“Ah, what’s that?” replied Dakkon. “I was a bit lost in thought.”
“I could see that,” said Ramses. “Did you see anything particularly odd about that krimmer? They don’t usually go down that fast.”
“First time I’ve seen one,” said Dakkon. “Maybe we just got the drop on it?”
“Thanks for the distraction, Dakkon,” said Hebbeson. “And the wind and heal were a nice touch, too. Honestly, I thought we would be run over the second the pig saw us from that far away.”
“If this thing weighs so much, do we only kill one before heading back to town?” asked Dakkon, looking a bit disappointed.
“Haven’t done any gathering, I take it?” asked Benton. “In Chronicle, tasks such as skinning and butchering an animal, picking herbs, mining ores and gemstones, and the like have an assist mode just like melee skills do.”
Dakkon’s form of gathering had been to wrench fangs from wolves and stuff full animal carcasses in his bag. He had no intention of mentioning that. Furthermore, he wasn’t aware that attack skills had any sort of combat assist. He didn’t want to reveal that he had no real combat-ready class skills in his arsenal, as he didn’t want to draw any attention to the fact that all of his damage was coming from his precious and covetable dagger.
“When you go to harvest parts from an animal—or rather when Hebbeson does it for us, since he actually has some class skill dedicated to harvesting which will yield better results—the game will determine and generate the quality and amount that is harvestable,” explained Benton. “Supposedly you can actually butcher an animal yourself and can get much greater yields for doing so, but it takes a lot of time and skill to get anything at all, so almost everyone prefers the auto-assist harvesting skills.”
“Neat,” said Dakkon. Maybe his previous methods weren’t that odd after all. “But even then, that carcass has to weigh as much as a car. Won’t we get a full cart-load from just one?”
“Unfortunately,” shrugged Benton, “the creature may have that much meat, but the auto-harvesting won’t get us a whole lot. Don’t worry, the meat is nice, but the real money comes from selling the glands.”
Dakkon decided to hold off, for now, on trying to keep the harvested krimmer parts cool. He needed a control, after all. He wanted to know what the haul would be worth as-is so that he could compare it to one which he tried to preserve with a little magic. He could also do without more people knowing that his class excelled at heating and cooling things, but not a whole lot else.
Dakkon watched as Hebbeson quickly swiped a small dagger through the krimmer’s massive body. In a flash of light and practically no time at all, the harvester had—laid out before him—a pile consisting of neatly assorted meat, tusks, glands, and some amount of dark fur where the boar had once been.
“That’s about three times as much fur as I’ve harvested from one of these,” remarked Hebbeson.
“Most I’ve seen too,” agreed Ramses. “Must be because it went down so quickly, we didn’t get a chance to mess it all up.”
Hebbeson walked the spoils over to the cart and dropped them in, barely filling a twelfth of the space, without accounting for any attempt to stack future materials on top.
“All right,” said Dakkon. “Let’s do that again.”
The group found and killed another krimmer as quickly as the first. Then, after the third krimmer went down in much the same way—immediately after getting hit twice on the underside by Dakkon—Ramses had questions he wanted answered.
“Pretty good with a knife, huh?” remarked Hebbeson with a smirk.
“Just what was it you said that your class was?” asked Ramses, eyeing Dakkon up and down. “And your level?”
“I can’t talk about it,” Dakkon lied. “Sorry.” He kept his words short—he really needed get in the habit of not giving out important information.
“And is there any particular reason why not?” pried Ramses.
“Yes,” Dakkon stated bluntly. “But I can’t really talk about that either.”
Ramses looked a little taken aback at first, but seemed to come to the realization that alienating his newly found golden goose wouldn’t be in his best interests, and so relented. “Fine, whatever,” he said.
“Perhaps he just can’t tell us, Ram,” said Zelle. “There are all sorts of weird classes with restrictions in this game.”
Dakkon smiled at Zelle. It was timely and, from a shaman who appeared to be a class with weird restrictions, seemed believable enough. Dakkon simply hadn’t considered the friction that could arise from keeping his class a secret while doing loads of damage for his level.
“Back to hunting, then?” asked Benton.
The group continued killing krimmer until, after about an hour and a half, the party had a close call where one kicked Dakkon away and was completely uncontainable by Hebbeson, despite his efforts. Benton and Ramses managed to slow the creature down, giving Dakkon enough time to rejoin the fight, but Hebbeson and Ramses both nearly died in the process. No one was prepared to lose several days of game time to a random boar, so it was clear that they needed a tank first and foremost to keep attention as far away from Dakkon as possible. They decided to try their luck in town once more, this time bringing back a cart filled with krimmer bits to advertise their success in the field.
The advertisement worked. When the ragtag group returned with cart in tow, every person who had turned down Ramses’s initial request came up to him asking if the group was planning to go back out, and if they needed an extra member. Ramses made sure to look extra thoughtful as he said the group “wasn’t sure quite yet,” and “we’ll get back to you,” which worked to brighten up his temperament tremendously. Zelle chuckled at the little acts and Hebbeson simply snorted ambiguously.
After selling their collection of parts, the group made just shy of 12 gold in total, which divided evenly into two gold and 40 silver per member. Now that Dakkon knew about what a gold was worth, he wasn’t very impressed with the haul. After a moment of consideration, however, he realized that a higher-level character could probably do that all by themselves in that amount of time, earning around 20 gold in two hours. That converts to 10 credits per hour, which isn’t much at all—but when one considers that there are eight hours in game time for every one in real time, that 10 credits per game hour can amount to 80 credits per real hour. That’s a good rate of accrual, or would be if it wasn’t actually tied to eight full hours of in-game labor. Still, Dakkon was sure that there would be plenty of people working full time in-game to make money, even if that meant 320 hours of in-game work over the course of one real time week. The thought of working for a real-world company inside the game sent a shiver down his spine and he dismissed the topic.
From only that much time, Dakkon had gained nearly 10,000 experience—enough to level himself twice, and just short of what he’d need for his eighteenth level.
|————
|Statistics ( ][][ ) ( ][][][ )
|————
|Strength: 13 — (10 + 3 Equipped) ( ? )
|Stamina: 25
|Agility: 64 — (50 + 14 Equipped)
|Dexterity: 13 — (10 + 3 Equipped)
|Intellect: 13 — (10 + 3 Equipped)
|Luck: 0 ( X )
|Free Stat Points: 25
|Hit Points: 475/475
|Endurance: 262/262
|Mana Points: 258/258
|Leveclass="underline" 17
|EXP Until Next Leveclass="underline" [