A Rat Hole

Especially among the people around, the only one that had seemed very less busy was this person. Also he had checked his pocket 2 to 3 times. Had looked at the student 3-4 times, and at the family also. Some others had also looked at the students but not so much at their families.

Most importantly of all, Allen remembered a similar case from a detective game before…

Screen shifted again and this time he was in a fighting area and one of the doublets from before, the leg master, was present there. The punch master was also watching from the sidelines.

When he was ready to fight, the leg master came forward slowly and lightly tried to attack him. But the attack was too fast for Allen to see, much less think of useless things like avoiding it or counterattacking.

He was made to disappear just like that. Leg master also looked a little surprised, he probably did not think this would happen to Allen. 

Allen had returned to the area that he had come from before. He was surprised but the system notified

" Attention! A total of up to 10 matches may take place. The purpose is to be able to accurately gauge out your ability and match you with a specific score. You may opt out of the testing anytime but your score may be affected very severely."

"Additional info: Every match will have a ten second pause. This pause can only be extended to 1 minute and cannot be decreased any further"

The leg master had gone to the punching master in that very short amount of time and said to him

" I don't think I can limit my strength any further. You should try him out"

The other master said in response

"I believe you were the one to insist on fighting him..."

"Yes, I was. He will not be correctly tested like this. I think you have some kind of skill that limits your abilities... I think boy was right on that part"

The master only scratched his head on that answer, and walked to the fighting area. Almost 20 seconds had passed. It would take around 30 second for the first coming back, because the system will usually notify the user about the rules at that time. 

When Allen came, he battled with the punching master. He was quickly able to gain on the punching master in one of the many matches with him, Allen even striked one smack to his side.... At which the master looked like he didn't understand whether something happened or not…

After the seventh match, the master told the system that it was ready enough. 

Allen in his waiting room only got a prompt stating

 "Testing has ended. And the user's ability has been tested and tried thoroughly. Kindly see your results for this match. The overall score will be displayed in a moment.... Your overall score is graded as Good. 

Individual stage score is as follows

1st stage: Brilliant

2nd stage:Brilliant

3rd stage: Below Average.

Allen could only helplessly look at the shown result. One of the main things that they needed right now, he had failed miserably in, it really made him think of how he was going to fulfill the responsibilities that had come on his shoulders. In addition to that, he also wanted the best score in the game...

Very soon the system made some kind of matching and he was placed in a room in a very short amount of time. The room was not quite spacious but it was enough as his personal space in the game.  The system told him that his next mission was to go take a quest on the bulletin board.

Some kind of map opened and he was shown the way that he had to go to. On the way there he could not see others coming from the same area that he had come from. Maybe they were assigned a different area collectively in the next stage or some other arrangement. He knew very soon they would be gathered together. He went to the bulletin board, it was a kind of digital screen, and some kind of emergency alert was playing there.

It read as follows:

" Due to the increase in the number of swarm monsters, every new recruit is advised to first take that as their first mission. They may also take some kind of indoor mission instead of going out, but they will be responsible for protecting themselves"

The message seemed to be a little bit opposite to the obvious... the outside was supposed to be more dangerous, no?

Alan told the system"  Recommend me a mission according to my current power level."

 When he saw the system having calculated quite a few,  he additionally told it to filter out the mission by proximity to his location. Out of the four recommended, he randomly picked one of them after some light reading.

It was a mission about some kind of rats that he had to get rid of, not the most glorious type of journey someone may say, but he had to take it, nothing of good was small.  Also, no amount of in-game score that he was able to get to increase him in ranking was small for him...

When he went to the location pinpointed in the map, he saw some types of trees and rivers flowing all around there. He could already imagine what he was going to do from here on.

He gathered some amount of dried wood branches, leaves that had fallen out of the trees, and also cut out some branches himself, only the small ones.

He tried to get as close as possible to the nest of the rats, or more accurately speaking, some kind of their in-game cousin, but there were quite a few big, fat ones around the entrance and outside going around too. Didn't seem like he was going to be given permission to come any closer than this. 

He took out a kind of long range weapon(the sharpened sticks) and shot some of them. When there were only a few at the entrance, Allen went forward and put the wood branches with the  leaves. Very soon, most of what he had gathered had been put there. Allen tried to make a fire, by some kind of mechanism that he learned from some other game.

In short it worked well on any type of swarm type monsters that were living in some kind of holes or mounds in the land.

After the smoke had thoroughly cleared out every creature within, only then would he go into it. A few of them with rapid speed and near to the entrance had understood the threat and had come out but they were quickly subjugated by him, he had made some basic traps that could be used to either slow them down or wipe them down. The few that had been made to slow down or injured were quickly subjugated by him, he did bring some sticks that had been sharpened quite a bit along with him. 

He gradually understood how big the base actually was when even after a few tens of minutes, the system was still increasing the number of swarm monsters that he had killed. At the very minimum the population must have been in the hundreds, even if they were very small it was not very wise to take on so many at once. Some were getting out here and there but he could solo them and eliminate them one by one. And after that just block most of the entrance with their body, so that he could solo any new one coming out. Some kind of experience bar was showing by his side, that was progressing little by little, and that he was almost near upgrading to level 2.

A thing that was too much game-like and not on their checklist, but it had to be ignored because of the less amount of time that they had spent thinking about things. They really could not come up with any game that did not include such a system while also fulfilling their other requirements, these kinds of no levelling games were never on their radar before. 

However, the levelling system may have one important benefit too, that could help them in their fight in real life.