Newdlebak
“Thank you! I knew you'd manage just fine.”
“You're pretty good yourself. Thanks for that.”
“Yes, yes.”
Nothing out of the ordinary, as expected. Still, that boar had been a good deal rougher than it looked. The farmer chuckled low in his throat and handed over a single sheet of paper — surprisingly clean and crisp, not the kind of thing you'd expect to see coming out of a farm field.
Tutorial — 1
📍 Objective: Head to the Land of Beginnings.
🎁 Reward: 80 EXP, Class Recommendation Letter.
“There's a friend of mine in the village who knows his way around a weapon. In his day he got around quite a bit, that one. Go see him, and he'll help you out.”
A class advancement, then. You can't play a game without one. After all, in the world I'd been thrown into, I too had held the class of Divinity — Spear Artist.
For reference, Divinity — Spear Artist was a class that swung a spear wreathed in holy magic. If you had to pin it down, it was closer to a battle mage. Whether this place had anything like that was another question entirely.
An arrow appeared, floating in the air. I set off along the path.
Devil of Angel was a world where countless races lived side by side. The orcs and elves you'd find in any fantasy, along with dwarves, spirits, goblins, trolls, nymphs, and so on. All manner of races appeared, and by exploring certain special dungeons, a player could even transform into one of them.
But there were two races that stood apart from all the rest. Two races shrouded in mystery, vanished without a trace since the 7th Heavenly Demon War. The Celestials and the Demons. For all that the game bore their names, neither showed up even at ordinary boss-tier content. Three years on, aside from a scant few saints and fallen humans, they were races you'd struggle to find at all.
“Wow…”
I arrived at the medieval village known as the Land of Beginnings. A scenery that felt familiar and yet strikingly different all at once. And what made it different, above all, were the dazzling players. Users decked out in their weapons of choice wandered about chatting with one another, and the people who were presumably NPCs answered them in kind.
“Wow, the character custom on that one is insane.”
“What even is that?”
“That's basically just pure hours poured in, isn't it?”
As I wandered the village for a bit of sightseeing, remarks that seemed aimed at me kept drifting my way. They probably assumed I couldn't hear them, but a Heaven-Scented Human had very sharp ears indeed. That hearing had caused me plenty of grief before — you couldn't exactly pretend not to hear, but announcing that you had felt awkward too.
“Alright! Hello~ boys. What session of Newdlebak is it today? Seventh, right?”
Just then, a booming voice rang out across the village square, as though someone had cast an amplification spell on it. A few people winced, but the woman simply carried on, eyes fixed on the small black circle hovering in front of her, as if she had somewhere to be.
Don't tell me — a camera? Now that I thought about it, I had wondered how a livestream even worked in virtual reality.
“Hey! You lot, quit only picking the pretty girls! Look at me for once — me!”
The woman, who looked for all the world like a streamer, jabbed a finger at the camera with a shout. It might have come across as a bit abrasive, but if someone could raise that much of a ruckus in the Land of Beginnings — in the village square, no less — odds were good she was a fairly famous one. A black ponytail drawn straight back, and crimson eyes. She wore black clothing that barely covered the important bits, with small weapons strapped at her waist. Type-wise, an assassin.
As for her skill… I couldn't tell. Detection wasn't available to me.
“Huh? Who? Over there?”
Was it because I'd been staring at such an unusual sight? Or simply because hers was a face that drew the eye? Either way, I had the distinct feeling that woman was looking at me.
“Wow. She's just plain insane.”
She was right. The streamer waved her hands in a big flourish and asked, Won't you chat with us for a sec~?
“Nope.”
I vacated the spot at speed.
“It's your guys' fault!”
Ha…
Yena-land. No — Twitch Partner streamer Yena let out a long sigh. It had been a while since she'd seen a newbie easy on the eyes. And not just easy — extremely easy. What kind of lunatic put that much effort into their character custom? Even she, a woman herself, felt like she could fall for that face, and the figure had her wondering if making a body like that was even possible. On top of that, the outfit looked like something out of a saintess's wardrobe from some angel guild — pretty enough to make her briefly question whether this really was a newbie at all.
“Hah, they were definitely a fresh newbie though.”
One of Yena's skills, Level Detection, let her observe anyone below her own level. The level of that stupidly gorgeous newbie from moments ago: 7. Clearing the tutorial normally landed you around 4, so they must have picked off a few monsters on the way to the Land of Beginnings.
“Switch to what? You're banned.”
Even as she said it, Yena let the lot of them be. More than half of any chat was joking around anyway. These weren't people who would actually leave, and the ones who did either picked a fight on their way out or vanished without a word. If anything, the newbie drawing aggro from outside viewers was pure profit for her.
She mulled it over for a moment. A newbie at that level was bound to draw aggro. And not just any aggro — the premium, top-shelf kind that could send her long-stagnant channel skyrocketing. Besides, this was no ordinary newbie either — that movement skill was insane. Her gear wasn't even fully set up yet, and that burst of motion a moment ago had been hard for even her, an assassin, to follow with her eyes.
She stole a glance at her viewer count. 5,100. It looked like a lot, but measured against her past fame, it was a fairly small number. These days the streaming scene was so saturated that new streamers were springing up like bamboo shoots after the rain.
“What was that, hmm? A unique trait? Or a racial bonus? My money's on trait.”
“Right~?”
Ten minutes or so of dangling the bait like that, and her viewers had grown a little. 7,970. The community was probably already passing around screenshots of that newbie's character custom. The community always lost its collective mind over pretty and handsome customs. Good momentum. Time to ride this wave all the way in.
“That settles it, then. Boys! Today we hunt down that newbie!”
“Yep~ nobody on this earth can refuse when it's spoon-fed to them~”
It had always worked that way. That was exactly why she'd pulled this six times already. Yena shot off in a blur, chasing the trail of the newbie.
“What was that.”
I slipped out to the village outskirts. I had a rough idea what it was, but I had no intention of playing along. I'd come here to play a game, not to put on one. And being the object of someone's rapt attention — I'd had my fill of that a lifetime ago.
I did the saintess life for ten years, after all.
Meeting the expectations of countless people, standing alone more often than not. Granted, I'd gone twenty years without any of that, but I had no intention of picking the habit back up here of all places.
“So this is the place.”
A small shop that saw no foot traffic. Smoke rose from within, and the shop walls were hung full of something or other — it was hard to say whether it was a forge or a workshop for crafting sundry trinkets. I pushed open the familiar wooden door, and a hearty voice boomed out to meet me.
“Welcome!”
“Hello.”
“So you're the one Crops spoke of.”
The recommendation letter had led me to a man with a back built like a barrel, slabs of muscle stacked across his shoulders. The burly fellow, showing off arms like knotted oak, took in the weapon hanging at my waist and then swept his gaze over my whole frame. His eyes carried nothing lewd — they were simply and honestly assessing my ability.
“…Hm. Your frame looks like it couldn't so much as lift a sword, and yet you managed to take down a boar?”
“It wasn't hard.”
“Plenty of folk can't manage even that easy a feat.”
What's that supposed to mean?
I tilted my head, and the man waved me off, declaring that a spear was what suited me, and pressed one into my hands. How on earth did he know? A spear with no engravings of any kind. Nothing special in the materials, nothing magical worked into it — a weapon that seemed made purely to do everything a spear was meant to do, and nothing more.
Class Advancement — Spear Artist 0.1
📍 Objective: Hunt 3,000 monsters.
🎁 Reward: 3,000 EXP, 3 gold coins.
“Off you go, then.”
“Yeees…”
So at the end of the day, games really do come down to grinding, huh. I trudged out the door, an utterly stat-less spear in hand.