Ros Blinked out of her balcony room in the morning, after her daily spiritual and physical workouts. She even began trying to channel Qui while doing her workout. It didn’t work well now, but in the future it would be invaluable to do so.
She went to sleep cultivating Qui, like she’d been told to do, and it felt easier to get it started again in the morning.
Instantly she landed, in her jumpsuit with riot armor, wearing her own face and name, in a balcony suite in section C, a room she’d never been inside, but understood instinctively enough to jump onto the balcony.
She wanted to be seen crossing the bridge as herself. She was wearing her own name, but she was also wearing the Alibi Spot, hiding her stats, especially her Qui. Not that apprentice tier was anything strange. She could have bought that in the vestibule.
She had her shield on her wrist and her Mind Barrier visible in her French Braided hair. Both items were things she wanted her main alias to be known to have. She paused at the replicator in that balcony suite and bought a butcher’s hook. She put it in her ring and went strolling.
She hadn’t seen any bat winged monsters in the chasm, just that one on a balcony, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. The bat wing monsters arrived clinging to the top of the train cars. If one of the local geniuses had a good ranged attack they probably cleared them every time for the thirty or forty thousand coins, depending on the age of the monster and if they’d killed any humans yet.
Ros was making good progress writing her guide, but she definitely wanted to kill the Moon Wurms that had killed most of wave two, or at least the second wavers in H. She would probably want to kill all the living Moon Wurms near this station before she let the secret of doing it out.
Logically she should wait, but it wasn’t going to get easier to use her Wurm hack the stronger she got.
Moon Wurms had a weak spot, a weak spot most people would never find, because Moon Wurms don’t leave their tunnels and Moon Wurm tunnels, for the most part, aren’t enough larger than the Wurms to allow someone past the teeth to find the spots.
Enter the hack, the cheat, the reason she’d never been killed by walking into a Moon Wurm’s gullet while it used its mind control powers to make her think she was going to survive the experience.
The enormous stations of the First Realm were built into deep fissures in the surface of the unnamed moon, orbiting an unnamed ringed giant orbiting a dim, distant unnamed star. The planet is brighter in the sky than the star.
The Wurms, of which the Moon Wurms are the largest specimens, inhabit underground tunnels beyond the mining station, in the cliff itself. They swim in the deep rocky soil. They leave behind treasure poop and tunnels, lots and lots of tunnels.
The treasure poop, mostly metals and gems locked in a chalky matrix of matter, can be sold to the steward in the mine or to human crafters in the city. A large spatial ring, spatial backpack, spatial belt, something of the sort, is essential equipment when you’re exploring for Wurm poop.
To make the tunnels safe enough to explore, you have to kill the Moon Wurms. Moon Wurms respawn every 45 days. If they are left to roam unchecked there can be a whole lot of them, which also means a lot of poop.
Ros was almost- almost- regretting her impetuous regifting of the spatial ring, but really she needed a belt or something, two bonded rings get persnickety and confusing. A ring and a belt or a ring and a necklace would get along better. As much as magic objects could be said to get along.
Ros approached the big airlock doors leading into the caverns that led to the tunnels. Someone had painted a warning mural on the doors in the same lettering as the welcome sign. Katie? Ros smiled at it.
WARNING
You have been warned
Do not go into tunnels this high ->
Bigger tunnels mean bigger Wurms
Don’t try to say you weren’t
Bloody well warned.
Also, team of four advised.
Ros stepped up to the controls and opened the doors. She held a spear in each hand as the doors opened. Grublings were more nuisance than threat, foot long mini Wurms, that you almost have to stick your limbs into to get bit.
Roslyn speared the ugly white grubs on her two spears like she was picking up trash with a stick on the highway.
When the little Wurms touched her hands she transferred them into her spatial ring. She ignored the constant dings of the notifications telling her she’d picked up 9 coins apiece when she killed the nasty things.
Ros closed the airlock doors, but instead of cycling through the second set of doors she opened a maintenance hatch in the side wall and secured it behind herself.
She climbed up the maintenance ladder and into the short, narrow, squared off, maintenance tunnels. It only took her thirty minutes and zero wrong turns to get to her first hunting spot. Every section of every station was built exactly the same way, right down to the identical way the Moon Wurms brushed right up on the maintenance tunnels to nowhere.
Ros pulled out her pipe, the one she’d deliberately left without a coupling. She pulled out a half dozen Return and Unbreakable Rune enchanted Leaf Knives and tucked them in the strap across her chest armor. Not that she honestly needed the armor to do this.
She gripped the four foot length of pipe in both hands and used it to bang on one of the thick bars of the grate at the end of the maintenance shaft. There was no reason to have a grate gate in this location, especially not a gate that swung out into a tunnel the designers were not supposed to have expected.
Whatever.
The storyline was internally inconsistent. Big deal. It was, however, the ideal place to fight Moon Wurms.
After Ros banged rhythmically an unknown number of times, she heard the rumble of an approaching Wurm. She stopped banging and fitted a blade into her spear. It was possible to do this with just the pipes, but the blade was a more reliable kill shot on the behemoth monsters.
The Wurm slowed as it approached. It sensed her and it tried to call out to her. Of course, it didn’t do much good, it was already blocking the grate when she felt the ineffective tickle of its psychic abilities. She waited, poised, for the red spot on the side of the otherwise white Wurm to appear.
She slammed her spear into the center of the spot. She bounced the pipe, pulling it off the loose knife. The Wurm twisted away from the hurt, but only ended up presenting another red spot to Roslyn’s second blade. It barely took a moment to fit a new blade into the end of the breakaway spear.
Ros punched a second time.
Obtained: 122,000 coin
Ros relaxed. It would just take a moment…
The Wurm deflated as it died. Within ten minutes it had deflated enough for her to open the grate.
As a point of interest, the Wurm had a death spasm, a last ditch attempt to kill whatever had killed it. The Wurm’s impressive teeth pulled it’s jaws outward, adhering to the circumference of the tunnel, blocking it until it was cleared or until the Wurm body naturally disappeared into dust in three to five days.
The contents of the Wurm’s gall bladder (or analogous structure containing acid and enzymes) and main stomach are propelled into the tunnel in front of the body.
In a perfect world, from the Wurm’s point of view, that would eliminate whatever killed it.
Ros jumped down onto the squishy, rubbery carcass. She had done this oh so many times.
She found the second stomach, what she liked to call the appendix, even though it was in a different spot in the guts. She made an incision with her long serrated knife. The hide of the Wurm is Qui toughened while it is alive, but it parts like buttery leather when the old beast dies. Ros’s sharp knife sliced cleanly.
The Moon Wurm eats a lot of things, veins of ore, other Wurms, humans. The Wurms that were on site before the first wave of humans appeared had a non zero chance of having a builder’s artifact in their gullets.
Spawns had less chance of a builder item, more chance of a mock-up of what a human might have held, especially a poor quality spatial ring.
Ros severed the appendix, she used her meat hook to spear it and drag it up, out of the incision. She popped the whole thing in her spatial ring and added her knives. The spatial ring would clean and repair them if needed. She walked down the length of the huge Wurm, one of the largest she’d ever seen, until her feet felt the hard lump of the stool in its gut.
She sent her longest knife into the beast again, severing the intestine. She walked to the ass end of the Wurm and removed the cartilaginous spike over the anus. That was a quest item and astonishingly valuable on the open market. It represented a chance to double the Mental Stamina stat, which was called Resilience.
All the stats had a quest with a chance to double when you first killed the boss level of the monster chain. This was the last link in the long chain. Strength and the hell hounds was the first link.
When the spike was removed she cut around the anus and popped the poop filled sausage into her spatial ring.
One down, however many more to go. Ros blinked back to the junction of the maintenance tunnels and trudged down to the next one. Three grate gates per station section.
Since this was the first day anyone was killing Wurms here, she had a feeling she’d catch a Wurm in every trap.
She barely acknowledged that she’d recovered her Leaf Knives. The return runes worked perfectly, if she wasn’t calling them deliberately the knives appeared in her ring.
Many hours and thirty Wurms later, Ros Blinked back to the 24th floor balcony room a few floors directly below where she had killed DeadEye Derrick. She was exhausted. She took a long bath, and she used her soaking time to channel her Qui. She gave herself permission to skip the physical workout.
She crawled into the bed and fell asleep, still circulating Qui. She woke up still circulating. She grinned happily. Meditation Day, and not a moment too soon.
Ascending from one grade to the next inside a Qui Tier required a quiet place to meditate. Ros moved a cushion from the couch to the floor and stared at the bared couch seat.
Yes, it’s a common joke that things get lost in couches. Ros was slightly ticked as she scooped up the silver, gold and platinum coins worth one, one hundred and one thousand ‘coins’ respectively.
How many couches had she walked right past as she tossed rooms for loot? In the past few days? In her previous life?
Snorting in annoyed humor she carried the cushion into the elaborate en-suite bathroom and set it on the floor of the rain flood style shower.
She placed all her belongings in her spatial ring. She removed the ring, placing it carefully on the built in soap dish in the elaborate shower. Finally, and quite naked, she began the long process of inviting the Qui to expand her channels and enlarge her belly node.
The feeling was achingly familiar. She leaned into the process, aided immeasurably by the simple fact she’d done this before- twice. Dismissing and rebuilding her cultivation under the tutelage of a Qui Master had allowed her to progress.
The clock said it had only been four hours when she was done. She slumped, exhausted, but her status screen showed the result.
Physique: Human- F Ranked
Qui Adept- Mid Mortal
It seemed paradoxically an enormous achievement and a trivial accomplishment.
Ros stood. She was filthy, of course. The advancement process always left a disgusting mess of whatever impurities needed to be flushed from the body.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
She shoved the cushion aside. The suite would reset it and there was no need to worry about it getting wet. It was so encrusted with her first advancement that it still held the imprint of her legs where she’d sat on it.
Ros used the body wash and scrub puff which had been conveniently provided by the original setting of the shower. She scrubbed herself three before she even reached for her ring. She placed it in her nose again. It was the best place for now.
When she was satisfied, she ate a hearty meal and took a nap. When she woke she sat at the desk terminal, most suites had at least one desk terminal, and composed her first attempt to level up all of humanity through information.
She made an anonymous account under her middle name Moira the Seer and stickied the first installment of her guide: the monster manual for the first realm. She even started on the quest guide before she went back to sleep.
The next day Ros spent an hour at a time on her guide while also spending an hour between her hours writing on clearing rooms, because a part of her couldn’t give up the thought of free loot just hanging around in the green areas.
At noon by the clock, Ros picked a random-ish room and started processing the Wurm guts. A spatial object cannot exist inside any other spatial object without a barrier of recently living flesh. The stasis effect of the storage enchantment doesn’t count on flesh containing a spatial object. In other words the thirty Wurm appendices were each a ticking time bomb up Roslyn’s nose.
From long experience she had roughly a week to process her hunt, and her ring should theoretically give her a warning before it blew anyway.
The thirty stool samples had a much smaller chance of literally blowing Ros’s head off her lower jaw, but when she laid them in the corner like chord wood, several of them showed the unmistakable signs of degradation.
The nice thing about putting her loot immediately into her spatial ring was that any digestive juices or bacteria were immediately neutralized.
While she couldn’t quite think of poo inside a rectum as clean, at least it wasn’t bloody, acidic or muddy poo.
Ros had managed to keep track of the order in which she harvested the appendix bags, so she started with the first one, the one theoretically most likely to carry Brandon and Martin’s wave mates. Although it had been long enough that the Wurm could have travelled anywhere on the planet facing side of the moon.
The Wurm would digest most things. Bones, sinews, cartilage, mundane jewelry… but not even a Moon Wurm’s stomach acid could destroy a spatial object or even deteriorate it. Also, she might find a few C grade or higher artifacts in any of the appendices. Guns, swords, armor… Those wouldn’t deteriorate or would only deteriorate very slowly.
Even as strong as Moon Wurms were in life, nobody had ever elected to buy the wurm gut casings, so Ros simply cut them open casually. An upgraded mundane knife had no chance of seriously damaging the objects inside.
Along with the items there was a collection of large-ish rocks and an uncut ruby as big as a man’s fist.
She grimaced and walked to the replicator on the wall. She wasn’t doing this without:
Rubber gloves(S)- 10,000 coin
They were the most expensive cleaning gloves she had ever seen.
She just had to touch an object and concentrate on it to Identify it.
Spatial ring, spatial ring, spatial belt, spatial ring… 16 spatial objects in all and that was just the first one. It was a huge wealth of items, even without peeking into them. Every spatial item would have contents. An empty one could not fit the narrative. Sometimes the narrative was hit or miss, but it was a real thing.
Ros tossed the storage items casually onto a blanket she had set on the floor. She would have to examine each individually.
When she thought she had everything, Ros tried to put the casing back in her ring, because she would get a prompt if she was about to put an unshielded spatial object into another spatial object.
When it went easily, she fed the remainder into the local recycling port on the replicator. She got 15 coin in payment for each empty bag of gut.
She continued her gruesome work. She paused after the third appendix to put on her rebreather. The smell was getting to her. Moon Wurms smelled almost as bad as the sludge she’d made when advancing.
The pile of spatial objects grew rapidly.
She slit open the next to last appendix and stared at the object that had made it the largest of the many gut bags she’d picked up.
There was only one object plus a collection of large rough gems.
Heavy Weapons Specialist Vest(SSS)- a uniform piece from the fabled Builder Race’s Industrial Army. Bondable. Expressly designed to move ordinance and supply to the battlefield. There is a total of 700 cubic meters of space in this item in twenty pockets.
She picked it up and peeked inside. Whoever had lost this vest had been on the way to some major destruction. Eight different heavy weapons with accompanying heavy ordinance. Food, water, camping gear, a pocket room.
Ros gasped. Pocket dimension rooms were hundreds of millions of coins. She had been reluctantly contemplating purchasing a pocket hoard vault, a 3,000,000 coin item that would hold her many spatial objects outside of the current universe and could in turn be held in her ring.
Do you want to bond to Heavy Weapons Specialist Vest(SSS)? (yes/no)
She hit no, still examining the pocket room. She tried to pull it out.
Do you want to bond to Heavy Weapons Specialist Vest(SSS)? (yes/no)
She sighed and picked yes instead. Now she couldn’t sell the vest, but she didn’t actually want to sell the vest. She might not even want to sell the weapons. She pulled out the pocket room and set it up. She opened the door, holding her breath.
Her surprise felt like a gut punch and she blew the held breath out noisily. She was expecting a little storage closet. It was a bunk room, twenty beds. There was a replicator with army meals, no coins required. There was a long public lav and a closed door. She opened the door.
Armory. Weapons, ammunition, armor, offensive and defensive artifacts. Skill scrolls, even a slip for a Mental Trait: Telekinetic(S) and a powerful Ability: Heavy Gunner(B).
She smiled. That was Hugh’s ability, but he was Fifth Wave and he came through the gate with it. No gun yet, just the ability.
Ros smiled and shook her head. An embarrassment of riches, worthy of the Imperator’s Treasury. She slipped the Telekinesis Trait, and all the other trait and ability slips, into her personal ring. She put the vest carefully on one of the bunks and left the room.
She had a 50 pack of standard pillowcases she was planning to use to store her treasures. She would put them in the room and put the room in her ring.
Like sheet sets, the pillowcases were free at the replicator. Miko used to tease her for using pillowcases as bags. Funny how she hadn’t thought of the girl as a friend even though they spent a lot of time together for the first month or so. Miko had glommed onto Martin after the invasion. As the girlfriend of one of the top leaders, Miko had become the lady of the section, nose in the air, and ignored all her old friends.
She went back to the bedroom and finished digging through the last appendix, which yielded the usual multiple spatial objects.
She eyed the second to last gut bag as she fished in the last one.
“That Moon Wurm spawned after I got here. If anyone is watching, thank you if it was meant specifically for me, and I’m sorry but I’m not giving it back if it was meant for someone else.”
The only answer she got was a cacophony of Divine laughter that was barely perceptible.
“I guess that answers that. I’m not done giving my fellow humans instructions on this world. Hopefully one day we will be strong enough to spar with.”
She felt the Divine Approval and she felt the Divine Presence withdraw.
As she sorted the mountain of objects into the pillowcases, Ros withdrew any coins contained inside. It was a little known fact that a large monster received coin for its kills, but didn’t have anything to spend it on.
An even lesser known fact was apparently that monster kills might drop abilities or traits that the user had equipped. A human killing another human never got any of the abilities of the dead opponents. Ros immediately began collecting those abilities into her personal ring too.
Nearly as unknown was that monster bosses gained a portion of the kill’s coin on hand, not just the death benefit. The size of the portion varied by monster.
Dragons disgorged the coins into their hoard lair, Moon Wurms added them to their poop.
Unless… unless the kill in question possessed a spatial object, in which case the coin went into the spatial object to be found by whoever was lucky enough-
The phrase, Lucky Enough, made her pause. Luck was a hidden Stat until and unless you followed the Killer Bunny Quest Path. She had an eerie feeling that her Luck stat was quite a lot higher than it could have been. All the more reason to grind the quests out quickly so she could view that stat.
She forced herself to continue sorting, she could examine a few objects closely every night before bed. For now she just needed to get this embarrassment of riches under wraps.
She moved all the pillowcases to the bunks, spreading them out.
Then she grimly moved to the poop logs. Moon Wurms tunneled far and wide in the plains, always just underground, only in human breathable atmosphere. They ate the metal veins and crystal formations. They drew whatever sustenance they needed and they pooped out logs of precious metals and gemstones.
Ros emptied one of the spatial belts into a nearly empty spatial ring and used the belt to store all the poop she could find, even out of other spatial items.
In the deteriorating gut segments she found four more spatial objects, a hairpin, two tiny pendants on skinny chains and a ring that had been worn as a barbell piercing. All were just small enough to pass through the filtering apparatus of the Wurm.
She cleaned up the remains of the guts and dropped the belt just inside the pocket room before she closed it up and put it in her nose ring. She was now her own walking treasury. Not that she hadn’t been before.
Ros had collected over three million coins just for killing thirty Moon Wurms, the most valuable kill in the First Realm. She got over 27 million coin from the over 200 spatial objects she dug out of the guts of the beasts.
She was used to large hunts. The appendices often had three or four objects each. This was a lot more than she had bargained for. She made sure the door was barred from within and she Blinked up to the room she was publicly using. The butchering room would clean itself within a week.
Ros was feeling restless after the butchery session so she decided to do something she hadn’t done yet.
Every section of the station had five fully stocked gyms, and the nearest of them was the one in the green residential floors. She was living on the 24th floor, so she bought herself some gym clothes and went to the gym on the 25Th floor.
To her surprise, there were eight people in the gym, half on cardio machines and half just beginning what looked like a karate class. They even wore matching gis.
“Mind if I join?”
The woman leading the training looked her up and down. “No shoes on the mat.” Was all she said.
Ros took that as an invitation and took off her shoes. She put them in the line with the other shoes and stood in the back.
She joined them as they continued their warmup and moved into movements. They did not spar. An hour later they did a nice cool down and split up.
“You know what you’re doing?” The teacher asked as the rest of the class put their shoes on and left.
“Mixed martial arts. My gym wasn’t much into points, more like beating the crap out of each other on a regular basis.”
The woman looked hesitant.
Ros handed her a 500HP over thirty minutes pill.
“You think I’d need this?”
“I think I’m taking one.” Ros swallowed it. “Don’t hold back. Try not to kill me.”
“Agreed.” The woman swallowed the pill dry and took a fighting stance.
Ros Examined her.
Tanaka Setsuko
Human(base)
Qui Apprentice- Low Mortal Tier
HP 120
Ros took her own stance and proceeded to trounce the shit out of her new friend.
“Pause.” Setsuko said, breathing hard. “I’m out of healing, Sensei.”
“I’m nobody’s sensei.” Ros objected. “I can’t afford more than two of those a day. Sorry.”
“How much?”
“Bought with points.” Someone else had bought them with points, 2 points each, if she remembered correctly, but a 100 point healing elixir was only 5 coins. “They aren’t in the replicator.”
But they might be in the Game Center machines, she didn’t know for sure. A training field would be a better bet. Ros made a note to fix the one here.
“When they’re gone it’s back to spending coin.” True. “I’m going to go beat up some monsters before the buff wears off. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow at 3:30.” Setsuko agreed.
Ros took the lift to yellow and found enough Evrets to trigger the first canine quest.
As soon as she did, a maintenance droid that looked suspiciously like a Dalek bustled around the corner, polishing the light fixtures, vacuuming the floor and brushing at the walls, all at the same time.
From experience with Realm Quests, Roslyn understood that she had entered a closed instance as soon as she could see the robot. It was quite subtly done.
“Oh my goodness but those Evrets make a mess. I see you have been hard at work, eradicating the menace for me. I don’t suppose you've been keeping the pelts or the scent glands, have you? I can make you a nice little permanent strength potion with just ten of the scent glands and I’ll pay coin for undamaged pelts.”
“I think I can manage to find ten scent glands. How do I find you when I have them?” Ros was hoping for a call button. She’d had several over the years she’d hunted at stations. The quest robots had distinct personalities and the one she called often became a friend.
“Not to worry, I’ll find you. Got to go now, these walls won’t clean themselves.” Except they did.
The bot whisked itself around the corner and Ros was just quick enough to see it dissolve into pixilated nothing.
She smiled. Time to butcher again. She Blinked to the room she’d used as a butchering room before. The door was still barred from the inside.
Skinning monsters was something she had done many times. There was a lot of good gear available in the shops, but the very best gear was crafted by human, dwarven, elvish and giant hands. No automated shop sold gear made by any RuneMaster, for example.
Before she began, Ros bought a steel work table-200 coins.
She took her time and skinned the ugly dogs. She dressed the best cuts of meat and sold the rest to the replicator in the room. One thing she was not lacking was storage space.
She rolled the hides carefully and put them in a pillowcase. She put the scent glands in a separate bag.
With a rueful smile, she blinked into the corridor just outside her room.
“Ah! There you are. I was just looking for you.” The cheerful maintenance droid trundled around the corner and greeted her. As far as she knew it didn’t have a name. “Did you get the scent glands I asked for?”
“I have twenty.” The quest was for ten but only triggered after twenty had been killed. A whole lot of people had to get thirty because they didn’t know to save the glands. The quest giver had a diagram if the hunter was confused.
“Oh. Well. I only need ten. More won’t make you a better potion and two potions won’t do you any good either. That potion only works once per person.”
“I’m fine with one potion.”
“Do you want me to charm the others so you can sell them?”
“No. I think people should do their own killing for their own quests.”
“Right you are. Better that way. So. Let me see?”
Ros handed over both bags. The droid put the bags into a compartment in its trunk.
“Yes. Very nice. Superior quality on the pelts. Here is payment for your goods.” It held out a small brown bag that jingled. Those bags appeared automatically when you meant to give someone coins and disappeared into the ring when you deposited your money in your spatial object.
“The potion will take ten hours to brew. In the meantime, the Knock Dogs a few decks down are tracking mud around again. Do you think you might go down there and kill some of them for me? There’s a more powerful potion that I can make from their spinal fluid. It’s tricky to extract, so bring them to me whole. Eight Knock Dogs will do.”
“Sure. Can one person use that potion more than once?”
“Yes, but it gives five fewer points of strength each time you take it, so you can’t take it more than five times. Each batch will have to be stronger than the last as well, so bring me fifty Knock Dogs total if you think you can get that many.”
Ros smiled. Information like this was exactly why she hadn’t posted the quest guide yet. She knew some potions were repeatable.
The robot left without offering to trade for its inventory items, disappointing, but not surprising. After the first round of quests it would always offer to trade.
There was a historian named Heinrich Krause who had gone around the Fourth Realm asking everyone he could pin down hundreds of questions about the quests in the previous levels. Ros had been able to read his finished report. Truthfully, everyone had access to it, she’d guess very few people actually read it.
Krause had summed up what he thought were the best strategies for using the 1st Realm quests. He recommended that you maximize your unaided potential before you took the potions in strict order. His report had specified that the Knock Dogs potion was not repeatable, but her own experience said it was.
Nice to see she was right, although she hadn’t known it was repeatable five times.
Being on quest for specific monsters was interesting. If you were in the levels where the specific monsters were supposed to spawn they gravitated to you at a quick but manageable rate.
The day before when Ros had been walking through an orange corridor she wasn’t attacked. Today she was.
Another little known fact, the dogs would stop spawning when she went into a room, only the one she’d been running from would be waiting when she emerged after buying whatever she needed from the replicator, resting and healing.
A quest generated dog would chase her out of the usual zone. It would follow even if she teleported away. It would have her scent and it would follow her until she or someone else killed it.
Knock Dogs were named for their attack. The mastiff looking hounds had a bony plate on their skulls and they used it like a battering ram to crush their prey before they tore them to shreds.
Since quest monsters would keep spawning until the end of the quest, Ros had no trouble finding fifty dogs. She didn’t even have any trouble killing fifty dogs.
It did take her two days, during which she didn’t see anyone. She barely even gave a thought to monitoring the political climate upstairs. She had more than a month before whatever had caused the war before.
The Knock Dogs were fast but entirely predictable and couldn’t change their trajectories once they dropped their chin to charge.
Over and over Ros jumped out of the way and sank her spears deep into the chests of the on rushing dogs. She was even pretty good at using the dog’s own momentum and a spear quickly braved against a doorway or other angle to spear into the chest from the front, which was a small target.
She had chosen an out of the way corner of the orange levels, so it was entirely unsurprising that she didn’t see anyone in the entire time she spent grinding Knock Dogs. She stayed in whichever room suited her and ate from the room replicator.
There was one exception, she did stalk her way through the halls to the gym every day at 3:30 for training class.