Might as Well Have a Little Taste
Wouldn't hurt to just take a little taste, right?
Kroktoos, the Conqueror of Hobgoblins, uses Crush!
Kroktoos raised his greatsword high overhead.
If Lily had possessed the Combat Assist System, it would have fed her everything—the direction of the strike, the force behind it, even a prediction of the shockwave that would follow in its wake.
"Hmmm…"
But Lily had no Combat Assist System.
All she knew was that Kroktoos was using something called Crush, and that an attack worthy of his sheer size was coming her way.
Thud-thud—!
And yet, that alone was enough.
The moment Lily's steps lightened, she launched herself high into the sky.
"…!"
Her white saint's robes billowed as she hung inverted against the heavens, and with one more twist of her spear, she skewered clean through Kroktoos's shoulder.
Kroktoos howled in agony. Desperate to shake off the lance that clung to him, he unleashed Crush skyward.
KWA-GAGAGAGANG! The thunderclap of Crush detonating midair shook the entire forest to its roots.
Lily gave up retrieving her spear and lightly backstepped away.
Green blood fountaining from his wound, Kroktoos wrenched the spear free and tried to snap it over his knee.
"Kruk."
But the spear Yena had lent her bore an enchantment: Superior-grade — Cannot Be Destroyed by Physical Force.
After a few futile attempts, he gave up on breaking it and hurled the spear instead. Lily read the trajectory and bolted, snatching the spear back out of the air at full sprint.
"Lily, look out!"
But as if he'd been waiting for exactly that moment, the greatsword he'd merely been holding until now came flying at her.
Kroktoos, the Conqueror of Hobgoblins, uses Greatsword Throw!
A look of genuine surprise crossed Lily's face.
Hobgoblins aren't exactly creatures known for using their heads.
Was it different because he was the boss?
Even as she tilted her head in mild puzzlement, she didn't parry or swing the spear she'd just caught—she simply flung it straight at the incoming greatsword.
Spear met sword. With a KWA-JAJAK, the greatsword split clean down the middle.
Seizing the opening without a moment's hesitation, Lily surged forward, caught the flying spear once more, and drove it straight through Kroktoos's heart.
"Wow. Lily, that was…"
Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap.
Yena couldn't hold back her applause.
The fight she'd just witnessed was nothing a low-level player could ever have pulled off.
Low-level users have low stats across the board and their skills come burdened with all manner of restrictions. Skills can, granted, be triggered unconditionally, ignoring physics and the surrounding environment—but they're still bound by mana costs and cooldowns. Which meant Yena couldn't just spam her Mirage Dagger and Shadow Leap willy-nilly.
Lily, on the other hand, used the speed of skills like Dash with zero limitations whatsoever.
Because when you don't have the skill, your own body simply steps in to do the job.
Of course, a strong body doesn't make every fight trivial. Physical strength is, at the end of the day, just a tool that makes combat more convenient. Given Deoen's core design philosophy of "nothing is absolutely invincible," without the skill and finesse to wield that strength properly, you're nothing more than a very durable sandbag.
Well, the pro scene does deliberately build sandbags of exactly that kind, come to think of it.
"Got him."
"Great work out there! You're seriously skilled. No wait—really, seriously skilled."
"Thank you."
Lily retrieved her spear without a single drop of blood on it and flashed a bright smile. She'd looked sour earlier, but now her mood seemed excellent—so excellent, in fact, that a little hmm-hmm-hmm~ of a hum was slipping out of her.
"Ah, right. The guild. Yeah, we'll have to do that."
Someone with Lily's talent was a prize every guild and pro organization on the continent would covet. Going pro was Lily's own choice to make, sure—but the guild was non-negotiable. She could not let her be poached.
"Shut up! This time is going to be different, okay?!"
You have cleared the Hobgoblin Forest.
Rewards are being distributed.
With Kroktoos defeated, the dungeon was cleared.
The rewards: 1 gold coin, 17 silver coins, and 82 copper coins, along with hobgoblin hides and a pile of battered old weapons. And then…
"Oh, Kroktoos's Greatsword dropped!"
Apprently it was one of those boss items that drops only at a low rate when running subjugation dungeons. Among Deoen's six equipment tiers it belonged to the fifth, the Special tier—and when she checked the weapon's name, it was rendered in blue text.
I picked up the greatsword.
A gray-bladed monster of a weapon, nearly as tall as I was. The flat of the blade was badly notched and worn, and the grip, wrapped in what looked like monster hide, was fraying apart at the seams.
Yena gave it a once-over and nodded.
"You'll need to get it repaired. It's not all that expensive since it's Special tier, but it's a named drop, so a berserker would pay a pretty penny for it—"
WHUMPH!
I swung the greatsword in a smooth overhead arc.
It felt familiar. Not quite like my old colossal warhammer, but even this was enough to bring the old days flooding back—the memory of crushing the skull of an ancient beast that had slumbered for centuries, with a hammer twice the size of my own body, was still vivid as yesterday.
"Er… hmm. Are you going to use that one too?"
"I'd love to."
One more weapon added to the collection.
After that, a bit of chatting and another two or three hours of hunting brought the second stream to an end. Yena sent 5 million won to the account I'd given her, along with a message—Great work today too!—and a little emoji sticker. I replied in kind:
An emoji sticker that looked suspiciously like a cartoon of Yena herself. I'd spotted those exact stickers floating around in a few internet posts before—so that was whose they were. I bought the pack, sent one back, and she was absolutely delighted.
"Hmm."
POP!
I flicked my spearhead out and popped a few more of the giant fried-shrimp monsters.
Yena had left me a single piece of homework: "Next stream's in three days, so please have plenty of monsters farmed up by then. Preferably ones you can one-shot. The fried shrimp—er, I mean, the Low-grade Sagwi? Ah, right, the Sagwi. Yes, you'll be fine with those."
Yena's Newdlebak content went beyond simply bankrolling a newbie—it came with a kind of consulting service to set them up to stand on their own. In other words, she wasn't just handing over gear; she fed me key game knowledge and charted my future direction. As for skill, that was nobody's place to lecture me on—so for smooth gameplay going forward, the priority was clearing my class advancement quest.
Killing three thousand of them on stream would just be mind-numbingly boring, after all.
"Viewers will love whatever Lily does—no, they'll lose their minds."
Or so Yena had said.
"Hmmm…"
PA-BA-BAK!
Cull the Sagwi
☐ Sagwi slain — 760 / 3000
Shloop. KWA-JA-JAK!!
"Hmmmmmm…"
Cull the Sagwi
☐ Sagwi slain — 857 / 3000
"So bored."
The day after parting ways with Yena and striking out on my first serious solo grind.
God, this hunting is tedious.
These Sagwi monsters went down far easier than most other species, but their numbers were thin. Twenty or so per hunting ground, maybe? If they spawned in dense packs, I could sweep an area without a second thought—but no, I had to trudge from one ground to the next forever, which made it agonizingly dull.
Worse, not every hunting ground actually had prey waiting. Some had already been cleared by other players and sat empty through their respawn timers, and every so often I even had to fight other people over territory. The servers were split and the open world was vast, but with 400,000-plus concurrent players, the overlap was inevitable.
Cull the Sagwi
☐ Sagwi slain — 999 / 3000
"…Bored out of my mind."
Should I just log off and flop into bed?
But no—this had to get done. No three thousand Sagwi, no class advancement. No class advancement, no Yena's stream.
What a pain.
I, a onetime gamer, had grinded for a mere three hours and was already sick of it. Though in fairness, this was beyond my control. I preferred fighting with my actual body—preferred the spear—but this wasn't combat. It was nothing but spear-swinging drudgery, hour after hour.
It hadn't felt nearly this tedious when I was hunting alongside Yena.
And then, unbidden, her words surfaced in my mind.
"Viewers will love whatever Lily does—no, they'll lose their minds."
"……"
I stopped mid-thrust, my spear poised to skewer my thousandth fried shrimp.
The Sagwi, who had been staring death in the face, scrambled helter-skelter over the horizon at this sudden act of mercy.
Whether it fled or not, I manipulated something in the empty air. Settings. Inside those, Detailed Settings. And within Detailed Settings…
"There it is."
Would you like to activate Streaming Mode?
…Might as well just take a little taste, right?