That talk to familiar people managed to provide me with some really valuable information. I could not tell the time at all though. I could be spending seconds or hours in this place. I had realized that keeping track of time was not my forte but complaining about it and doing nothing would not be an option. To kill some time I just was thinking of proper preparations for the upcoming night. It was impossible for me to tell whether there was a fatique bar which but sleeping should have increased health regeneration for sure. The major problem would be zombies had it not been shown how easy to was to kill them, let alone escape. I could keep on thinking but I appeared the same place where I was standing before the maintainence. The same 3 faces spawned nearby as well.

"Now what?" wondered Luntra.

"Usually there's compensation for maintainence," I said.

"This might not be the case here," grabbed my shoulder Meqro, "because such compensations are given to players for limiting access to ingame servers for quite a long time. Basically this is a rewarded action based on players' patience. In our case it's simply our world and we can't expect to be given compensations like..."

A sudden announcement that appeared for everyone interrupted Meqro as Luntra read the message aloud:

"Dear players, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by maintainence. As compensation you will all be given 2500 gold."

"They are treating us like toys in their big game," Kenmo's edgy attitude never fails to show itself whenever possible.

"No fucking shit, kid. We should be glad they sent quite a compensation."

"I wouldn't call it a big compensation though. Later we are likely to get this amount by grinding dungeons or bosses."

"We're just starters. There's no damn way they'd give us 5 digits of gold"

"I guess I have to agree with you there."

"Stop now. What the hell do you mean by grinding domains and..."

"Grinding implies doing repetitive actions to obtain something you desire, like completing dungeons."

"But doesn't it take time to find each separate one?"

"In-game dungeons tend to refill with enemies and treasures after some time. Bosses are bit different since they need to be summoned, but things that are needed to summon them can be crafted rather often."

"So we'll have to undergo such process, won't we?"

"There's a good chance we'll have to but we won't have to rely on it this much."

"Why do you think so?"

"I was told that there is no free-to-play system."

"Alright, tell me about it later. Right now we just need to keep on walking to the city."

"Eh, alright. Hopefully you'll become more useful after visiting the city."

"I got your point now, Kuronto. Let's just already go."

"Welp. Fine, I guess."

As we were preparing for the night full of walking, running and fighting off zombies, I could not help but notice that the clothes on us had become a little better as it looked more of an actual clothing. It was sort of clothing that you would see on medieval peasants: leather boots, trousers and shirt that were likely made from linen or hemp cloth. Luntra herself wore a dress which was likely made using the same linen or hemp cloth. Everyone seemed to notice such changes but nobody really paid a lot of attention for it had not mattered much as we would, at some point, wear armor, which would hide all the clothing. But I really decided to put my mind into it because such changes with this sort of maintainence would mean further changes, some might have even affected damage, balance and some of these changes would bring new bugs. And new bugs would honestly be a lottery because you never knew if there was some psycho who would technically rule the world abusing the bug that would give him invincibility, a possibility of turning water into wine, walking on water or just some complicated dance that made berries recover no thirst. That was the nature of bugs.

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"Alright, I guess we're good to go," suddenly announced Luntra.

"I suddenly feel like making you a group leader," Meqro was quite right. Luntra might have not known much about that world, but she was still the person who had influence over the whole current group. I felt no need to remind myself why me or Meqro would protect her. For Kenmo the case was different: he simply listened only to Luntra, which meant that Meqro lost his influence over Kenmo. And overall I believe we really trusted Luntra as I still had not so good vibes coming from Meqro.

"We should really bother ourselves with it later. We still only have rough ideas and it's obvious this world will be different from your games in one way or another."

After making final preparations we had finally started walking towards our destination. The one who was using the map this time though was Meqro. For the most part this walking was not really interesting though: we were mostly walking through forests and plains, ocasionally killed some spiders, slimes, boars, collected berries and chopped down some wood. As it was getting darker, the atmosphere was becoming more tense. Then it got pretty dark and we saw the following message:

The Crimson Moon Is Rising... [ ? ]

I clicked the question mark rather naturally and was met with the following guide:

At certain points the moon will glow in ifferent shades of red. The brighter the shade, the stronger the following effects:

Increased HP and SP regeneration

Increased Blood Magic effeciency

Increased spawn rate for Zombie mob(s)

Increased stats for Zombie mob(s)

Chance of Half-Dead mob(s) spawning instead of Zombie mob(s)

The first night we all had decided to spend walking might have become the worst one. Thankfully though, the moon was glowing in a really dark shade of red, which meant that we would not have as much hardship throughought the whole thing compared to brighter shades of red. But we would never be able to compare properly before we faced proper crimson moon.

"Zombies can't climb the trees, so use your boost or whatever and take me with you!" Luntra took the initiative. Apparently she was indeed suited to be our leader.

"Why can't we..." was about to ask Meqro as I interrupted him.

"Dark element."

Receiving the look of realization, Meqro and me took Luntra in our hands as we used fire boost and water boost respectively to jump on a big tree's branch.

"3, 2, 1, go!" screamed Meqro as we almost managed sync jump on a really thick branch.

As stable as it might have been, we still decided to each quickly jump away from it, even seeing it not cracking.

"Is everyone alright?" Luntra now really looked like a caring sibling and not unofficial leader of the group.

"Could have been better had it not been for..."

"All good here," interrupting Kenmo had never failed to give me more than enough satisfaction.

"I'm fine."

"Hm... I think we should be fine as long as we're on this height."

"A bit of learning and you might really become a successful raid leader."

"Just get going already!"

In the end we were just squirrels or ninjas or whatever else existed that jumped from tree to tree. I must admit that it was pretty fun though. But we were yet to survive the whole event.