Chapter 6 – Tutorial Village Part 2

As the highschool girl’s avatar fell to the ground, a beam of light shone down from the heavens and enveloped her, floating her in the air, and her eyes opened back up and life flooded back into her body. Revived, she looked around confused. 

The tutorial guide faerie laughed and explained. “During the tutorial, you will be revived after death with no penalties, so you can experiment and learn the game as much as you want~”

The black haired highschool girl wandered back to her friends, and the faerie flew into the crowd and grabbed the wrist of a chubby man in his 20s. He was going to be the next labrat for the tutorial. 

“Hm… you need to be low health for this~” 

She tapped his head, and the chubby young man’s health bar instantly plummeted to a silver of red remaining. He didn’t seem bothered at all, too smitten by the faerie’s beauty to care about what was about to happen to him. 

“Now I’ll explain how to replenish your health bar. You can heal by resting at inns, consuming food and beverages, using potions, receiving healing spells, and other things.” 

“Healing works a bit differently in this world, however.” The faerie snapped her fingers, and two mechanical straw target dummy healers holding staffs appeared in front of them in the town square. One of the healer dummies raised its staff, and the chubby man’s health began rising, although it continued to go down to red once it reached a certain point, since this was the tutorial and his health needed to be low for the explanation. 

“As you can see, one healer heals at a constant rate. However, if you add another healer…”

The second healing dummy raised its staff mirroring the first’s, and the chubby man’s health bar began increasing just a bit faster. It was drastically less than twice the healing output, more along the lines of 1.1x as much. To put it simply, the first heal worked at 100% efficiency, but the second heal only added about 10% efficiency. 

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A tooltip appeared on Daniel’s screen.

[Healing has diminishing effects for stacking. The most effective heal will register at full strength, and subsequent heals will produce diminishing marginal gains.] 

Eric yawned. “Mmff.. this is boring, let’s just get to the killing already.” 

Felix nodded. “I know right. I want to live my mage go pew pew fantasy, let’s hurry it up…” 

Even Donovan voiced his agreement. “Yes. This is all just basic stuff.” 

Daniel’s three friends, himself included as well, were notorious for venturing forth on their own when they started playing a new MMORPG. They each liked to do their own thing and hold a friendly competition as to who could proceed the fastest. Once the tutorial village was over, they’d probably team up for a while just to figure things out, then independently go their separate ways once they found their footing. 

Other people were looking equally frustrated with the pace of the tutorial. 

To the right, a frowning player looked at the tutorial on healing with impatience. “Tch. Hurry it up already. If we minimize the amount of time we spend in the tutorial, we can get into the game earlier… everyone on the forums is trying to speedrun the tutorial…” 

His friend returned the comment. “Yeah. Everyone knows that the tutorial is a waste of time. Let’s just try to speed run it as best as we can so we can start exploring the actual world.”

Daniel frowned. Was the tutorial really that useless? He didn’t think so. It seemed kind of helpful to him. The tooltip about diminishing heals was kind of a big deal. 

Guiding the players to the front gate of the town, which was just a minute’s walk from the town square since this was a very small dummy town made for the tutorial, the faerie floated near a mechanical straw dummy town guard and pointed towards him with her cane. “Now I’ll explain player killing and town aggro. Come here, darling~” 

Dragging over the chubby man to act as her guinea pig again, she tapped him on the shoulder with a cane, and a skull icon with a white outline appeared to the side of his health bar. 

“The skull icon is a mark of a pker. When town guards see a player with this, they will be aggroed and chase the player down. Bigger cities have more powerful town guards, so they are safer for regular players~”

The explanation was met with a lot of oooooohs and aaaaaahs, and the straw dummy town guards began charging at the poor guinea pig player, who got hacked up by the dummy’s nonlethal mock swords and shields. After letting the dummies thwack away for good effect, the faerie called off the town guards. 

“Now let’s get to the interesting part of the tutorial, before I let you finish the rest on your own. It’s time for combat tutorial~”