The quests they had been assigned were unexpectedly easy.

Mark and Zirrilit followed as their automated servant lead them to areas where the herbs were commonly found, and then they would watch as their robot would go and collect those herbs for them.

Flowers, Trees, moss, random bushes that he couldn’t tell the difference between.

All of it went into their own individually packaged bags which the machine would then label and store into its carrying case.

They had succeeded in five different herb fetch quests; he now had close to five hundred of those little golden coins that the people here used as currency. Or rather four coins with a little ‘100’ stamped onto them and a lot of smaller ones.

He was either rich or he had enough money for a bus ticket. Mark had no concept of how much this could buy other than the fact it could buy all those herbs he found.

They made their way back to the adventurer's guild through miles of rough terrain, forests, hills and random patches of water. This time when they walked to the back of the adventurer’s guild no one accosted them.

He looked over the quest board, he could have sworn there were more of those easy herb gathering quests but he had to assume that someone else must have taken them because they were missing.

So he shifted his focus.

Kill: Wyvern

“Hey Zirrilit, how strong is a Wyvern?”

“Hmmm…” She grunted, “I can maybe take one. Maybe. If you summon your angel we can both take it down pretty easy.”

“I can’t just summon angels,” Mark started again, “that’s like, something God does or something.”

“Yeah, you said that. But your god must really like you, so if you go with me you could probably get him to send an angel at the wyvern.” Zirrilit nodded. The theory checked out as far as she knew.

“Let’s just skip that one for now.”

He went over the other listings.

Someone needed help finding a lost- well the paper magically translated the animal’s name to cat but he understood it as a slightly different species.

Someone broke a vase and needed someone to magically put it back together without obvious seams or deformities. A quest to supply someone with fourteen knives as a fancy kitchen set within eight hours.

These were all things he couldn’t really do.

“What kind of quest are you looking for?” Zirrilit asked.

She wasn’t the only one with that question, the metal plated machine behind them focused on Mark. Even the bar patrons quieted their conversations so they could hear.

The issue was that Mark himself didn’t really know, he understood the tropes. He had even explained them to his caretakers when they started questioning him for stories about gifted humans.

You went and did things so you leveled up, and it was important because someone you haven't met yet was the bad guy or something and you needed to be a level three hundred and seventy five so you could kick a young master in the groin without consequences.

If he learned anything from all the media he consumed, it was that he would either get a cool level up system that no one else had or he was innately so powerful he didn’t need one. The real question was whether he got it before or after he was left for dead by the people he thought cared about him.

“I think I’m supposed to fight really weak monsters, and I get stronger until I can fight the strong monsters.” He answered Zirrilit.

It was a fairly standard assumption for a human in a fantasy world to make, though it made little sense to most of the other species who were more… Realistic. A scarred body didn’t really make you more powerful unless a god specifically required that as part of their faith.

Zirrilit nodded however, because it made sense in a way. Kill something weak and then move up. Baby steps so he could learn to summon angels to devour the weak.

She might call it practice instead of leveling up, but that too was because it was a more realistic take.

Zirrilit tilted her head, “So where do you go to kill weaker enemies?”

“That’s the issue… Usually you would just go and fight like, wolves or skeletons or something in the woods. Or maybe be sent to clear out the sewers and deal with giant rats? I think slimes were supposed to be the weakest starting creature-”

The barkeep felt the urge to write all this down, but of course if he thought this sounded important then the researchers spying on the human would have already copied it down word for word. Doing that would accomplish nothing but possibly making the human suspicious.

“-Oh, but I don’t see any hunting quests for anything really weak. I think a wolf would probably just eat me.”

The barkeeper looked down, and noticed a small slip of paper. It was still shimmering and warm to the touch, evidence of recent teleportation.

Destroy creature infestation

Location: Local sewer system

Stolen novel; please report.

Known entities:

Acid Slimes

Giant Rats

Reward depends on the number of kills.

He understood the mission without it being explained to him, the orc edged around the bar and walked up to the notice board. Then he shuffled close to the duo looking over quests and pinned his note.

The dragonoid pointed it out, they were so lucky exactly what Mark needed was being requested!

The orc thought the sewer system was automated, and too small for a human to fit into, and not full of any monsters or giant rats or anything. He had thought it was just piping and sludge that they sometimes needed to pull the sidewalk apart to fix.

In fact, slimes as a whole were a fairly niche and rare creature. In theory you could make a liquid type of golem out of acid or something but why would you? It couldn’t perform labor or anything, and even the acid would be much less effective than a giant rock monster crushing you to death. The liquid itself would be more difficult to keep contained than a solid, so it would waste energy every second it existed.

Nevertheless, Mark came up to the bar counter with the paper that had just been nailed down. “I would like to take this job please. Also, is there somewhere I can buy a weapon?”

“Yes of course!” Introducing where the human could buy various equipment was something that had been planned for, “The entrance to the sewers are located in the-” He checked his notes, “Two miles down the road, the weapon and armor shop is down the block, it is the… Red painted building with a sign that has a sword painted on it.”

“Whoa, good thing this is all so close! I don’t think we have a ride until later when we get picked up.”

Lucky. That was one way to describe it. The orc might go with planned or constructed at the last minute.

With that they saw the human off, and considering they had been cautioned that someone could die testing the human’s abilities they had in fact succeeded in their jobs.

No injuries, no deaths, just a bit of a scare when the deathworlder looked like they would start eating everyone’s brains.

He went back to pretending to polish glasses. The human was someone else’s problem for the next few hours.

~

Mark had no idea how much a weapon should cost.

He had gone and found the building. It had a sign and everything like the orc described, but as it turned out that was the easy part of this experience.

He also had no idea what weapon he should be using right now.

On top of all that, he had no idea that most weapons were custom made to suit a person’s specific build and species and that for some reason all the armors and weapons were decidedly human in handling ability. None of the swords were oversized for say, an orc’s hands. Someone would have had to take the time to make a large amount of human sized goods for a bar that lacked human sized warriors.

He stared into the corner gazing at a rack of weapons. For some reason this shop sold swords, guns, whips, knives… He could see a laser rifle in the corner.

On top of that there were suits of armor, padded suits he might call gambesons, vests with a sign that said ‘helmets sold separately’, boots, and anklets since some species did not have proper feet the way humans did.

There was even jewelry, though that had been clarified to be magical in nature.

Right now he had two main options he was thinking about. Obviously guns were superior to swords.

Except there was a suit of armor with ‘projectile resistance’, which meant that if you shot it with a standard bullet the round would magically stop two inches from the metal plate and drop to the ground like a parody of the Matrix.

So theoretically, he could get a fancy gun, like the laser rifle. Or he could get the fancy armor and one of those flaming swords over in the corner.

The sign said those swords were hot enough that if you poked a person with it they would explode as the liquid in their bodies turned to steam.

He had options to consider and a budget to decide on, after all maybe he could simply afford nothing since he didn’t know how much everything cost and there was no way you should be able to trade some random herbs in for a scifi space laser.

He turned to Zirrilit, who probably knew more about fighting than him, “Which one should we get?”

“Hmmm…” She grunted, thinking. “I am immune to bullets unless they are large enough to damage armored vehicles. And also I can shoot lasers out of my mouth. You should get the fancy armor since you are so squishy and then also get the laser so you can stay far away from dangerous stuff.”

That made sense, Zirrilit would just kill everything so he didn’t need to focus on outright damage. Thus he could be ranged and in armor and the least likely to be harmed.

“I do think I should buy a gun.” Mark nodded. Range meant things couldn’t hit you back most of the time. “Should I get the laser, or that handgun with the explosive rounds?”

“Well, explosive rounds can hurt you if they go off too close to you, also I am more resistant to light and heat. So if you get the laser you can just shoot wildly at me and anything around me.” Zirrilit nodded.

She had everything planned in her head already. He would basically be a slightly smaller and weaker dragonoid who sometimes spawned angels near him to wipe out entire battalions of enemies.

“Okay then, I will get the laser. How much does it cost?” Mark brought the rifle to the store’s counter.

An elf he could swear he met before was manning their equivalent of a cash register, though they were not the teacher he had met multiple times. They had a different hair color and slightly different features.

Though the biggest giveaway was that they were also not female.

“It costs… well actually it comes in a bundle with a set of armor for… four hundred gold?” She answered as if questioning the price to herself. She must have been unsure.

“Okay, uh… Which armor?” Mark eyed what looked to be something from the feudal era.

“It’s all enchanted actually, so it’s all the same price!” The elf replied cheerfully.

Mark nodded, clearly things were the same price because of magic. He should have just assumed any detailed questions he had would be answered the same. He was in magic land after all so it made sense.

Or at least he was pretty sure it made sense.

He pointed to the suit of full armor, designed to completely hide any traces of his flesh “I can have that?”

“Of course, of course, there will be a test to ensure you are capable of wearing it into combat though.” The elf nodded. Elves loved their tests.

“Sure, what test would that be?” Mark had heard that armor was heavy and that it slowed your movements. He had also heard the opposite, and that since it was distributed well it rarely mattered.

He stared at the armor, then nodded.

Twenty minutes later he collapsed outside and began throwing up all over the grass.

The test was simple, an obstacle course where he needed to navigate across a series of ropes and logs. A mild workout using the body’s own weight, and then a mile run within eight minutes.

A simple exercise. It was very simple. A moderately fit human could perform this task easily.

The issue was in the details. Mark was wearing sixty pounds of metal and the helmet obscured his face, trapping the heat from every breath he took and pushing it directly into his own face.

He had not been able to run a mile in eight minutes with sixty pounds of weight slowing him down. Mark had barely been able to keep up a fast walk. He hadn’t been able to do a single pullup with the armor on. He had fallen on his face repeatedly on the obstacle course.

Mark spat, trying to clear the taste of puke from his mouth. Whoever said armor didn’t slow you down was a fucking idiot and he hated them.

He stood on his wobbly legs and Zirrilit helped hold him up, being the most helpful partner imaginable in her mind.

“Okay, so uh… That exercise is basically the minimum required to be accepted in a combat role in most governing bodies. If you can’t run that in time with what you have on then you need to get lighter armor until you can.” The elf nodded, though it was slightly embarrassing to call him a failure. “Sometimes you need to climb or avoid areas or run away, so you can’t wear that if you can’t do all of that easily.”

The elf clearly expected an argument, which was why he was charging a simple burden spell to increase the weight of Mark’s equipment in case he became physically hostile as most physical attack based species would when under high stress.

The truth was that Mark would not have argued with anything the elf said because he was puking again and barely heard a single word.

Lighter armor, because you were expected to wear it for days at a time without it reducing your ability to function.

Mark decided on a lighter set of armor.

And light armor had a different meaning to the magically inclined, it was actually full plate but enchanted to weigh less at the cost of some protective enchantments.

There was also armor made from beast hides, spider silks, and other such materials, but that was generally for people with specific niche powers or abilities that didn’t mesh well with metal.

Mark and Zirrilit, followed by their ever-present recording device disguised as a servantile automation paid the vast majority of their savings upfront. Then Mark walked away with an actual alien laser weapon and a suit of magic armor.

“Try shooting me Mark! Shoot me! I’ll tell you how much it hurts!” Zirrilit was excited and wanted to try it out.

Mark was excited and almost listened to Zirrilit when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Okay, it’s time for the basic weapon safety brief and light equipment usage test.” The elf smiled. “For the record if you shoot people just to see what happens you fail.”