Project: TheirWorld - Chapter 019 - Part 1

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Child of the Gumiho

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TheirWorld

The option of using the same techniques as she had with the Moarbits was quickly thrown out the window. After a few tries, she realized that the thick armored shell of the beatles was so tight that she couldn’t get her dagger in between the crevices of the shell. It was also heavy and strong, she found. Every time she got close, it attacked her with its large pincers, which she dodged. In addition, though they meandered around as if they were slugs, they actually had fast little legs, and the wings hidden underneath their shells allowed them to fly - Everything else about them was slow, though.

Since sparring with them was turning out to be of little use, she decided to try and change tactics. If her experience with the Moarbits was worth anything in fighting these guys, than her ability to kill them should be relatively deadly. All she needed was one or two good hits. Guin backed off far enough for them to rubber band back to their starting positions and observed for a moment.

Turtles! She thought with a grin. Shifting into [Fox Form] she bounded over, and then instead of going to attack with her dagger, she put her training to good use, swiping her leg at the underneath of the beatle. It was almost successful - but she hadn’t put enough force in. She sparred with the beatle again until she had a second opportunity. This time she succeeded! The beatle flipped belly up, and before it had the chance to right itself - which it clearly had the ability to do, judging on how it was going to use the armor on it’s back to lift itself over - she stabbed it clean in the thorax. Her attack didn’t kill it however, so she went for it’s and - somewhat unintentionally, severed it clean off. A sticky green goo covered her from head to toe.

Though she was mildly disgusted, she looked at it’s twitching corpse with pride. She killed several of the beasts after that, learning how to trip them without leaving [Fox Form], which made for much more efficient hunting as she could trip several in one go, and then finish them off in her human form. Those who successfully righted themselves before she could remove their buggy heads proved to be a little more of a challenge, but she got half decent at tripping them without the use of her initial tactics, too. After killing around ten of them, she heard the delightful bells of progress ring:

> <<[Fox Form]>> > > > > > > > <<[Spirit Armor]>> > > > > > > > <<[Trip]>> > > > > > >

Guin did a little dance. [Fox From] was already at Level 4. Was it possible that she could hit the first Rank before leaving the tutorial? What even was the first rank of [Fox Form]? Frowning, Guin pulled up the ingame browser attached to the [Menu] and did a quick search.

TheirWorld had many skills. It had many skills that had so many requirements that there was almost no limit to what people could discover, and certainly no one person could have all of the answers. Even if they did have those answers, it was highly unlikely that people were going to be willing to share a lot of that information - especially for free. They didn’t really want to make their enemies stronger, or imbalance the game by pushing people in directions they might otherwise not have taken based on numbers or uses. The fact of the matter was, the game had proved that even the most useless of skills could have game changing growth as you grew your character.

In large part, this was because of Rank trees. Rank trees were just about as unpredictable as classes. When an ability was able to be ranked up, the player would have to find a trainer to rank up the ability. When one did this, the original skill was traded for a new, more powerful one. In most cases, this was simply a better version of the same skill, but skills had different paths you could choose. A warrior, for example, usually tries to push his ability trees to match the weapon that he uses. The basic skill [Slash] branches out into [Two-Handed Slash], [Heavy Slash], [Quick Slash], or [Elemental Slash]. From there, each one will have its own tree, allowing the skill to become more and more specific and unique to the character. Martial skills tend to be more simplistic and straightforward, but depending on one’s aims and class, they can get more and more complex. A martial DPS AOE-style combat character might choose [Two-Handed Slash] and upgrade to [Expert Two-Handed Slash], but if a mage character aiming for a close combat caster class acquires [Slash], upgrades to [Elemental Slash], they might be able to upgrade into abilities like [Dance of the Arcane Edge] or [Slash of the Unseen]. From what the community gathered, the maximum amount of ranks a skill could have was 10. A Rank 10 skill was considered to be a God-Skill. It took a long time for people to get that far, but it was well worth it.

As for [Fox Form], Guin couldn’t find anything. It was possible that it didn’t have another rank. Either that, or no one used the ability enough to rank it up. The [Child of the Gumiho] trait was nowhere near as popular as the other ‘child of’ traits, so there weren’t many people out there with the ability to begin with. There were no records of people being able to acquire it outside of the trait, either.

All the more fun for me, she thought with a shrug. It seemed that she was one of the few who found the skill to be useful. Plus… Guin looked over at Tik-Tak, who was happily playing with a passing butterfly as he waited for her. She smiled. It was like she had gained a little brother. She thoroughly enjoyed playing with the little fox - and it was all the more fun doing so in [Fox Form].

“Tik-Tak!” she called. “I’m taking a break, want a snack?” The little fox snapped his head in her direction, and bounded over, nuzzling her arm.

“Your hunting skills are getting better!” he told her. “Soon you will be a master hunter like Momma!”

“Thank you!” Guin smiled and shared her bread with him. He gobbled it down greedily.

Suddenly, she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. A soft voice seemed to be whispering in her left ear: “You’ve done quite a number on these critters,” it was the voice that had frightened her earlier. Guin shuddered and snapped her head around to once again see nothing. Then, in her right ear she heard: “Of course, you are going to kill more aren’t you? After all, just look around! These creatures have overrun the forest! They must be culled…” She felt something run through her hair - and a strange surge of strength enter her body.

Jumping up with a screech and a shiver, she shook her head as if there were some sort of bug in it. After a moment she looked around again.

“A-Are you okay Guin?” Tik-Tak asked her, but she had no answer.

“You didn’t hear that?” she asked, but he just shook her head. Growling, she pulled up her notifications again.

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Well that’s nice… Guin thought to herself, though she still felt a little skeeved out...