It is clear to Jason, even without moving, that he was limited by the stats system. Luckily it isn’t like the system can limit his mind with stats or this might have been too stifling.

With a quick look around several screens pop up declaring various challenges. Just looking at some goblins running around the track and three different quests show up.

Yeah, you get the idea. All the quests were like that. Mildly insulting and mentions of stars. When the game was new, people thought there were hidden quests in the tutorials. They weren’t wrong per se. If you collect enough stars then the gear you start in is upgraded a little. Almost any gear is an upgrade from even the strongest starting gear. It was a lot more important in the past but now there are vendors set up to sell a set of clothes to new players for their starting money. “Hey lady, can I just run around a bit and ignore all these quests? They aren’t particularly interesting to me.”

The lady thinks for a moment then responds, “Sure do whatever you want. Most people don’t even take the tutorials anymore, even those that go with strange body shapes. I keep partitioning for better rewards but meh.”

With the confirmation that he is free to do whatever an hour of general running around begins. Jason’s basic plan here was to just treat it like an obstacle course and that worked decently well after kicking a few goblins. No actual fighting as that wouldn’t be much of a challenge but dodging a swarm of them was decent after adding the rest of them. Now it had gotten a bit boring. Jason had already gathered all the goblins and jumped over or under most of the equipment. He then yells “Guess it’s time to finish this up then. Lady, can we finish this up or do I have to aggressively de-aggro them?” With a quick chuckle she assures him they can if he really wants to. Noticing the emphasis but deciding it would be fun Jason gives her the go ahead to move onto the next thing. With that everything pauses and turns grey before fading away.

They are now in another white room. This one though stretches into the distance with many pillars of light and a light mist seemingly only to stop one from seeing into forever. Turning to Jason the lady proclaims, “Welcome to the hall of beginnings! Here you shall choose your starting weapon.” and with that the light pillars dim and each one can be seen to contain a weapon or set of weapons. The closest weapons being the most common with a normal longsword being right next to him followed closely by a book of fire magic and a dagger.

With a wave of her hand the lady say, “Once you choose a weapon we can continue. Also congratulations on finding one of the better kept permanent secrets.” and with that a couple more quests pop-up

Jason takes a quick look around and can see that every pillar of light has a weapon in it. Turning to the lady he asks, “So uh, do I have to choose a pillar? My preference is barehanded.”

“Hmm, that is a new request. Even the past martial types would want battle gloves or something like brass knuckles. I can’t let you just skip this as it is sort of required. If you keep walking eventually you should find an empty pillar or you might want one of the other options.” and having said this she waves her hand at the pillars again.

With a sigh Jason starts walking. After a minute the weapon choices have gotten really strange. Various whips and strange multi bladed things. A bit more and a pattern appears, if he follows a type of weapon more similar ones show up. With that in mind he heads toward the more glove like weapons. As he goes it gets stranger and stranger. Gauntlets, gloves, and handwraps of all sorts. Metal spikes all over the place and blades, some for seemingly no reason.

Farther and farther, onward and onward. The pillar of lights have gotten sparse. It seems the game knows the sort of thing he wants now but really wants him to have Something. Soon there are barely over 5 light pillars in view at a time and the number just gets fewer. At this point Jason has started to run. Slowly the number visible get fewer as he runs toward the most minimal looking options. Now only one or two are visible at a time and most are barely straps of leather or cloth of various lengths and shapes. Finally no more can be seen as he runs and runs. Eventually in the distance one last pillar of light comes into view. This one is empty. He finally found what he was looking for. A bit more time than he wanted but what else do you expect when using a graphical interface instead of a more direct approach.

“This one, I want to go unarmed please”

And with that the lady appears and tosses a handful of glitter while cheering, “Congratulations, you actually walked all this way! Besides a few who took it at the beginning even the personal user created weapons have a higher rate of being taken. As you likely know, now your main weapon will be your own body and you will get a slight bonus to training it. Do you want to proceed to the combat tutorial?”

“Sure, let’s rock”

Akhier

Things I wanted to mention but didn’t:

The quests aren’t even really a challenge if you can fight barehanded at all. Literally all the challenges involving the goblins can be beat by beating them up. Even the non-goblin related quests like the hurdles generally have some cheese way to beat them such as just running around the hurdles.

The comment about being a kept secret needs a little more explanation but it doesn’t matter too much to the story as is. The ‘Goblins Added Combat’ quest is one of the few permanent secrets. There are still many secret quests and such out there but they are dynamic and go away after completed or failed (save the kings daughter and she is saved). This specific secret is being kept because only a very specific set of people would be able to aggro all of them without actually killing any of them. These are either those looking for a secret to monopolize and thus won’t share or were an expert like our MC who either also want to keep it secret or just didn’t bother sharing.