The next week passed in much the same way, hunting the weak mobs around town to keep it safe, and working on enchanting. Eventually, I got to the point where I was comfortable enough with enchanting that I decided iI would feel comfortable enchanting a spear in real, but I decided to wait until I got a proper weapon to do so.

The first thing to do however, was try and find out if herbs had appeared in much the same way that the monsters had. I then hopped onto the ever expanding wiki for information. What I found left me happy, but a bit annoyed. It seems with the infusion of mana into the world, the herbs themselves had not appeared, but many plants had changed, and people were currently researching the effects of some of them.

The equivalents of health and mana herbs had been found, and were oddly enough, changed variants of dandelions and rose leaves. They’d both changed the look of the leaves to be more similar to the herbs found in game, but otherwise were just the regular plants I was used to.

Unfortunately, nobody had found the equivalent of the aruuki plant, so I was going to be doing some searching. If basic plants had changed, I was likely going to be able to find something similar eventually. Deciding that there had to be a better way to find the herbs than just testing each and every one of them, I logged back in to find some information.

Once I’d logged on, I did something I should’ve done a good deal earlier, I messaged Loss to see if he and his party were doing ok.

Hey Loss, I don’t know when or if you’ll get this message, but I was just wondering how you guys were faring in real. It’s chaos out there, but hopefully you’re all safe

I was very surprised when just a few minutes later I got a response.

Hey Rayth, we’re all doing ok, though a few of us have been just hiding in real. Mars, Light, and I are all out hunting down monsters, trying to keep it safe, you know?

Good to hear. Where are you guys in real by the way, I heard some places got hit really hard.

After a few minutes, I found out that they were only around a twenty minute drive away. Deciding that I wanted to group up with them to hunt some three star mobs, as most of group aqua had expressed no interest in doing anything other than staying around town clearing out nearby mobs, a surefire way to have a monster wave come crushing down on their underleveled selves, I decided to see if they would be interested.

Seeing as how close you are, I was wondering if you guys would be up to hunting some three star mobs together, I could use the levels, and we all could use the culling to help prevent a monster wave

We’d be down for that, where would we meet up? Saturday sound fine to you?

Saturday would be fine, do you know of any good hunting grounds though? The only one I know of nearby has a lot of four star monsters as well, and I’m not willing to take that risk.

There’s actually a decent amount of them in part of my town. The police are keeping them down as much as they can, but there always seems to be more. Mind meeting us there?

He gave me the address, and I soon agreed, then got back to my original business, finding a better way to find herbs. I soon was headed in the direction of the alchemy shop, if anyone knew how to tell herbs apart, they would be the best bet.

I soon arrived, and was greeted by a cheerful old lady who introduced herself as Sylvie.

“I was wondering if there was any way to tell herbs apart other than their look. If you haven’t heard, our world was invaded, but our herbs are slightly different so I was hoping that you could help me out.”

“Well you could always try mana sensing. Just slowly put your mana into the herb, similar to imbuing, but don’t make any sort of sigil, just feel the mana in the herbs themselves, they all feel slightly different.”

I tilted my head to the side, I’d never tried just sensing the mana in things, I’d always put my mana in my weapons, armor and potions with a purpose. Deciding to try it out, I grabbed a health herb out of my backpack and slowly and carefully put my mana in, trying to feel the mana of the plant itself react.

It took a minute of focusing, but once I could feel it I realized it was a very similar sensation to meditating. For lack of a better word, the mana in the health herb felt hot. Not hot as if it would burn me, but like the warm sun shining on you on a brisk day.

Intrigued, I pulled out the basic mana and stamina herbs to see how they felt. The mana herb felt like cold water, which I don’t even know how that works, and the stamina herb felt like taking a deep breath, making me forget to breathe for a bit until I started turning blue. Sylvie let out a chuckle at my confusion before making a comment.

“It’s an odd feeling isn’t it? Just get used to it, you’ll find it’s very useful when making potions.”

I’d always wondered why I couldn’t seem to break past a certain point in my potions, but maybe it had been because I wasn’t trying to feel the mana interacting, but rather just approximating.

Next, was the moment of truth, I was going to see how the aruuki herb felt, and then I was going to go searching for it. I slowly put in my mana sense and started. It felt spicy. It wasn’t like a nice calm spice, it was like habanero injected directly into my veins. I hissed and instantly took my mana out, sighing in relief as the sensation faded.

Deciding that it had a unique enough sensation that I would be able to find it without too much trouble, I thanked Sylvie, then logged off, I was going to head to the nearest plant nursery and do some searching.

It took maybe twenty minutes to get there, and I was greeted by a few people standing out the front.

“What’s going on? I was hoping I could look at some plants.”

“Well, unless you’re one of the militia, I’d stay out of there, there’s quite a long limbed things in there. I want to open up, but the police told me that I would have to wait for the milita.”

“Well I don’t mind clearing them out for you, I’ve been working for the militia for almost two weeks now. Let me just grab my spear real quick”

“It’s your life, but if you do take care of them I can get you a few plants or seeds or whatever you want, they’ve been taking my business for the past few days now, and the militia still hasn’t come around”

I grabbed my spear from my car, I assumed he was talking about moglins from the long limbed comment, and I would be comfortable taking a few on, if I needed to I could just cast freeze, though the owner wouldn’t be happy about the plants getting frozen.

When I got back from my car, the owner unlocked the gate for me, a sturdy thing made entirely from iron, and gestured me in before locking it behind me. I suppressed a shiver at that, I suddenly wasn’t feeling so confident, maybe I should go get my group, I don’t know what I had been thinking when I volunteered, this wasn’t the game.

Deciding to go take a look before running away, I slowly slinked through the plants, searching to see how many enemies there would be.

I soon found out three of the moglins all in a group, but even if there were only a few, I waited until one was all by its lonesome, and pelted it with a few force bolts until it went down. Quickly backing away in case the others noticed the commotion, I let out a breath as soon as I realized they either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared.

I would’ve done the same again, but the other two refused to split up, so eventually, I got into a good position and launched an ice spear at the rightmost one. It impaled it spectacularly, pinning it to the ground, and the other was instantly charging at me.

I took my spear in my hands, and took in a deep breath, this was the first time I was hunting without a group to back me up in real, and it was terrifying, even for some mobs that I could crush in my sleep.

Holding my spear tightly to prevent it slipping from my now sweaty hands, I stepped to the side as the moglin swung out, and stabbed out as hard as I could, likely much harder than necessary, as my spear went clear through the moglin, instantly killing it.

I then headed over to the other moglin, and confirmed its death before letting out the breath I had been holding in. Once I’d calmed down enough, I went around, scouting for more moglins, finding only a couple of solitary ones, and dispatching each of them with an ice spear.

Once the place had been cleared out, I tried to calm myself down, while it had been scary hunting by my lonesome, it had also been exhilarating. I then headed back to the gate and saw the man who had sent me in wringing his hands, likely only now realizing he may have sent me to my death.

“I took care of your moglin problem, mind letting me look around a bit now?”

The man sighed in relief before replying. “Of course, feel free to look as much as you want, I can even give you a few plants if you’d like, I’ve been losing so much business with them there.”

I thanked him, and started searching around the various plants I didn’t know the name of trying to find one which matched the mana signature of the aruuki herb. It took a while, but eventually I found one.

Turns out, tulips, or what looked sort of like a tulip and used to be a tulip, was the plant which had that habanero in your blood sensation. I then went up to the guy, and left with a couple tulips, some tulip bulbs, and a small rose bush, all with pots to grow in. Unfortunately he didn’t have any dandelion seeds, so I’d have to order those online.

It wasn’t long until I arrived back at home, and put my new potted plants beside my glass door to my balcony and went online to learn how to properly care for them. After that, I simply lay on my bed, wondering what I was going to do until saturday, I would of course be with the militia and training, but I’d already done my exercise for the day, and it was already past the time the militia met up.

Deciding that I may as well go for another run, I put on some comfortable clothes and left.

Once I got back, I hopped onto the wiki, it was time for me to contribute a little. I soon found out that nobody had posted the way to identify herbs for mana, so I put that up, along with my information on the aruuki herb equivalent. Deciding that I’d contributed enough for the night, I checked the time, and went to bed.

The next day was peaceful, just running through my exercise routine until I went to meet up with the militia, when we had a disagreement.

“I’m telling you, we need to go level up, or at least cull the higher level monsters before we have a monster wave on our hands! We can’t fight off something like that if we stick to just these trash mobs!”

“Look, I get what you’re saying, but we need to be here to help protect these people, we can’t just leave them out to dry.” Justin replies.

“And what happens when a monster wave comes and we’re not even close to strong enough to do anything? It’s not like we have guns, we’ll just be sitting ducks if they decide to attack us, even if we’ve been grinding our stats as much as we can.”

“We can get enough stats to make up for that, you know it.” Hanuel mentions.

“You may have a point, but just stats aren’t going to cut it without the combat experience. How many of you have fought four star mobs in game? I know I haven’t, and I’m at a decent level. And if we don’t cull the monsters, we’re going to be fighting four star mobs very, very, early. Monster waves tend to happen when enough of them aren’t killed off so they build up a large population. We can’t take that risk” I continue to try to convince them.

Jolie chimed in with a quiet “He may have a point”, but is drowned out by the rest of the groups louder disagreement, leaving me uncertain if I’d actually heard what she’d said.

“Look, we’re going to stay here and fight, if you want to go off on your own, leaving the civilians alone, it’s your choice. We have enough of a handle on it alone at this point, so go do your grinding on your own you obsessed gamer.” Hanuel comments.

I sigh, and give up, feeling a bit defeated, as we continue to head off to clear the town of mobs. We’d been seeing much fewer of them lately, and the town didn’t need nearly so many people defending it as it had at first, especially with the defenders constantly growing stronger, but they seemed to believe that they were the only ones who could protect the town, completely ignoring the fact that the police had taken almost all of the hunting duties up.

The rest of the hunt proceeded with a silent tension between all of us, with Jolie trying to get everyone to just get along, but she seemed muted somehow, clearly affected by the atmosphere that now pervaded the hunting.

We finished our hunt together, and after it was over, Jolie approached me after the rest of the group had left.

“Hey, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to come along on the hunt. We’ve been seeing almost no monsters lately, and I really do want to help prevent the monster waves. The rest of the group wasn’t logged in for the monster wave in game, so they have no idea how bad it can be.”

“Glad to have at least someone to join me, thanks for the support.”

I handed her the address and time of the meeting point, and then we headed our separate ways for the time being.

When I got back, I let out a sigh and slumped down against the door, their arguments had made a good deal of sense, but we needed to prevent the monster wave, at least long enough for the police to get enough levels that they’d stand a fighting chance.

I shook my head and got up, I was going to do something I should’ve done earlier, and hopped online to order my dandelion seeds and a proper spear. I didn’t have much money at the moment, but I could probably make some good money off on enchanting weapons, seeing as how I was likely the only person who could do it in the general vicinity.

Eventually, I’d finished looking over the wiki for relevant information and after I started yawning a bit too much, I headed off to bed.