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“It’s been a long time since I played using a stealth playstyle, I had to stretch my limbs for a bit to find my groove. Even if the allure of stealth is quite tempting, I still find it weird to play this way. I guess it was because I had the inclination of always making a frontline fighter and honest warrior in every game that I played."
"But it became easier after I got used to the strange sensation of sneaking around. Now every time I went hungry I can basically go: [Take this, rabbit! BUTTSTAB! How dare you refused to be eaten by me before!]. It’s not that I run out of ration like before, I am just amusing myself with the fact that catching any runner is easy when I had magical stealth equipped. ”
“I think the amount of the rabbit and the herbivorous critter is doubled compared to my previous outing through this place. As for the wolf and other meat-eaters, I had to walk far before I could catch a glimpse of them. It’s kind of weird since I had to kill every animal that tried to eat me every hundred meters back when I returned to the city to resupply.” |
...
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“I went for the straight-line route to the cliff instead of meandering around with no clear destination like before. The predator and monster that I happened to meet were just milling about contentedly, ignoring me to focus on the abundant prey around. It only took me about three weeks and a half of walking non-stop – interspersed with offline time – to reach the cliff.”
“There are nosy people following me stealthily to find out where I am going, but they've gone one and half weeks into the journey. It’s good that the nosiness of the people here is way lower than the other games. I had a flashback of people trying to steal kills and running away with my loot.” |
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“I reached the cliff, it still looks the same as the time I left it. After making preparation and approximating the perfect place to start, I dug under, making my own tunnel. 2 meters down, I found out that having a Mining skill loadout is the correct one to choose, but not the one I needed.”
“I am not actually in need of Tunneling Knowledge, or Digging Skill from Mining Package. I should have made my loadout to be an Earth Mage or at least some kind of Earth Shaper because the tunneling subset in Mining Skill is kind of problematic. It had cheap upkeep because you only need to know how to dig, what kind of tunnel you should make in a particular geographical area, and how to make it last for a while.”
“But the tunnel would definitely collapse if it was not reinforced. and I need to reinforce the tunnel by myself. That would mean that I also needed something like Skill to harvest and shape wood, or doing it manually – cutting a tree, shaping it to make a wooden beam, placing it in a tunnel, etc.; all those kinds of things are necessary to keep me from buried alive.”
“Compare to Earth Shaping. That skill is just the skill to shape the earth, but someone had used this skill to shape dirt into a defensive wall that was as hard as a stone wall. It was very solid and sturdy, even a rhinoceros monster that could tear down a scout tower had to give up and walk away.”
“I don’t think there was any tunneling knowledge in Earth Shaping, but if I can make my tunnel wall as solid as it can be, I wouldn’t need to worry about collapsing tunnel. Plus point, I don’t need to do back-breaking labor of swinging pickaxe and shoveling dirt in-game.” |
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"It is really fortunate that the ground here is hard and dense enough for my purpose. I don’t need to make a special preparation like making any support beam to keep it from collapsing. I had no ax or any tools to process lumber, and cutting a tree by hacking it with a sword would look sad and pathetic." |
...
| "Stealth doesn’t work while huffing puffing, swinging pickaxe with all my might. I gave up on making my own tunnel and resignedly use the herbivore’s tunnel. At least now I could sneak away when it gets too disadvantageous for me." |
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“I had found the tunnel that leads to the rift valley a week in. My ration is still about 75 %, so I am not in a hurry to go inside. I had mapped about two and a half kilometer of the tunnel, including dead ends and abandoned passage. This place was so full of tunnels going in any direction, I don’t think I had reached even 20 % of the entirety of the tunnel’s network.”
"I went about mapping the place slowly, and when I got bored I went offline to do something else. I also hid the tunnel I came from, it was now practically invisible from any cursory inspection. It is still quite distinct for those who knew where to look and what to look for."
“Incidentally, I found an amusing way to pass the time; I called it ‘Roll the Bastard Down’. I snuck around to find the herbivore in sloping tunnels, and after teasing it around with stealth I kicked it down from the higher ground. It’s fun seeing their panicked grunt and yell when they are rolling down the slope. So cathartic.” |
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| "I only had less than half of my rations left, and I switched to eating roasted meat. At first, I went through the nearest passage among dozens of tunnels leading outside and roast the meat after checking if it was safe enough to camp there. But then I got really lazy, I didn’t want to spend that much of an effort. It’s such a hassle walking outside to roast my kill, so I just did it in any wide enough place. I almost died from smoke suffocation, but a quick search on how to make a smokeless fire saved me in subsequent fire-making." |
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"Five weeks in; everything underground is already stir crazy. Everything, not just me. These tunneler rodent is getting really jumpy. They would jerk and twirl quickly every time there is a sudden noise. They would go out of their way to avoid slopes and high ground, and if there were no other way, they would dash or go about with stiff and wary steps."
"I was so bored in mapping that I sometimes made a campfire roasting the meat of the herbivore that I killed, even if I wasn’t hungry. The smell made them panic and made a loud commotion, sometimes they would violently charge and lunge to anything that set them off." |
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| "These herbivores are not the only inhabitant of the tunnel! There is something else lurking around this place, and they are very interested in the delicious smell of barbeque!" |
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"I am going back aboveground. I will wait for things to calm down. I kind of regret that I played around in the tunnels instead of just packing up my hidden stash in the rift valley. I don’t want to spend more of my time underground, it's getting really crazy in there."
"I don’t have the confidence in surviving down there anymore, because my third death was quite baffling. The herbivore running about, I saw various indistinct shapes of things picking off the stragglers, and there was something in the air that made me quite unwell."
"Things are getting quite confusing, I was going to lurk and watch the massacre, but I found that I quickly lost track of what happened. And then sudden death coming from nowhere. I guess I died really horribly since even the respawn time was a lot longer compared to when I fell down to my death."
"Now I am going outside, I don’t care whether it is to the rift valley or to above the cliff. I will pick whichever way is closer to my liking and then I would turtle up, waiting for everything to start making sense again." |
...
Finn sat hunched over the terminal with his head tilted to the side, eyes distractedly skimmed over the lines of words on the screen. His left hand’s finger was kneading his temple, cheek draped above the ball of the thumb, while his right hand idly picked any forum post that caught his eye. He would open the post, read the content briefly to find out what was the post about and close it if it didn’t interest him.
‘that guy who got wrecked by butt raping rabbit is getting bullied by wolfie mc wolf... this guy is already graduated from being maimed horribly by a horned rabbit? He should have picked a lifestyle path instead of combat... Chancing upon the great treasure of the land... it’s just a porn picture gallery.’
The game’s forum was quite a bustling place, there was an influx of new posts every couple of seconds. Most of those posts belong to the trivial and superficial categories, but sometimes, he would find a gem of useful information hidden inside. Some time, something that only looked trivial and unimportant at a casual glance – a recounting of someone’s gameplay, e.g. – gave an inspiration that he could use to make his own gameplay more fun and engaging.
‘Someone had been imprisoned for bombing the critter at fort city grom’s outskirt... He got blamed for driving the mob up the wall. There’s no attached video? Too bad, I actually wanted to see how they went crazy and attacked everybody in their sight... What does this remind you of? ...It’s a game where the forum-goer guessed where the game’s dev got inspiration from.’
There was a video from the game attached to the one post, followed by a couple of replies with content that was similar to the attached video. Finn cut and extracted the full sensation recording depicting the indistinct shapes he recorded in the cave network from his collection of game’s recording and uploaded it in the thread. The reply was coming in droves, with most of the people expressing their doubt whether this footage came from the game or not.
Finn could understand their incredulity, after all, something with those shapes would definitely make people think of Lovecraftian horror. After the incident of Call of Cthulhu (remake) interactive virtual movie a couple of years ago, every popular media who dare includes non-euclidean horror – even if it was just a reference – would be harshly criticized.
Even if he was only in the periphery and not involved whatsoever – he wasn’t interested, and also didn’t have money to buy the ticket back then – he still knew the barebones of it. A movie studio production made a remake of Call of Cthulhu, by using the description in the original stories. Most people were already prepared for the abominable view of the titular monster, but no one was prepared for the Cthulhu stench.
It’s a cult hit, with the Lovecraftian horror aficionado expressing their satisfaction with the interactive movie. But the general populace was traumatized, with copious puking – from those caught unaware of Cthulhu various trait – involved. Now any other media who tried to put any depiction of non-euclidean horror would be labeled as a sensationalist and be avoided, even if they didn’t include ‘Cthulhu Authentic Stench’ inside.
The doubting response started to trickle down after Finn uploaded the authentification, and the forum-goer started to make a speculation and debate that ended with the thread being hijacked. The moderator came down to give ban for those who were insisting on being out of topic, even Finn almost got the ban even though it was not his fault that his video started the derail.
When he’s done browsing the forum Finn found that It has been 17 hours since he last went online. And even though he was tempted to log into the game to continue playing, Finn decided to go to sleep.
