And so, just like that, I found myself alone again.

I watched as one of the three carriages that had come into town the night before left carrying about a dozen players back towards the starting city.

On it were Mari, Dante, and Willow, my three impromptu traveling companions. They were joined by the three survivors from the boss incident, as well as a few others.

Those three players and the three that had died before we’d arrived were apparently part of a small guild together back before the Eld project had started. Once the fighting had stopped and the adrenaline had run off the weight of what had happened to their friends crushed the three survivors. Their good friends, people they’d spent years playing with and hanging out with, were probably dead. They were never going to be able to see them again, and that wasn’t an easy thing to come to grips with.

Even now the concept that people dying in a video game led to their deaths in the real world refused to register in my head. It was like I’d refused to believe that something like this could even lead to something like that… But deep down I knew better. The three of them may never recover, they may never decide to venture out of Origin and fight again. I wouldn’t blame them if they made that choice.

The six of them, as well as a surprising handful of Levin’s front line players, had decided to call it quits right then and there after we got into town. There were so many people looking to make the trip back, and so many uncertainties about the road to get there, that a few of the front line players who were still in good spirits decided to take the impromptu escort quest to bring them back.

Rain had gone along with them to lead the trip, but according to him, he was going to turn right around and come back once he’d seen them safely back to the city. In reality, I was sure he just wanted to make sure Willow would be alright.

Much to her embarrassment, after we’d gotten back to town Rain made it a point to hang around her as much as possible. A doting brother, indeed.

I sighed as I watched the carriage finally vanish into the trees and out of sight. After a long moment I turned and walked back into the town of Oaktree.

The town itself couldn’t be more different from the sprawling city that we had just come from. True to it’s name the town was built around a large section of the forest that had been cut back just enough to fit about two hundred buildings nestled into the forest floor.

Besides one wide main road that ran through the town and continued on further north that was still made of packed dirt and cobblestone, the streets connecting the buildings were made of wooden beams that were hammered into the ground to create a set of pathways that wound through the dense woods.

In the little exploration that we’d done this morning before they left, Mari, Willow, Dante, and I had already managed to get totally lost at least five times.

“It’s almost like a big hedge maze!” Mari had said. That was probably the best description of the town I’d heard. The deliberate paths through cleared out trees definitely gave the whole town a maze like feel. It didn’t help that none of the paths had signs or names, meaning that after a while they all kind of blended together.

The only place in the town that was relatively straightforward to get to was the guild hall, which was located in a small clearing towards the back of the town. So long as you just walked along the main road that cut through the center of the town you’d wind up there eventually.

The fact that it was almost impossible to miss almost gave the guild hall a sort of unnatural feeling, like it was the only part of the town that didn’t belong.

The only other shops along the main road were two restaurants and an old building that looked like it had collapsed years ago. I was sure that the collapsed house was part of some sort of quest, but I wouldn’t be going out to poke around quite yet. There were a few things that I needed to do before I was comfortable taking on any more fights. I’d saved up a lot of Gold and SP in yesterday’s fights, and until that was spent I told myself I wouldn’t do anything reckless.

Besides a little bump to my core stats from hitting higher levels, not having spent any resources meant that I basically hadn’t improved my character at all. Converting that Gold and SP into stats and skills was the only way that I could lower my risk of getting caught in another nasty situation, and so that was exactly what I’d planned to do.

As I walked along one of the wooded paths, the third on the left off of the main road, one thought kept popping into my head. The town felt empty. It was only the start of the fourth day since our nightmare began in the world of Eld, and yet so much had happened it felt like weeks had passed. I guess I’d expected more people to make it to the town, but besides the expedition, which now only counted about fifteen people, there were only a handful of other parties that had ventured out this far.

Part of that, I was sure, was that finding a map of the area around the city was needlessly hard. It would be way too risky for players to just walk randomly out into the woods without knowing they had a safe place to stop and rest for the night.

Another part was that level four and five enemies surrounded the woods, so that was probably the level cap of the Golden Fields zone. Even after killing that boss, I only had enough SP to reach level five… If this forest had stronger monsters than the Fields then it probably wouldn’t be “safe” to play in until most players hit level eight or nine… though who knew how long that would take just doing quests and killing the low level monsters surrounding the city of Origin.

Memories of the Fields coated with players fighting over scraps made a worried feeling build in my chest. The competition for resources was only going to get worse and worse as more people ventured out of the city. That would mean more parties like ours, and that other guild, would be forced to venture into the forest way before they were ready… if that was the case…

There was a chance that this death game was about to get a lot more deadly.

Eventually I came to a stop in front of a wide, two story building that’s front had been completely overgrown with thick moss. A small sign staked into the ground outside had “Inn” carved into it.

Pushing the door open I walked into the lobby and was greeted by a young NPC who was standing behind the counter. I took a glance around the lobby but the well built and spacious room that reminded me of a little ski cottage in the woods was practically empty. There were two players sitting across from each other at a table by a window all the way on the left-hand wall, but besides that the inn was deserted.

Since I’d already paid for my room for the next five days, I walked past the desk and up the staircase behind her that led up to the second floor, where the rooms were located. Our room… my room, was the first one on the right.

The large room that I’d rented felt completely empty now that the others were gone. We’d gotten a bigger one than we’d needed to save money, but now that the other three had taken off the whole place just felt lonely.

I walked over to a well built wooden table that was nested between two bookshelves on the side of the room. Unlike the small one star hotel that I’d holed up in in the starting city, this place was actually pretty nice. It had two beds with mattresses that felt much closer to the beds they were supposed to be instead of mystery bags full of vaguely-comfortable filling. To round out the space there were a table and some chairs, a pair of bookshelfs full of things to read, and even a small washroom that had a bath tucked into the corner.

That last part was the highlight of the night, as each of us took turns taking a dip in the hot water. Honestly I’d never thought that I’d need a bath in a video game, but there was something cathartic about just letting yourself soak in the warm water, even if it didn’t have any real effects. After relaxing in that tub I was finally able to get the first full night of sleep since arriving in this world, and I loved every second of it.

Pulling out the chair to the table and sitting down. I opened my menu and projected it out over the flat surface in front of me. I navigated over to the “skills” tab as I had a couple of days prior and got to work finally allocating my frankly absurd number of skill points.

Needless to say, killing a boss monster that was so many levels higher than I was had led to me getting a frightening boost in level. All the way from three to five, in fact. And since level was tied to how many skill points you had, it was safe to assume that I’d collected a lot of them.

The actual amount that I’d gained across all of my skills was close to twelve thousand. Though there was one slight issue…

I assumed that it was because I’d used it to land the finishing blow on the boss, but a huge amount of the SP I’d gained went into the “Thrown weapon” skill and not my one handed sword skill. Or anything else useful for that matter… I hung my head and sighed.

In total I’d gained 7423 points in the Thrown Weapon skill, meaning that I could spend 200, 1000, and 5000 points respectively to unlock three whole tiles on the skill tree. Where my one handed swords skill had only climbed back up to about 8,000 SP after a whole day grinding giraffes and fighting the boss, meaning I could only grab one new tile on that tree…

Oh well. There was nothing that I could do about that now.

I opened up the Thrown Weapons menu and weighed my options. There were three this time, instead of the two I’d seen from my armor and one handed skills.

“Critical Style”

“Speed Style”

“Defensive Style”

The critical and speed variants were easy enough to understand. One seemed like it made hits to weak spots on monsters do more damage, and the other decreased the skill delay between throws… but what really interested me was the last option.

“Defensive Style. Proficiency in using thrown weapons to intercept projectiles.” I said, putting my finger to my chin. Interesting. I’d never thought to use thrown weapons as a way to cancel out ranged attacks…

Since I had no plans on chucking my sword away at every chance I got, I let my curiosity get the better of me and spent 200 sp to unlock the Defensive Style.

“New Skill Acquired! Intercept Missile!”

“New Skill Acquired! Intercept Projectile!”

I briefly was confused as to why there would be two separate skills for the same thing, but the skill descriptions clued me in that one had to do with magic, and the other had to do with physical attacks like arrows.

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Only one new tile appeared off of the Defensive Style skill. Unlike the other skills that now cost 1,000 points, for some reason, this one cost 10,000 and had a bronze border.

I tapped on it and read the title.

“Shadow Counter.” Huh. The skill didn’t have a description, but still… that was interesting. I thought for sure that every skill would follow the same rule when it came to cost, but it looked like going down certain skill trees would change that… Well, since I had no real desire to put a ton of effort into thrown weapons, maybe I’d save up and see what that did.

Next up was my one handed sword skill. There were ten skills that I could unlock, but most of them were variations of “hit thing hard” with varying numbers of strikes. Some had specific movements, like spins or jumps, but I already had a skill that was a dash, so I figured I’d save those for later. There was one skill that caught my attention, though.

A one handed sword skill called “Buckler Break”. From the name and description, it sounded like a skill specifically designed to deal with enemies holding shields. I hadn’t run into one yet, but since I had decided not to invest in the “sharpness” attribute of my sword, the one designed to cut through armor, I figured having a skill that would be useful against armored opponents was a smart call.

I finished off my skill trees by increasing the amount of damage that my light-medium armor blocked by %10, and increasing my detection radius for monsters and enemies by 5% using the “survival” skill.

The two branches on my health skill were total health, and health regeneration, both for 200 sp. I only had enough for one, and decided to chose health regeneration to help augment my lack of healing.

With all of my skill points spent I went back to my menu and another familiar message appeared.

“You have two unspent class points. Would you like to use them now?” Right… I’d gained two levels so I could unlock two new skills. I clicked yes, and an even longer list of skills I could learn appeared in front of me, causing me to groan.

After looking over the list, I finally made the connection. It seemed like the skills that appeared on this list were either basic skills that anyone could learn, or they were tied to skills that I’d either seen or fought against in the game.

“Hmmm...” I rested my chin on my fist as I looked over the options.

As a solo player, at the moment I had three big weaknesses.

The first was that I wasn’t very tanky. This could be solved with buying better armor, or equipping heavier gear. After yesterday’s fight, though, heavy armor definitely seemed like a liability.

It was incredibly powerful if you had the tools to stay alive, namely a healer and some potions, but when you were alone it just meant you wouldn’t be able to get away from a larger number of monsters.

The second was that I had no way to heal in the middle of a fight. Now that Mari was gone there was nobody to cover for me if I’d made a mistake. The obvious answer was to use healing potions, but as of yet I hadn’t seen any for sale, and potions had one big flaw. If you were stunned or knocked down there was a good chance you couldn’t pull one out and use it in time.

Still, it was better than nothing, and taking healing magic for myself, while tempting, probably wasn’t the best idea. Healing magic usually worked on very specific stats, and changing my stats around to make my heals stronger would also make me much weaker when it came to fighting.

Lastly, I was still lacking a true ranged option.

My thrown weapon skill was now about on par with my one handed swords skill, but there was a big issue with going down the thrown weapon route. Ammo.

Sure, I could pick up rocks and hurl them at monsters with enough force to probably cause some legitimate damage now, but if I wanted to be effective with the skill I’d need to go out and get a set of throwing knives or something similar.

With how the weapon enhancing system worked, I wondered if you had to reforge each knife individually or if you reforged a set and they would get all the benefits. Honestly I had no idea how the thrown weapon system worked at all. That was something I should figure out while in town…

The other issue with thrown weapons was besides maybe a specific poison needle weapon or something similar it was just another source of raw damage. Always useful, but nothing that I couldn’t do with my sword skills. What I really needed was a way to lock down enemies, either to go on the attack, or to be able to run away safely…

There was one type of attacking move that was indispensable in games like this that was designed for exactly that purpose. Crowd Control, or CC moves. Like the name implied, these skills were designed to control groups of enemy monsters, by knocking them down, paralyzing them, blinding them, or applying other types of debuffs.

That type of skill was usually dominated by one particular class… mages. After some deliberation I figured it was finally time to unlock the other staple of the MMO genre… magic!

I scrolled down on my skills list until I found the list of magics I could learn and was surprised to find only two. “Divine Magics” and “Elemental Magics” It looked like they broke up the magic categories based on whether they came from some sort of deity or directly from the elements.

Mari had been a holy mage, so she probably went down the “Divine Magics” path from the start.

I wasn’t sure if it was my own bias of the term “Divine” usually dealing with healing and restoration magics, but I decided to try looking through the “Elemental Magics” tab first.

“You have selected Elemental Magics. Please select a subcategory to unlock.” A message read.

Huh… so it wasn’t like other games where when you unlocked elemental magic you started off with a random ball of energy and over time could pick what element you wanted that to turn into… the game was asking me to pick right off the bat. At least this time next to each of the elements was a brief description of their functions.

Hopefully somewhere in the list would be something that would involve crowd control or other strong debuffs…

I skimmed over the list and their descriptions, trying to make heads or tails of it as I went…

Fire - damage.

Water - debuffs.

Earth - defense.

Air - buffs.

The basic four elements seemed like they each had one skill that they did particularly well, while the other skills seemed to be either weird or combination effects.

Frost - defense, debuffs.

Lightning - evasion, debuffs.

Poison - damage over time, debuffs.

Dark - disruption, debuffs.

Light - buffs, healing.

Urgh… why did this game have to have so many damn options. At this point I think I’d honestly kill someone for a wiki… or even just the ability to preview the tiles in a skill tree…

I took another look over the list and ruled out anything I knew I wasn’t going to take.

Fire was a no-go, I already had both ranged and melee damage.

Earth was also out. I didn’t need defenses.

Air was something I may come back to later, being able to improve my own stats while fighting seemed really strong, but not what I needed right now…

That only left Water from the basic Tree.

Out of the other magic categories I had access to, only frost, lightning, and dark fit the bill.

Since both frost and lightning did what water did, but with additional effects, I could rule water out at this point. It probably had the stronger debuffing spells, but without party members to capitalize on them it didn’t make sense to go for a category like that.

Since Ice only gave defenses as it’s other upside, I could rule that out at this point too.

Dark and lightning were the two options remaining.

Dark had more of what I was originally looking for, but something about getting extra evasiveness drew me towards the elemental damage type of lightning. At the very least, having some extra evasion would make getting away from bad situations a bit easier. That made it the safest choice.

And so, after a bit of deliberation I clicked the “lightning” specialization and then accept.

“New Skill Class Unlocked: Magic!”

“New Magic Affinity Unlocked: Lightning!”

“New Spell Unlocked: Spark!”

I pulled open my skill menu and tapped on my new ability. A picture of a circle with a triangle inside of it was the first thing to pop up. It had a small arrow pointing counterclockwise and a little 1-2-3 icon next to each side of the triangle.

From watching Mari cast her healing magic yesterday, I figured that this was a glyph that would let me cast a spell, and that the numbers signified what order I was supposed to do the motions in.

I copied her movements from yesterday and pressed my index and middle fingers of my right hand together, and folded my thumb over my folded down pinky and index fingers to create almost a cursor shape out of my hand and held it straight out in front of me.

As I slowly drew a counter clockwise circle in the air, I felt a faint tingling run up my arm. Before I could complete the first part of the incantation, though, a popup cut me off and a stern “WARNING: COMBAT MAGIC IS NOT PERMITTED INSIDE OF SAFE ZONES!” Appeared in my face. Well, that was about right…

I turned back to the menu and began reading the actual description of the spell. It was annoying that I couldn’t see what skills I unlocked until I’d already invested in them, but that also made each unlock feel like unwrapping a present… it was kind of exciting.

“Let’s see… Blast your foe with a ranged bolt of lightning, dealing light damage and stunning the target for one second… targets affected by this stun become immune for thirty seconds. Some attacks are unable to be stunned.” I said. A smile crept onto my face. This was exactly what I was looking for!

I closed my skill menu and was about to close my character screen when the list of items that made up my inventory stopped me. When was the last time I’d gone through that? Not since the boss, at least…

I pulled open my inventory and decided it would be a good opportunity to take stock of what I had. We’d killed just under a dozen Alpacaraffes, and that boss the day before, so I probably had quite a few materials laying around that could be turned into gear. Honestly I had been too tired and too distracted to really look through my stuff since yesterday. Dante even had to remind me to even check if the boss had dropped a unique item or something.

Looking through what I had, it seemed like I had a healthy amount of random crafting materials. It was kind of hard to tell exactly what they would be good for without visiting a crafter and seeing what could be made… So for now I figured I’d just leave them be.

The boss had also given me almost eight thousand gold. When I saw the number yesterday my head almost spun off my shoulders. When I’d talked to Rain and Ascilla about their drops for contributing, I was surprised to hear that only Ascilla got anything similar. Apparently she’d gotten a good chunk of experience, and about five thousand coins herself, while the reinforcements had only gotten a few hundred coins combined.

Still, that amount of gold made me think… if bosses this early almost gave 15k gold split across a whole party, just how big of a pile of coins would the last boss drop? I imagined some sort of dragon perched on an entire boss room full of millions of shining gold coins… I could definitely see that happening. I then arbitrarily wondered if coins had weight and took up inventory space… maybe I should see if there are such things as bag upgrades in this game…

Either way, before I started grinding in earnest, I had to spend some of these materials and some of that money on some new equipment. Though that would probably take some time unless this town had a high level smithing NPC that was easy to find… I gave up on that angle almost immediately. But even if I couldn’t craft gear right now, there was one thing I could absolutely still do.

I walked out of the inn and back onto the street. I was glad to say that after only three wrong turns and a dead end I found myself back on the main street. I gave a passing glance down towards the direction of the Guild Hall, but eventually found myself walking the other way, back out of town.

Just like in Origin, Levin had planned to set up crafters outside of the guild hall, but just like before I doubted that they were ready just after arriving. I rested my hand on my sword and walked back towards the direction we’d come from the day before. If I couldn’t get any new gear right now, the least I could do was spend my time waiting practicing my new skills. The idea of casting magic especially made me a little bit giddy as I passed the last building on the way out of town.

I walked until the “safe zone” notification disappeared and then left the road to find a small clearing. Once I found an area that seemed like it would meet my needs, I unsheathed my sword and held it out in front of me.

The first thing I did, of course, was cast Spark. I traced a counter clockwise circle starting from the 12:00 position all the way around, then still going counter clockwise I cut a triangle into the center of the circle with my fingers. As soon as I finished the last swipe, the tingling energy building in my arm shot forward and a crackling jet of purple shot forward and sailed off into the forest.

My mana had gone down by half, but I still had enough for one more try. Taking aim at a big tree I drew the pattern again. This time the lightning shot forward but fell short and hit the ground right before the tree trunk and scattered dirt all over the place.

I clicked my tongue. Without an aiming reticle getting that to go where I needed it to would be really hard to get the hang of…

With my mana now quickly depleted, a problem I’d have to figure out a solution for later, I decided to focus on the other aspect of my fighting style. My one handed sword skills.

I now had a total of four skills. I was pretty confident in my Cross Slash at this point. It almost felt like a signature attack. The rear hitting Vital Slash was easy enough to pull off. Though since I hadn’t really used it much in either of my fights, I did give it a couple of swings.

I leaned my sword over my shoulder and got down into a crouch. When I felt the power build in my wrist I swung the blade out and down in a diagonal cut. The skill left a red streak of light as it cut through the air.

The skill itself was strong, but since it had an accuracy penalty and you needed to be behind your enemy to use it, I’d held off on taking advantage of it in the fight against the King Minotaur.

The real skill I needed to practice, though, was Step Slash. I know I pulled it off twice in a row during the boss battle, but that was the one and only time I’d been able to get it back to back. As soon as I’d tried it again after the battle had ended I wound up falling flat on my face.

I took a deep breath and leveled my sword with the ground, sinking into that familiar deep stance. My fingers hovered over the flat of the blade and I felt the power growing in my legs.

Almost there… almost-

“Eh? The hell’re you doin’ out here in the woods, beansprout?” A voice called from behind me.

“Wh-“ I tried to turn around but the sudden motion caused my Step Slash to activate and I immediately was accelerated straight into the ground.