

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Word Count: 400

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start II

Ryan leaned back in his chair after setting Ryuuketsu off to his next destination – a section of the land filled with Young Pittered Boars and Dull Green Slimes alike. Variance in the types of enemies that he needed to fight was something Ryan would have enjoyed if monsters at this level of the game were capable of doing anything but rush at you with the intent of butting heads.

Combat wasn’t something you needed to be super focused on when attack patterns were so predictable that you could more or less fight a creature with your eyes closed, especially when they weren’t designed to aggro onto you unless you attacked them directly. Briefly, Ryan pondered if Ryuuketsu could get as bored of tired and repetitive combat as he himself did. It was unlikely, as the character was nothing more than a collection of bits and bytes.

Still, for the sake of actually making a character, the idea of kicking around a few personality traits in his head to entertain himself wasn’t so bad.

Maybe his character was one of those really dark, brooding adventurers who spent way too much time reminiscing about his own dark past to care about such pointless things as how much time he had to waste killing dumb amounts of low level creatures.

Well that was depressing. What kind of depressing past could his character even have? Extreme lack of friends? His character could whine about things that actually mattered when it came up. Elder Tale was the kind of world where there was always something to do and no repercussions for wasting time doing whatever you wanted. So long as monsters died, gold and items would drop. So long as you had gold, you could buy food and shelter. That was all you really needed to survive, wasn’t it?

Well, brooding didn’t really fit his modus operandi all that well anyways. He wasn’t the type to find happiness through excessive altruism, either. That more or less ruled out any reason he should even be doing anything in town. Maybe he was just a man with a plan who knew the fastest way to the top was to do chores, even if he didn’t particularly care about the people he was doing them for. That was definitely plausible. After all, what was an adventurer but a traveler looking to grow stronger and use their freedom to its greatest extent?

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Word Count: 403

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start II

The strength Ryuuketsu had at this moment was small. Even with a surprising amount of early game power, the Swashbuckler was only as strong as his level allowed him to be. That meant he was still in Ryan’s boot camp, and that also meant that until he hit a half decent level he probably wouldn’t be doing much of anything but punching through quests and grinding up experience.

Still, that kind of thing just sort of felt…dishonest? It wasn’t really cheating; the game was designed around the mechanic that a character would complete quests and kill monsters to gain experience, money, and items. Those would allow the character to grow stronger either through obtaining levels for their various classes and in turn gaining health, mana, and skills or giving them the means by which to obtain stronger equipment.

Was it odd that he wasn’t even paying attention to what he was doing? Pittered Boards had to be dropping left and right, and their slime companions were dying just as fast as they spawned it seemed. Given the slow rate Ryuuketsu was taking them out, Ryan was confronted with what actually felt like a never ending horde of creatures.

The small bar denoting how close his character was to “dinging” was gradually climbing as more of the creatures were sent to an early grave only to be instantly replaced by their relatives somewhere else on the map.

After a while of this, all of Ryuuketsu’s listed quests finally managed to obtain that oh-so-precious “completed” marker, and Ryan prompted the swordsman to face-turn and march his way back to town. There were rewards to be taken and skills to unlock, after all.

Turning in a few quests was a simple enough task to complete. It had only been about an hour or so, and the quests that he’d managed to take Ryuuketsu through had already brought up his level meter a few times. The stats that came with the levels were welcome, though the process of getting someone to craft him a weapon would probably be difficult. There wouldn’t be any decent increase to his attacking strength anytime soon, and that was just something he was going to have to learn to deal with. As disappointing as it was, he supposed that material gathering was just too much trouble for an alternate character whose sole purpose was to be a time sink.

Besides, there were plenty of items available in shops for players to buy every few levels or so. That would be enough to get by.

”Just have to reset my quest log and grab some of the higher level stuff…and there we go.

Ryan set the auto-travel function on his character to head back into the plains. More monsters needed hunting, and more levels needed to be gained. It was a cold, empty cycle, but it was a way of life for an adventurer like Ryuuketsu, he supposed.

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Word Count: 489

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start II

So, why was Ryuuketsu actively engaged in hunting down Dull Green Slimes right now? What were his character motivations? Who taught him how to fight? These were the sorts of things Ryan liked to think about. He liked games for their stories, which is why he never really played MMOs without a dedicated group. Without any sort of a good narrative to follow, all that was left to do was appreciate a map aesthetic or enjoy a combat system. While Elder Tale’s combat system was a refreshing change of pace from the clunky turn-based combat system assigned to most other games of this nature. Freedom of movement and the ability to actually dodge attacks that get thrown at you made big differences.

For example, the fact that two slimes in particular charged at Ryuuketsu from opposing directions would have meant guaranteed damage in any run-of-the-mill MMO, but Elder Tale was different in the fact that it came with skills specifically designed around dodging, bobbing, and weaving your character through attacks.

Fold Step was useful for when the man in charge of the Swashbuckler who knew the skill accidentally drew way too much aggro onto themselves. The teleportation-like speed burst as well as the other quick movement skills were sort of the bread and butter of the build he’d been going for so far. He wasn’t quite sure if the Swashbuckler skill tree allowed for high-evasion DPS builds. It was worth a shot, though.

Ryuuketsu’s engaged targets were confused for a bit when the hitbox they’d been aiming for had shifted drastically to the left…er, right…East? Yeah, East worked. Either way, they had to refocus on Ryuuketsu, and in that time Ryan was able to guide his avatar in the world to finish the two opponents off quickly.

More slimes and more boars clustered around the Swashbuckler, but at this point Ryan had more than made Ryuuketsu ready for attacks from all sides against this kind of enemy. Proper cooldown management as well as good positioning and relatively high stats for fighting these enemies made it so anything getting in his way was quickly cast aside and wiped out.

It was at around that time that Ryan came to the conclusion that moving to another area and looking for stronger instances of the enemies this game had to offer. If he stuck around the beginner areas too long his rate of levelling up would only continue to go down. Besides, daily quests only offered so much experience, and storyline related quests were worth much more sizeable chunks of the valuable asset.

Sighing, Ryan guided Ryuuketsu to head back to town once more. He guessed it was time for a new environment anyways.

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Word Count: 451