As it turned out, Lonnie wasn't at the camp when Mickey arrived; he was off at work, making sure the roads stayed safe. Mickey had two choices. He could wait, or he could do something in the area and kill some time. Given the two options and knowing that he had limited time to enjoy the game, Mickey went to visit a certain someone.

"Come on—bring it, Peter!"

"Raaaaaw! Mraaah!" the zombie, dragging its claws, roared.

Mickey returned to fight with Peter. There were things that he still wanted to confirm, and Peter, a monster whose patterns Mickey knew, was the perfect guinea pig.

Mickey baited Peter's dog like he had the day before and pulled back toward the wall. "It's so great to see you again, Peter. Looks like you all really do come back after a night."

Mickey was referencing a detail from one of the guides. Boss monsters were consistently re-spawning. This wasn't a feature unique to Asniels, but rather all of the Realms. Re-spawned monsters wouldn't give as bountiful rewards—a detail that Mickey thought was good for the purpose of maintaining balance within the game.

Peter's dog went through the motions—it turned into a repeat of the day before. Peter, the poor soul, hadn't learned anything, it seemed.

Mickey brutalized Peter's dog right in front of his rotting eyes. Peter rushed in, swinging his arm. This time, Mickey dodged fully and jumped over one of the walls. He had to make sure to create a similar situation to the day before. He wasn't testing variability in behavior today—what he wanted to know was beyond the battle.

Peter was consoling his dog once more, and once more, Mickey came from behind, choking Peter with the spiked ball's chain and bashing his skull in with the spiked ball. The battle progressed through the same steps like they were acting out a play. The only change occurred when it was time to stab Peter. Instead of using the skull of Peter's dog, Mickey held the dagger in his third hand. With that dagger, he stabbed away.

Peter died much faster.

Mickey reflected on the battle and agreed with himself that the increase in his statistics from leveling-up, while small, and the dagger contributed to making a noticeable difference.

Peter and his dog fell, but Mickey kept his focus on the corpses—there would be no disappearing just yet.

"Okay, so let's figure this system out."

Mickey fell to his knees and began cutting away at Peter's rotting flesh, keen on extracting more drops. Mickey was curious. In most games, you would get drops after defeating a monster—that was how this game seemed to work too. But after coming to a situation where he found that the skeletons sometimes dropped Funny Bones, and after seeing how flexible HWO was with quests in general, he wondered if HWO would be flexible with drops.

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The idea of boss monsters giving rare drops—it wasn't strange. In fact, in many games, players would repeatedly fight a particular enemy in hopes of receiving a drop that could very well have less than a one-percent chance of appearing. It wouldn't be strange to expect something similar to be implemented here.

Mickey cut through Peter's hands and pulled out the iconic bone claws. He placed them to the side, nodded, and began working on ripping through Peter's chest.

The bones were separated only because Mickey wanted to see if actually separating components he was interested in would affect the final results. He already tried bagging the claws, but nothing happened. In other words, it seemed he wouldn't be able to store them in his inventory.

Now, the chest had one more thing that Mickey was curious about; he was hunting for the strange light. Mickey, with hands plunged into the puddle of black that was the chest's contents, fumbled around for something. He eventually felt a prick and a shock—a sure sign of something unusual. He fished it out and held it to his face.

"Hmm. Yeah. Can't say I expected this."

Between Mickey's thumb and index finger was a lustrous, purple crystal. It looked like a jagged ball of flame frozen into its form. Energies swirled within it, and Mickey was sure he could see faint wisps of black flowing from it, like some sort of aura.

Mickey placed the crystal next to the bones and wondered about his next move. "Should I break them? Or should I let it dissipate?"

The problem in this particular situation was that there was no way he could draw good conclusions without hunting Peter many times. This led to the conundrum that if he did have a good result, he would need to remind himself that he may have just gotten lucky and that the extra effort amounted to nothing.

Acknowledging that further tests were without a doubt going to be required, he decided that he would let Peter fade and see what happened.

"I'll do this ten more times, and then I'll switch to destroying these objects ten times. It won't be great, but maybe it'll give me some broad ideas…"

Peter's corpse began to fade in black particles, as did the other components. The forms faded away, but they left something behind, and these could be picked up. There was a Skill Bit left in the place of the claws, a smaller version of the purple crystal where the crystal was, and an EX-EXP crystal where Peter's body was.

***

Received:

Mauling Peter's Crystal

[Bone Claws] Skill Bit

2EXP

10EX-EXP

***

"[Bone Claws]… Isn't this?" Mickey scanned his memory, looking for the right bit of info from the guides. "Right! These are the Adversarial Skill Bits! The guide said some monsters drop a Skill Bit that reflects an aspect about them—but the way the guide talked about them, it seemed like it was talking about special event bosses… Did the guide know regular bosses dropped them?"

Mickey was tickled that he may have found another detail that the guide didn't mention outright, but he reminded himself to not get cocky—he may simply have misinterpreted what the guide said.

He dusted himself off and got up with a sigh, the purple crystal in hand. "Is there any data on you?" Mickey thumbed through his Slate, but there was nothing on the crystal. For the moment, he could only surmise that it needed to be appraised. If realism was being pursued, he would have to go to an expert, though when it came to an expert on the boss monsters, only one person really came to mind. Still, that person was back in Torea. Mickey shrugged, stored the crystal, and went on his way back to the midway-camp, happily humming.