Maria reverted back to her normal form after she took down the first [Cursed] monster she encountered on the island. Perhaps because it was located in the island’s outer layer that it was comparatively weaker than the ones that Lizzy and Gerald’s party had encountered, so Maria was able to take it down by herself.
Of course, there was also the fact that because she was fighting the monster alone, it had no other targets to jump to, so it only focused its attacks on her. The attacks were quite tricky since the monster’s AI was really advanced, but it wasn’t like Maria had never experienced fighting such a monster before and being the ‘pro-player’ that she was, Maria was able to easily deal with the attacks without too much problem.
“Mary, are you okay?” Mikael asked after the battle was over. His sister, at the moment, was currently butchering the [Cursed] monster corpse for its materials. Despite it being a rather normal thing for players to do, he still couldn't get used to seeing his cute little sister take apart a monster like this.
He wasn't going to stop her though. Since this monster was a new monster that she had never encountered before, Maria was really interested in its materials. The usual monsters no longer piqued her curiosity since they were monsters she’s seen in the Underworld, so she let the others in her party have them instead.
The dwarves of her Empire have already gathered enough of the Underworld monsters’ materials to craft a few items for her while the rest of it had been put into the assembly line to craft into regular items for her soldiers and for future commercial purposes once players finally found the Underworld. The equipment and items created from the Underworld monsters had pretty decent stats and a lot of the effects were beneficial to players if they wanted to hunt in the Underworld.
Maria had her own set of customized equipment that her dwarven craftsmen had made for her to use in the Underworld, but she hardly ever used it because her current set of equipment was already pretty good even in the Underworld. Her friends, Lizzy, Elizabeth, and Amanda, also had their own equipment sets too. The dwarves wanted to curry favor with Maria again, so they went the extra mile and made sets for her friends, which the 3 gratefully used.
In fact, they were currently using these equipment sets to hunt on the island and thanks to their special effects, it gave them an edge over the monsters that originally were supposed to remain in the Underworld.
Unfortunately, it couldn’t be said the same for the rest of the players in their group, which was why most of them struggled to fight against the island’s monsters. It was even worse for Gerald and his group though they managed to hold their own somehow.
Anyway, since most of the players were already struggling with the normal monsters even though they managed to find a way to fight them, it was a nightmare for them when they encountered their first [Cursed] monster.
Lizzy and Emily probably wouldn’t have struggled as much as they were now, if they didn’t bring such a large party of people with them. The system basically designed these [Cursed] monsters to be the exact opposite of boss monsters. Boss monsters needed a large party of players to defeat them while for [Cursed] monsters, the smaller the number of players, the easier it was to take them down.
Since these monsters had a better battle AI, they knew how to fight properly against a large group of enemies. It was a new gimmick that was supposed to test a player’s combat prowess and separate those that were truly skilled and those that only got to where they currently were through their level advantage and equipment.
Further down Unitale’s storyline, more and more worlds would open up that require a player to be truly skilled in the game if they wanted to progress through the story. Vanhal was the planet that would test and hone a player’s true individual skill and it was why so many of the monsters on the planet were extremely hard to battle, even if you were in a party.
Of course, the rewards they gave were substantial and in line with the difficulty to kill them, and with the EXP and Item Drop rate buffs introduced, this made fighting the monsters all the more enticing, despite them being really hard to take down. Most players nowadays would rather go down fighting a powerful monster and risk losing their EXP due to the death penalty than simply giving up just because it was too hard to take down. The gamble of winning against a powerful monster and potentially obtaining amazing items including rare skill books and the like, plus a huge load of EXP and gold...it was just too alluring.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The devs knew what they were doing when they designed the planet and its features along with its monster and NPC inhabitants. If they made the monsters and quests a little too difficult without any extra incentive, it would kill the motivation of the players, so they laid down the perfect bait which was in the form of the incredibly awesome buffs and loot.
Maria turned to look at her brother after she had finished harvesting the monster materials and replied, “I’m fine. The monster wasn’t all that strong, but we should be careful of them. If you guys spot any, immediately let me know and I’ll deal with it alone.”
“I know that you’re strong and all, Mary, but at the very least, let us pull our weight too, okay? Don’t push yourself for our sake,” Mikael replied.
“Hm? Don’t worry about it. These monsters are fun to kill since they fight smart and like a player. Also, they’re really intelligent and might take advantage of the situation if there are too many players involved, so just let me handle them and you guys do what you’ve been doing before.”
“Alright then…”
The group had leveled up quite a bit and they were able to contribute more to the hunt, but Maria believed that their level of skill and ability weren’t enough to help her if they fought against a [Cursed] monster. Her judgment was correct on this because if they did try to help her out, it would only lead to more problems and it would make the battle a lot more difficult for her as she would be put in the same spot as her friends and brother who were being troubled by a single [Cursed] monster in the inner layer of the island.
Over on their side, they were still struggling to defeat the first [Cursed] monster they found. The monster’s HP bar had depleted into the red, so it began employing the same tactic as the [Cursed] monster that Maria had fought–running away. This was certainly new, so Lizzy, Emily, and Gerald, along with the rest of the players in the group were definitely caught off guard by it.
“Don’t let that bastard get away!” Lizzy yelled before she spread her dragon wings and chased after the monster.
Emily quickly turned towards Gerald and yelled, “Gerald, we’ll chase after it! You guys circle around and try to cut it off! We’ll do our best and lead it to you guys!”
“Got it!”
Gerald didn’t hesitate and immediately followed Emily’s suggestion. Her quick-thinking helped Gerald snap out of the dilemma he was facing which was to chase after the monster or not. It was almost dead, so it would be a pity to just let it escape, but if they run around chasing the monster, they might attract the attention of the other monsters within the island’s inner layer.
Taking that into consideration made Gerald hesitant on chasing the monster, but since Lizzy and Emily were determined, he dropped the hesitation and decided to just go along with their plan.
“It’d be a waste to let such a monster go! I bet its drops are going to be pretty awesome!”
He turned to his party and yelled, “Follow me guys! We’re going to kill that monster!”
“Yeah!”
“Let’s not let our efforts go to waste!”
“We'll definitely take that thing down!”
For the next few minutes, a large commotion was raised in the island’s inner layer as a large group of players chased down a wounded monster which naturally attracted the attention of the many monsters that they passed by. Lizzy and Gerald’s groups completely ignored those monsters and focused solely on chasing down and killing the wounded [Cursed] monster that was running away.
Eventually, they managed to bring it down after Lizzy’s group led it towards Gerald’s group and they pincered it together, finally leading to its death at their hands. The drops were immediately shared and distributed amongst the two parties, but they couldn’t rest since they had pulled quite a lot of the island’s monsters in their chase.
“Let’s extend the cooperation, yeah?” Lizzy asked with a helpless smile as she looked at the monsters surrounding them.
“You don’t have to ask, Liz, we’ll be put in a difficult spot too if we don’t cooperate,” Gerald said in reply.
Looking around, Emily shook her head and added, “I think we should ask Mary to help out…the amount of monsters here is a little too overwhelming.”
“Yeah, good idea. I’ll message her–”
“I already did that,” Emily said as he cut off Lizzy’s words.
Lizzy nodded and replied, “Good. Now let’s do our best to kill as many as we can before she arrives!”
“Right!”
“Stay in formation and don’t let the enemy breach our line! These guys aren’t as tough and as smart as the previous monster!”