With a mighty leap the Jackalope flew toward me again, and I not so much attacked with the dagger as held it out in front of me, eyes closed and hoping for the best. The blade failed to connect with the beast, but it did become entangled in its antlers. The Jackalope’s jaws snapped at me as it dangled from my outstretched arm, antlers firmly stuck on my knife and its powerful hind legs kicking at the air in determined futility.

“What the hell?” I said.

Holding my arm out to keep the thrashing Jackalope at a safe distance I grabbed an antler with my free hand and wrenched the dagger free.

“What the hell?” said the Jackalope, still kicking and thrashing and snapping many teeth at me as I held it away from me by the antler, those black eyes still boring into me. I walked carefully over the slippery patch of damp leaves to the nearest tree, swung my arm as hard as I could and smashed the Jackalope against the trunk with a satisfying crunch. I swung it a few more times then dropped it. It lay there at the foot of the tree looking up at me, body crushed but legs still kicking, albeit lamely, and venomous teeth still clacking. I pondered what to do with it for a few moments.

“What the hell?” it gurgled, bloody froth oozing out of its wide slash of a mouth mouth and staining its snow white fur crimson. “What the hell?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, then I lifted my heavy boot and stomped down hard on its head, careful to avoid the pointy antlers. I both heard and felt its skull crack and head squish underfoot, then I stepped away, more than a little appalled at what I’d just done.

System: You have slain a monster several magnitudes more powerful than you - Reward Tokens: +3 (7)

Well, my first monster hunt was a bit of a shit show but at least it wasn’t a total flop.

System: You have enough Reward Tokens to access the Rewards Shop

Yes!

System: You are the first to gain access to the Rewards Shop - Reward Tokens: +1 (8)

Yes yes yes!

System: Rewards Shop cannot be accessed during Tutorial

No no no!

System: Calculating compensation

System: Compensation calculated - Reward Tokens: +1 (9)

Well, at least I had something to look forward to. When I did get access to the Reward Shop in a little under a day and a half I’d have a decent number of tokens to spend. It was nice to see System wasn’t skimpy with rewards and tried to be fair about it, too. That was very good to know. If only I also knew what the Reward Shop sold.

System: Boss monster slain – special criteria met: Hidden Gift unlocked

System: You have a new Gift: Murder Hobo

Well okay then. That was good, I had to assume, even if the name of the gift sounded a bit...ominous.

Murder Hobo - Better chance to get better loot

I had to laugh. So Stratos had a sense of humor after all.

In roleplaying games, there are two reasons to kill monsters. Well, three if you include self-defense, which was certainly the case here. But the two main ones are to earn experience and to loot the body of all its valuables. Or because you had to do it because of a quest or something, so four reasons. Five if you include it just being in the way. Whatever, the important takeaway here is that looting is a core motivation for most people. If you’re unfortunate enough to play with a certain kind of greedy player, looting corpses becomes the only motivation, and the game can easily degenerate into a party of goons going around killing everything in sight just to amass a horde of treasure.

We call those goons murder hobos.

When I told Stratos about murder hobos at the convention they were delighted, once I explained why it was funny, that is. I was pretty sure that this special reward, made just for me, was their attempt at a joke.

I didn’t see it at first, my field of vision being too clogged up with System notifications, so it wasn’t until I cleared them all away that I saw another notice down by my feet.

Jackalope Corpse Items: Blue Mana Crystal

Jackalope Antlers

Jackalope Venom Sac

Rabbit’s Foot x 2

Beasts like the Jackalope didn’t use weapons and they didn’t have pockets so there was no gear or treasure to loot from their bodies. With these kinds of monsters, you usually only get gold or other treasure if you catch them in their lair where they stash the shiny objects they collect, and because I encountered it in the wild, there wasn’t that kind of hoard to pillage either. However, there are many kinds of treasure.

It’s a very common trope in RPGs and isekai stories alike that a slain monster will leave behind special drop items. Often, the monster’s body itself has value, or at least parts of it do. That looked to be the case here with the antlers and venom sac drops, which can no doubt be sold to an NPC with appropriate skills who can use them to make potions or enchant items or whatever. Sometimes, the monster will leave some of its power in the form of a physical object, usually a gem or something similar. In this case, that would be the mana crystal.

I wondered if Sifu would be interested in the Jackalope’s drop items. He had all those jars of weird things on his shelves, probably used them to make potions and stuff. I didn’t know how valuable these drops are, but I figured I should probably collect them for him, just in case.

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If this was a video game, the Jackalope’s digital body would have disintegrated in a sparkly animated effect leaving behind its drop items to be casually picked up, but for better or worse this was real life. All I had was a bloody mutant bunny corpse. I crouched down and grabbed an antler, expecting to be able to just take it from the body, but it remained firmly attached to the Jackalope’s squashed head. One glassy eye stared up at me. It had turned red again after its owner died. I wasn’t sure if that was an improvement or not.

I groaned as I realized I’d need to get surgical if I wanted to collect my booty.

Heaving a deep sigh I gripped my dagger and got to work. The feet were easy enough to chop off, but liberating the other parts was significantly harder. I began carving at the base of the antler, but the long pointy blade wasn’t made for that kind of mutilation, so I wiped the blood off on the Jackalope’s fur and stowed it, then pulled out a curved knife with a sharp blade made for cutting. It took some effort, but I finally wrested the antler free, dripping gore and bunny brains onto my boots.

Yeuch. I had to give props to whoever designed all this, the commitment to realism was impressive. But still. Yeuch.

Having come this far I dug out the second antler, then wiped as much of the carnage as I could off of the ends of the antlers onto the bunny’s fur and stuffed them into my backpack. Then I paused. Did I really have it in me to go digging for the rest?

That was not the time to be squeamish. Who knew how rare and valuable Jackalope venom was, so suck it up, buttercup, I told myself.

I made a deep thirty centimeter incision in the subject’s torso. Which is to say, I sliced open the Jackalope’s body from navel to neck. Viscera spilled out onto the forest floor like trash fleeing from a torn garbage bag. Even in this clearing precious little light filtered down through the canopy of leaves overhead, so it was hard to make out anything like a crystal in the tangled organs. I needed more light.

Suddenly, I had more light. As soon as I’d thought about it, a glowing, marble-sized sphere of pure white light hovered in the air in front of me, illuminating a small area.

System: You have developed affinity with Light

Ha! Maybe this Good At Everything was pretty decent after all.

I immediately noticed something bright blue glint from within the guts, so I flicked at it with the tip of the knife — no way was I going to use my hands to dig around in there — and a tiny crystal about the size of a peanut flew out and disappeared into the leaves.

Heaving another sigh, I rooted around until I found the glint of blue again, then picked it up between two fingers with the slow delicate movements of a bomb disarmament, carefully cleaned it off too, and tucked it away in my coin pouch.

Almost done.

Using the tip of the knife again to poke around inside the pulpy remains of the Jackalope’s head, I set to work hunting for the venom sac. I quickly started wishing I’d done this before hacking off the antlers so I’d have something I could grab onto to hold the shattered little head steady, but determination won in the end and I managed to gouge out a small green organ from under its nose that had to be what I was looking for. After wiping off my blade on the only remaining section of the creature’s fur that was not smeared in blood, I stood up and looked down at the crime scene that was what remained of the Jackalope.

I’m the guy who gags when someone else vomits. The sight before me almost made me barf up sticky rice.

This venom sac had better be worth something. Now then, where the hell could I put it?

There was really no way to clean off the venom sac, so in the end the empty bento box became its makeshift canopic jar. Gathering up the discarded sword I decided that I’d lost the taste for hunting for the day, so eager to put this horrific tableau behind me I kicked some leaves and branches over the Jackalope’s dissected remains to hide the evidence of my clumsy butchery and prepared to leave. I’d just opened my map to plan a course back toward the edge of the forest when a new kind of notification appeared. Even the color of the ethereal text was different.

An unnamed observer is impressed with your unexpected brutality

That forest was just full of surprises. Nice of System to warn me I was being observed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to associate with anyone who was impressed by the way I slaughtered the Jackalope then tried to hide it, though.

I scanned around the clearing, crouched low, knife at the ready, waiting for whoever was observing me to leap out.

An unnamed observer wishes to reward you

What the what?

System: Error - gifts and other sponsorships are not permitted inside the Tutorial

An unnamed observer wonders why not?

System: Gifts and other sponsorships are not permitted inside the Tutorial

An unnamed observer grows pissed off at System

System: System does not make up the rules

An unnamed observer will remember this

I seriously did not know what to make of all that.

I put away the dagger. I knew now that the mysterious unnamed observer wasn’t anyone there with me. Once again, I was familiar enough with isekai stuff to figure out what was going on. The knowledge didn’t relax me, though. If anything, it made me more concerned than if there had been someone physically lurking in the forest to spy on me.

In a lot of isekai stories, people aren’t transported into the other world and left alone. They are often watched by entities, much like a god would watch what was happening to people on Earth. In fact, the watchers often are literal gods. But these entities don’t just watch, they meddle. They comment, offer advice, and interject observations. And they also interfere. They play favorites. They give gifts if they like what you’re doing, and, sometimes, if they disapprove of your actions, they bestow curses.

If you know your Ancient Greek myths and legends, this should all sound pretty familiar. By the way, The Odyssey is an isekai tale, as are many other Greek myths.

That must have been what had just happened to me. Some higher form of being was out there and for some reason it enjoyed watching me make a gruesome mess of that Jackelope. Sick bastard.

Since everything else so far had remained pretty true to the isekai formulae, it was safe to assume that there wasn’t just one observer, an idea confirmed by the fact that it was ‘an’ observer, not ‘the’ observer. Clearly, these were the meddlesome type of watchers, too.

This alone didn’t worry me. It was the broader implications of what this meant that had my mind racing.

It had given me a clue about the reason we’d been isekai’d. We weren’t brought here simply to play games. We were brought here to play games for someone else’s amusement.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, it was to be expected, really. Stratos went through a massive amount of effort to create this insanely detailed environment for us. They researched us and designed this to be an isekai world specifically tailored for human gamers.

Why would anyone do that?

Would anyone capable of all this do it just to give us an unbelievable gaming experience?

No. There had to be some greater purpose.

This world was clearly a game board. But what if we weren’t really the ones who were actually playing the game?

Who’s to say we weren’t just pawns on the board?

Was this a God Game for someone else? Actual gods, maybe?

Sure, Stratos called us Players with a capital P, but they also liked to metagame, didn’t they? After all, it was Stratos who invented the God Game at the convention, so wouldn’t it make sense that the game we thought we’re playing was actually a game for someone else?

So the million quatloo question was: whose game was this really?

Only time would tell, just as time would also reveal what it meant for us Players. Was it benign? Was the purpose of the game for everyone to have fun? Or was it more nefarious, and the point of the sinister game on Crucible wasn’t just to test us, but also to torment us?

I was deeply concerned that I’d already been given the answer to this. An observer is impressed with your brutality.

I didn’t think that was the sort of game I wanted to play, and I knew it wasn’t one I would enjoy playing. The only thing that gave me hope was the possibility that this particular observer did not reflect all the entities potentially watching.

Maybe, perhaps, there were other observers who’d reward me for not being brutal. I hoped.

It’s kind of funny how naive I was back then.