Soul Art Online

Soul Art Online

Disclaimer: I own nothing

Chapter 2: The Game Master

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- Arthas -

I reached the village and sat under the nearby tree.

Veena came beside me and caressed my back, trying to comfort me.

The scenes flashed in front of me repeatedly as if I was reliving the entire event. The smell, the feel of the blade slicing through their bodies, their shouts, the resistance of their bones against my sword… everything.

It was probably the first bout of intense emotions I have had in such a long time and I… hated it.

I wanted some excitement in my life… but not like this.

"Close your eyes." I heard Veena's voice sounding in my ears.

I hesitated.

"You can see those scenes. I know. But the only way to drive away your fears is to face them up front. This… game will force us to do such things sooner or later. If you hesitate, it will be you who dies instead of them. So do this…"

I did.

"Take deep breaths. Calm your emotions."

I did and calming down my emotions wasn't exactly hard.

Meditation did help.

She brought out a pack of incense and gave them to me.

"These have a calming effect on the mind. Normally they are used to calm down enraged beasts but they don't have any side effects on humans. You can appraise them easily. Just light one of them and leave them beside your bed when you sleep." She looked at me and added a few more words. "You can have Martha assess them if you want."

"Thank you." I brought out a dagger from my inventory and the girl reflexively took a defensive stance.

I grabbed the sharp end of the dagger and passed it on to her. "Your spear broke. You can keep this for the time being. It's….not something you can buy in the village."

She took the dagger and thanked me.

We both had received 'drops' from the kills.

It was money and some items they had equipped.

The game had a rule of only having a 2% chance of dropping an item in the inventory and even this was only reserved to a maximum of three items, each having their own separate probability.

But there were skills which can be used to steal items even from someone's inventory in High Tier Classes.

That said, we had a 50% chance of drops on the equipped items.

But according to the developers, there were many hidden conditions which we had to figure out ourselves.

And despite the characters of those people, they had the highest levels in the village apart from Veena and me.

Not much was said between us and we both left for our own residences.

The hotel rooms were secure so I could finally relax.

I did appraise the pouch given to me by Veena but didn't use them.

I just couldn't bring myself to.

Thankfully, I was too exhausted for everything and sleep overtook me.

I woke up a few times during the night but by the end of it, I was getting better.

Today was the day I would get my weapons and the custom ordered armour.

I took an hour to make a plan on how to face the mutated boar.

The meeting with Veena gave me an idea which I was not considering beforehand.

With the plan in mind, I got ready for the day.

My first stop was Martha's shop.

I checked around but Veena was not there so I asked Martha and found out that she was in the back garden.

There were some talks in the village, basically people gossiping.

That's when I realised that I didn't know if the bodies of those people would just disappear. Or maybe someone saw them last night.

Either way, I didn't want to think about them right now.

With Martha's permission, I went to the back garden.

The garden was… well, bigger than I was expecting. Inside, there was a small cottage with a workbench in front.

Veena was working on something on the workbench.

She noticed me and gave me a light smile.

"Are you feeling well?"

I nodded.

"Good."

"I wanted to ask you for something."

"Yes?"

"I saw that you were using the pouches as weapons. I was wondering if I could commission you to make some for me. The stronger the better."

"Those pouches were something I made from the leftovers and won't work on the higher level monsters."

"I can get the items you need."

She thought for a second. "What is the level of monster you are hunting?"

I paused for a second and she noticed my hesitation and was about to say something but I stopped her. "A Peak Tier 2 or maybe even a Tier 3."

This information was something she actually needed to make suitable items so hiding would have been counterproductive.

She looked at me in surprise for a moment and then spoke.

"Anything I make right now won't be strong enough to affect them. I am just a Level 5 Gardener. I would need to be at least an Apprentice Herbalist for that."

5 more levels.

"If you don't mind me asking, how much would it take you to reach that level?"

She smiled. "I only get experience in that Class from the gardening work I do here. As you know, a Gardener isn't really suitable for fighting so I had to use the Villager Class to level up."

"How are the experience requirements?"

"A bit lower than the Villager Class."

I thought for a while.

She was still Tier 1 in all her Classes, then… maybe it can work.

"I have a suggestion if you don't mind."

"Oh?~"

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"And that's level 8. Just how many of these did you have?" She asked, looking at me in surprise.

"I cannot use them to gain experience after gaining a Tier 2 Class or rather a total level above 10 so they are pretty useless to me." I replied while I took the money she had gained.

What I did was give her the items required to complete the collection quests Tier 1 people could do.

I had plenty of them due to my hoarding habits.

There were five different quests of this kind and could be done multiple times.

She did give me the rewards from the Quests back and only got the experience and in return, she would make the items for me for free.

I think it was a decent trade.

"We still need to go to two other places. With that, you can get to level 9 at the very least."

After an hour, we got her to level 9 while I had over four thousand extra Gold in my inventory.

"Okay, this much will be enough. I can help you level up the last level or you can do gardening here while I get some more materials for Quests?"

"I will go out and hunt." She clenched her fist. "I will be able to manage with this."

I looked at her for a second and nodded. Since she didn't have a problem then who am I to say anything?"

I knew most of the outer forest like the back of my hand already, including the areas where the items for those quests spawn and there were still my bases at the top of the trees.

We reached one of these areas and the herbs had respawned.

I didn't find any fresh tracks of the wild animals nearby either so we both got to collect the herbs and I set a few traps after which both of us hid in the base at the top of one of the trees.

"Is this how you hunt?"

"This is the safest method."

"Can't argue with that. So, what kind of animals live here?"

"Mostly boars. Sometimes there are snakes but those are rare."

"Boars eh? Let me help then." She brought out a pouch from her bag, lit the corner of the bag with fire and threw it on the ground.

"What's that?"

"Bait. Boars love the scent of Wild Violet Berries. The bag contains the dried peels of these berries. Their smoke is generally used to repel insects but can also be used as bait for Boars. They get drunk from this smoke. I mixed them with Blue Lilies which increased their smell even more."

I listened to her explanation in surprise.

The game was really detailed, to even put so much thought to these little things.

But then another thought struck me.

I was going to hunt a mutated boar.

"Can I order one of these?" I asked.

"Sure. Treat this as a thank you gift."

Our talk was interrupted by a sound as I signalled her to be quiet.

The sound grew louder.

And a few moments later, a fucking hoard of boars came running to that area.

The craziest thing was that even though the initial bunch fell into the trap I had dug along with the burning pouch, the others… jumped into the hole themselves.

Isn't this bait too crazy?

We waited for sometime as the smoke took effect after which I handed her a spear and brought out one myself.

After that, it was like hunting fish in a barrel… or boar in a hole.

Within half an hour, she was a Level 2 Apprentice Herbalist.

I, on the other hand, took the chance to level up another Tier 2 Job which I had gained somehow- Militia.

My personal guess was due to the thing which happened last night.

Apprentice Hunter was without a doubt the best class to level up right now and had some extremely vital skills to survive but Militia had better stat gains.

I prioritised my speed of growth first as I could always level up the rest of the Classes later, after I got a good set of Skills.

Now was such a time.

Unfortunately we didn't have much time so I could only bring it up to level 3 and changed back to Apprentice Hunter to return back.

The harvest was great but now was the time for the real hunt.

We returned back to the village quickly and Veena went back to prepare the set of items for me while I went to get my weapons from the shop.

Everything was ready in half a day and while this was a bit later than what I originally had in mind, it was still much safer than before.

"Are you sure you don't want my assistance? I might not be as strong as you but I wouldn't be a burden either." Veena asked, as she handed me the pouches.

"Thank you for offering but this is a solo quest."

"Ah, too bad. Take care and be safe."

With everything done, I took a leave from the village.

The next part was going to be hard.

I reached the area where the Mutated Boar was said to live.

The place itself was on one of the deeper sides of the forest.

I scouted the area and cleared some of the wild animals in the area to get the area ready for work.

Digging the place was harder as I was often interrupted by animals and had to face them and even that was hard as this area had high level animals.

With the hole dug, I placed several spikes with poisoned tips inside the hole to injure the boar when it fell. After that, I chose an old enough tree to make a base.

I had no idea how strong the mutated Boar would be but it was probably top of T2 or T3 at the very least.

A weaker tree could get knocked out and I would be fucked.

With everything done, I decided to locate the boar and bait it there.

One of the best parts about tracking such animals was that there were barely any animals around where the boar lived.

To bait it, I used the special bait Veena had prepared.

I placed several of them above the trap and lit them and placed several fruits and nuts on top of it as I waited for the effect.

The place was covered with smoke instantly and the wind blew it towards the boar's habitat.

It was what happened next that I was not expecting.

There was a loud grunting sound from the distance and I prepared myself.

A second later, I felt tremors and they got larger and it was followed by a loud crashing sound.

From the top of the tree, I could see that small trees were being uprooted in the direction from which the boar was coming.

I nocked an arrow as I held my breath, preparing for the attack.

A figure jumped from the direction of the sound.

And finally I could see it clearly.

Black hide and large white tusks. It was almost double the size of the few T2 Boars I had hunted in the past.

The unique thing about it was probably the horn on top of its head which was red in colour and sometimes embers lit the tip.

Magic.

We still had no idea how to get a mage class here.

But I didn't have time to let my thoughts stray much as the boar jumped directly at the fruits, crashing and falling into the pit and directly into the spikes.

A loud screech resounded in the area and a burst of fire came out from the pit.

I waited with bated breath and saw that the Boar actually got up and actually tried jumping.

Even with its hurt leg, its jump was too high for my comfort so I let go of the arrow, directly shooting its eye as it tumbled back into the spikes with a loud screech once more.

Without waiting for it to recover, I nocked another arrow and let it fly.

After a total of five arrows, the beast stopped moving and I got a notification.