Golden Experience

“The monsters are undead. The landlady musta been up in the middle of the night ’cause the town was just attacked.”

The next day, Kerry went to the sellsword guild to get information about the town’s defense. She ground her teeth in vexation at hearing it, though; if they had known about the attack, then it would have been better to have gone out and seen what was going on themselves.

“Y’all safeholder sellswords too? Well, we grateful they protectin’ us, but… we want to get ’em to stop attackin’ us period; y’know, get at the root cause… We sent a bird to the gov’ment, but… We ain’t gotten no response yet.”

The worn out middle-aged man standing at the guild’s counter sighed after voicing his complaints. Just as Remy had said the night before, it didn’t seem like the players were proactively trying to solve the problem.

Another man in the lobby who looked to be a sellsword spoke up. “About that, we also wanna do something about it. Not everyone is on the same page, though, and it’s not enough for just one or two people to go looking for the undead base…” he said in frustration.

From the way he talked, he had to have been a safeholder—a player. It seemed that not every player was completely indifferent about the town’s situation. Just as the man said, though, if there were different perspectives about what should be done, then it would be difficult for them to all come to an agreement.

She couldn’t imagine her beloved leader getting so much as a scratch from a sellsword of this caliber, no matter how many of them joined forces. However, if they happened to be at Kerry’s level, or any of the other girls’ level, then she wouldn’t be so sure. If they had both numbers and coordination, then it might be possible for them to inflict real harm.

But if a large number of players gathered who were antagonistic to Boss, they shouldn’t all have exactly the same goals. Considering it from that angle, it might be possible to turn a large group of enemies into multiple smaller groups of enemies.

“You might have a point. And you are?”

That was a pretty suspicious introduction. Probably a fake name. However, given that he should believe Kerry to be another player, she couldn’t think of a reason for a player to hide his name from another player.

“No, I know what you’re thinking, really. Wrong guy. I finished making my character first so I got the name, but now he’s the one who’s famous. It’s a bit embarassing.”

It appeared that he didn’t know what Kerry was thinking at all. Though neither did she know what he was talking about. But speaking of names, she felt like Boss mentioned something about no two names being the same once, so maybe these players were unable to have the same names as one another or something. It would be easy for Kerry to just give out her own name here, but if there happened to be a player named “Kerry” out there then it could turn into an annoying thing. However, from the way this guy talked, it seemed names could be extremely similar as long as they were subtly different.

“You can call me Kerry. These are Riley, Remy, and Marion. All nicknames, though, since we’re just used to going by them.”

That should be good enough.

“So do all four of you usually play together?”

“Yyyeah…that’s right. Riley’s got something to do right after this, though, so she’ll be back later.”

They’ll pretend she would be going back to the inn to “sleep,” or log out, and she would be able to sneak out from there. Since Riley had a lot of skills suitable for monitoring areas and general covert activities, it would be easy for her to operate without being seen. That was why she was picked to find the enemy chief, too.

“All right, so there’s three of you. If you’re up for it and we get attacked again tonight, do you wanna party up? It would be your first time defending this town, right?”

Wayne had been this way too, but why were these player people so nice? Before now, the only people who got close to the catkin girls wanted to either rob or kill them. That’s why they were reflexively suspicious of anyone who seemed to be acting out of good will at first glance. That said, it wasn’t like Kerry’s group lacked ulterior motives either.

“Yeah, that’d be nice. There’s a lotta stuff I’d like ask about.”

They would part with Gilgamesh for now. Night was still a long ways away, and they wanted to check on the townspeople as well. Plus, if the monsters only operated at night, then it would be best if Riley went scouting around noon. Since it would be bad if she were seen at this time of day, she would be going out with her hooded cloak. It would stand out, unfortunately, but with this many players there would be no shortage of suspicious-looking figures around anyway, so at least she shouldn’t be particularly memorable.

“We’ll be going, then.”

After dropping Riley off at the inn, the other three went back out into the town. When they went to the shopping district, they didn’t get the impression that there were any shortages of goods. This should have been the third day of the event. Apparently the event’s ripple effects hadn’t fully propagated yet.

“Potions…have gone up a bit. If deliveries stay stopped, we might be able to make a profit from selling raw ingredients.”

“Depending on how things go tonight, if we’ve got enough for ourselves then it might be better for you to just make and sell ’em yerself, Remy. No clue how long we’ll be staying in this town, but our funds won’t last forever.”

The main ingredient for potions came from an herb that grew pretty much anywhere. If they ever had time during the day, they could go out and gather more. Prices going up meant that either materials or crafters were in short supply. So either no one wanted to leave the town because of the monsters, or there just weren’t a lot of crafters here in the first place. Whatever the reason behind it was, Remy would be able to turn a profit.

Having decided on a general plan, they just had to wait for the sun to set then meet up with Gilgamesh.

Around when the curtain of night began to fall, the girls went outside the town walls and prepared for battle. A number of sellswords and town guards were also in the vicinity. They couldn’t tell at a glance, but some of them must have been players too.

“All right, the sun’s gone down… From here on out, monsters will start showing up. Any time now.”

“How exactly are they going to show up? They gonna crawl up outta the ground?”

“Ah, nah. You see that rocky area over there? And those clumps of trees? They’ll come from out of there.”

Looking in the direction Gilgamesh pointed, Kerry could see a bunch of larger rocks strewn about, which is what he referred to as “rocky.” Trees twisted away from those rocks, as though avoiding them. This appeared to have repeated a few times and became a sort of pseudo-forest. They served as the entrance for the monsters to flow out of during this excursion.

“Look, there they come.”

Just as Gilgamesh said, a number of undead started creeping out from the forest and heading toward the town. Kerry believed they were skeletal knights. However, the sellswords immediately started taking them down, littering the area with dismembered monster parts.

“Ain’t nothing for us to do…”

“For now. The min-maxers and the gung-ho players dive in right and, well, since they can be one-shot that leaves us free. But once it starts getting even darker, they’ll start coming out faster than we can kill ’em. Once that happens, there’ll be plenty of work for us.”

Gilgamesh told her that the really proactive players would somehow spend the day in a different town. There was something called an “event port” that could be used once a day, where two people could use it to make a round trip to efficiently earn more XP during the event. There were some hardcore solo players who would use the event port one way then die to return back to their starting town. Kerry had no idea what half the things he was saying meant, but she could at least memorize it. Boss should be able to make sense of it if she just repeated back to her later.

After observing for a while, more and more undead began to slip past the other players, so it was time for Kerry’s group to make their debut. Remy used her archery to corral them while Marion took them down with magic. When waiting for cooldowns and MP regen, Kerry and Gilgamesh stepped up to engage them directly. They continued grinding using this general pattern. Because the enemies were too weak, defending the city turned into monotonous work. That wasn’t only the case for Kerry’s party either; other parties seemed to roughly feel the same way. Indeed, if the townspeople were watching, they would be more than justified in thinking that someone could be spared to go assault the enemy’s home base.

“And that’s pretty much it. There are a few waves that come during the day too, so with the bonus, this event is pretty nice for farming XP. There’s only undead here, so it’s not great for cash, though,” Gilgamesh commented during a short break, around when the number of attacks started dying down.

“I getcha. Thanks for the rundown.”

All in all, between the town guards and the players, the monsters invading this area weren’t much of a threat. As long as they weren’t deliberately holding themselves back like Kerry’s group currently was, an army of ants and adaman soldiers should easily be able to trample them underfoot.

Now they just had to wait for Riley’s report. Since Boss believed that other beings on Deas’s level could possibly be scattered around the continent, they needed to confirm what the undead ringleader here was, although it was frankly hard to imagine a captain-class monster laying low somewhere in this country.

After they accomplished their mission, all they had to do was continue mingling with the players here to pass the time.

“Although… We haven’t seen the lord of the town or the knights that are probably followers make an appearance yet. Are they up to something, or do they just not care what happens to the town?”

Occasionally, stronger undead or ones with better equipment would be mixed into the horde and kill off some of the town guard. If there were any knights stationed here, they would have been able to prevent that.

After Riley’s investigation was complete, the girls might have to poke around for that information too.

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