The Price of an Orc’s Head
It was a fair point. And it wasn’t even that unreasonable a request.
It wasn’t like they were asking him to join a guild. They were only inviting him into a party. Parties were the sort of thing people threw together with total strangers whenever they needed to.
And yet Tae-hyun frowned.
The loner instinct.
This isn’t going to turn into us traveling together all the time, is it?
It wasn’t as if being in a group made him physically tremble or anything, but he still preferred moving around alone. Even setting that aside, two or three people was his absolute limit.
“Excuse me?”
When Tae-hyun didn’t answer, Choi Ha-yeong tilted her head.
“Ah. Go ahead and invite me. I’ll join.”
They’re growing way faster than I expected.
That was what Tae-hyun thought.
People misunderstood this all the time, but Tae-hyun had never been interested in raising a weak character to stay weak.
Characters everyone said were bad. Characters everyone dismissed as inefficient.
What he liked was taking characters like that and pushing them to the absolute limit, making them as strong as possible.
That was more satisfying—more fun—than picking a character already known for being strong from the start.
That was how he had eventually succeeded in making a blacksmith strong in Fantasy Online 1, too.
The problem was that this kind of playstyle took an absurd amount of time and effort.
Which, in a way, was only natural.
Why was a strong character considered strong in the first place?
Because they could become strong quickly and easily.
Weak characters couldn’t do that, which meant you had to dig up all sorts of different methods.
In fact, before Tae-hyun had reached the point where he could hunt down other players as a blacksmith in Fantasy Online 1, he’d gone through a truly blood-soaked amount of suffering and effort.
To be honest, Tae-hyun was confident.
If he’d raised a more conventionally powerful character, he could have hit rank one ages ago.
He just hadn’t done it.
Was I worried for nothing?
Back in Fantasy Online 1, once you hit max level, growth got so difficult that even a slow starter could eventually catch up.
But 2 didn’t even have a level cap.
That was why he’d been a little worried when he first started.
After all, Tae-hyun hadn’t started at the same time as everyone else.
For ordinary players, maybe that wouldn’t matter. But for rankers competing for placement, that amount of time was more than enough to create a massive gap.
And even so, Tae-hyun had deliberately chosen an even harder path.
No class. And every single stat point dumped into Luck.
If I can’t catch up, then fine. That just means that’s as far as I can go.
Even if he couldn’t catch up, he still refused to walk the same road as everyone else.
An obsession twisted enough to seem almost perverse.
And yet…
He was growing much faster than he’d expected.
The Luck stat is more useful than I thought.
It wasn’t that Luck was bad. Players simply ignored it because the other stats—Strength, Agility, and the like—were so obviously good.
Luck was a perfectly strong stat.
It was just that when people were already desperate for every stat point they could get, nobody wanted to invest in Luck.
On top of that, the other stats gave immediate, obvious results.
If you pumped a few hundred points into Strength, your attack power would skyrocket.
If you pumped a few hundred points into Agility, your movement speed and attack speed would go insane.
Compared to that, you could raise Luck by a few hundred and still not get any effect that made you think, There it is!
But once it crossed into the thousands, the effect became monstrous.
The probabilities that had been inching up little by little suddenly exploded.
A butterfly effect born from casually tossing an item that boosted Luck into the area outside a beginner village.
Tae-hyun had no idea.
At that very moment, while the rabbits had temporarily vanished, the developers were desperately trying to delete Rabbit Foot.
> “Damn it, why did we even put this in?!”
> “I told you we should’ve just left everything to the AI!”
> “This village barely gets any players anyway. I thought a bonus like this would be fine! How was I supposed to know?”
> “Come on, let’s be honest—what kind of lunatic refuses to class up and spends all that time doing nothing but killing rabbits at that level?!”
I’m happy about this… but also kind of disappointed.
It was satisfying to see results coming from the path he had chosen for himself.
But because those results seemed to be coming too easily, part of him felt let down.
This is just a normal strong character at this point, isn’t it?
Choi Ha-jun and Choi Ha-yeong’s party looked like they were somewhere in the high thirties to low forties.
Tae-hyun had guessed their level range from the equipment they were wearing.
His own level was 25.
And yet these party members were reacting like he was something incredible.
They’d even actively invited him to join them.
So what I showed them must be the kind of thing you’re supposed to need at least level forty or fifty to pull off.
Even Tae-hyun had to admit his evasion rate and critical rate were beyond absurd.
He understood why other people would be shocked when they saw it.
No. Don’t get cocky. If I don’t class up, I won’t get class skills. The gap’s only going to widen later. This isn’t the time to sit here feeling pleased with myself just because I’m doing a little well right now.
As long as he’d decided not to class up, stats were the only thing he could rely on.
Tae-hyun found himself wishing there were more items like Rabbit Foot lying around—things that boosted stats other than Luck.
You have been invited to a party.
Joining the party didn’t actually change much.
Experience would be shared, and if a Rare-grade item or better dropped, everyone had to discuss it before anyone took it.
In Fantasy Online 2, it was very hard to see another player’s information.
Even if you joined a party, even if you joined a guild, player information wasn’t automatically shared.
Class, equipment, skills… every single one of those things had value.
Maybe not for beginners, but rankers were in constant competition with other rankers for placement.
Knowing what class someone had, what skills they possessed, what strengths they had, what weaknesses they carried—that kind of information was mouthwatering.
There were even places that did nothing but gather and sell those details.
So naturally, in this kind of temporary hunting party, nobody asked for specifics.
The only thing you could trust was what someone said about themselves.
And if they lied about their level or class, it would be exposed the moment the hunt started anyway.
If someone claimed to be level 50, then lost half their health fighting a level 10 monster, what else was there to say?
“You joined.”
“Wow. That’s reassuring.”
“First, let’s collect the orc heads! We’ve gotta clear the quest.”
Choi Ha-jun walked over to the orc corpses.
Tae-hyun had done the slaughtering, but Ha-jun himself had killed two. The other party members had taken down one more, so in total, three of the kills belonged to them.
“The orc heads… aren’t here?”
“I don’t have any either.”
“Me neither…”
Seeing that, Ji-su whispered, “Don’t you have to cut the heads off yourself?”
“What kind of horrifying thing are you saying? Quest items like this are supposed to just drop automatically.”
If players actually had to cut them off by hand, half the player base would give up on the spot.
You could turn off the grotesque settings, sure—but people’s instincts didn’t change that easily.
“No heads?”
“Yeah. Nothing’s dropping… Damn, this could get annoying. Looks like the drop rate’s low.”
He’d thought it would be easy, but as expected, quests in the Salz Kingdom weren’t easy at all.
Drop rate.
The chance that an item would fall.
“Bring me 10 orc heads” sounded simple enough—but if orc heads were rare drops, that was a different story.
Would it take 100 kills to get 10 heads? 1,000? There was no way to know.
And this quest required each of them to collect 10 personally.
Ji-su whispered again.
“We don’t need those, right?”
“Right. Ours is way more brutal, though…”
Destroy the orc tribe’s village and bring back the chieftain’s head.
What kind of bullshit is that?
No matter how he looked at it, that was not a quest meant for two people under level 30.
“Um… would it be all right if we checked the orcs you killed too, Mr. Tae-hyun?”
“Go ahead.”
As soon as he said that, Tae-hyun walked over to the dead orcs.
Messages started pouring in instantly.
No, come on. Even so, why the hell is one orc dropping two heads? Four heads?!
A drop rate explosion caused by stacked Luck.
Tae-hyun was dumbfounded, but he took what the game gave him.
“S-six heads…?”
“There are three over here too!”
In an instant, they’d reached ten.
“Was I just incredibly unlucky?”
Choi Ha-jun tilted his head.
For an item that apparently dropped this well, getting nothing from three kills felt absurd.
None of them even imagined this was happening because of Tae-hyun’s Luck.
“Um…”
Choi Ha-yeong spoke carefully.
“If you’ve already collected your 10 heads, would it be all right if we took the extra ones? We can pay you in gold if you want.”
Choi Ha-yeong was polite.
After all, there were plenty of party leaders and priests who would shamelessly say, “We’re in a party, so let’s just split the drops,” without a second thought.
And when people approached him politely, Tae-hyun tended to become more generous.
“Go ahead.”
“Huh? You’re not taking money?”
“Why would I? It’s not like these are worth much. Earlier we weren’t in a party, sure, but now we are. If you start calculating every little thing in cash and demanding payment for it, sooner or later somebody stabs you in the back.”
Ji-su nodded.
Tae-hyun had killed all the orcs, so she had no reason to complain.
And yet, for some reason, she still felt a little jealous.
What’s so great about being nice to those people…?
But Tae-hyun had no idea.
Right now, they were far from the only players scrambling to get their hands on orc heads.
“What the hell, do these orcs not even have heads?! How many has it been now? Dozens? And not a single head! Not one!”
“Goddamn it! XXXX!”
Rare drops had a way of making people furious.
This party was no exception.
They’d gotten a quest from a knight serving a nearby territory to bring back orc heads, and they’d come all the way out here for it.
But no orc heads were dropping.
“Anyone selling orc heads?”
“Who the hell would sell them? They probably all used them to clear their own quests.”
“I think I’m going insane.”
Kim Byeong-guk muttered viciously.
The two of them were friends in real life too.
A true game-addict duo.
Kim Byeong-guk was level 56. Choi Eun-cheol was level 51.
For people who had started a little late, that was a very fast pace.
And both of them had Rare classes.
Kim Byeong-guk was an Iron Axe Warrior, and Choi Eun-cheol was a Fire Specialist Mage.
“Damn it. I need to clear this if I want to raise my territory affinity…”
“Huh? There’s a party over there.”
“So what? Forget the party, find orcs. Orcs.”
“No, look closer. Aren’t those orc heads?”
At this point, Tae-hyun and Choi Ha-jun’s party had so many orc heads that they were throwing them away.
Everyone had already filled their quota of ten, and they were still dropping.
“???”
“Let’s… steal them!”
The answer came out without even a second’s hesitation.
At a glance, the other side looked low-level.
There were eight of them, but this much of a level gap was more than enough to win.
If you classified players by temperament, these two were the very worst kind.
The type who would PK—attack and kill other players—without hesitation, penalties be damned, if there was something they wanted.
“Hey!”
“...?”
“Hand over all the orc heads. Give us a hundred, and we won’t kill you.”
Kim Byeong-guk said it arrogantly, hefting his giant axe.
Their quest was different from the one the others had received.
Naturally, the number of heads they needed was different too.
A hundred in total for the two of them.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Who do you think you are, demanding that?”
Kim Byeong-guk smirked.
“Bit slow on the uptake, huh.”
With that—
Explosive Strength!
Axe Throw!
He launched an attack using two skills at once.
The party member struck by it was driven to the brink of instant death in a single hit.
And then came the mage’s Fire Arrow.
“Aaaagh!”
“That’s one down.”
“...!”
Only then did the party fully grasp the situation.
Those two had intended to PK them from the very beginning.
All for a handful of orc heads.
“So? You gonna hand them over quietly, or do you all want to die?”