Zack clenched the empty vial in his hand, annoyed. He had seven kobolds left to kill, but only three lesser health potions remaining. At this rate of using a potion per kobold, he’d end up dead in the water by the fourth kobold, and he still wouldn’t have nearly enough iron coins to pay the return fare.
No wonder he kept fucking dying in those other lifetimes, pardon his language.
He had guilty thoughts of proceeding through the door to the next room, to just give up this pointless endeavor to stretch three health potions over seven kobolds that would surely end in his death.
The exit lay just to the north of the room, a door, except this one had a doorknob. The thought was tempting.
But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Following his stupid instincts was exactly what managed to get him killed several billion times over. If he wanted to survive here, he needed to follow the Fool’s advice and take the stellar fragments seriously.
With a scant minute left until the next kobold spawn, Zack quickly brainstormed for a plan. He’d been a study rat all his life, with A’s in most of his classes from calculus to literature, so how hard could it be to squeeze his noggin a little to save his own skin?
Just think about it like an open ended problem. Seven of these clueless fuckers, only three health potions. I need a way to kill these things without getting too hurt.
He looked around the room for anything that he could use. It really wasn’t helping his case that his muscles felt so strained from his unfortunately timed gym workout. Although they were starting to feel progressively less sore ever since he unlocked the status screen.
So these lizard things keep spawning on the middle platform over here. What if I…
“Ah,” he said loudly, smiling. “I got it.”
He saw a way to survive this mess.
Each kobold spawned on some part of the platform while facing a random direction. The summoning process took less than a second, but each kobold needed a hot second to orient themselves.
In other words, if Zack just stood right next to the platform, there was roughly a fifty percent chance that the kobold would be facing the wrong direction after spawning, disoriented and vulnerable.
Which gave him a perfect cheap shot.
Suddenly, having three health potions didn’t feel so bad anymore. He got into position right as the next kobold spawned.
“Human?”
Bad luck this time.
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
You have defeated an enemy. Experience has been distributed.
Angry Kobold has dropped the following loot.
A ragged spear.
1 iron coin.
He had to pop open another vial.
The next two times went smoothly. The kobolds spawned facing the entirely wrong way, and Zack got to sock them in the head like a pipeball batter up at home anchor against little Timothy’s infamous spitball. The third time went smoothly as well. Then he got a consecutive bad luck streak. He was starting to get better at reading their movements, but still no dice.
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
Angry Kobolds have dropped the following loot.
Three ragged spears.
A ragged machete.
A glass shard.
4 iron coins.
The fourth kobold dropped something interesting but entirely useless upon second glance, a glass shard. Although it did demonstrate that some items didn’t drop every time.
He could only hope that lesser health potions were included in the drop table.
Eventually he still had two kobolds to go and no potions left. Well, that was it. Checkmate for Zack.
Was he supposed to roll over and die now, blaming his bad luck for this unfortunate series of events? Nah. He was a survivor.
Zack already thought of another scammy tactic to help out his bad odds now that he’d collected a bunch of ragged weapons. He placed all of the ragged spears he had together to form a teepee, using the edges of the spear blades to fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle. This hastily thrown together construct gave him a barrier between himself and the kobold.
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Next, he did something similar with the excess machetes he had, arranging them like traps on the floor.
The ninth kobold spawned right as he lined up the last machete.
Time to see if this strategy actually worked.
The kobold approached like usual, although this time it looked visibly confused.
“Spear?” it asked.
“Oy! Over here, you dumbass!” he shouted. He waved his pipe, beating it against the ground to get its attention.
The taunt worked, and the kobold let loose a battle cry and charged at him, but Zack simply shuffled in a semicircle to keep the obstacles between him and the kobold.
Because he had longer limbs, he took cheap shots and poked at the kobold every time it got close.
A steel pipe jab connected with the kobold’s torso. Then another.
Slowly but surely, the health bar above the kobold’s head began to deplete.
It took a while to beat it this way, but thankfully no further respawns could occur until the previous monster was killed.
After countless jabs, Zack finally stepped in for the killing blow.
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
Angry Kobold has dropped the following loot.
A ragged machete.
A lesser health potion.
1 iron coin.
Zack’s eyes widened. Jackpot!
He was right. There were health potions in the drop table after all.
He grinned. Time to start farming for real now.
Zack created more and more obstacles, taking down kobold after kobold with his new cheesy method.
He got scratched and dinged here or there, twice by a spear and once by a machete thrown towards his chest, but that was fine. Zack noticed that a few things about his body had changed.
Ever since he unlocked the status screen, his health bar went up by itself slowly but surely. The scratches that he received were healing right before his eyes, mending like he had some kind of regenerative superpower like a cartoon character, although the healing process was far slower than with a health potion.
Clearly this new rejuvenative effect was the combined effect of his new endurance and vitality stats. Health regen. Ha. It sounded so strange, since it was a video game concept, but here he was healing like an iguana regrowing his tail.
But the healing effect was not the only thing different about his body.
The muscle fatigue from the gym that he felt before, the soreness and strain he felt each time he raised a weapon— that was recovering as well.
That’s what it meant to have an endurance stat of seven, huh.
Honestly, he was very curious how this whole stat thing would work out in the long run. Zack played his fair share of games in the past, and the way that stats worked never really made much sense in a realistic context.
The system did mention stat growths were limited by being a baseline human. So he figured that getting ten more strength wasn’t going to make him Hercules all of a sudden. Not until he ascended.
Maybe that meant that stat growths would yield logarithmically decreasing returns rather than linear returns until ascension.
He hoped that to be the case. The last thing this world needed was a bunch of baseline human initiates running around with herculean strength just a few levels in.
In the meantime, he had to make do without any stats to help him out.
Thankfully, it was working out well.
A few more kills later, Zack wiped his bloody hands on his clothes. The bloodstains started to recede as if by magic the moment after he wiped them. He realized that after his health bar finished regenerating, the excess heal regen then worked on mending and cleaning his clothes to the state they were in before.
Between bloodthirsty monsters appearing out of thin air and gods speaking into his head, Zack still found magical stat-fueled laundry to be grossly fascinating.
He couldn’t help it. The human brain was weird.
A glance at his inventory revealed that he already gathered the ten iron coins he needed to board the train back.
Zack let out a big exhale. He did it. With enough iron coins to survive the night, and even a small collection of health potions, he could finally relax.
But it wasn’t enough.
He didn’t do all that work just to be content merely surviving. No.
The grind had just begun.
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
Hours later…
Congratulations! You have slain an Angry Kobold.
Zack heaved, sitting on the floor and flicking open his inventory.
24 iron coins
4 lesser health potions
An assortment of ragged weapons
Miscellaneous garbage including glass shards and broken baubles.
Twenty four kills, huh.
Honestly, he lost count of how many kills since the 10th. Each consecutive kill, each additional thrust into the throat, it just felt like another body in the pile.
Even though they were monsters, it bothered him how real their flesh felt upon contact. The system had familiarized itself with the video game conventions of this world. It tried to present itself like a game, but nothing in a game could quite compare to the visceral and gross feeling of actually stabbing something.
It made him slightly sick. He probably would never get used to this, but at least he needed to desensitize himself, and fast. For his own sanity.
The platform began to glow again, and Zack leisurely got up once more. He’d gotten pretty good at this, now that he had twenty four rounds of practice.
Standing in the same place as usual, he raised his weapon and waited for the kobold to fully materialize.
The monster’s head was spawning.
Zack swung.
Thunk.
Suddenly, he realized that something was wrong.
Kobolds weren’t supposed to be armored, were they?
An elite enemy has been summoned.
[Angry Kobold Elite– Level 5]