The Horny Boar Fields, a pack of trapped wolves about to be slaughtered.
“What are they doing?” asked a noob in the crowd, watching the monkey-masked student on his donkey and the muscular guys arranging themselves.
“Showing off,” replied another noob, frustrated after missing out on the battle with the wolves in the forest. "Weirdly dressed brats.”
The Beast Tamer leading the operation, studying the team as perplexed as the rest, stopped the monkey-masked student when he nocked an arrow to fire at the wolves.
"Wait," he warned. “You should probably dismount. If you miss, you might pull more than one pack.”
“Check the arrows.” Henry shrugged dismissively, riding off towards the wolves.
The Beast Tamer examined the arrows carefully, wondering what he'd meant. They did seem unusually...regular. Following a hunch, he used a commander skill to measure the distance between them and found to his astonishment that they were almost precisely 7.6 metres apart, veering by only a few centimetres.
The Beast Tamer frowned.
Henry meanwhile pulled up beside a Cutthroat. “Ready."
"Don't you need to plan the shot first?" The Cutthroat pointed to the mass of thousands of gnashing wolves, their positions in constant flux as they came forward to bark or reattempt an escape.
One misfired arrow could draw hundreds of them.
"Nope," replied Henry.
He wasn’t concerned in the slightest. This happened to be one of the areas in the game where he wasn't physically crippled.
Ever since he was a kid, he'd had a knack for processing large quantities of information, from school to videogames.
Playing Saana too much had exercised and improved this innate talent, turning him into a bit of a mutant. The freakish ability he'd developed didn't extend to only solving quests at a somewhat inhuman pace—for example, he’d spent less than seven minutes in the bunker curing the Earthfriend curse—they also helped when reading the movements of monsters.
While the Cutthroat began casting, Henry drew his bow and rotated the donkey in preparation.
The Cutthroat turning transparent, Henry let loose.
From out of the pack, a wolf was stepping forward to growl at the donkey-riding monkeyman who’d joined its captors in taunting and humiliating its kin.
The arrow landed in the dirt about 15 metres from it.
A hater noob in the watching mass cackled. “All that pomp and he’s got worse blimming aim than Louis Braun!”
No one else laughed. This, however, was not because they'd realised Henry hadn’t missed, his aim impeccable. Rather, Louis Braun was an adored musician who'd been blinded fighting androids during the A.I. Revolution. The joke had been in very poor taste.
At the tap of the arrow striking dirt, the wolf’s head snapped towards the sound, the movement abrupt and discontinuous like a robot.
Its eyes flashed red, and it howled.
Awooo!
From behind it, four wolves responded in kind, their heads swivelling mechanically towards the fleeing human.
Their peers tried to hold them back, but it was futile. Under the spell of the Bloodlust, they sprinted away to their doom.
Henry, the wolves chasing behind, had the donkey gallop towards his teammates.
The strategy was straightforward. He'd positioned them in a line parallel to his path of travel, with about half a second of travel time between each of them. As the column of wolves following him passed, each meathead would strike one, aggroing it to themselves.
Once they’d engaged the wolves, the meatheads were to focus on dodging and save their
In this way, his group would preserve their HP and not need to heal as often, allowing them to chain pull packs and finish post-haste.
As a precaution in the event of a meathead missing their wolf, he’d positioned Handsome Dan at the end. With the few tips Henry'd given the kid while beating him up, he should be able to handle a maximum of three wolves temporarily.
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It was a simple plan, almost impossible to screw up, and, if they hadn't had an audience, it would have gone without a bump.
Henry, riding back to them, squinted. "Oh, what the hell..."
Three of the meatheads had stripped out of the armour he'd painstakingly convinced them to wear. Back to their shirtless selves, they were flexing and showboating for the watching crowd.
“FOCUS!” yelled Henry. "DON'T GET DISTRACTED!"
“Me? I’m not distracted at all,” laughed the Battleaxe Meathead at the front of the column, giving Henry a wink.
Henry felt ill. “DON'T DO IT! FOLLOW THE PLAN!"
The Battleaxe Meathead flashed his teeth. “As a player, you gotta adapt to the conditions of the field!”
"SOMETIMES, SURE! IN THIS CASE, HOWEVER, YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE GAME IS LIMITED, AND IT'S UNLIKELY THAT THE ALTERNATIVE YOU'RE CONSIDERING IS MORE EFFECTIVE! AT LEAST WAIT FOR AFTER YOU'VE PRACTISED THE FIRST PULL! DON'T BE A HERO!"
“You gotta grasp opportunity by the balls!”
"THERE'S NO OPPORTUNITY HERE! YOU'RE KILLING FIVE TUTORIAL MONSTERS! IT'S NOT SPECIAL! STICK TO THE PLAN!"
Henry sighed as he rode past, knowing from the meathead's grin that he'd failed.
The meathead raised his battleaxe and roared at the approaching wolves. “Boys, let's tame us some pups!"
Not to be bested, the Spear Meathead, second in line, jumped forward and stabbed one wolf, kicked another, and hit the last with the butt of his spear.
Before one could scream, "you hollow-skulled idiots!", three wolves were upon the cocky spear-wielder.
Sighing, Henry commanded the donkey to stop. He fired a shot, drawing the agro of a wolf about to sink its teeth into the Spear Meathead’s exposed belly.
The Bastardsword Meathead, The Russian Girl, and Handsome Dan, not wanting to miss out on the action, sprinted forward and started slashing and stabbing and slashing.
The noob in the crowd who'd insulted them laughed again. “Hah! Nice fuckin' strategy, you got there, bozos! Fuckin roided-out mongrels!"
This time, the audience joined him in laughing, including the Beast Tamer and the Cutthroat cancelling his invisibility to prevent any more wolves fleeing through the gap.
Henry, expressionless, unleashed a rapid volley of arrows, hoping to finish the wolves quickly and minimise the damage.
By the time the last wolf fell, Dan cleaving the poor pup in two, the Battleaxe Meathead had lost about 60% of his HP, and the Spear Meathead, 85%.
Most of the damage to the latter hadn’t come from the wolves. Instead, the nincompoops behind him had missed half their attacks.
Henry wished he'd been able to shoot them, too, although his arrows would probably ricochet from their thick skulls.
With so much damage sustained, his team would have to pause for several minutes to eat and replenish their health.
As a final sprinkle of poo on the poo stew Henry'd been served, because he'd been courteous enough to not selfishly tag the first wolves by hitting them first, he couldn't absorb any of them.
He was still 0 for 15.
The Beast Tamer gave a consoling grunt. “At least you were fast. So, yeah, everybody, that’s how you do it, roughly. Disperse and get to work.”
As the other trainees, snickering, went their ways, the meatheads sat down and began eating wolf steaks with their bare hands.
“Sorry about that, Big Bro." The Battleaxe meathead apologised, tearing off a chunk. “Don't know what got into me.”
“It’s fine,” replied Henry in a monotone.
That they would fail to meet even his lowest expectations, this was not unexpected.
On the bright side, with his team having volunteered first, one such mishap wouldn’t prevent his goals being reached.
But, if there was a second mishap, or a third...
Henry, riding off alone, returned to a Cutthroat maintaining the perimeter.
“Ready."
“Your teammates are still healing.”
“Don't need them. Do it on my own."
As long as the meatheads were nearby to block stray Sentient wolves, he should be OK.
The Cutthroat obliged, hoping for an encore to the previous comedy.
Henry fired and pulled another solitary pack.
He kept the donkey stationary long enough to shoot another arrow.
The wolf leading the group yelped as a hole was punched through its nose, into its brain.
“Gallop!” he shouted.
As the donkey raced off, he shot again.
Hrik! the same wolf squealed, falling, dead.
That was 1 out of 15.
Easy.
He dragged the wolf pack out into the fields, which had emptied after the flight of the boars.
As he passed the meatheads, Handsome Dan sprang to his feet to ‘help’.
"Keep eating," Henry ordered, swivelling in the saddle to put an arrow through a wolf's upper palate. "I'm fine."
He had calculated that it would take the Spear Meathead about two and a half minutes to reach 100% HP.
He shot again, the arrow clipping a wolf in the side for negligible damage.
With his current aim, roughly the same time would be needed to whittle down this one pack.
Thigh hit, throat into torso, dead.
2/15.
To preserve Stamina, he alternated between unempowered and empowered attacks, reserving the latter for pushing extra damage when he needed a kill. At higher levels, unempowered attacks were completely ineffective due to the resilience given by Vitality, along with armour. Against these low-level, naked wolves, though, the difference in damage was only about 30%.
After the last wolf took a fatal shot to the chest (5/15), he rode back to the meatheads, retrieving the spent arrows and bodies for absorption later.
The Battleaxe Meathead, seeming to have forgotten about his blunder, grinned and raised a thumb. "A stunning performance, mate.”
“You’ve got to teach me shooting, Big Bro.”
Henry was too annoyed to reply.
He wasn't just unhappy with them but also with himself.
If he hadn't been so out of practice with mounted archery, he could have killed three packs during that interval, finished this tutorial section in a single pull, and ridden off into the horizon. Alas, the 1v1 tournament wouldn’t allow mounts, so he’d neglected to practice the skill.
He would eventually suffer for this negligence...right now.
Far above them, an arrow was whistling as it traced a high-arc across the night sky.
The missile's flight went unnoticed, from the moment it was released by a hairless hand, to the moment it returned to land, smack dab in the middle of the swirling mass of wolves.
No one noticed the dozen extra arrows that followed after, fired for good measure.