Chapter 9 - Team.

An important question asked just above the character, so please provide input. (Not so important that you need to skip down the chapter to see it.

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"Go seek the receptionist at a tavern, you should have the option when you ask." To which I received the reply of "No it doesn't appear, maybe it has limits, anyway back on topic, how far away?" from Deathly Smile.

"2 Miles away, only about 30 minutes if we keep walking this slow, pick up the pace so we can get it done and get back before the day ends." I said semi-sarcastically.

After saying that they all turned more serious and started walking faster and with them walking faster made me walk faster after all the quest master can't arrive late to the party.

20 minutes later we arrived, at what we supposed was going to be a simple bandit camp, but noooo, why would the game ever do something as simple as that, instead we rolled up to what seems to be a village, however, compared to the beginner village it was smaller, had shorter walls that were made of wood instead of stone, had smaller and fewer gates, each only being around 12' and 6' wide.

What was weird was that they had no gates, just open spaces, and they let anyone walk into the village, it seemed peaceful.

Walking down the street, we looked at the landscape, various houses made from both wood and stone had sizeable gardens with a patch of grass, and various flowers surrounding them.

We walked straight up to what appeared to be the 'leaders' house, it was directly in the centre of the village, it had roads connecting to both gates and had its personal wooden wall about the same height as the one surrounding the village.

We walk straight through the front door, there appears to be no one inside the house apart from the bandit leader.

"Well, we seem to have found him, I just expected that he would have some kind of guard squad, you know to protect him." Said Deathly Smile.

"Nothing we can do about that though can we, hopefully, nothing unexpected happens, we can get in and get out in a few minutes." I replied.

We slowly crept up towards the Bandit leader but when we reached 3 meters away from him, he looked up towards us.

He had black eyes, you could stare into them forever, it was as if you were staring into a black hole, but he did not do anything other than that, he just stared at us, so we continued moving forward, when we reached 2 meters away from him he stood up, he isn't very tall for a bandit leader, only around 5' 8'' or 5' 9'', he has a round face, small but deep-set eyes, high nose and smallmouth with dark blue hair coming to shoulder height.

He wields 2 weapons both battle-axes and leather armour which covers his entire body with a metal helmet, probably made from something like iron.

We still keep creeping forward, 1 meter out and he starts preparing and because we are close enough to him we can examine him.

[Bandit Leader Damned]

[Level: 12]

[Health: 2500]

[Attack: 100]

[Defense: 150]

"So to be clear whose doing what?" I asked.

Deathly Smile laid out a battle plan, Deathly Lead was MT as an Orc, with Demon as secondary tank and a Troll, Glutton and decay were healers with Decay being a Light elf and Glutton being Human, Spring, who was the only female in the party, was a Human Mage, Smile was a Fighter and Dark Elf and Senator as an archer and Neutral Elf, which leaves me as the Thief although I would've thought that they would have been able to get a Thief, it's not like the class is unpopular especially with the fact that you can use stealth.

"So when are we going to start?" I asked, to which I received the reply of "1 Minute, were doing a once over, then in 55 seconds we drink our attack and defence potions then we start."

"And where did you get defence and attack potions from?" I had been talking with most of these people for almost 2 days and I started warming up to them.

"Alchemist, each guild has several, as well as blacksmiths and enchanters." I almost face-palmed, I had asked a question to which I already know the answer.

50 seconds later and everyone was drinking their potions.

"Okay let's go." Deathly Smile said before Deathly Lead used [Leap] it allows guardians to quickly jump onto a target and stun them for 1 second dealing 75% damage.

-49

It only did a small amount of damage, but providing Damned is maybe 5 levels above me, I doubt I can do any better, Smile followed up with a [Shattering Blow] which does 150% damage and a chance to stun the target for 2 seconds.

-85

Followed by my attempt, which was kinda perfetic, (Not to be confused with perfect.) I even used [Stealth] and [Backstab].

-40

Before anyone else could get an attack in Damned managed to land an attack on Lead which dealt a hefty amount of damage to him.

-125

+50

+47

Which was followed up by 2 [Basic Heal]'s from the 2 healers.

-5

Senator used [Snare] which stunned the enemy for 2 seconds but only does 10% damage.

-15

Demon followed up with his own [Leap] Stunning him for another second.

-25

And Spring used [Fireball] Which does 100% damage and has a chance to set the target on fire.

-50

-37

-22

-45

-10

After we finished using our skills we all used standard attacks apart from the mages who had to cast healing spells when Damned attacks.

-105

+45

+50

The cycle starts every couple of minutes.

until we whittled him down to 10% of his health when he went berserk, we all received the same notification.

[Bandit Leader Damned has entered Berzerk Mode, Attack and Defense increased by 50%.]

This caused us some problems because our tanks were running low and health potions and our healer were running out of mana potions.

-53 'Critical Hit'

I managed to go into [Stealth], do a backstab which further increased my damage by 2.05x and then managed a critical hit which then further doubled that damage, dealing a total of 1/5 of his health.

Luckily that was my highest hit and I didn't manage to shift aggro, probably because I'm under levelled.

We carried on but doing less damage compared to before.

-10

-25

-15

-397 'Critical Hit'

We got in some good damage, but our MT died, he got insta-killed by a critical hit from the boss, now we had to rely on our secondary tank Demon to do it by himself for a little while.

-10

-15

-20

-5

He was slowly losing health and luckily he didn't have an AOE attack so he couldn't just party wipe us, because that would be both unfortunate and depressing.

-105.

Demon took another big hit, but luckily our healers had just enough mana to heal him.

+50

+45

-20

-35

-30

After Demon cast [Leap], I cast [Stealth] and [Backstab] and Smile cast [Shattering Blow], we have almost finished him off.

-150

But not before our tank died, we were out of HP, MP and potions for both, luckily he only had tens of health left remaining, enough for us to get a quick kill.

-10

-5

-25

-15

Damned finally died and I levelled up.

[Level up, 3 Strength Gained, 2 Agility Gained, Luck triggered, 1 Endurance Gained.

"So can you gain extra stats from being lucky during the level up." I asked, to which Smile nodded, but didn't go into detail.

"Let's check our loot" Smile said, while I said quite the opposite.

"Why don't we wait for them to come back?" I questioned.

"Naah, they can stay in the Beginner Village, we would have to wait around 20 minutes for them to get back when we can check the loot and bring it back to them to distribute instead, saving us 20 minutes of waiting." He countered, to which I agreed.

"Okay let's loot it since you're the party leader you check it." I said, to which he agreed and walked towards the corpse.

He touched the body and a list appeared in the party chat.

[Shadow Greaves (Blue)]

[Level: 5]

[Attack: 4]

[Defence: 5]

[Strength: 3]

[Agility: 1]

[Light Staff (Blue)]

[Level: 5]

[Healing: 10]

[Wisdom: 2]

[Intelligence: 3]

[Hunters Bow (Blue)]

[Level: 5]

[Attack: 15-20]

[Strength: 2]

[Endurace: 2]

[Berzerkers Helmet (Purple)]

[Level: 5]

[Defence: 15]

[Endurance: 4]

[Skill 1: Chance to negate all damage. CD: 20 Seconds.]

Leather Cloth: 5x

Iron Ingot: 3x

Coins:

Silver: 15x

Bronze: 65x

"Kinda worth it." I said, to which everyone else nodded.

"Well, lets head home." Said Smile and then we started walking.

20 Minutes later.

We've reunited with the rest of the team and now we decide to split the spoils, The Berzerkers Helmet went towards the MT Lead, the Greaves went to me, the Staff went towards Glutton when both Glutton and Decay rolled for it, Glutton getting 67 and Decay getting 4, Hunters bow went to the only archer in our group which was Senator.

"Okay, I'm going to go collect my quest rewards, if you want, you can come along, if not we can go our separate ways for now." I said, receiving the reply of "Let's go with you, it was fairly hard so you should at least show us what you got, I mean we did get quite a bit of EXP but only you levelled up and by the question earlier you got your first bonus stat point."

To which I started heading off towards the Thieves Guild.

"Hello, I want to receive a reward for a quest I completed." I said to the receptionist. "Sure, tell me what the quest was." Was the reply I received, which was strange at the time providing most things just happen straight away, without the need for chatter.

"I killed Bandit Leader Damned." Then I received the notification for my quest reward.

[Quest Reward - Kill Bandit Leader Damned.]

[Reward - 1 Gold, 1 Free Stat Point, 1 Crafting Material of your choice at grade Blue or Below, 20 Thieves Guild Reputation]

Then a panel popped up with various crafting materials.

[Gold Ingot (Blue)] - Used for Blacksmithing

[Depraved Ingot (Blue)] - Used for Blacksmithing

[Deer Skin (Blue)] - Used for Tailoring

[Turtle Shell (Blue)] - Used for Tailoring/Blacksmithing

[ToadShroom (Blue)]- Used for Alchemy

[Grey Bark (Blue)] - Used for Alchemy

The list went on and on, so I sorted them in the 6 best, which I guessed based on the name.

In the end, I went with the Depraved Ingot, it sounded luxurious and mystical.

But when I received it I gained no more information about it apart from its quality.

[Depraved Ingot (Blue) (Quality: 35] - Used for Blacksmithing

After I showed my rewards to the party they were excited for me, although not about the coins or crafting material, but rather the free skill point, it seemed as if it was a legendary reward, something even better than the purple equipment that we had gotten from killing the Bandit Leader Damned.

I looked at my character sheet to see my gains.

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CHARACTER SHEET - EQUIPMENT STATS IN BRACKETS YES? OR NO? AND ADDED TOGETHER YES? OR NO?

E.G. The character sheet below doesn't have them added together right now, but I can do that, so it would be strength 16(+3) showing that 3 came from equipment or as is now Strength 13(+3) for a total of 16. or just 16.

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[Dark Rose]

[Class: Thief]

[Level: 7]

[Affiliations:]

[Thieves Guild: 30 (Neutral)]

[Beginner Village: 120 (Friendly)]

[Elves: 20 (Neutral)]

[Health: 180]

[Mana:110]

[Stats:]

[Strength:13(+3)] (20%)

[Endurance:8] (20%)

[Agility:13(+1)] (25%)

[Wisdom:6] (12.5%)

[Intelligence:5] (12.5%)

[Luck:7] (10%)

[Traits:]

[Deadly - 10% extra damage when in Stealth]

[Skills:]

[Stealth (592/1000) - Becomes Invisible for 5 seconds. CD: 10 Seconds.]

[Backstab (34/800) - Deal 1.6x damage from behind. 2.05x if in [Stealth]. CD: 14 seconds.]

[Critical Strike (5/400) - 6% increased critical hit chance.]

[Crafting Skills:]

[Smithing level: 1 15/100.]

After checking out my character sheet, I logged off to sleep.

'Another day has gone by just like that.' I thought to myself just before drifting off.