Golden Experience

After learning all the elemental magic types for the [Enhance Follower] skills and boosting all her stats, Rare had more XP than she knew what to do with and was thinking about how to spend it. She could just keep dumping it into her stats, but that could be done at any time. It would be better to only increase stats based on what was needed at the moment and instead improve her countermeasures for others’ skills.

That said, she didn’t feel like investing in weapon skills. Not only was Rare not planning to ever participate in close-quarters combat, but also weapon skills would be taken by regular players already, so there would be buzz on social media about any skills that were especially good. She could just wait to learn them until after that information spread.

She was also reluctant to get any more crafting skills. The engineers were already constructing a factory, but Rare had no confidence in her own creativity. And good tools required good design.

So what Rare decided to learn was a type of magic she hadn’t yet: [Space Magic].

This element of magic required [Enchantment Magic], [Wind Magic], and [Earth Magic] to unlock. These requirements were discovered during the closed beta, so a lot of players probably had it already.

This type of magic was powerless on its own; the skills in its tree assisted other types of magic. It was similar to the way [Bind Soul] improved [Summon].

With the [Space Magic] spell [Perceive Coordinates], you could change the casting location for spells. When mastered, you could be face to face with an enemy and cast a [Flare Arrow] behind them and have it hit them in the back. However, this didn’t affect the spell’s power at all. While it was incredibly useful to use for surprise attacks and bluffs, there were also a lot of conditions in order to learn it. If you really had all the XP to learn it, you’d be better off directly improving your combat strength. Since most players thought this way, [Space Magic] tended to get a bad rap. [Perceive Coordinates] was also limited to your own perspective, so in general you were limited to your own field of view.

To start, Rare wanted to test stuff like whether the [Summon] location could be moved to a specified position. She had already learned all the prerequisite skills, so she only had to pay for the cost of learning [Space Magic] itself. Since Rare had already acquired quite a number of skills and fulfilled a lot of conditions, she was excited to see if she unlocked anything in the [Space Magic] tree beyond [Perceive Coordinates], but nothing new appeared.

As she hoped, it was possible to designate the [Summon] location, but it really was dependent on her own limited vision. Since Rare’s vision was bad, even though it was a magic skill, she couldn’t really use [Perceive Coordinates] to its full potential. She started to think this was a wasted purchase, but then she realized that, conversely, [Space Magic] itself could have fulfilled some prerequisites for other skills, so she decided to check her other skill trees.

[Discipline] had a new entry called [Perceive Follower]. This skill informed her of her followers’ coordinates, where they were at the time. Based on the skill name and the effect, there was no question that the unlock condition was [Perceive Coordinates]. After learning it, she checked all her other skill trees again. All this checking and rechecking brought back that feeling of excitement she had during the first day of the open beta. The next tree she checked, [Summon], had a new skill available called [Summon Vision]. This skill allowed her to “summon” just the vision of a follower she was tracking via [Perceive Follower]; by closing her eyes, she could jack into that follower’s eyes. She could not even begin to express how useful this skill was. For example, with a bird-type monster tamed, a commander would be able to perform reconnaissance themselves.

What was even better, since she saw through her follower’s eyes, her own bad eyesight never came into play. When she originally took Poor Eyesight, she thought she would someday have to find a method to cover for it, but out of nowhere she had already solved that problem.

So Rare had gotten Kerry the [Enhanced Vision] and [Enhanced Hearing] skills then dispatched her as a sellsword to gather information about nearby cities. Being able to watch live through Kerry’s eyes meant she could immediately give orders whenever a quick decision was necessary. The [Enhanced Hearing] was since Rare also learned [Summon Hearing], which got unlocked after she took [Summon Vision].

When she had Kerry go to the city near the great forest, she had Kerry call herself “Rare.” Since Kerry could use the inventory, if someone saw her doing it, then information about NPCs being able to use it would get out. Instead of letting that happen, Rare thought it’d be better for her to pretend she was a player instead. She didn’t know if there was a player also named “Kerry,” but it would be problematic if there were and it turned out there wasn’t a way to hide your name in this game. However, if Kerry went by “Rare” instead, she knew she herself wasn’t going to suddenly appear out of nowhere, so it would be fine. Regardless of whether or not names could be hidden, “Rare” was the safest alias either way.

To avoid inviting suspicion while pretending to be a player, she had to make-up an explanation of what “players” were for Kerry and the other girls. Something like how players were from a world connected to this one, and while they slept here they had separate lives in the other world. Because of this, it was possible for players to share information with one another regardless of where they were or how far apart they were. When they used terms like “developers” and “official whatever,” that referred to divine intervention that players were convinced existed but they held no particular reverence toward. Rare was honestly quite proud of the story she concocted.

Since it would be unusual for players at this stage in the game to have gear like Kerry’s, worn out leather armor fit for thieves or bandits, Rare took off her own starting equipment and had her use it. Kerry stored her own armor in her inventory while Riley went to town to buy some secondhand clothes for Rare to wear. They cost a pretty penny; going by the design, they were probably nobles’ clothing. Right now, some of the ants were making new clothes using these used clothes as reference.

In order to focus on gathering information in town, Kerry was told to just pick simple, random requests to fulfill, but if she were to run into another player, she should call out to them first before her cover was blown. Even if some of the things Kerry said were inconsistent, if she were to explain it away as roleplaying, she should be able to play dumb. Rare had pretended to be an NPC before, and there were surely other players who had tried to do so as well, but it was unlikely that the opposite were true, for an NPC to pretend to be a player. That should mean it was very unlikely that Kerry would get exposed.

After getting whatever was unlocked in the [Necromancy] tree, the other summon sense skills aside from vision and hearing, and whatever those sense skills unlocked, Rare would stop learning new skills for the time being. What she needed for now she more or less already had, and she wanted to be more efficient with her XP spending. Looking ahead, she also had to consider having Sugaru unlock the [Summon]-type skills, but otherwise it was better to refrain from unnecessary spending.

Rare’s most pressing objective was to get her hands on a new follower capable of flight for extended periods of time. Ideally, this unit would also have the [Night Vision] skill or an innate characteristic that provided a similar effect. For aerial combat, there were the Soldier Vespas, but they were Sugaru’s followers, so Rare couldn’t summon their vision for herself.

The most promising candidate was the owl-type monster in the great forest, but compared to the Solder Vespas, they weren’t very powerful. They wouldn’t be bad for scouting, but she really wanted something that could fly long distances to gather information from far away locales. Owls wouldn’t be able to take on such missions.

Something that could operate for a long time outside of forests, ideally with night vision, that doesn’t stand out and can hold its own in battle… It would sure be nice if there were conveniently a monster that checked all those boxes.