"Are you sure we can survive a night like that?" Luntra's curiosity was peaking.
"I mean last night we managed to kill a lot of zombies and came back..."
"With you still losing some HP," I wish Meqro had not reminded me of that.
"For fuck sakes, it doesn't mean that staying outside is this dangerous."
"I'm just afraid you might get carried away again."
"Alright, you both can stop now. We got some trouble."
"What is it?"
"Bestiary shows everything that was encountered or killed, right?"
"Let me guess, zombies aren't in bestiary, are they?"
Wait... Of course! I remembered that there were only 3 entries: slimes, spiders and the boss. But there zombies were not there.
"We shouldn't concern ourselves with something as trivial as bugs," one of these days Kenmo's acting might really be his last.
"Bugs?"
"Now that's surprising. You said you haven't played this exact genre, but bugs exist for almost any game out there."
"Oh... Uh..."
"You haven't played any video game at all, have you?" Meqro felt as if she would not give proper or honest answer so he looked at Kenmo.
"She only played three in row genre and I guess that's about it."
Of course, a simple game genre that was unlikely to get bugs at all. Gameplay was as simple as breathing: random objects emerge and once you connect 3 of more of them, they pop. But Luntra really looked at me with desparation hoping I would explain her, which I tried:
"Bugs are errors of the game that result in various things that likely weren't intended: falling through the map, dealing no damage or immense damage for no clear reason and so on."
"So zombies not appearing in our bestiary is that sort of mistake?"
"Of course. Usually those mistakes are fixed by developers in almost any update they release. I don't know how it will be done here though."
"Why?"
"Well... You can't really update your game while you're playing and for big things of multiplayer games servers are shut off so no players can join."
"So the problem will be shutting off said servers in this world."
"Of course, but let's not bother ourselves with it this much for now. We still need a sturdy stone and a cave."
"I am quite curious though," suddenly said Meqro, "is there durability for items?"
Another thing that I had forgotten. Usually in survival games almost everything has durability which shows for how much a certain item can be used. But at the same time we were playing in RPG world, so it made sense Meqro asked that.
"We'll find out one way or another," shrugged Kenmo, "but to be safe we might also want to upgrade our weapons at some point."
"Oh, of course, at this point we should already have a rough idea of what class we'll play."
"Excuse me, class?" Luntra's confusion never ceases to amaze.
"You see, in RPG there are generally 3 classes: Melee, Wizard and Archer. Some games tend to have more but you get the overall idea."
"And I should go with wizard one then, right?"
"I wouldn't be so sure. Wizards tend to have the lowest HP of all classes, but highest damage. Archer would be a safe option for you. Melee isn't your style clearly."
"Can I somehow um... Mix them?"
"Hybrids technically exist in some games but as for this one... We really..."
"Need to make some food," I thought it would be a good idea to change such topic to something we should care about more. "While berries are good for our thirst, they aren't so good when it comes to our hunger."
"As stupid as you are, I can't really disagree with you here."
Did Meqro really have to say that line? Whatever, what mattered is that now we would hunt some animals and typically in games like these the animals in question are boars. Like most mobs that were not meant to be fought with, boars must have had low HP. Better question was the amount of food each boar dropped when killed, how rare they were generally and how hard it was to hunt them. This is where I had an opportunity to learn that from Meqro.
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"Fine. Me and Kuronto will go hunting while..."
What interrupted Meqro was likely an announcement that everyone must have received:
Planned maintainence in 1 hour(s) 00 minute(s)
Fucking great. So we had exactly 1 hour of hunting and then we had no fucking idea what would happen.
"That should still be plenty for hunting. Kenmo, you're with Luntra. Kuronto, let's go."
We immediately walked away. While following Meqro I was charging water bolts, to which he responded with charging his own fire bolts. I thought of this as of fun competition and tried to create water bolts again just to see what would happen if I did. After that I saw my MP being drained... Oh... So that was likely another bug. Meqro tried to repeat after me but failed.
"Apparently that's a bug related to water magic or some other factors. Otherwise water magic would be broken."
I could not disagree with him there but I did not want to see limits of this magic for I was fearing what would happen. But honestly when you were wandering around with charged magic it felt pretty weird at first. The whole forest seemed pretty thick though. There were no small trees to cut down, not even a sign of pebble or anything. Just greenery and some birds singing. After some time, we finally came across our target: a bunch of boars.
"I'll take the left one, you take the right one," whispered Meqro.
"Ok."
I did not want to waste any time and shot the right boar while Meqro got caught off guard and aimed quickly and somehow we both hit our targets.
"Kuronto, we needed to fucking aim properly before that. You can treat it as eercise for stealth or whatever but next time tell me when you're shooting, all right?"
"Ah my bad. I got you."
I could not really tell how much time had passed since we were doing the same actions: tracking the boars, shooting as much as we could down and getting the meat. But I could count us doing that 7 times. And I could really say that tracking took us the most time in general. We were sure to also monitor our progress as it was earlier decided to meet up at least 5 minutes before the maintainence.
"Alright, the time has come. According to the map, they haven't moved too far."
Meqro's timing was quite neat as few seconds later apparently both of us saw the announcement:
Planned maintainence in 0 hour(s) 30 minute(s)
"Well, let's get to them then."
I myself checked the map to see that we ourselves moved quite far. I also got a bit nervous when we saw announcement of just 15 minutes remaining before the maintainence. By the time Meqro and me arrived we saw them being pretty worried as less than 5 minutes remained until the maintainence.
"Alright. We got plenty of meat. It will be cooked after the maintainence is over."
"We also walked around gathering some materials," smiled Luntra.
"Now I like where this is going. But well, maintainence could happen at any time at this point."
After those words we just remained silenced for some time. And here it came. Suddenly everything went blank and I basically felt nothing. I did not bother counting how much time passed as I was thinking of the boss thing and unsuccessfully trying to understand differences between SS and F ranks. And then I was standing on my hands and knees but... I felt things. And as I opened my eyes, I saw a familiar gray and spherical space around me.
"So, why did you bother bringing me here?" I turned around to see someone familiar.