So, goblins apparently just give 60xp each. They really look like the rabbits of this forest eh?

Speaking of rabbits, looking at my status I get an urge to quickly go and butcher a hundred or so of them just to get my second combination point, but it would probably be way more time efficient to just finish off with the wolves and the goblins I guess.

Name: Qualexis Race: Wildkin Gender: Male  Level: 3 Experience: 70/3000 HP: 31 MP: 40 Rage: 0/100 Stamina: 100/100 HPregeneration: 0.06/sec MPregeneration: 0.1/sec - STregeneration: 10/sec Strength: 8 Dexterity: 12 Agility: 12 Constitution: 6 Intelligence: 10 Wisdom: 10 - - Physical attack: 23 (26) Magical Attack: 20  Physical defense: 22(23) Magical defense: 50 Critical chance: +2% Critical damage: -2%  Speed: +2% Reputations: Elves: Favorable, Fey: Favorable, Avon: Noticed EXP%: 1x, +0.2x bonus for hunter related skills. Skills: Talents: Natural camouflage Lv4 - Feral senses Lv4 - Elementalism Lv4 Summon minor elemental, Inscribe Lv3 Minor P.Att rune, Minor P.Def rune, Dagger Mastery Lv4 Stab, Backstab Sneak Lv4   Outdated Stonemanship Lv1   Toughness Lv2   Cloth armor mastery Lv2   Cooking Lv1   Dissasembling Lv2   Leatherworking Lv1   Throwing Lv1   Tracking Lv1   Infused Elementals Lv4 Inscribe minor elemental, Combination Points: 0

Some stuff looks really promising from what I can tell. The third level of inscribe which I got Immediately after inscribing the rusty dagger finally gave me a defense inscription, which I promptly applied to my chest armor, and will basically double my xp grind for this skill.

Toughness, which I initially thought as useless may be of some use, because apparently, it gives hp equal to its level each time, so if you leveled it up from something like level 19 to level 20 you would get an additional 20 hp, which doesn't seem that awful as I initially thought, still bad though.

And infused elementals seems way too easy to level up. I've made what? 30 or so of those stones and it was already level 3, level 4 with the bonus skill point from the level up. It shouldn't be that hard to let it reach level 5 so as to gain that Air Dart or whatever it was called.

Due to the fact that elementalism keeps up with my stealth and camouflage skills, which are probably getting that xp bonus from my race, it seems almost certain that the skill gains xp when you are using the elementals in battle, and not just when you summon them, which seems pretty good considering it's one of my two main damaging skills and I constantly use two elementals.

Mana and mana regeneration seems to be the main issue though. With the second infusion, keeping two elementals and two infusions up would cost me 40 mana over that period of 5 minutes, while I would only regenerate 30 mana at the same time. So, for the time being, it seems that the Pdef infusion has to go, it only boosts my defense by one after all. But for the future, when I would probably want to infuse all my armor pieces, I would need to find a way to dramatically boost my mana regeneration, and boosting wisdom doesn't seem sufficient enough.

I should probably ask for the spellcasting teachers in the starting village about that, or even head towards the elven village in the woods, obviously after I'm done with the goblin quest. They will probably have an answer to my problem. I can't believe that the devs have made such a blatant balancing oversight regarding magic.

Now, onto business, let's continue searching for those wolves. Onwards Dirt-kun!

"Searching for tracks, searching for tracks, wolfie wolfie where are your tracks?

searching for tracks, searching for tracks, leather armor where are your tracks?"

I continued onwards, lightly humming a tune while my eyes were glued to the forest floor and my ears open for any more goblin speech and ten minutes later I was rewarded with a fresh looking pair of tracks leading to yet another wolf.

I started following them but not even after a minute, from the direction I was heading to, my ears caught up sounds of battle. Rushing along, I was rewarded with a scene of carnage. Five goblins were desperately trying to kill a duo of wolves. Two goblins were already lying dead and both wolves seemed to be greatly injured as well.

Obviously, I waited until a goblin was almost dead till I sneaked towards the battlefield and backstabbed it, instantly killing it. The wolf looked surprised for a second that its prey had been killed, unsure if it should attack me or turn its attention to one of the other goblins.

I helped with his decision by taking out and throwing towards him one of my flame blast rocks, finishing his life and getting one more goblin that was rushing towards the wolf in the explosion. 

One more goblin tried to rush towards me but his path was instantly blocked by the pair of my elementals, giving me just the right time to sidestep, pull another flame blast stone, and hit both the other wolf and two of the goblins that were literally on top of him trying to bite him.

Unfortunately, the blast didn't kill the wolf, and fearing that I might lose the precious xp, I had to rush towards him, putting myself right in the middle of the goblins that were attacking the wolf and the one that was battling it out with my elementals, just so that I could use stab and finish off the wolf.

Before entering the fray, I really wanted to kill equal amounts of goblins and wolves, but my greedy self just couldn't resist that beautifully set up blast that hit all three... and ultimately left me in the middle of four goblins, all of their attention now only me. Not only that, having seen me throwing tiny fireballs to my targets, two of them broke from the trio in front of me and flanked me. At this point, I couldn't afford to look back, and I had to pray that my elementals could keep the one directly on my back occupied.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Cursing my hastiness, I threw one more stone burst to the one on my left, since it seemed to be the most gravely injured, but the lucky bastard ducked and it flew right above him. The one in front of me rushed forward trying to smack me with his club with an overhead swing, but with a quick sidestep from my part it missed. His momentum carrying him forward, stopping at the spot I was standing seconds ago and blocking the path of the right goblin which was getting ready to attack.

My own movement had pushed me just one step closer to my initial target, the leftmost goblin, which hadn't yet recovered his balance from the dodge against my stone, allowing me to cleanly slash him with my dagger twice before he backed off.

Almost immediately, a heavy bash on my back threw me completely off balance, almost making me fall, face first, on the ground. I clumsily turned, trying to slash at whatever was on my back, but my hand went wildly off target, slashing the empty air, way above the goblin's head.

With a quick glance I saw that the initial goblin that I had attacked was crawling on the ground, bloodied, trying to slowly get away from the battle, but before I had time to go and finish it, the rightmost goblin which was wielding a dagger similar to mine, finally managed to circle around and cut my path.

The view from behind, the goblin against the elementals, seemed to be going in our favor at least, although I couldn't tell how much more time would the elementals need to finish him off.

Counting that side safe allowed me to focus my attention on the two remaining goblins in front of me. One was a stick wielding, quite injured one, while the other one was a dagger wielding and relatively unharmed. Attacking either one had its merits. If I went for the stick one, it would probably be easier and quicker to finish him off, allowing me to completely focus on the dagger one. But that would give more free time to the dagger one to attack me, and I feared that his attack would hurt a lot more than a stick.

Cursing myself once more for lacking the patience to kill a few more goblins before I killed the second wolf, I lunged towards the stickgoblin, stabbing him once, before the cooldown of the actual stab finished and stabbing him with that as well, watching him fall backward, dead.

At that time, a searing pain penetrated my left thigh as the other goblin's blade dug its way into my leg. I jumped back, almost falling down due to the pain in my leg, and realizing that one more such hit and I'll be dead since I was sitting at just 11/31 hp and that fucker had just stabbed me for 15.

There was a crazy glint in the sickly yellow eyes of the goblin like it was watching his prey squirm, but seeing that my elementals were just short of clearing their side of the things, my morale rose once more.

With a quick flick of my wrist, I threw the mostly unbalanced rusty dagger, betting on the stereotypical goblin stupidity. And watching him jumping, dodging out of the way of the dagger that would probably barely scratch him even if it hit, I felt rewarded.

Before he regained his footing, I had already picked up two more stone burst pebbles out of my inventory, and I had launched them already. The goblin smirked, seeing as they would miss him, and seeing him still, I smirked as well. I had aimed them just in front of his feet, fearing that another full miss could cost me my life. And I was rewarded as the twin explosions burst in a million sharp fragments that embedded themselves into the naked legs of the goblin. 

The goblin screamed in pain as he tried to charge towards me, but his very first step just landed his naked feet right on top of razor sharp fragments left from the explosion, making him yelp and jump in pain backwards.

And like on cue, my two elementals finished off their own goblin, and rushed towards the last remaining one, which was jumping on one leg while holding the other, and quickly finished him off.

Casually, I walked to where my dagger has landed and then walked back towards the goblin crawling for his life was, just a few meters ahead. With a sadistic gleam in my eye, I immobilized him with my foot on his back, and then stabbed him right on the back.

I felt alive. I WAS alive! For someone outside it may have seen like a cheap tactics battle against a bunch of the lowest possible opponents, but even with all my experience in quite a few VRMMO, it was one of the few times that it actually felt REAL.

I couldn't pinpoint out why. I had played games where the pain was even more realistic, or where battles were more gruesome. But there was always this feeling of disconnect. No matter how cool and nice the graphics, no matter how close to reality the settings, it always felt like you were controlling a character.

This time it actually felt like you WERE the character. 

Maybe that mumbo jumbo about the cognitive ability that they said was the fuck up that caused the bug had something to do with it, but ultimately, that felt like one hell of a battle. And if a battle against goblins felt that way, it only helped to spark that itch wondering how would a real battle, against something awesome like a dragon, would feel like.

Not to mention... PANTS!

I quickly looted the dagger and the crystals that the goblins had dropped, getting pleasantly surprised that even the two dead goblins that I didn't help kill had left a crystal drop, and then proceeded to loot and disassemble the two wolves, finally having enough materials to craft my leggings.

Thankfully, even with my slow as hell health regeneration, by the time I was done crafting, my health and mana were back to full. My only problem was that I was running dangerously low on stone burst and blast pebbles.

I could return back to the village, turn in my quest at this point and make some more, but it was still way too early, and I had finally enough with being constantly penniless. So it was an awesome opportunity to actually farm a bit more xp and materials. What the hell, there was bound to be a rock or something in this damn forest for me to replenish my supplies.

Thinking back, I quickly opened my map just in case it noted where the stone I used to make Rock-kun for the very first time was, but to my dismay, I finally realized what it meant that my map would be crap without a cartographer skill. It was, indeed, crap. Looking on the nearly non-existent map, I could safely say that I was officially... lost. At least it had a working compass, so at the very least, I should land near the village if I follow that...

Well, that's a problem for another time. Now, farm. Dirt-kun help me with those tracks!

I didn't really have enough time to move away from the scene of my glorious battle until a very familiar sound reached my ears. Something like the crunching of leaves, slowly but surely coming this way. Something very, very, similar to my first fight in the game. I smiled thinking it was finally time to get my revenge for the scare that the wild boar had given me yesterday. 

Just to be certain, I activated camouflage and walked a bit closer, and there it was, a majestic, huge, wild boar, sniffing the air, searching for its next victim. Only this time, I was prepared. This time I would be...

-35

For a split second, I felt a prickling sensation on my back, lowering my vision, I saw an arrowhead clearly extending out of my chest, and then I died.

"GODFUCKINGDAMNEDPKERSONNEWBIEZONES!!!!!!!!!!!" Was the scream that echoed from inside the small rural church in the village.

At least the system was on my side for once.

Due to dying to a Red player before you reach Level 10, you suffer no permanent penalty. Instead, your stats have a 1 hour 50% penalty. Death before this timer is up will greatly extend it.

Ehh... whatever. Since it's just a one-hour penalty, I may as well see it as an opportunity to just finish my quest and figure out something to help with my mana regeneration.