Welcome to the Grind

John slipped the scale back out of his pocket and tried to will the Arena barrier open, but nothing happened. Confused and somewhat alarmed by this, he navigated through the windows to the available options. ‘Pseudodrakes’ was still there, and when he selected it the world shattered and fell away like glass in the barrier transition that he was still getting used to.

‘I wonder why I couldn’t just will the option to be used now that I know it exists like I can with most of my stuff.’ While that thought went through his head, he scanned his surroundings for threats, bleach-loaded water gun at the ready.

When nothing jumped out at him, neither figuratively nor literally, he took the time to actually take in the appearance of the barrier. At first glance, the dry landscape dominated by reddish-brown dirt and yellow patches of dry grass was completely different from the cozy suburb where he lived.

On closer inspection, however, there were still some things the two had in common. The cluster of jagged cliffs sticking almost vertically out of the ground nearby was in more or less the same place that his house had been. A mix of more rock formations like it and sinkhole-like pits overlapped locations of other houses nearby. Clusters of thorny bramble were scattered about where flowerbeds, bushes and trees had sat in the real world, and a hollow that looked like a dried out riverbed roughly corresponded with the path system John had used to get to his grandparents’ house yesterday morning.

After a few minutes of taking all that in, he still hadn’t seen anything resembling hostile creatures. In fact, the only thing moving besides himself had been a tumbleweed rolling by. ‘I really would’ve thought that the enemies would be coming at me to attack, but I guess it’s a search and destroy type of deal instead. Maybe it varies by the selected enemy?’

In any case, he had to go looking now. Assuming that the pseudodrakes weren’t just standing around in clusters that happened to be out of view at the moment, they had to be hiding somewhere.

That could be either in the brambles, in the pits or in the numerous cracks and fissures in the cliff formations. Obviously, the sensible thing to do was assume ‘all of the above’ until proven otherwise. Still, John thought that the latter two were more likely. The brambles had few leaves and thus made for poor visual cover. Meanwhile, drakes were presumably related to dragons in some fashion, and in most fiction dragons made lairs in caves. So hiding among rock seemed a likely instinct for them to have.

Still, the poorer visual cover also made the brambles easier to check, so he started there. Brandishing the water gun, he slowly approached one until he got close enough to first prod it with his foot, then give it a quick kick. When nothing looked off, he deemed that shrub clear and moved on to the next.

After a little while, he had cleared all of the ones around a section of the dried out riverbed, giving him an area he could safely fall back to without ‘aggroing’ more enemies if need be. Pulling multi-aggro and dying was not a mistake he was keen on repeating here.

That done, he moved on to the rock formations. While the pits probably had fewer hiding places, and thus would be faster to check, he didn’t really have a good way of knowing how stable the ground near them was.

While slowly circling the rock formation overlapping his house, a faint hint of movement inside a fissure caused him to immediately dodge backwards and to the side. In doing so, he narrowly dodged the pounce of a pseudodrake.

Pseudodrake
Level 4 Draconid
HP: 30
MP: 5

The creature was a bit bigger than your average house cat, and moved with similar grace. It was covered in mottled, brown and gray scales, with a hint of coppery sheen along the underside. Its head, tail and feet were fully reptilian in appearance, all resembling those of a monitor lizard, but the body and legs had a cat-like shape and structure beneath the scales.

John threw a quick Observe at it as it hissed at him, but let the image fade immediately as the incised beast pounced him again. He tried to sidestep it while simultaneously letting go of the water gun with his left arm to block if the sidestep failed.

The sidestep did fail, but between it and his interposed arm, the small draconid was still kept away from his face and chest. That only bought him a fraction of a second, though, as the beast’s claws found purchase in his jacket and it started climbing.

-2 HP.

-6 HP.

A claw punched through the un-reinforced inside of his sleeve and tore into John’s lower arm as the creature pounced for his face. He closed his eyes reflexively, but opened them again a moment later in surprise when no claws or teeth tore into his face.

Instead, his hat left his head. For a moment, John was confused by why the beast would attack the hat instead of his face or throat. Even so, he spun trying to locate it and his foe. When both hat and drake came back down from a mostly vertical arc, with the latter landing on its back, John recalled the enchantment on the hat.

He’d have liked to not burn that on the first enemy today, but he liked not having his eyes clawed out and regrown with Gamer’s Body more. He also didn’t waste the opportunity that came with this and shot the draconid with a squirt of concentrated bleach.

4 poison damage. Debuff applied

1 poison damage.

The critter made a panicked leap backwards from being halfway back to its feet, hissing and spitting as it went. The second tick of damage was from it trying to clean its eye with its tongue, which brought about more hissing and spitting.

John noted two other immediate changes to its behavior. Where before it’d kept its head trained directly on him, it now veered from side to side in a searching manner. It also tried to seem bigger by arching its back like an angry cat and whipping its tail side to side.

Recognizing it as the creature being on the defensive, John switched weapon set to the bat and stepped up to deliver an over-head strike. Unfortunately, while seemingly unable to track him well, something clued it in on the attack, and it made a twitchy jump backwards.

Then it immediately pounced for a counter attack, but its aim was slightly off-center. Between that and John’s hasty attempt at evading, the pseudodrake only barely grazed his arm with a single claw that found purchase for neither scratch nor climb.

The combatants turned to face one another again, and for a moment the standoff continued. Then John went on the offense again, but this time he only stepped aggressively closer while holding back his strike for a moment.

2 damage.

The draconid had responded with the same evade and counter-pounce, as expected, and John sidestepped cleanly. He had also tried to swat it out of the air with the bat in passing, but only managed a glancing blow.

While it dealt little damage, it did affect the creature’s trajectory enough to mess up its landing. Trying to capitalize and immobilize his prey, John swiftly stepped onto its tail.

5 damage.

With an audible ‘snap’, the tail broke off about 2 cm below its base. Between it being bloodless and the low damage for a severed limb, John assumed it was intentionally shed rather than him having found a weak point. The word ‘autotomy’ emerged from his absorbed biology knowledge.

With the brief distraction of surprise, the beast pounced up to try to climb him again, finding a claw-hold on his right arm. Half-reflexively, he dropped the bat and grabbed the reptile, trying to yank it off.

For a long moment, it clung defiantly to his arm, but John ultimately proved the stronger of the two. Not wanting to give it a chance to wiggle free of his grasp, he immediately called the kitchen knife from his inventory and stabbed it through the creature’s chest.

Critical Hit! 25 damage.

3 damage. -3 HP.

1 out of 6 enemies slain.

Ouch! John dropped the knife and pseudodrake both, the latter turning into a red silhouette and vanishing completely before it hit the ground. Those last three points of damage had been from him stabbing his own palm through the beast.

While the pain and injury both vanished quickly, he still rubbed the spot with his other hand, wiggled his fingers, and clenched and unclenched his fist to make sure it was fine. Then he glanced at his EXP bar and was momentarily disappointed, before recalling that all rewards were given when this set of enemies was fully cleared.

Nothing to do about that other than get to it, but the smart play here definitely was to take a look at what he’d learned from this first one. Especially since the point of holding off on Enhance Muscle had been to figure out where it’d serve him best. First step of that was checking the thus-far ignored Observe window for concrete information.

Nothing useful for fighting them, and if there would be anything in the future, it’d undoubtedly be sitting in the still unavailable ‘Information’ box. He also would have liked a look at the loot table, but getting bonus stuff from his first kill was nice in any case. The dictionary especially so, if Low Draconic was whatever Qhila was speaking. Beginning to learn it so they could communicate better without the incense would be nice.

Returning to the matter at hand, John reflected on the fight with the pseudodrake. He’d been stronger and tougher than it, but that was unsurprising given the size difference. If anything, the surprise was how much it’d taken to pull it off his arm despite that difference. Without the points he’d put into STR, he probably wouldn’t have been able to.

On the other hand, the draconid had been faster than him. Not by that much, though. Buffing AGI to improve his precision of movement, including course correcting mid-motion, would probably let him negate that advantage. At least with regards to the buffed body part.

While he had done some side-stepping, his arms were probably still the better pick. It would let him use his weapons, or just hands, better for both offense and defense. Pressing his offensive advantage, in turn, would finish fights faster and with less chance for something to go wrong and cost him HP.

He cast the spell while returning the knife to his inventory, picking up the bat and then swapping to the other weapon set. That way, he got a bit of work in on Theurgic Focus.

He also retrieved his Hat of Close Calls. As expected, it fell off in blatant defiance of gravity and friction the moment he tried to put it on, so he hung it around his neck by the chinstrap for now instead. A quick trip to his inventory confirmed that this still counted as equipped for the purpose of the Gold Star Sticker bonus. Then he returned to the cliff cluster that the pseudodrake had come out of, to finish checking it.

Nearly a half-circle around it later, another flicker of movement alerted John to an imminent attack that he narrowly dodged. Even knowing what to look for, he couldn’t spot the draconids in there when they sat still.

Like the first one, this Level 3 pseudodrake immediately followed the first pounce up with another attempt. Instead of blocking, John tried to swat it aside. That prevented it from grabbing hold of his arm and climbing, but dealt no damage.

2 poison damage. Debuff applied.

John tried to hit it with a squirt of bleach as it landed, and it had worked decently well. Not quite as well as the face full that the first one got, and this one didn’t seem to have trouble tracking his general location. It still put the creature on the defensive, though, which was the most important part.

John switched to the bat and stepped forward aggressively. Holding off on striking until his foe had leapt back, its counter-pounce was met head on by the bat, impacting with an uncomfortable crunch.

Critical Hit! 20 damage.

6 damage.

The second damage notification was John finishing it off with a kick. Once again, the carcass was gone before it hit the ground.

2 out of 6 enemies slain.

—-------------------------------------------------------

6 out of 6 enemies slain. Barrier cleared.

Taking the same approach to the remaining four had largely worked out. More so than he would have expected, even, but he’d noticed something about these creatures. While looking at any one of them in isolation left them seeming like real creatures, at least until they de-spawned on ****, they didn’t hold up so well when looked at as a whole.

Simply put, their behavior was too consistently patterned. Granted, animal species had behavior patterns too, all dogs growled when trying to intimidate and all that. But this went too far. It wasn’t just a matter of the same general type of responses, the pseudodrakes had all acted in nearly the same way, following almost exactly the same pattern and even with nearly the same timing.

It was like they were mobs in a hyper-realistic VR game, with flawless graphics and other feedback but still limited to a small set of moves and run by the same AI. Kinda fitting, given that this was all a ‘special Gamer option’.

None of the rewards had turned up yet, but a trail of floating sparkles had appeared that presumably led to them. While following it, he took stock of his performance. He’d had two minor slip ups after the first fight. One had cost him 3 HP to a claw tearing at his hand, the other one had just cost some Durability for his jacket. It was down to 96% now.

The trail led to a sparkly treasure chest situated roughly where John had appeared himself when he opened the barrier. In addition to being sparkly, it also looked like a cartoonish animation object and thus stood out quite a bit from the real-looking everything else. In fact it looked like it was plucked straight out of one of the Legend of Zelda games of the last decade and a half.

The moment he touched it, the chest popped open and a bunch of softly glowing, yellow orbs flew out of it and into his chest. That caused a mildly tingling, pleasant sensation that was immediately joined by a feeling of success as his EXP bar jumped by about 20%. ‘Not bad for-’ He checked his phone. ‘- 22 minutes of work.’

Opening the chest had also produced some pending notifications, but he decided to check the loot first. The drops mostly consisted of claws, teeth, scales and vials of pseudodrake blood and saliva, all of which Observe called ‘crafting materials’ without elaborating further on their use.

The most immediately interesting part about those was that the first of each that he observed incremented the ‘magical objects’ counter in his Observe Skill Quest. He also got two tails, marked as ‘raw food’, and a whole pseudodrake hide that was marked as a crafting material, trophy and gift item. He briefly wondered if the number of tails was a coincidence, or specifically from the one that had autotomized its tail, multiplied by the first kill bonus.

The most important parts were the money and the dictionary. Coming out to $62, it was a pretty meager sum by Abyssal prices, but a quick trip through his phone calculator showed it to be around $120/hour once he’d taken out the First Kill Bonus. Even if he never upgraded his cash flow from here, this still paid better than just about any mundane job he could hope to land.

The dictionary offered a prompt to learn Low Draconic, which the Librarians’ website confirmed to be the native language of ‘most’ kobolds. After a few moments of consideration, he decided that it would probably still be useful even if he was so unfortunate that it wasn’t Qhila’s native language, and hit yes.

The immediate consequence being a feeling of vertigo and information being crammed into his mind, rather than an error message, indicated that a language did fit inside his ‘academic capacity’. He didn’t have time to congratulate himself on that, however, as a warning message popped up, followed by an icy gust.