Sen is soon back in one of the automated vehicles, holding his weapon between his legs, as greatswords on one’s back aren’t exactly conducive to sitting comfortably, and he is too attached to his shiny new blade to put it in his inventory. Luckily the cars themselves are quite tall, so he isn’t having any issues with it.

Once he is back at the grasslands, he decides that the sword will be total overkill for anything he can find in the grasslands, so he dejectedly puts the sword back on his back, and pulls out the pitiful dagger he had been using before.

Walking through the vast fields of grass, he slaughters everything he comes across except the other players. Unlike before, the fields are totally filled with players, and he constantly has to range further and further afield to find places that aren’t entirely crawling with them. Eventually, he gets to the edge of the grassland, the tall stalks of grass giving way to trees, which seemed to grow ever larger the further into the forest they go.

“”Hey Tir, anything I should know about the forest?”

“Monsters in the forest range from rank F to rank C. While you may get a better harvest there, you’re also far more likely to die.”

Sen let out a grin. “A challenge then? I’ll take it.”

Stepping into the forest is a drastic difference form the grassland. The ground is covered in dead leaves, crisscrossed with paths the animals have worn into them. The trees themselves look very similar to those found on Alpha, but the fallen leaves vary in size from the size of Sen’s hand, to the size of his torso.

As he steps into the forest, he pulls his greatsword from his inventory, and lays it on his shoulder, ready for any fights rather than leaving it stuck on his back. He tries to move as silently as he can, but inevitably his feet crunch over a dead leaf here and there. A few minutes in, and he hasn’t seen a single monster, leaving him disappointed.

He is about to let out a sigh, when he hears a light crunch of a leaf being stepped on, and he whirls just in time to see a giant cat with bone spikes sticking from its back leaping towards him.

Too startled to remember to use body strengthening, his dodge to the side is too slow, and the cat like monster leaves a series of scratches on his arm, though they aren’t deep enough to prevent movement. Annoyingly, all he sees of the wounds are red lines on his skin rather than the torn flesh that he would have seen if he was over sixteen.

Raising his sword overhead and engaging body strengthening, he slowly circles along with the monster that Tir distractingly tells him is called a spine panther. That small distraction nearly proves fatal as the spine panther chooses that moment to jump at Sen, and his cleave downwards with his sword only catches it just before it will have left another nasty set of scratches on him. The spine panther is cut entirely in two with the full force of his body strengthened by the mysterious energy, not that he could see it fall apart into halves, there is just a bright blue line bisecting the beast before it dissolves into blue sparkles.

As the monster disappears into sparkles, Sen takes a few deep breaths. Tir then helpfully informs Sen that the monster is an F ranked monster, and Sen told Tir where he could shove his “helpful” information given in the middle of a fight. He exhausts his dictionary of curse words from this life and his previous complaining about how Tir had nearly gotten him killed. He then takes a deep breath, calms himself down, and gets back to walking through the forest, this time far more carefully.

Sen keeps his eyes open, and his head on a swivel as he continues, tensing at every unexpected sound and movement, even though most of them are simply the wind blowing a leaf up here and there. He runs into a few different monsters, and another spine panther tries to ambush him, but as he is expecting it this time, he chops through its front legs in one blow, then simply lets it die under the bleeding “debuff”, as showing actual blood is clearly far too scary for anyone underage.

Grumbling about censorship, Sen continues his walk, killing a monster here and there. He is happily farming when he starts to hear grunting noises from up ahead. Staying behind the massive tree trunks, he sneaks up on a group of what he would assume were goblins, if goblins were a foot taller and more muscled.

With a quiet whisper to Tir, he learns that they were what he had expected, hobgoblins, and they are a rank F monster, unlike the rank G goblins. Sen feels a grin slip onto his face as he grows excited about what will hopefully be a proper challenge. Each of them has a wooden club, showing they are at least more intelligent than their lesser cousins, and all they wear is a loincloth. Thank god for that, if the eighteen plus version doesn’t have those, Sen is pretty sure the devs would be murdered, seeing how ugly they were.

Holding his sword to his right in preparation to slash upwards, he dashes forward, grinning madly as the hobgoblins responded to his reckless charge with feral glee, rushing to meet him. The first hobgoblin is too late in its response as he sweeps his sword, which had far longer reach than the small clubs the hobgoblins were using. His sword makes the now familiar blue line through only half of the hobgoblin’s torso, and he frowns before kicking at the body to remove his blade from the monster, which apparently has a much tougher body than normal goblins. The next hobgoblin is now close by, and swings its club at his head, which Sen avoids with contemptuous ease, simply tilting his body to the side.

His sword at a ready position again, he makes a much smaller chop towards the skull of one of the monsters, and frowns, as even with body reinforcement he barely manages to cut through the impressively hard bone that makes up its skull. Ripping the sword from its head while leaning to the back to avoid the next club, he grabs his dagger from his waist. In one smooth motion he steps forward to spike the hobgoblin that is out of position from its swing in the eye.

The last hobgoblin, showing far more intelligence than its lesser cousins, turns to run, but with body strengthening, Sen is faster, and he spears it from behind, his blade held parallel to the ground in order to avoid the ribs that he can feel but not see due to the damn censoring. Interestingly, he finds that their flesh isn’t any tougher than a normal goblin, only their bones are.

Sen lets out a breath. It may have been a short fight, but it was still tiring, his hands stinging from the impact of his sword on their bones. Even with his strength empowered by body strengthening, the hobgoblins are just as strong as he is, if a bit slower and terribly less skilled. Their bones have proven tough to the point that he isn’t sure how easily he could cut through them without body strengthening as well. He considers for a moment picking up a combat skill, but decides that he’ll put it off for now.

His musing is interrupted by Tir, who kindly tells him that he had acquired a skill book. Excited, he checks his inventory, to see a skill book named “copper bones” in his inventory.

“Hey Tir, what is this, it doesn’t seem like an active type skill.”

“It’s a body enhancement skill. Body enhancement skills will toughen your bones or skin, enhance your muscles, or allow you to heal faster.”

Sen nods, then frowns, before asking Tir something he needs to know.

“If I practice this, will I be unable to learn other methods, like, say I get something called iron bones which is better, will using this make it so I can’t learn it?”

“When it comes to body enhancement skill such as this one, they add on a second circulatory route to the one your energy naturally takes to strengthen your body in one way or another. These have permanent benefits, but also preclude using certain other versions. In the case of copper bones, it’s actually the starting pattern for a skill that actually goes to orichalcum bones. You need to get copper bones to a certain level to learn iron bones, then get iron bones to a certain level to learn steel bones, and so forth. On the other hand, if you learn this you won’t be able to learn the other elemental bone body skills”

Sen nods. The company would likely get a massive number of complaints if they made an early game skill lock out a late game one. “So what other options are there for skills that have to do with my bones anyway?”

“I’m not allowed to give you that information. I can say that there are quite a few other options though, and that they tend to follow the pattern of the elements.”

Sen shrugs. He guesses it will be too much to ask for Tir to help him with everything. That will be what the out of game wiki will be for.

As the discussion peters off, he hears a roar far more terrifying than anything he had heard in reality echo throughout the forest. Immediately, Tir yells at him. “Fast travel to Falan NOW!”

Jumping a bit in surprise, he does as Tir asks, and presses fast travel, waiting the ten seconds he is required to stay in place. He starts to get nervous as he hears massive footfalls coming closer, and just as the teleport animation began, he sees what looked like a seven foot tall lion, except for its color being an icy blue. It turns it’s head towards Sen, and opens its mouth as if to roar, and then Sen is back in the city.

“So what the hell was that thing?” Sen asks Tir as soon as they are safe.

“It’s called a frost lion, and it’s one of the top C ranked monsters. It can shoot freezing beams, and if you’re under rank C you can’t resist it unless you practice a flame type body modification skill.”

“Flame type? You mentioned something about elemental skills earlier.”

“Skills are usually split into the elements, flame, water, earth, and air. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. Copper bones and it’s greater evolutions for example is an earth type body modification ability. While it may make your bones much stronger, it will also slow you down some as the density of your bones increases.”

Sen frowns. That will definitely something to look out for. While he may use a massive sword, he is very reliant on his speed, as he doesn’t have a big shield to hide behind. It seems that he won’t be using the new skill book on himself after all. Considering earth skills will make him slower, he is leaning towards the air version of the skill, as he can really use some more speed.

“So say I want the air version of the bones skill, can I trade my skill book for that?”

“Skill books become bound to a player after you read them. So long as you don’t read it, you can trade it away with no problems.”

Sen feels a bit mollified at that, and has Tir call another one of the automatic cars to bring him to the market district, where hopefully he can get himself the air version of the skill. Along the way, he makes sure to swallow all of the energy crystals he had acquired, but still doesn’t have any of his stats raise to E rank. Sen sighs, it would be too much to ask to level up this quickly it seems.