Evil Avalon - Volume 1 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Getting Confused

After leaving the Hayase house, I got back to doing stretches.

Once I’d warmed up, I packed a lunch box and a flask of water into my rucksack and revisited the slime room. Despite a couple of close scrapes, I made good progress slaying the merged slimes and even found another slime ring. I took a break to grab my lunch after training for a while.

The player could only equip one ring on each hand, as only two slots were available. As an experiment, I put all three on my fingers and could equip them all. It wasn’t clear whether I benefited from the triple effect as my stats didn’t update in real time.

Now that I knew discrepancies in the game’s mechanics existed, I’d have to perform more experiments and research to understand what carried over. I could start my research by taking out some of the many books in the Adventurers’ Guild library written about the dungeon on my way home.

At that point, I noticed again that I was the sole adventurer there and realized the slime room was out of reach. It stood off in the corner of the four square kilometers of the dungeon’s first level map, and adventurers would have to turn down several forks in the path to arrive. Given the sheer number of adventurers down here, it was odd none of them had found their way to the room.

The stairs to the second level were quicker to reach from the portal, so perhaps everyone wanting to fight level 2 monsters preferred the more desirable path to the stairs. While merged slimes and goblins that spawned on the second level were worth the same amount of experience points, merged slimes were easier to kill with a high probability of dropping slime rings, which were rare items. It appeared more likely that nobody else knew about the slime room.

Of course, it suited me just fine that I had the place to myself; slaying merged slimes wouldn’t be as easy with a horde of other adventurers crammed into this room.

I ate the few scraps of calorie-deprived food I’d packed for lunch, then leaned back and relaxed since no active monsters were around. Once I’d finished my meal, I got back to slaying slimes.

After another two hours—

“Yes, level 3!”

There was a brief spell of dizziness until I felt energized. I gave my bat a swing to test it out, and I could swing it much faster now.

Ooooh yeah!

I couldn’t tell how high my job level had climbed, but it was less than level 7. It would’ve been great if I could check my live stats.

Adventurers with the Newbie job could learn the active skill* Basic Appraisal at job level 7 and the passive skill* Plus Three Skill Slots at job level 10, the highest level.

*TIPS: Active skills only have an effect when the player activates them.

*TIPS: Passive skills are always active so long as players save them in one of their skill slots.

As the name suggested, Basic Appraisal enabled users to appraise their skills and items. There were plenty of rare skills and items found in the deeper levels of the dungeon that Basic Appraisal wouldn’t work on. It became invaluable because it could appraise most things early in the game. You could also use it to appraise other people and monsters, but the results were vague. The skill measured their strength relative to yours, with readouts like “slightly stronger” or “very weak” but only stated how many skills they had and not what they were. You also had to be careful when you used it as your target would realize that you were appraising them; spying on people’s abilities was a good way to start a fight.

The other Newbie skill, Plus Three Skill Slots, was incredibly useful in DEC’s gameplay. The skill slots players had limited the number of skills they could learn, so those who wanted an array of skills needed to increase said skill slot capacity. Players started the game with just two slots and gained an extra one with every ten levels. At level 3, I only had a limit of two skills. Those with full skill slots who wanted to learn a new skill would have to erase an existing one. I planned to do that with my Glutton skill, which I suspected was the cause of my weight and unusual appetite. Plus Three Skill Slots, however, gave players more slots to play with. Newbie wasn’t the only job with a skill that opened up more slots, but skill management posed challenges even with slot-increasing skills. As such, Newbie’s Plus Three Skill Slots was a must-have.

“Right,” I said. “Do I want to go up to the second floor or continue killing slimes?”

Being at level 3 meant I’d receive fewer experience points for killing level two merged slimes. Farming slimes here was simple, and other adventurers probably filled the second floor.

“Plus,” I argued aloud, “I don’t fancy bumping into those four up there.”

Kaoru’s group had talked about raiding the second floor. Running into them would defeat the purpose of turning down Akagi’s offer; the rest didn’t want me around to spoil their fun.

And so, I settled on sticking to the slime room until I reached level 4.

I stayed until the evening, racking up a score of a hundred and four merged slime kills and obtaining five slime rings. I put all five on my right hand as a test but sensed nothing different about myself except for a new flush of embarrassment—excessive bling didn’t suit me. I’d never put much thought into my appearance in the game, focusing only on my stats, but I’d have to pay more attention in this world.

I could’ve stayed a bit longer, but I decided to leave the dungeon at this point and headed to the Adventurers’ Guild building to hit the books.

***

I entered the first floor of the guild skyscraper complex. Besides registration for new adventurers, this floor also housed markets to trade items, raw materials, magic gems, and other goods. Adventurers returning from raids and others in dungeon-related professions crowded the area. I estimated there were a thousand people in here, and it was like the seafood market at peak time.

None of the pamphlets I picked up from the traders’ stalls listed the rates for slime rings. I considered putting them up for auction but knew they weren’t valuable, so I decided to gift them to my family.

Turning my back to the market, I got on the elevator and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor, where the library was. Inside was an elegant room with a vaulted ceiling and luxurious wood pattern walls. A famous European library had apparently inspired the opulent design.

Bearers of an Adventurers’ Pass could freely browse or borrow any books here. The selection on offer put the average public library to shame, and it did not limit itself to texts relating to the dungeon.

I walked along the rows of shelves searching for books about the dungeon, admiring with a little surprise the quality of the mats on the floor, which muffled my footsteps.

I spotted a book titled An Illustrated Guide to the Monsters Found in the Japanese Dungeon, which I picked out and opened. It had been released two years ago, and according to the table of contents, it cataloged the monsters from the first twenty-nine dungeon floors with additional information and pictures. Further research was necessary on monsters from higher floors due to insufficient exploration.

The twenty-ninth floor? I thought, surprised. That’s not even in the middle section!

The game had floors one to thirty, which were the early section; thirty-one to sixty were the middle; and everything higher was the depths. The twenty-ninth floor was still in the early section. For reference, floors ninety to one hundred had been my hunting grounds in the game.

Now that I think about it, barely any of DEC’s NPCs* had been high-level adventurers.

*TIPS: NPCs stand for non-playable characters. This refers to characters in a game world that human players don’t control and that act according to preprogrammed instructions.

Assuming that the front lines of dungeon exploration were around the thirtieth floor in this world, members of the clans raiding these areas would be around level 30. That was a big difference to the game’s frontline players, who were generally level 90, but this didn’t detract from this world’s adventurers’ skill. Death in DEC’s dungeon would strip players of their items and respawn them in a weakened state at the portal. In this world, death was final if a party member did not know a resurrection spell. Without the need to fear suffering pain, exhaustion, or death, players could face the mightiest bosses with a smile. It was logical that adventurers from this world planned their dungeon raids to minimize the risks involved. The two just weren’t comparable.

There’s a chance this world might be based on the pre-DLC day one version of the game as well, I thought.

At launch, the game’s level cap was level 30. The NPCs in that game version hadn’t been close to that level cap in any of the storylines. Piggy hadn’t reached level 10 when they expelled him in the main story’s second half. In the early days, players had rarely raided deeper into the dungeon than the fortieth floor. Subsequent DLCs raised the level cap to level 90 and added jobs, quests, and items. It was reasonable to conclude there were few expeditions past the thirtieth floor because this world was the same as the pre-DLC game.

Up to this point, I’d assumed that this world was a copy of the latest version of the game and that the level cap was at level 90. In that case, the best character builds were balanced ones with equal proficiency in weapons and magic.

If the level cap were 30, and only the items and jobs from the base game were available, it would be best to specialize as either a combat or support character. There were several reasons for this, the foremost being that the base game had limits on the number of jobs and skill slots.

I’m gonna have to investigate what the max level is, I thought. But the dev’s email clearly said there was an update, so would it make sense for things to roll back to the max-level 30 days of the game?

There were several ways I could test my hypothesis. If I could find even a single DLC-exclusive item, job, area, or monster, I’d be able to at least rule out that this world was the base game. I’d have to dive a little deeper into the dungeon.

Afterward, I picked up a job encyclopedia that had “latest edition” written on it and found the publication date on the back cover, which was last year. Jobs could be divided into five categories based on power: starter, basic, intermediate, advanced, and expert. I could determine whether the DLC applied in this world by checking how many of the five categories were present. There hadn’t been a single expert job included in the base game, so finding one in this encyclopedia would show at least one DLC was in effect.

I immediately got to work skimming the table of contents. Newbie was the only starter job listed. For basic jobs, there were Fighter, Caster, and Thief. None of the DLCs had changed or added jobs to these two categories. In the third category, intermediate, the book listed Warrior, Archer, Priest, Wizard, and...nothing else. Just those four? The fourth category of advanced jobs listed only Holy Woman and Samurai. None of these jobs were DLC additions. Still, the encyclopedia was missing jobs that were in the base game. At launch, DEC featured Knight and Warrior Mage as intermediate jobs while Assassin and Berserker were advanced jobs. I flicked through the pages but found no references to the missing jobs.

Why could that be? Did nobody know about them, or was their existence kept a secret? Governments and international agencies would seek to cover up information to avoid it falling into the hands of marauding adventurers, dropouts, and terrorists.

The encyclopedia entry on Newbie struck me as odd. Basically, the entry recommended adventurers switch to an intermediate job at the first opportunity because of the few benefits. There was no reference to the Plus Three Skill Slots skill available when one reached the max job level of 10 in the Newbie job. Adventurers without it would have a tough time in the long run, so how could the book ignore such an important skill?

Next, I picked up an encyclopedia of skills and scanned the table of contents once more, and I spotted Basic Appraisal but not Plus Three Skill Slots. I searched for references to the advanced jobs of Samurai and Holy Woman, finding no instructions about how to get those jobs or the skills they unlocked. This encyclopedia’s publication date was also a year ago, yet the information presented within was severely lacking. The publisher had been bold to label it an encyclopedia at all.

I picked ten more books off the shelves, but each and every one recycled the same gap-ridden information.

The lesson learned from my library research was that this world was based on the base game, as I’d failed to find any reference to DLC additions. Even if that were the case, the documents here were far from complete. Was it sensible to conclude that no DLC additions existed because of no written record in these books? My confidence was fading fast.

Whatever the case, there was no reason to jump to a conclusion there and then. I could take my time gathering information during my dungeon raids and explorations to fill in the gaps and reveal the truth.

I could continue this mission tomorrow by checking whether Manual Activation worked for skills. This skill activation method was not in the base game, so if it worked I could prove the presence of DLCs. I was going to be a busy man.

TIPS: Below is a list of jobs. Entries in parentheses are jobs not yet known to this world.

Starter job: Jobs that the player starts with.

Newbie.

Basic job: Jobs that one can reach from a starter job. Some characters may start the game with one of these jobs.

Fighter, Caster, Thief.

Intermediate job: Jobs available after reaching a certain job level in a basic job.

Warrior, Priest, Archer, Wizard, (Knight), (Warrior Mage).

Advanced job: These jobs may become available after reaching a certain job level in an intermediate job or may require the character to have an aptitude for the job.

Holy Woman, Samurai, (Assassin), (Berserker).

Expert job: The final stage of jobs. There is only one expert job, Weaponmaster, which is the job Piggy used before arriving in this world.

(Weaponmaster).