POV – Tobias

[Day 280, Around a month later…]

The past month has been relatively boring.

It hadn’t taken long to discover what happened with Stanley and Tracy. As they had been waiting outside the temple for me cooking themselves a meal.

Stanley and Tracy informed me that apparently that particular temple had surrender option… Well, mainly Stanley… Tracy seems to be avoiding speaking around me, or directly to me, for some reason.

Still, if I had bothered to pay attention to my surroundings during the arena… I probably would have discovered easily that there was a surrender option when they both had disappeared. Guess I got too caught up in slaughter golems. Whoops… 

Anyways, after taking care of feeding God-hunter, I continued traveling with Stanley and Tracy. Together, we’ve discovered various temples from which I've obtain several different artifacts. Altogether, I’ve obtained four artifacts from the temples we’ve visited.

The most difficult to obtain was from a temple with various forms of parkour and puzzles that needed to be done to obtained it. Inside that temple I found something called, <The Ring of a Forgotten God>. It basically is a small ring that fits on my index finger. It’s looks quite cool as it's made up of some kind of material that constantly changes its color…

According to the system, the ring supposedly increases reaction speed and perception… But, I haven’t really noticed or felt anything different after wearing it. So… I don’t know? Maybe the effect is minuscule?

In another temple that required passing through various types of terrain, from dessert to jungles… I obtain something called the <Umbrella of Lies>. I’m not even sure what to do with this one. It’s a pure black umbrella… but, it can’t even function as an umbrella.

Literally everything (beside myself) that touches it passes through it… According to the system, it protects its owner with lies… but, unless that’s some type of translation error... I’m questioning whether it was simply to screw with people because that’s so vague and unhelpful.

Next, beneath a lake (inside a hidden temple) I found my new shoes, The <Shoes of Comfortable Escaping>. These dark brown shoes are rather useful compared with the earlier two item… With a small mana cost, once per day they allow me to teleport a short distance (around thirty meters).

Finally… the item I’ve found most recently, and the most useful, is the <Glove of the Hated One>. It came from a small temple that appeared similar to a monastery. This white glove has some runic symbols on its back, which through it constantly maintains a small magical barrier around the wearer.

Granted in combat the barrier doesn’t last very long, as it seems to always disappears after the first attack (the strength of that attack being irrelevant)… But, according to the system the barrier recharges every thirty minutes and blocks the first attack received after being recharged.

Currently, I don’t know if any limits exist on what the glove can block… But, until now I haven’t had any problems blocking the attacks from normal monsters in Hell Difficulty, which is already a relatively impressive feat.

So… beside the fact that it looks absolutely retarded and hideous to actually wear… it’s overall an amazing artifact…

Changing topics to my missing memories… I’ve drinking daily from the Recharging Canteen of Spiritual Recovery.

… And, while I’ve noticed some of my memories are less hazy than before, it hasn’t seemed to have had much overall effect on my memories. At least, I haven’t particularly remembered anything important... or really anything that I didn’t already have some fuzzy memories about.

At this point, I’m starting to doubt that I ever will. The soul might stores memories, but I doubt something as simple as repairing the soul will return lost memories.

Still, I don’t regret choosing the Canteen. It’s a useful item. I’d have to have found a way to repair my soul eventually, otherwise even if it didn’t end up killing me… having a damaged soul would have likely caused other problems.

Considering it’s getting close to the time the beacon to next zone will appear. There are some necessities I need to prepare to survive in that zone.

I suppose that I should explain a little about the next zone. First, the teleportation beacon doesn’t actually take us to the third zone, instead it takes us to a transitional, or residential, zone that everyone from all difficulties will arrive at.

If anyone chooses to they can continue onward to their next zone by heading to the easily accessible teleportation beacon in that zone… Of course, this residential zone has actually led to many problems.

The largest problem is that groups (or guilds) from the hard difficulty level have created their own government and rules, which are preventing people not in their own groups from proceeding onward to the next zones.

After all, it’s common sense to prevent rivals to gaining power… but, this is only creating more of incentive for the weak to stay weak. Which isn't a good thing considering that we'll need people to be powerful enough to survive after the zones collapse in around ten years.

Anyway, despite all that, the residential zone actually isn’t that dangerous. Unless I actively attempt to change their current system, there will be basically no danger to myself.

Let say it takes about ten people from the Easy Difficulty to kill someone from the Normal Difficulty… and it might take around 100 people from Normal Difficult to kill someone from Hard Difficulty…

Now, consider how many people it would take to kill Rin… Yea… Even if through some miracle they manage to succeed once, Rin would simply reload learn from her mistake... then proceed to murder them all.

Anyways, basically no matter how many people from hard difficult team up, it’s almost impossible for them to actually kill someone from Hell Difficulty.

Of course, when I say that I’m talking about the other people from Hell Difficult… While I’ve become stronger, I’m still much weaker than Duke. Don’t have the insane survivability of Stanley and Tracy. Nor the effective invincibility of Rin…

I might be in a better position than Hansoo… but, then again, I’m not really sure what’s going on with Hansoo. He wasn’t discussed that much in the story and was mainly a weak side character that hung out by himself.

Still, my ability means that I shouldn’t ever be in a position where I’d have to fight the Hard Difficulty guilds.

… And I’ve gotten side tracked from discussing the next zone. *Imaginary Cough* Anyways… If the topic of this zone was poison, then the topic of the next zone is fire.

Fire everything… Instead of lakes have lava pools… Instead of rain have fire showers… Monsters? Here have some Fire Elementals that were born from and constantly heal from the general heat, fire, and mana in the area.

Berries? Here have some berries that explode when you eat them… you probably get the idea…

In order to survive all that nonsense, there are a few things I need to prepare. Namely food, water, and fire resistance.

Fortunately, water is already taken care of from the Recharging Canteen of Spiritual Recovery…

Meaning that I still need to acquire something that provides some level of fire resistance and some way of acquiring food in that type of landscape.

All this means that I’ll be splitting up with Stanley and Tracy…

Good news is that I know where I need to head. Far to the east, there is a world tree. The journey will probably around a month, if I travel with minimal sleep. Fortunately, beside the distance, it shouldn’t be difficult to obtain one of the seeds from the world tree.

A seed from a world tree was something Rin would eventual discover as a solution to not having enough food for the fifth zone. Thus, it shouldn’t be much of stretch for it to work earlier than initially intended.

The bad news… Well… Fire resistance, I really have no clue where to find something that would provide that... and the time I’d have left wouldn’t be enough to search for one.

I’ll have to simply hope that my regeneration will be enough to survive in an environment of such extreme heat, or (the unlikely possibility) that Rin will be considerate enough to acquire provide something for me that gives some degree of fire resistance.

As for what Stanley and Tracy will do for the next zone?

Together they should have already obtained enough artifacts they’ll need to survive such a zone… If they haven’t, the artifacts they have should at least let them survive for long enough for Stanley to reach a temple that’ll provided them with the things needed to survive there long term.

I’m not actually worried in the slightest about Stanley… He is actually probably the trickiest person to kill (beside Rin) in this entire zone.

Rather, I’m more worried about Tracy… She might end up dying because Stanley’s luck doesn’t cover his companions (the very reason, I’m leaving to go obtain my own source of food).

Still, Tracy didn’t die in the Story… So, that combined with some of the artifacts I know she has, as I was there when she obtained them, means I’m in considerably more danger of dying than Tracy.

It’s time I leave… I’ll definitely miss chatting with Stanley. I can actually hold a conversation with him, unlike Rin. Rin’s personality results in her nearly always being quiet, which makes it extremely difficult to tell what’s on Rin’s mind at times…

[Day 323, Around forty days later…]

Okay… So, it took slightly longer than anticipated to reach the world tree.

Not entirely my fault… I blame God-hunter, she has begun to get pickier about the monsters fed to her.

If it isn’t strong enough, or meet whatever strange criteria she uses, she continues crying... That meant that I couldn’t simply hunt as I walked. I had to specifically seek out powerful monsters to feed to God-hunter…

Still, she has stopped waking up at night demanding food. The first time I got a good night sleep, I thought it was miracle. Instead, I’d had simply traded good night sleep for fussiness with food…

Well, I’d still consider that a miracle… I’d take that deal any day. I much prefer pickiness… at least, when compared to slow death resulting from extreme sleep deprivation.

Gazing upward toward the colossal tree, it seemed as if it would dwarf the empire state building in both height and width… I might have underestimated the difficult of obtaining a world tree’s seed.

It sounded so simply in theory. Climb the tree. Obtain the fruit. Take out and use the seed.

How the HELL am I going to climb this?! Even without defenses the sheer size it makes obtaining its seed near impossibility difficult…

Gah… This wasn’t exactly something I considered. It’s too late to back out now though, I don’t exactly have many other options to begin with.

Although, I wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to make proper climbing ropes or harnesses… Attempting to free style it would be utterly insane. A fall from such a height would almost certainly kill me, even with my enhanced regeneration.

Guess I’ll have to attempt to make some climbing rope... I’m definitely not going to attempt to do this without one.

[Day 328, Five days later…]

So… I’ve managed to make a small climbing rope and harness… Granted, if anyone from any type health and safety inspection saw it in use (on Earth) they would almost definitely shut whatever business was using it. Forbid them from ever operating again… and someone would probably serve jail time, along with several different lawsuits for extreme negligence.

The good news is that I don’t particularly need it to be ‘safe’. It only has to stop my descent and prevent damage to my brain, my regeneration should take care of any other type of damage.

Bad news, the lowest branch of the world tree that has a fruit is around... 700 feet upward. Meaning that I’ll have to climb to roughly that height to obtain the seed I need.

Wish me luck I guess… This is probably going to go poorly isn’t it?