The oldest two, a boy and girl, were in their late teens, which meant they had the fun job of working the bellows. They weren’t yet eighteen, so I couldn’t see their names when I focused on them. Gretel had told me their names while talking about the village’s residents, but I’d been told so many others that I couldn’t remember them. Another two girls, around twelve years old, were polishing a piece of copper that might have been a mirror when finished.
A small boy, no more than six, wearing a worn cloth flour sack as his clothing, saw me approach. He dropped the ball he was playing with and gave it a kick. With a small scowl, he walked up to me and sniffed, wiping his runny nose on the back of his arm, before scratching the mop of curly blonde locks on his head. “Welcome to The Beaten Anvil,” he said squeakily. “What do you want?”
“It’s ‘how may I be of assistance,’” shouted a girl only a few years older than him, working a knife blade across a rotating stone wheel.
The little greeter scowled and turned to the girl. “That’s what I said, stupid.” Then he turned to Ava. “Mom, she’s doing it again.” When Ava didn’t immediately reply, he stomped off in a sulk, forgetting me.
Ava shook her head as she worked away at the glowing axe head. “I’m sorry. I’m a little busy. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
Everyone was working with the kind of intensity that told me I’d come at a bad time. The sound of bellows and clang of worked metal chased rhythmic patterns through the air as I waited for someone to take a rest.
After a few minutes, Ava put the axe head back into the fire and came over, wiping her hands on her apron. “Sorry about my youngest. He wants to help, but he’s still a bit too young.” She held out her hand. “I’m Ava and this is The Beaten Anvil. What can we do for you, Arnold?”
“I’m looking for a spear, a machete, and your cheapest sword,” I said. “Gretel told me this is the place to go if I didn’t want to get ripped off.”
She smiled. “Well, Gretel was right. Do you want them new or are you happy with second-hand?”
“Second-hand is fine so long as they have at least 80% of their durability left. The sword can be the oldest you’ve got lying around.”
“Planning on playing a little bit of farmer’s sword,” she said cheerfully.
“Something like that.” It had taken Salem four days, not three, to beat the basics into me, mostly because I’d fought him on several points. Since I wasn’t getting much sleep some of what he said sounded utterly absurd. So many things about this world didn’t make sense. The idea that I couldn’t go out and kill some basic monsters for experience, but an adventurer could, was ridiculous. And I refused to take his word on it.
The sword was another one of those stupid rules. Farmers couldn’t wield swords or weapons, like at all. Apparently, they would buck in our hand, throwing themselves out of our grasp. The arrogant furry asshole claimed that it was a common drinking game for farmers to see how long they could hold on for before they lost their grip. The fact that Ava had just said the same did not improve my mood or change my plans. I needed to see this for myself to believe it.
“Well, we have everything you want in the storage room. If you let me take your measurements, I can see what’s the closest to your size. They’ve been sitting there for a few years, so I’ll sell them to you at base.”
Base meant she would sell everything for the lowest price she could, without haggling for extra. Their economy was another weird concept to get my head around. Every good had a fixed base price which you couldn’t sell below. If you tried to, you would find your item falling apart within days or food spoiling in hours. Whoever received the coin would find something similarly unpleasant happening to their wealth. That’s why most profits came through the merchant skill, which altered how much you could haggle.
Skills like the merchant skill that allowed you to haggle were a watered-down version of the class they represented. And when I say watered watered-down I mean watered-down. The class and skill systems leveled identically, with the skill system requiring the exact same amount of time and effort as the class they came from, without the fun shortcut of being able to purchase and use experience generated by others. You would think that having to do the same amount work to level would give you similar benefits, but you only received a few of the base benefits of the class, and even with all those restrictions not every class could acquire every skill. Farmers, for example, couldn’t acquire the swordsman skill. The only good part about the whole skill leveling systems, that I could see, was that if you reached level 100 and took a second class, which you already possessed the skill for, then the skill’s experience would change to class experience and automatically level your second class to whatever your skill level was before the change, unless some other rule interfered. Unfortunately, there were plenty of rules that interfered.
So haggling was where everyone made their extra money, but even that had rules. Thankfully, the village was in a bad enough way that she was ignoring those rules. Otherwise I would have been fleeced.
“That works for me,” I said.
For the hundredth time, the battered old sword kicked itself out of my hand and fell, landing on the forest floor. It had happened so many times that Salem had stopped laughing at me.
I shook my hand, clearing away the new round of pins and needles. I still wasn’t ready to admit that I couldn’t wield a sword. It didn’t make sense that just because of my class, I wouldn’t be able to. That wasn’t how things worked. A sword was a sword. And a person was a person. If it worked for Jack then it should work for Jim.
I mean, speaking from a purely physics line of reasoning, where the hell was the energy that threw the sword from my grasp coming from? What was creating it? It wasn’t like I had some mental block that wouldn’t allow me to pick it up. The sword physically didn’t want to stay in my hand. Something was actively trying to force it out. I mean if this was a full immersion VR game this might make sense. But this wasn’t a game. I was in another world. Something I couldn’t see was physically stopping me. The energy expenditure to stop me from doing something so trivial was insane.
“I am all for testing a theory, but what you are doing is now bordering on insanity,” Salem said, his tone bored.
“I’m not insane. This is insane. I can use the machete just fine. I got novice proficiency in less than an hour after cutting through that tree, so why can’t I use a sword? They’re basically the same thing. How can one work and the other not?”
Salem stood up from where he’d been lying on a fallen tree log, stretched, and then lay back down, intentionally making me wait for an answer.
He yawned, showing teeth. “Now, let me first point out that I am completely ignoring the stupidity of your question while humouring you. Comparing a machete and a sword is like comparing a man and a woman. You seem to expect that because they are a similar shape and come from similar materials, they are the same thing, but one can produce babies and the other can’t. A machete is a tool that can be used as a weapon. A sword is a weapon that can be used as a tool if you are desperate. They are similar, but not the same. You are a farmer. You work with tools. A warrior works with weapons. This is the way things are.”
“Well, the way things are is stupid.”
Salem rolled his eyes. “Of course, in a fair universe, you would be recognised for your greatness, and dozens of beautiful woman would flock to your side begging for you to take them…You sound like a child. The world is the way the world is. You need to learn its rules and master them if you want to be successful.”
“I don’t want to be a farmer.” I unconsciously added extra emphasis to my words, unable to disguise my anger.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I did not realise I was talking to the first person who was ever unhappy with what life offered them. How can I be more considerate? I know, why don’t you pick up the sword? I’m sure it will work this time. I’m sure it won’t buck out of your
hand like it has the hundred other times.”
I growled. “Fine, we can try something else. You said you could track monsters. Let’s go kill something.”
“Oh, goody. Another pointless enterprise.” Salem rolled his eyes one more time. He glanced around, scanning The Wild Woods, the forest on the eastern border of Blackwood, and then looked pointedly at me. “Stay here until I return, and please try to remember you are a farmer. Practically everything in here wants to eat you.” Then he turned without waiting for my reply and ran farther into the forest.
“Screw you,” I said, bringing up the stats.
Looking at my stats almost made me scream.
I was so basic.
I thought about opening up one of the other pages, but most of them were even emptier. I had no skills, and only two tool proficiencies—and one of those was a wash bucket. I had gained about a dozen lore proficiencies from listening to Salem, but all of those were only novice rank. A child knew more than I did.
I was painfully in need of more information.
From my gaming experience, I knew that all systems held a flaw, something you could exploit. I just needed to find the one in this system. No system was perfectly balanced. Everyone screwed up. Only…the damn familiar refused to admit there were any flaws.
I dismissed my stats and checked over my weapons one last time, hoping they had somehow improved.
They hadn’t.
I picked up the spear, feeling the weight and touch of wood against my fingers, and began practicing my lunge, hoping to finally get my novice proficiency.
At least spears weren’t class restricted. However, I could only get the tool version of the proficiency, not the weapon version. Salem claimed that was actually a good thing as tool proficiencies were significantly easier to obtain than weapon proficiencies. And I wanted the proficiency. The moment I’d received the novice version for the machete, holding it had felt more natural.
The same went for lore proficiencies. The moment I’d received the novice rank, my comprehension of the subject felt clearer. Thankfully, these were even easier to obtain than tool proficiencies, but they scaled completely different. Getting novice rank only took fifteen minutes for most subjects, but after that, reaching the initiate rank could take anywhere from another hour to several weeks. The ranks after that grew proportionally harder. Less than 10% of lore had been mastered by anyone, and those that had were all sub-categories of more complex fields and were outside my reach without years of study.
Tool proficiencies, thankfully, weren’t. Most only took a few months of intentional practice or extenuating circumstances to reach expert.
Fifteen minutes later, Salem padded into the clearing and said, “I have found something you can handle.”
I tried another lunge, stabbing my spear into an imaginary target. Keeping active was the only thing stopping me from screaming in frustration. “You sure it’s at my level? You said the monsters in this forest are strong. I don’t want to fight a bear.”
“I said the monsters in this forest can be strong. There are exceptions. And yes, I am certain you can win a battle against a giant mosquito.”
“Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad.” I lowered my spear and turned to Salem. “Lead the way.”
After ten minutes of tramping through the woods, stepping over roots and pushing aside branches, Salem had me drop to the ground and crawl across the forest floor to sneak up on what was, basically, a big mosquito. Damp soil and rotting wood filled my nostrils as we made our way closer. The stupid monster was so small I couldn’t even spot it until I was ten yards away.
Salem waited as I read the description.
“How many are there?” I whispered, staring at the palm-sized mosquito that I could see.
“Three, I will distract them while you take them out.”
“What if more come?”
“They won’t. There is no swamp nearby. These three are lost, probably blown here during the last storm. Now, follow me.”
Salem leapt, crossing ten yards in the time it took me to blink, pouncing on the back of the nearest oversized mosquito. The giant insect hit the ground, with the cat landing on top of it. Salem immediately leapt for the next, slamming into it before it had even realised something had happened to the first. The third caught onto the danger and tried to dive-bomb him, only for him to move out of the way with casual ease.
Salem turned to where I lay stunned and gave me a look of utter contempt while leaping around and battering all three mosquitoes into a disoriented state. He was like a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. “Are you going to do anything?”
I scowled back at him as I got to my feet, clutching my spear.
This wasn’t my first experience killing a wild animal. My father had grown up in the country and didn’t like the idea of me and my sister missing out on some of his experiences just because we lived in the city. We still went fishing as a family a couple of times a year. He’d taught me how to rip the gills out of a fish’s throat by the time I was six and I could gut and clean one so it looked like you’d bought it in from the shop by the time I was eight. We’d even gone rabbit shooting a couple of times at my aunt’s, so I knew how to dress those too. I wasn’t an avid hunter, but I knew where my food came from and what was required to get it onto my plate.
I planted my boot so I wouldn’t trip over on the uneven ground and then charged the insects.
The little buggers were fast, and I was never the most coordinated in my high school class, but their attention was focused on Salem, so even though I missed a few times, pretty soon, I landed my first hit, killing the mosquito instantly. As the giant mosquito twitched on the end of my spear, a satisfying prompt appeared.
Well done, you have successfully killed a Giant Mosquito with a spear and gained a new tool proficiency. You can now boast that you can use a spear as well as any Novice.
The spear suddenly felt a little more natural in my grip, the way the machete had after I used it to cut down a tree.
I grinned and charged the remaining mosquitoes.
The fight lasted less than a minute, an embarrassingly long time considering the situation. I was basically fighting large bugs.
The dead mosquitoes lay in pieces as small green orbs began to appear above their bodies the way Salem had described when he was explaining everything at the inn. I reached out for the nearest loot orb. The moment my hand came into contact, a prompt appeared.
Well done, you have killed three Giant Mosquitoes. Would you like to loot their bodies for items and experience?
Yes/No?
I knew from Salem’s instructions that it was safe to accept, but I still cringed as I did so. It had taken a couple of days for me to understand just how big of a mistake fast travelling had been. It wasn’t just that I’d lost ten weeks of my life; it was that it could have been more. If Varla had set the location to somewhere I couldn’t reach, I never would have come out of the state. Now, I was more than a little wary of accepting new prompts.
You have found:
Giant Mosquito Stinger x3
I pulled up my experience tracker. I only needed one point of experience to become a level 1 farmer.
0/1 experience to next level.
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“I told you—farmers do not gain experience from killing monsters,” Salem replied.
I pulled up my logs.
Combat end:
Giant Mosquito x3 Located, looting attempted.
-Unable to meet experience requirements.
Experience lost.
-Giant Mosquito Stingers found x3.
Looting End:
“This is bullshit.”
“No, it is exactly what I told you. Now can we return to the inn?”
“No, this doesn’t prove anything. The mosquitoes were probably just too weak to give me experience. We need to fight something stronger.”
Salem rolled his eyes. “Oh, you are insane.”
Five days. Five days, twenty-seven monsters, and no experience, but I finally knew why. They had all been too weak. Every monster had been below ten. I needed to fight something stronger to gain experience.
I threw myself to the left as the puma lashed out with its paw. Salem came in from the right and slammed into it with a shoulder tackle. The strike didn’t hurt the bigger cat, only pissed it off and drew its attention away from me.
It turned and roared at Salem.
I used the opening to jab my spear into its side. There was a thump as the blade hit bone. The overgrown housecat turned and lashed out, striking and snapping the end of the spear in two. I dove backwards, tucking into a roll that put me back onto my feet, before tossing aside the now useless stick to go for one of my backup spears I’d planted in the ground. The stronger the monsters, the more they destroyed my weapons. If I hesitated to change weapons I’d suffer a quick end.
Five days of continual combat was enough time for me to see an increase in numerous branches of combat lore proficiencies. Only a few were above the initiate rank, but the sheer variety advanced my capabilities significantly. If I had taken on this puma on my first day, I would have tripped over my own feet.
The next spear went into the puma’s other side twice before I needed to replace it. As the seconds dragged on, the beast slowly began to tire and weaken. With a final shout, I drove my third spear between its ribs ending its suffering.
Well done, you have successfully killed a Forest Puma with your spear and gained a new rank of proficiency with spears. You can now boast that you can use a spear as well as any Journeyman.
I didn’t care about the stupid spear rank, so I dismissed the prompt.
With almost frantic anticipation, I waited for the loot orb to materialise. Salem retreated somewhere nearby to watch. He’d stopped talking to me a couple of days back, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I would gain experience no matter what. I had found the way.
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 5
