Sen wakes from the dream he hasn’t had since he was Damien with a melancholy expression. Even after he’d gotten away from that life, he’d simply continued to swing his sword, as that is all he’d known. Even in his current situation, he still escapes into the peace he can find with his sword. He’d never had any real connections with anyone except for his lady as Damien, but here, even with a loving family, he often tries to escape the closeness, not used to care.
He ignores the tears, not quite sure if they’re from remembering the pain, or remembering that he’ll never see the only person he’d cared about in his past life. His melancholy mood continues as he looks at his capsule. He has a group now, but even with that, he’s still not sure how to interact. He hasn’t even had a normal childhood this life, taken from school early after his accident and homeschooled.
He eventually shrugs off the mood, his family loves him, his friends, as few as they are, care for him, and this time he’s not alone. He logs back in with determination to do what his family needs him to for some mysterious reason, do well in Fifth Dimension. Logging in, he’s the first one in, and he spends the time waiting practicing his skin enhancement skill, wanting to get it up to C rank as quickly as he can.
It isn’t long until his sister is on, and he’s distracted from his practice by a message from her.
‘Did you see? King put a bounty on our head after we beat them! Bastards!’
Sen’s surprised, getting on King’s kill on sight list had happened a few times, but they’d never put out an actual bounty for him. Curious, he sends back ‘How much is the bounty?’
He can imagine his sisters disapproving face as she replies. ‘It’s three C rank crystals for the first kill on anyone in our team, and 3 D rank crystals for every kill after that.’
Sen’s eyes widen. While the best players have found dungeons to farm, and won’t find the reward too attractive, solo and small groups of players will be flocking to them for the total of 18 C ranked crystals. That’s enough to get a D ranked person up to rank C in all stats theoretically, though practically they’ll all be the same crystal and they’ll lose some trading for the crystals they need.
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Sen is almost tempted to convince someone from Ares guild to kill them and split the crystals, but he doesn’t want to lose the fifteen hours he will if he dies.
‘What do you want to do about it?’ Sen asks through chat. He knows exactly what he wants to do, but he isn’t sure Lynna would agree, even if it’s pretty likely.
‘Let’s copy what we did last time they put us on their KOS list.’
Sen feels a grin slipping onto his face, it seems it’s time to go hunting. They wait for everyone to log on, send them a few messages on the plan, and everyone logs off to go do some research. The only one who stays on is Julie in order to find a more offensive array, as her current ones are more illusions and debuffs.
They each split up to do research. There are usually two ways to get rid of a bounty. The first is simply to bow down, apologize, and then probably let yourself get killed once or twice. The second, which they are going to do, is simply cause them so much trouble that they’re forced to rescind the bounty.
They’re currently researching all the different farming areas that King guild uses, and they’re going to go on a killing spree. As it turns out, the King guild has taken over the C ranked dungeon that has the ogres in it. Sen isn’t sure how they found out about it, but it will be an excellent first target.
Ares guild still controls the wriggling tarantula dungeon, and has an agreement with Epic Skillz to share the dungeon with the twisting tigers in it. Luckily, Sen’s group is included in that agreement, but as they haven’t done their dungeon runs for the day yet, they hadn’t found out about the ogre dungeon being taken over by King.
Sen doesn’t bother looking over the lower leveled farming areas for now. Picking on the noobs will only give them a bad reputation. The original target would have been hunting around the deep portions of the eastern forest for groups of King. Now that they’ve all grouped up to control a dungeon, it’s going to be far easier.
He messages the rest of the group what he’s found, and gets a bunch of evil looking emotes in return. Logging back in, he messages Julie what he’s found, and she practically orders him to come over to the Lotus school. Once he arrives, he’s dragged to a large room filled with a forge, and various materials ranging from bone to metal.
He’s sat down at a desk, and Julie hands him an etching tool, shows him what pattern to make, then plops down dozens of knives in front of him he has to etch the pattern into. He lets out a sigh, this is not what he signed up for, but if the number of knives are any indication, Julie has something very fun planned for King.
He starts the etching, and while the first two are failures, he quickly gets the hang of it, and it turns pretty relaxing, just slowly etching the same pattern into metal over and over. The relaxation soon fades to monotony, but he continues, and when he finishes the first batch of knives, he’s handed yet more knives and a different pattern to etch.
The other girls soon join them, and seem to be rather familiar with the process, getting to work without any questioning about why or what they’re doing. Eventually, the seemingly limitless knives run out, and they rent one of the off road vehicles to go head towards the ogre dungeon.