5) Skilled Gameplay
Sam conversed with Gama while they walked towards the slime field south of Copper Town and saw his two other teammates talking to each other while killing slimes. Sam waved them down, and the two of them approached to help kill slimes.
"Took you two long enough." Said Violet with huff in her voice.
Sam smiled with a toothy grin and pointed at the huge sword on his back and then at the small ball on a string curled around Gama's hand, saying "I managed to get my sword for pretty cheap and bought a roughed up pendulum for Gama here too."
A spark of annoyance showed on Violet's face for a second before she said "Hurry up and get grinding! We need to level up and clear the goblin place, so let's get to our first task! Alright, team, our first mission is to help Shanks and Gama with their skills. I am guessing you two put your skill point into bio synchronization and weapon mastery respectively. Right, Gama? And not Flesh shaping or force tear, so I'll just get to the activation part of your skill."
Gama nodded his head with a blush from having Violet stare at him so much and baby him, as if he didn't know what he was doing, because he was slightly anti-social. He subconsciously took a step back, only to be stopped because of Sam's arm around his shoulders.
Violet then looked at Sam's smiling face and said "From what I understood, you want unconventional defense as your first form, so I am guessing you know how to do it and you should have Cleave as your other skill, so you will go first. I already helped Luci activate his skills, so hop to it boys!"
Sam nodded his head and skipped over to agro a couple of slimes and get his skills. In Realms of Conquest, soloing mobs is extremely difficult, as mobs have more stats on the same level and the Slimes here range from level 1-5 and between blue, red and green, with blue packing the biggest punch, but also being the only slimes Sam could satisfy the condition of his skill with.
[level 3 heavy slime]
Health: 160
*Blue slimes weigh twice as much as any other slime, meaning this is the best opponent for me. The movement speed is slow, it is large and has more push power, than actual damage and It can only tackle, so I can use my shoulder and strong grip to stop it from pushing me back, but fking hell will this mess up my sword. Well, a bit of durability in exchange for a skill point is a very good deal.*
Sam quickly unbuckled his gigantic copper sword, no, it was too big to even call a sword, it was a mass of metal in the shape of a sword. It was a two-handed great sword either way.
The slime felt an organic being approachit and began compressing itself, only for it to Jump directly at Sam, who stabbed his sword into the ground and braced the top and middle part of the copper greatsword with his hand and shoulder respectively, barely being strong enough to stop the slime dead in its tracks and barely having the armour value to block the full damage.
*One.*
Doing this is usually quite complicated, as activating a specific form takes a lot of effort. Using a skill point on unconventional arts and its counterpart skill for other classes will allow the player to choose between 3 forms, because of which there are 12 forms for each art in the game, out of which a player can only choose 10, while manually activating it will mean doing a very specific task, such as the one Sam was doing.
For unconventional defense, the task is to solo a mob 2 levels higher than you without taking direct damage and you have to use your greatsword to block at least 10 attacks. That is why Sam chose the blue slime, as it did only physical damage, damage, that Sam could overcome by allowing his sword to take all the damage, rather than taking damage himself.
With the slime now bouncing backward from the recoil and Sam intentionally pushing it off his shield, Sam grabbed his sword with both hands and spun in a wide arc, quickly slashed at the slime and pinned it to the ground. With the slime now grounded, the Slime's bouncy property kicked in and pushed the sword up, which Sam took advantage of, as he spun around and whipped his sword onto the slime once again, cutting it and dealing even more damage.
-6hp
-8hp
*This is going to be annoying.*
Slimes didn't have much intelligence and the only thing this little blue ball could do was tackle Sam until it could land a solid blow, but Sam had enough strength to defend himself and constantly blocked it, until he finally blocked it for the 10th and it jumped at him once again.
Unfortunately for the little blue slime, its HP had gone down to 20 by this point and it was time to wrap this skill leveling session up. Sam smirked as he switched his footwork and spun his body around and then stood his ground, as the massive sword whipped around him and directly cut the slime into half mid-air.
-27 critical
[level 3 blue slime has been killed]
+33% experience
[Skill cleave has leveled up.]
[A new form has been learned.]
Sam finally breathed out heavy sighs as his body was drenched in sweat and he barely breathed out.
Name: Samshank
Class: Berserker Knight
level 1: 33%
Health: 26/26
Strength+: 3
Agility: 1
Intelligence+: 1
Constitution: 2
Perception: 1
Charisma: 1
Creativity: 1
armour value: 4
Free stat points: 0
Skill points: 0
Skills:
Cleave(1):
Rotate your body along with the weapon, giving it extra momentum and damage up to 110% depending on the distance it traveled before reaching the target. Can hit multiple enemies occasionally. Cooldown: 10 seconds
Two-handed weapon mastery (1):
Increase the strength of your grip on two-handed weapons by 20% and the damage of a two-handed weapon by 5%
Unconventional Swordsmanship (1):
Somehow you wield a sword bigger than yourself and still manage to be effective.
Form 1: Unconventional Shield-Using your chosen weapon(Copper Greatsword 27/35)+5 armour value
Sam fell onto the ground and said "That took ages, but at least I managed to get both skills activated at the same time. Let me rest up a bit and we can get helping Gama."
Violet nodded her head and said "That was pretty impressive. Didn't think you'd get both on your first try. That critical hit was pretty lucky."
Sam smiled and said "Ya, I am a pretty lucky guy. *Crit bucket is a pretty neat method of randomization, old but gold, as they say.*
After Sam, the next person to activate their skills was Gama, but his skills weren't as straight forward as Sams. Most classes, that needed to use mana or a special power to cast skills needed a lot more thinking and feeling, than action. Sam took only 15 minutes to activate 2 skills, but an average person would take an hour, maybe two, while an average person might spend an entire day trying to activate their mage skills, but still achieve nothing. Sadly, not every player was capable of, nor destined to have mage skills.
The activation method for Gama's skills was not as simple as Sam's, who had to just fight and fight in a skilled way. Gama had to feel another living creature's flesh and force it to move in an unnatural way, making it become thicker or thinner once for it to activate flesh shaping and then to activate force tear, you need to use your mana to latch onto something and tear it apart.
The thing torn isn't allowed to be broken or damaged and needs to be torn in half, not snapped or bent, which means Gama would need to first figure out how to force flesh to move and then have enough control to do a precise task. Sam expected this to take the whole day, 12 or so hours if Gama was talented and he would spend the time grinding slimes, but to his surprise, it took barely 2 hours. Such talent in any magic is amazing.
*Gama is surprisingly good at creature magic. Maybe I have found a gem here. Mine took me only 15 minutes to activate both skills, but mine were straight forward and I have experience, while this lad managed to activate magical skills within a couple of hours. That's some talent right there! I will have to rethink my approach to this party dynamic.*
Sam discreetly looked around at the two other party members, who were now eyeing Gama up with overwhelming slimes and friendly faces, as the young adult was using magic on his own character's skin.
Sam frowned a bit *And two hungry wolves are eyeing my gem. Well, at least I know where my, my party members and my little friends loyalty lay now.*
With the sudden shining of Gama, the two leaders suddenly become much more friendly and approaching, which visibly made him uncomfortable. *I gotta help the kid, or he will fall into a honey trap and become an eternal simp for Violet or basically be their slave, now why would I want someone else to steal him from me?*
"With all our skills activated, let's grind up our levels. We have a nest of goblins to clean out later." All of team Violet agreed to the suggestion and began grinding with the slimes for a couple of hours, until all three level 1 members leveled up and they decided to log off for now to rest and gather back up tomorrow to quest and gather money.
Name: Samshank
Class: Berserker Knight
level 2: 2%
Health: 56/56
Strength+: 4
Agility: 1
Intelligence+: 1
Constitution: 2
Perception: 1
Charisma: 1
Creativity: 1
armour value: 4
Free stat points: 2
Skill points: 0
Skills:
Cleave(1):
Rotate your body along with the weapon, giving it extra momentum and damage up to 110% depending on the distance it traveled before reaching the target. Can hit multiple enemies occasionally. Cooldown: 10 seconds
Two-handed weapon mastery (2):
Increase the strength of your grip on two-handed weapons by 40% and the damage of a two-handed weapon by 10%
Unconventional Swordsmanship (1):
Somehow you wield a sword bigger than yourself and still manage to be effective.
Form 1: Unconventional Shield-Using your chosen weapon(Copper Greatsword 25/35)+4 armour value
With one last look at his stats, Sam left the game and came back to the real world. It was already midday and he felt the effects of pulling the all-nighter yesterday.
"I'll eat something and go to sleep in a bit... God does this suck, can't even work on a project with how tired I am. I'll nap for like 3 hours and then go jogging to the gym.
With my account now deleted, I have to get back to the corporate world, well until I get my battle mage class and begin mass producing quality 2 items. Those aren't quality 3, but who will turn down a good quality 2 item? Until then, I'll finish my game and continue grinding. I have enough savings to last me 2 months of rent and food, by then, I'll be far enough to not have to worry about income."
Realms of Conquest have an in-game market and a real world counterpart, as some people would buy really powerful in-game items for genuine money. Sam's previous place of employment was managed by an in-game noble rank player, who partially owned a blacksmith shop, so they could make quality 2 items with a profitable rate.
A quality 3 equipment hasn't appeared on the market yet, but some rankers possessed, though they kept this information completely private. A quality 3 equipment piece or weapon would sell for more than 200k credits. Quality 2 items usually can be sold for 20 to 10k credits depending on their secondary ability.
*I'll just post my CV to a random company hiring for Crisper programmers. I have a master in IT with Crisper as my main focus, though I'll still put down Forester developer in my resume. Even if I wrote a few line in a function, I still did help develop the damn program! Anyway, nto really looking for a job, but a backup is always welcome.*
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(A.N. Mob health will have absolutely no math involved. I will completely and arbitrarily use a random number generator for the health and stats I will decide proportionally to level and player stats)