The Four Major Dungeons Await
“Unnie! Let’s go to the new Four Major Dungeons! Hurry up!”
“I’m serious! Yesterday while I was playing, I almost rage-quit and threw my keyboard across the room, unnieeee!”
Im Harin had just finished dramatically recounting the epic saga of everything that went wrong in the single day we hadn’t seen each other. She was now huffing and puffing all by herself.
“Hey, isn’t that just because you were messing around with Park Ara? It’s not my fault.”
“Shut up! I never said it was unnie’s fault!”
Im Harin, sitting to my right, let out a loud nasal whine before latching onto my right arm with a death grip.
The sweet peach scent of a high school girl suddenly wafting over me was, in a certain sense, pleasant. But she was heavy and warm, which made it a little uncomfortable.
“In that spirit, unnie… you’re coming with me to the Four Major Dungeons today, right? Yes? Please! I only managed to run one run in two whole hours yesterday and got absolutely nothing. I’ve been salty about it all day.”
“Fine. Then today we’ll start with one run of Gemstratholme Front Gate, grab the key, and then keep running the Back Gate.”
“Front Gate? Back Gate? What’s that?”
She looked completely clueless, so I immediately pulled up the map and showed her.
“See? It says Gemstratholme right here. The name’s literally written on the map.”
“But unnie, I heard people complaining that one run takes almost two hours?”
“Two whole hours, unnie? Ugh… Even though it’s the weekend, we won’t be able to run many runs like that.”
Im Harin looked a little disappointed.
“Does it drop anything good?”
“Based on the Front Gate, the only thing you’d probably like is a neck piece with hit rating. It’s a level 65 pre-raid item.”
“O-oh? Really? I’ve got nothing on my neck right now and I’m stuck at combat power 59. I really want to change it!”
Im Harin’s eyes sparkled again.
“But… do I really have to spend two hours just for one item? Isn’t there some kind of speedrun or something?”
“The two hours Lee Siwoo mentioned is what happens when people don’t know the proper route and end up running all over that huge city. Only absolute degenerates do that.”
“Ooh… Lee Siwoo! Hey! You got it wrong!”
Lee Siwoo made the most wronged face in the world.
“Gemstratholme lets us choose whether to start at the Front Gate or the Back Gate of the same dungeon.”
“Ooooh…”
“The boss locations shift slightly depending on your starting point. Anyway, the Front Gate is basically a grind-heavy farming spot, but if we run the Back Gate, you should be able to get that magic wand right away. The one that increases shadow damage.”
“O-oh! Ooooooh!!”
“Everyone’s new to it so it might be a little rough, but we can just kill Baron and leave. Once we get used to it, we can clear it in thirty minutes flat.”
Im Harin nodded her head furiously like an excited puppy.
“Let’s go! Let’s go! Honestly, it doesn’t even have to be Gemstratholme! Yesterday in a public party I seriously almost passed out!”
“Really? Then do you finally understand how warm and cozy this unnie’s embrace is?”
“Yes! I want to stay with unnie forever! Unnie~~~! You can’t abandon me from now on, okay?”
Ah… no…
I’d thrown out that cheesy line thinking she’d find it gross, but having her hit me back like this just made me feel embarrassed instead.
“Anyway… I showed you the map earlier, right? Fly over here.”
“Yeees~ unnie~! There’s a gargoyle marked there so I’ll ride that!”
“Unnie. Hana unnie.”
While Im Harin was happily manipulating her character, Lee Siwoo spoke to me in a serious tone.
“What? Is there a problem with your profession?”
“No, it’s not that. Can I come with you to run the Front Gate too?”
“Have you hit max level yet?”
“I still have one level left…”
Lee Siwoo looked incredibly disappointed.
“Then your combat power right now is around 860?”
“Yes, exactly that. To be precise, it’s 859, unnie.”
“Wow, that’s super low. It’s seventy points lower than mine~!”
At Im Harin’s little jab, Lee Siwoo looked even more depressed.
“Lee Siwoo. You want the ‘Orb of Execution’ that drops here, don’t you?”
“Th-that’s… ugh! Yes, unnie! You mentioned it last time and I saw it on the Loofan Head forum. It goes into every good magic enchantment!”
“It’s good to stock up on them in advance…”
Level 59 with combat power 859…
It wasn’t enough to carry the party, but it wasn’t quite at the level where he’d be completely dead weight on the bus either.
“Alright, I’ll bring you along too. We’ll run it as a priority reservation party for the orb. In return, you can’t roll on any other gear. Got it?”
“Just getting the orb is enough for me, unnie!!!”
“Oh… what’s going on, unnie? Are you carrying him?”
“It’s not really carrying… Besides, he needs to level up his enchanting so we can use him later anyway.”
Lee Siwoo seemed to already know he was being somewhat exploited, so I just said it outright.
“And isn’t this better than feeding orbs to random kids we pick up in the wild?”
“That’s true. Those things are pretty expensive.”
Im Harin watched the gargoyle flap across the screen for a moment before standing up from her seat.
“Unnie, unnie. Can I go to the bathroom real quick?”
“Go ahead. Since it’s everyone’s first time, it’ll probably take about an hour anyway.”
Im Harin nodded and left. Lee Siwoo cleared his throat once.
“Unnie… I saw a post on the gallery earlier.”
“What was it about?”
“It was recommending healers, but everyone there was saying paladins are bad! But the paladin you play is really good, isn’t it?!”
“Ah… Are you saying this because you heard Harin complaining earlier that the healer paladin couldn’t heal at all even though we have the same class?”
Lee Siwoo nodded.
“Honestly, if you’re not going to put in any special effort and just want to brainlessly heal, priests are easier. Farseer priests are a bit harder, but if you pick a regular Holy Priest and just heal normally, you can still do your share.”
“Are they that different?”
“Yeah. Holy Priests are pure healers, while Farseer Priests aren’t great at raw healing but can put shields on allies.”
“Ooh…?”
“So if you can use all your shields properly? Obviously you can prevent a lot more damage.”
But in the original era, Farseer Priests weren’t that great.
First of all, their shields had very short durations, and compared to Holy Priests, their healing skills consumed an absurd amount of mana.
“Then what makes the Holy Paladin you’re raising so good?”
“You can think of Holy Paladins as focusing on one target and constantly pumping out quick heals, then using all their various utility skills to have fun.”
“Ooh… So if someone doesn’t know how to do that, their healing barely ticks at all?”
“Exactly. And if you don’t set up your five-second mana regeneration properly, you’ll spam quick heals until your mana is completely drained and you become a dry husk.”
The healer paladin Im Harin met yesterday was probably exactly like that.
They probably didn’t even know how to apply blessings properly, and with mana issues, they couldn’t even use big heals when needed.
On top of that, they had no AoE heals, so the moment the whole party’s health started fluctuating, it was the perfect class for sweating buckets and basically vomiting blood in panic.
“As expected… You really know a lot, unnie. The people on the gallery who say they’ve tried healing are all priests.”
“Priests are convenient. There’s no need to raise a Holy Paladin like I did.”
I just kept playing it because the class had grown on me.
“Unnie, unnie. Then have you seen the tank evaluations too? They say shield warriors— I mean, anything except warrior tanks—is trash.”
“Yeah, that’s correct.”
“Huh? For real? Then is the Protection Paladin that Irea plays bad?”
“That’s just marketing hype right now. It’s not terrible against undead, but it’s not good. Warrior tanks are the best.”
It couldn’t be helped.
The game was simply designed that way.
Lost of Fantasy certainly had many classes, each with three specializations to choose from…
But the game wasn’t perfect from the start.
Especially when it came to tanks and healers, the flawed design was painfully obvious.
“What do you think about that druid that turns into a bear?”
“Bear tank? Unless they buff defense by about 2.5 times in the future, it’s not great. You’ve never seen one, have you? Those guys melt. You don’t even know about the concept of smite in this game, do you?”
In the later original period, they only became somewhat decent tanks after receiving a defense buff.
Even then, if you asked whether to bring a warrior tank or a bear tank for raids, everyone chose warrior tanks.
“What is smite, unnie?”
“It’s when the enemy boss slowly cracks open our tank’s skull because their damage reduction isn’t at 100%. Bear tanks can’t use shields, you know?”
“Huh? Then how do they tank?”
“They’re bears. Their hide is thick. So there’s no concept of blocking with a shield. They just take every hit with reduced damage.”
“Ooh…? Then isn’t that better?”
“If it were, everyone would have brought bear tanks.”
Before the buffs, they couldn’t even mitigate Smite, crits would land, and their terrible damage reduction meant they ended up taking every hit harder. There was zero reason to bring a bear tank.
Besides, even though Protection Warriors had “protection” in their name, a warrior was still a warrior.
If you combined their talents cleverly, they could put out some pretty decent damage too.
“Then unnie, how are you planning to form the Front Gate party today?”
“First I need to look at some parties. Kang Minseo doesn’t seem interested, so we’ll leave her out…”
I’d seen earlier that Irea looked like he wanted to go to Gemstratholme…
For this dungeon in particular, a Protection Paladin could tank well enough. It wasn’t a bad choice.
The only problem was that I wasn’t solo.
—Vrrrr!
“Oh, hold on.”
My phone suddenly rang. When I checked it, it was a message from Im Harin.
Bathroom…?
If she needed toilet paper, she could’ve just said she needed toilet paper.
Hmm, or maybe from a high school girl’s perspective, it’s hard to type that directly?
“Wait here. I’ll be right back from the bathroom.”
“Yes, unnie. I’ll keep grinding.”
Listening to Lee Siwoo’s energetic reply, I stood up and headed to the bathroom.
Come to think of it, at first entering the women’s bathroom felt like I was committing a crime…
But these days I’ve gotten pretty used to it.
“Harin? Im Harin?”
Maybe I should’ve asked the part-timer for some toilet paper before coming straight here?
“Ah, unnie! Unnie!”
The pitiful voice coming from beyond the stall made me chuckle despite myself.
“What’s up? If you need something, why couldn’t you just say it in the message?”
“Well… ugh, unnie. Can you lend me something?”
“…Lend you what?”
“That. You know. That thing.”
What is she talking about? Makeup?
But doing makeup in the bathroom… wait, actually, bathrooms are where people do touch-ups, right?
“Uh…”
“A pad, unnie! I suddenly leaked!”
“Uh, uhhh… Huh? Really? But I don’t carry pads with me?”
“For real…?”
“Yeah. I only carry my phone.”
…Do girls really carry those around?
Why? Why?
“Then buy some for me, unnie. Anything’s fine!”
“Uh… Me? Okay, I’ll tell Lee Siwoo to—”
“Why would you make him do it?! Unnie! Are you crazy?!”
But I really don’t know…!!!
“Ah… okay. You want me to buy pads? Where do I get them?”
“What?”
“I mean, a pharmacy? A supermarket? But the supermarket’s kind of far, isn’t it…?”
“What are you even saying, unnie?! Haven’t you ever bought pads at a convenience store?! With that white hair, are you actually an alien?!”
“Uh, um… I always bought them through delivery so I didn’t know. There were always some at the orphanage…”
The truth is I don’t know! I really don’t! Ever since I became Jeong Hana, I’ve never had a period!
And I don’t want to!
“Ughhh! Anyway, just buy some for me, unnie. Please?”
“But is it okay for me to buy them? Wouldn’t it be better if you went yourself—”
“What are you talking about, unnie! I leaked, I said I leaked…! And… buy me new panties too!”
What exactly leaked…?
If I asked any more, it would basically be announcing that I was actually a guy on the inside, so I backed off.
“Just wait a bit… Unnie will go downstairs and buy them for you.”
To think there would come a day in my life when I ran an errand for pads…
How did it come to this?