After shutting down his monitor, Noah logged back inside Vesper.
The 2x time speed made it so that it was almost dusk inside game while Noah had a few hours before dinner time. Since the sun was up he went to a fellow soldier and asked for the fastest way out of the city.
After having seen some combat video posted by a player, he decided to have a go at it. It didn’t look so hard to slay some horned rabbits that inhabited the outer perimeter of the forest.
He took only a couple of minutes to reach the city walls; conveniently, the military camp headquarters were situated near them. The forest didn’t encircle all of Divel borders, it stretched from the west to the northern districts.
Exiting the majestic gate made of solid rock, enough to fit three cars side by side, he could see to his left the forest starting 500 hundred meters from the city walls. Between them there was a flat grass carpet sprouting small bushes with a dirt road as large as the gate going to the horizon. While not planning to delve inside it because Noah still remembered what Dominik affirmed about him and a wolf, he left the road and made way towards the trees planning to find some demonic aberration.
It didn’t take long for his wishes to come true, from a small and flowery bush came out a hybrid between a cute rabbit and a unicorn. Taking a second to admire this strange and exotic creature that didn’t exist on earth cost Noah his first points of damage taken.
He lost 3 Hp from that damned stingy horn and 3 others from a mix of his stupor and slight pain that allowed the little aberration to strike again.
What followed was a series of sword swings or more exactly, a sword shaped iron rod. What was to be used as a weapon of mass murder was none other than Noah training sword. He didn’t plan to hunt for that length of time and he didn’t have enough resources to get a real one so it had to do.
Still, it did his job, a nice -10 appeared above the rabbit head and his hp bar decreased by one tenth. Apparently, they had the same amount of hp but he didn’t plan on getting hit again, he came to practice dodging after all.
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The first five exchanges between the horned rabbit and Noah were a mixture of pain filled curses and some successful dodges.
‘it was hard after all, it looked so easy in that video. This damned hell spawn won’t stay firm in a place, I can’t strike it and dodge right away’.
He had a hard time to strike and doge right away, it was his first real combat after all. While swinging his sword to maim that little jumping pest, Noah couldn’t properly concentrate on the right attack to follow a successful one or taking a step back to dodge a spearing rabbit horn. He needed practice and knew it so he decided to come here every day after training to put in practice what he had learned during his sessions from Dominik.
After slaying his first horned rabbit, purely thanks to the huge disparity in stats, he picked up the pace and in almost an hour, he had become an expert rabbit butcher.
Noah gained his first level up and made almost halfway to level 2, he also increased by one his dodge(passive) netting a total of 2 free attributes points and 0,5 of agility.
‘where should I spend them? In character creation, it stated that charisma was needed to make beasts follow me but also the strength to subdue them. Right, there was also that intelligence mention. Guess I will wait for now’
He decided to keep his points unassigned and find some information before assigning them. Surely he had no need for intelligence right now and his agility was raising, albeit slowly, thanks to the dodge skill. This left strength and charisma as possible picks, it wasn’t known how charisma worked yet and strength added flat damage to his attacks, or so he thought considering his 1 – 3 damage from the blunt iron sword plus his 10 points in, factoring a hypothetical defence of 1 or 3 from the rabbit, he dealt exactly 10 damage damage per hit.
After rehearsing his deductions, Noah felt a sudden urge to assign his first point in strength to prove himself right but, ultimately, decided against it because something else caught his attention.
In all this time he dealt exactly 10 damage with almost every hit, rarely he saw a -9 or -8. Factoring in luck was too much, probably it depended on the way he attacked, seeing as he kept repeating only a downward swing on this rabbits, it made sense. Being consumed by its curiosity, with his nerd side surfacing, before logging out he went to find an experimental subject to test this theory.
‘I didn’t realize this before but the way I attacked resembled those transitions from Dominik sword dance. Am I becoming mad that I did it without realizing?’
After some experimentation on a poor rabbit that got repeatedly smacked in every possible way that came up in Noah mind, he collected solid pieces of evidence.
<<”Apparently it was as I guessed, swinging this blunt weapon downward deals 13 damage and poking with it deals 11. This is probably because of it’s nature as a blunt training sword.”>
Feeling satisfied by his findings and gains, he logged out to get ready for dinner.