“... which defends me,” Brian said.

This was the first time Brian was getting a skill and he had secretly been jealous of Lucas and Jack already getting skills, so he was excited for this.

Jack and Lucas looked on with excitement as well.

“So what’d you get?” Jack said.

Brian was silent.

“What’s wrong?” Lucas said.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fucking useless!” Brian yelled and kicked a tree.

“Fucking useless! Now I feel like I’ve trained the basics of holding a shield for 10 thousand hours and it’s absolutely useless. At least I know that I’ll never flinch away or drop a shield from bad instincts. However useless that is. Thank you very much, super system!”

Brian sat down on the ground.

“Okay, at least you pick something good,” Brian said to Lucas.

“Okay then, my turn. I pick…”

There it is again with that stupid dramatic pause. Just get on with it! Jack thought.

“Super system, I want to spend my skill point on getting a bigger dick!”

Enlarged Penis: Rank 1

“Did your mom drop you when you were a baby?” Jack said. Brian sighed in annoyance.

Lucas turned around and looked inside his pants, with his back turned from the other two.

“Eh, I’m not sure. I mean, it kind of looks and feels like it grew? But maybe only by 0,3 centimeters or something,” Lucas said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Brian said.

They were now back to grinding balloon monsters.

The biggest problems we have is money and figuring out how to get those skills to work. Also I have this skill crystal I wanna use now, but I’ll wait until after getting through this hard grinding work as a reward.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Everyone had stopped talking and were in a flow state of monotonous grinding.

Jack took a photo of the forest. And recorded Lucas killing a balloon monster with his new combat knife while he was behind him and ready to give emergency support.

This place is… beautiful. The air is clean. The sky is blue. The trees are freshly green. When I look at the green leaves, I just feel my stress going down. When I take down a monster, I feel a kind of purpose. Or achievement. Like I am doing something. This is so much better than my real life. Why am I even going out back to the real world? I never wanna return. If it wasn’t for needing food, I’d just stay here forever. Earth is dirty. Dirty air. Dirty people. Dirty buildings.

It was a few hours into grinding when they all received the same notification.

Kill 100 non-Balloon monsters

They stopped grinding and took a lunch and toilet break and sat in a circle.

They forgot to bring a can opener so they opened the cans with the spare kitchen knives they had brought with them.

“It’s too dangerous. We'll probably run into other people. And maybe get hurt by new monsters. There’s nothing stopping us from just grinding here and getting our money up. And we’ll get skill crystals anyways. Probably once per day. I say we wait and get our money up. I think we shouldn’t do anything new until we’ve bought at least 3 guns, and a shield,” Brian said.

“I see your point. But I think skill points are essential and maybe we will fall behind the other groups if we do not get free skill points to spend. Those skill crystals only give random skills and the skills they give don’t sound that useful, just in terms of raw power. We also need to figure out that problem that Eugene was talking about. But, I think I want to go with your plan. It’s safer and getting guns sounds like a smart move,” Jack said. “Yeah, and I wanna get more money so we can move out of that fucking dump. Move into a motel or something,” Lucas said.

Suddenly, while listening to Lucas, something popped up in his mind.

“Hey, guys, I think maybe I know the solution to the skill problem. So when I first got that murder skill, I think it was kind of a mistake on the system’s part. Like you were supposed to unlock the achievement after having played the game for a bit. And I was supposed to have more options and be able to pick anything related to a knife. But it said I didn’t have “undisclosed and undisclosed”, so it automatically gave me this knife fighting skill. What if, none of the skills work without these two things? I think maybe it’s some shit like mana, or ‘magical fuel’,” Jack said.

“Oh shit, that actually makes sense,” Lucas said.

“Why didn’t you say this shit before I wasted a free skill point? Fuck!” Brian said.

Why did I waste that skill point on my knife skill… No, I still think it was a good choice. Probably.

“If these other guys figure this out before us, we’re fucked,” Jack said.

“Okay, let’s just focus on grinding hard today and making money to buy a pistol first. Fuck the motel, Lucas. And then we can go to a new tunnel and move onto this next challenge and get mana something skill,” Brian said.

“Okay, but before we move on. Lemme pop this skill crystal real quick. I’m tired of waiting. Please give me a mana skill or something,” Jack said, and pressed the skill crystal in his hand and popped it.