Walker’s Lair:

An abandoned castle that was taken over by a necromancer and his forces, now it has become a den of evil, where not even the souls of the dead can rest at peace.

For being the first to discover this dungeon you and your party will gain 20 fame when the discovery is reported to an NPC, if someone reports the dungeon to an NPC before you, they will instead receive the fame.

The area we entered was just a brick tunnel, but as we went through, we arrived in a massive courtyard, oddly the grass here was black and the trees dark and withered. In the center was a hill, on top of which a tree ten times the size of the others stood, not much else other than that, the door to the keep itself could be seen to the end of the far courtyard at the top of some stairs.

However the undead were patrolling the grounds, they were sparse so I didn’t think we would aggro more than one party unless a fight went on too long, there were perhaps sixty skeletons patrolling the whole courtyard, and they were in groups of two to five.

It seemed there weren’t any elite skeletons patrolling outside here, but the castle looked to be perhaps three or four time the size of the courtyard, and two armoured skeletons were on either side of the stairs, hmmm on top of the hill was a goblin, likely the commander I was originally tasked to kill, we decided to grind the patrolling skeletons for a day, before we had finished for the day we decided we would challenge the goblin, logging off to our white rooms we both activated our well rested bonus.

First we waited for a patrol that was only two skeletons, first I attacked with a backstab sword draw, then switched to the other target while Alexis cast her fastest heal, mend, on the skeleton I had started on. With one consecrated it wasn’t too much of a challenge to fight two, the consecrated one could be parried with little problem, however non consecrated I couldn’t seem to get the timing down and the occasional parry I managed to get off would end up knocking me off my feet.

Either way the first patrol was dispatched, nothing good dropped, just bones and rags. We stared off pulling only the groups of only two or three but it was fairly easy. So soon enough we started to pull the groups of four, they were harder and occasionally we overran the fight and another patrol in but we could handle it with her healing. Trying to kite them was an option, but we ruled it out since the patrols of the undead seemed to be completely random, there was just as much chance of us running into a group as there was for us to avoid the next patrol.

Eventually we started on the five man patrols as well, these were quite harder because the damage was high, and they would interrupt me before I could kill the first one we went for, so it would take at least two rounds for me to kill one skeleton, ensuring that a second patrol would come before we could finish the pack off, added to this if I parried one and got knocked off my feet they would all deal extra damage to me, I almost would have died if Alexis’ Reverence spell didn’t heal me twice over, eventually I figured out how to get the timing for the parry down, it had to be at the right timing not too soon not too late, and I had to predict where the strike was going.

For the knockdown if I successfully got down the timing for the parry, if I switched to water stance, and instead of putting my hand back on the hilt, put my left hand on the bottom of the side of the blade, I could receive the force into a forward stance, which would take the force to my back leg and instead of being knocked down I would be knocked back quite a bit, but still on my feet they wouldn’t get extra damage, it seems that in game skill really did trump stats and levels, sadly if I took more than one or two straight after the other like this I would still get knocked down, and I couldn’t attack properly in water stance, so I mainly used it to keep damage down to an acceptable level.

On the issue of sustenance, if we killed a two man patrol there would be some time of us to rest and eat, drinking water seemed to make mana regenerate faster, so I tried making a soup with the goblin meat, and the meal gave a flat number of mana and the well-cooked bonus included a mana regeneration increase. With the meat, we had hunted so many goblins, with not much else for them to drop, I had two and a bit stacks, since they were stacking to 999 that was quite a bit, more than enough to last us our entire time in the castle.

The skeleton drops are pure trash though, at least with goblin meat I could eat it, but they only dropped bone piles and rags, sometimes their weapons dropped but they had anywhere from little to no durability and they wouldn’t stack, even I couldn’t put the clearly human, bones into our soup.

Naturally on the front with Alexis, things were going quite good, she was pleased with my company and the progress we were making, we were sitting down while I was cooking some soup, sitting with her back on a nearby tree, she was making some casual conversation as we usually did, she said she thought it would be impossible for her to solo this castle, by the looks of it and I would have to agree, so then I dropped the bomb.

“Yeah, I don’t think I could solo this castle either, we make the perfect team though don’t we?”

“Yeah we really do, it’s been so smooth.”

“Alexis, I was wondering if you would permanently become my partner, I’m going to create a guild with the aim of becoming the top guild in this game, and I know in my heart I couldn’t do it without you.”

Her cheeks were flushed once more, oh my little strawberry, sweet, red and juicy, you know you’ll never escape my claws right?

“Umm, I think I would like to become your partner Zeke, I was a bit scared at first, my elder sister kept going on about how men are wolves, so I felt scared of playing with boys and thought I would create an all-girls guild with my sister.”

“Since playing with you, these past few days has been so much fun, and you’re such a nice person, a good listener, a good cook, you’ve been indulging my appetite, even though it’s been slowing us down, you’re fun and interesting, you’re smart and so good l… at the game.

“*ahem* I don’t feel like you’re only with me because you want something from me, other than my healing skills of course, so I think I definitely want to continue to play the game with you.”

“But I promised my sister I would play with her, and I would never join a guild without her, I didn’t start in this country, I started in another with her, after I finish this quest I’ll have to go back there to hand it in and then I won’t be able to travel without a passport, it’s also 28 days away unless you get transport, which is 10 gold without a special permit.”

“I don’t know if we can play together, I’ll do my best to convince my sister, but I can’t be sure, and it’s a long distance, it might be some time before we can play together, if we can, we can whisper but I don’t know if you can wait for me.”

She still blushing, looking down at her hands, she was fiddling with her fingers again, she really was too shy, abandoning my pot of soup, I moved and sat beside her, I began staring up the sky.

“Alexis, you’re a special girl, I think if you told me to wait a hundred years for you, I would.”

Saying this I hugged her close to me, her ears began to glow.

“With that reply. does that mean I take your answer as a yes?”

A small voice rang out.

“Yes…”

I stroked the top of her head.

“It’ll be fun, you and me against the world, we don’t have to get you sister to agree to join us in our guild for the minute, if we all play together I’m sure she’ll eventually come around.”

With that, I had to quickly get back to the soup since it was over boiling.

Serving up, I had taken to giving Alexis a portion three times the size of my own, so we weren’t stopping for breaks so often, she herself was a bit embarrassed at first, but eventually accepted it, such a glutton, but thanks to that we did find out that portion size while not increasing the effects themselves, would indeed increase satiety a bit more and the duration of the effects would last longer.

Thanks to our monopoly of this dungeon, our levels had risen quite fast over the day, especially since the roaming skeletons had a level from 27 to 32, so my own level had risen to 28, and Alexis wasn’t far behind at level 24, so it was time to fight the enemy I had come here to hunt, no patrols were roaming near the hill, and so we started our climb.

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To the guy who gave me the 3.5 star review, and to anyone who agrees with his points, other than the last one, they’re fair tbh.

a) Please feel free to point out any errors in the chapters on their page and I will make amendments, I’m banging these out fast as I can so mistakes will be made. However please do note I use casual English for most of the characters and anything from the MC’s POV, so in some cases it might be intended to be like that, if someone can consistently read and proofread my work before I release it (read: be a neet) that’s also an option, I think I might be able to give people mod powers as well to change errors? You just have to run it by me though.

Also at some point I feel I’m going to slow the chapters down to 2-3 a week and make them bigger, that way I should be able to up the quality a bit, also I’m planning on lowering my submissions for a while since exams are coming up.

b) Imperfect skill windows, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this, but if you want the windows to become tables, well that’s frankly hard so I’ll need help with it, I could do it, but at the start I decided I didn’t wanna do it since it would be hard to constantly update the MC’s stat table, that I have saved in a word doc as we go along, it didn’t seem like it would record well in a word document but if you can do so, please feel free to give me it.

Since I didn’t do the stat table, I didn’t do two part windows for system messages, feel free to give me the template if you know where it is.

c) Lastly plot holes, I don’t believe there are any plot holes, I don’t believe in spoon feeding, so many things will be discovered later or are just plain not explained, if you feel there is a part of it you don’t understand comment in the thread, I do check them and reply, some I won’t say because it would be a spoiler but if it’s anything I wouldn’t explain in the novel I’ll say it, such as how monster stats work, other things I just won’t say because I’ve left hints in the piece already and wouldn’t want to spoil, though I may give more hints.