Below the Capital, there was an S tier dungeon. Filled with dead ends, twists and turns, it formed an expansive labyrinth of underground tunnels. At every corner, there were mobs in hiding, waiting to spring out on any unsuspecting player. It was connected in multiple places with the Ruinspun Catacombs zone that spread out under Briarwood, forming the dark heart of the Catacombs.

Within the S tier dungeon resided the slumbering King of Briarwood, Oberon. It was said that when the Briarwood was cut off from the rest of the world in its seclusion from Humans, Oberon erected a giant barrier to encase the entire kingdom. This feat took its toll, and when the deed was done, he fell asleep amongst the roots of the Great Oak, leaving his children, the Thorn Prince and the Briar Princess, to rule his kingdom.

Oberon was once the hardest boss in the game, at least before the unbeatable Decay fight was added to story mode. He was so hard that as a reward for beating him the first time, you were allowed to pick one of all the S items in the game.

I expected that my opportunity to meet the god of this world would come during this choice. Which meant that I would have to be equipped enough to tackle the second hardest boss in the game.

I opened up my status menu.

Username: Bad_Luck

LV 52

Class: Kobold

Guild: Chosen Ones’ Alliance

HP 12 000

MP 430 (RECOVERY 220%)

STAMINA 50 (RECOVERY 100%)

ATK 2400

DEF 50

INT 8

SPD 18

DEX 4

CRIT RATE 30%

CRIT DMG 150%

Equipment:

Weapon1 Sorrow

Weapon2 Ruined Ash

Torso Dragonfly Tunic

Legs Gossamer Leggings

Shoes Splash Step

Accessory1 Stain of Autumn Gold

Accessory2 Jade Sash

Accessory3 Ring of Dimensions

Skills:

Short Range Teleport: Allows the caster to teleport anywhere within a 7.5m radius

Throwing Knives: Throws 3 knives in a certain direction

Compensation: Completing a quest perfectly doubles quest rewards

Invisibility: Turns the caster invisible. Enemies stop aggroing. Drains MP over time. Attacking in this state guarantees a crit hit.

Gift of the Sun: Grants the user 20% increased attack.

Gift of the Wind: Grants the user 20% increased speed.

Peace of Mind: Increases MP recovery rate by 50%.

Candle Flame: Summons a fire spirit to protect the caster from damage. Max 3.

In the Dead of Night: Mobs do not aggro unless the caster is in their line of sight. Increase movement speed by 300% in the first 1 second of casting Invisibility.

Burning Passion: All normal attacks do low burn damage for 20s.

Quenched Thirst: Grants the caster corrosion resistance.

Overpower: Grants absolute authority over an NPC in the form of commands. 1 command allowed per day. Cannot stack.

Skill Points Remaining: 26

The leap in levels from the Fortress of Ruin raid with Trix had given me a large number of skill points I could spend. Since my ultimate goal was to get to the Oberon boss fight as soon as possible, I had to pick skills that would help me out.

I looked at the Kobold skill tree for comparison.

Passive skills:

Fire Resistance (3): Grants 30% resistance to fire attacks.

Retaliation (3): After taking damage, increase attack speed for the next 5s.

Speedster (3): Dash cooldown reduced to 0.3s.

Backstab (3): Attacking from behind has a 50% chance to crit.

MP skills:

Fireball (3): Shoots a flaming ball of fire.

Curse (3): Inflicts blindness and weakness on enemies.

Shapeshift (5): Allows the caster to shapeshift into any enemy lower than their level.

Stamina skills:

Boost (3): Launches the caster in a certain direction.

Flurry (5): Peppers enemies with rapid attacks

Unique Skills (MP):

Territory (3): Set a 10m by 10m area as “home”. MP gauge refills 200% faster and all skill cooldowns are reduced by 80% at “home”. Territory can only be set once every day, and cannot be set inside a boss room.

Blaze (5): All attacks do high burn damage. The caster is engulfed in flame.

Indoors (5): Crit rate increased by 10% in an enclosed space.

Goldemar’s Judgement (7): Gives the caster the same stats as Territory even if not at “home” for 30s.

Fire Resistance, Backstab and Curse were useless, since Oberon didn’t use fire, had no back, and used so many AOE attacks that blindness was pointless. Flurry, Speedster and Boost were unnecessary, since my speed was already really high, making the extra movement and attack options pointless.

Reaching out, I picked Retaliation. With the strategy I was planning on using, I was going to be taking a lot of damage. With this skill, losing HP would become a resource instead of a liability.

Oberon’s fight would take place in an enclosed space, so I considered taking Indoors. But even with the increased 10% crit rate, my crit rate would still be only 40%. I hesitantly picked it. I would need other skills to support it if it were to be of any use though.

With Burning Passion as a freebie, I wouldn’t have to get Blaze to boost my damage even if it objectively did more.

Goldemar’s Judgement was good, but it cost a whopping 7 points. I ended up fretting over whether I should pick it for a long while, but ended up grabbing Territory instead. While “home” couldn’t be set inside a boss room, I did know an exploit that would help me bypass that limitation.

That left 20 skill points left for the non class specific skills. The ones that would help me out the most were Fae skills. This class was more MP intensive, like the Kobold class, and would provide me with the support skills I needed.

I opened up the Fae skill tree, and, cross referencing my other skills, picked out 2 skills.

Toadstool Ring (5)

40MP cost. Cooldown 30s.

Establishes a temporary zone for 20s. Allies within the zone receive 10% increased attack, speed and defence, while enemies receive 10% decreased attack, speed and defence.

Swap (3)

5MP cost. Cooldown 5s.

Switches your position with the target’s position. Not effective on hostile mobs.

Gift of Chance (3)

5MP cost. Cooldown 15s.

Increases Crit Rate by 15% for 20s

Since Oberon’s arena was fairly small, Toadstool Ring would boost my damage dealing without compromising my ability to move around too much.

Swap would let me actively switch positions with my Candle Flame summons, granting me enhanced mobility.

Gift of Chance (which I dubbed Crit) would bring my crit rate up to 55%. It wasn’t the most ideal, but still better than the 40% from before.

Next for Pixie and Druid skills.

High Ground (3)

Passive

Increases Crit Rate by 15% when airborne.

Regeneration (5)

Passive

Regenerates HP slowly. Raises MP regeneration speed by 50%.

With the Candle Flame pogo trick, I had a fair bit of confidence that I could stay airborne for a long time. As a result, High Ground would reliably bring my crit rate up to 70%. A value much more dependable for damage dealing.

As for Regeneration, the HP regeneration part was just a plus. What I was really looking for was the MP regeneration. With it in place, my MP regeneration would go up to 270%, a good rate of 5MP per second regenerated. It didn’t seem like a lot compared to the 430 MP I had. But considering Short Range Teleport cost 10MP, it meant that I’d have a Short Range Teleport ready every two seconds.

Of course, I wasn’t going to spend all of it on Short Range Teleport. I had a lot of buffing skills I needed to cast every 20 seconds, which would quickly eat away at my reserves if I didn’t have the regeneration in place.

All that remained was… 1 skill point. I’d poured all my investments into buffing skills, with no skill points leftover for some attack spells. That was the plan though. The more powerful skills tended to have lengthy cooldowns or large MP investment. While you could do a lot of damage in one hit, with the help of buffs, damage built up from multiple attacks would actually end up doing a lot more than the skill in the long run.

That said, I did not intend to waste the MP skill buffing effects of Ruined Ash. There were points in the boss fight where Oberon would be on the other side of a cliff, needing me to either use ranged attacks or fire off skills anyway. My current plan was to save up a total of 9 skill points to get me three offensive skills, as well as to speedrun the remaining bosses in the game to get all their freebie skills.

With the current 1 skill point left over and 3 skill points from Compensation when I recycled it, I only needed to Level up 5 more times to get enough skill points.

As for the bosses, there were four of them left. In order of difficulty: Carman from the Deep Woods, the Questing Beast from the Forest, Balor from the Lakes of Luna, and the Ruinrot Knight from the Ironsalt Wastelands.

There were, of course, the Seasons, but those were time based, and I didn’t think the Forest would let me speedrun the Seasons as easily as the other bosses. If I took too long, I might be able to fight Winter, but hopefully it wouldn’t get to that.

I paused in my planning to think about my trade with Rosa. She wanted me to get rid of Overpower altogether, and I understood why. Just the description of it scared me.

Overpower: Grants absolute authority over an NPC in the form of commands. 1 command allowed per day. Cannot stack.

Absolute authority… that was frightening. It was like giving players access to the debug menu and letting them do whatever they wanted with it.

I didn’t know why the god of this world would give us this kind of power over his creations, but it didn’t feel right. If I had to guess, Rue didn’t try to escape or fight back in the Fortress of Ruin because Pam and Adam had used this skill on him.

Did this mean I could “/kill” an NPC and they’d just die? I didn’t intend to try the idea out, but considering that I thought of it, someone else probably had as well. There was no telling what sort of damage they could cause with it.

True, important NPCs and bosses like Rosa and Rue would respawn, but what about the randomised NPCs? An entirely different NPC would take their place, and no one would care.

It wasn’t as if having authority over NPCs would give us any more of an edge on escaping. No matter how many we could interrogate, if nobody knew anything, we’d just be as clueless as before. Yet if we had it, we’d just be wreaking more havoc like what was happening with Rue.

Rosa wanted the skill gone. I agreed with her point of view. But the issue was the means of getting that.

The run in with the god of this world was just going to be a preliminary meeting. A poke at his power so that I knew what I was going to be dealing with. If the Michael incident was anything to go off of, angering him with such a blatant request was a bad idea.

I didn’t want to cheat Rosa out of our deal, but I didn’t want to die trying either. I knew it was probably scummy of me to have lied to get that information but…

“Uncle Luck!”

I turned and spotted a small hand waving to me. Emmie came beaming out of a nearby shop.

“Hey there, Emmie!” I brought myself out of my thoughts and crouched down to meet her. “How’ve you been?”

“Papa said I could go to the Lakes of Luna with you on your next adventure!” she threw her hands in the air. “Mama will come along too!”

“Really? That’s great, Emmie!” I smiled, but internally I was making changes to my plans. Fighting Balor was definitely not a fun or safe adventure for kids. Should I turn her down?

Nah. I promised, and I would definitely feel worse than I already did by breaking two promises one after the other. We could always go somewhere kid friendly.

“Thank you for agreeing to this, sir,” Richard’s voice came booming out behind me. I turned to see him coming up the stairs of the Great Oak. “I can’t go in person, have to man the smithy, but I hope it’s alright if my wife comes along to keep an eye on Emmie?”

His voice sounded a little more strained than usual, and he called me sir instead of by my name.

“Of course! The more the merrier,” I gave him a thumbs up. “But my next destination will be the Deep Woods, not the Lakes of Luna so… maybe after I get back?”

“That’s perfectly fine,” Richard nodded. “We were hoping to set out a few moons later anyway. Give Emmie a bit of time to get ready, especially after the last ordeal.”

“Ordeal? What happened?”

Richard’s shoulders sagged.

“Emmie was a bit too chatty with a Chosen One, and he turned her mute. She couldn’t speak for a couple hours, and we were all panicking until her voice came back.”

What?

“Who would do that to a kid?” I spluttered.

“It was my fault for not keeping a closer eye on her,” Richard sighed. “But I know better now. Wherever she goes, me or Lydia will be close behind. I hope you understand, sir.”

“Of course,” I frowned. “I’m sorry for what happened.”

“No. It’s alright.” Richard shook his head. “We‘ve learned our lesson. Won’t happen again.”

“I’m fine, papa,” our attention was directed back to Emmie, who had been silently watching the whole time, as she protested at us. “And I am ready!”

“Have you packed?” I asked.

“Umm…”

Richard laughed heartily and put his hand on Emmie’s shoulder.

“Come along, Emmie. Let’s not bother Uncle Luck,” he steered her back towards the smithy, waving at me with one large hand. I waved back, faltering a little as my thoughts strayed back to my previous line of thinking.

With Overpower, could I have muted Emmie just as easily as that other Chosen One had done? If I thought that they were puppets, would I have done that? The power to ruin someone in just a few words… I didn’t know I’d feel safe with it in anyone’s hands. Let alone my own.

If I had noticed it earlier, what havoc might I have wrought? I thought this was all a dream, back then. Would I have tried it out just for the sake of seeing what it did? I could very well see myself using “/kill” on a random NPC, thinking that it wouldn’t hurt to try.

Ugh. Enough thinking. I brought myself back to the topic at hand. Right. Bosses. Freebie skills.

First on the list — Carman. I took off in the direction of the Deep Woods.