Maybe This Just Isn’t Your Aptitude
“If this really doesn’t suit you, then how about taking a production-type class instead?”
“A production class?”
“Yeah. Traditionally, Fantasy Online has always treated production classes well. Blacksmiths, engravers, tailors—stuff like that. If you level them up a bit, people start lining up to recruit you. They’re insanely popular.”
“But classes like that are hard to play solo, aren’t they?”
“Huh?”
Kim Tae-hyun tilted his head.
“Didn’t you say you were playing with friends?”
“We split up... And sure, playing together is nice, but I’m not really into classes that have to depend on other people. I’d rather have something I can solo with....”
“You like solo play?”
Tae-hyun sensed a familiar air from Ji-su.
The aura of a born loner!
This brat... he doesn’t actually like hanging out with people that much, does he?
The sort who liked their friends just fine, but when it came to games, preferred to dive in alone and brood in glorious isolation—a natural introvert, through and through.
In that sense, he was similar to Tae-hyun.
Except Tae-hyun had the skill to back it up...
As for Ji-su, Tae-hyun wasn’t even sure skill existed in his case.
“You can solo as a blacksmith too.”
“What? No way. I researched all of this before I started.”
“You say you researched everything, but you didn’t look at Fantasy Online 1? There was that guy who soloed as a blacksmith.”
“Oh, Kim Tae-hyun? Come to think of it, Opp— no, Hyung, what’s your name?”
“...Kim Tae-hyun.”
“You didn’t copy that Kim Tae-hyun, did you?”
“No, you little punk!”
Tae-hyun snapped before he could stop himself.
Sang-yun had warned him people might misunderstand him like this, but actually having it happen was infuriating.
“I did see that, but... doesn’t that kind of thing require natural talent?”
“Kid. You’ve got a good eye. Yeah. It takes innate talent.”
Isn’t he actually a fan?
Ji-su grew suspicious in secret.
No matter how he looked at it, Tae-hyun seemed to like the Kim Tae-hyun from Fantasy Online 1 quite a lot.
“If you don’t have a sense for close combat but still want to solo... well, there is a way.”
“Really?!”
“Pick a class that doesn’t do much close combat. Mage or archer types. Mostly ranged attacks.”
“Ah....”
“Though if you wanted to be a mage, you shouldn’t have picked the Salz Kingdom. Hardly any mages there.”
There were separate starting zones for people who wanted to become mages.
“It doesn’t have to be mage! Archer is fine too!”
“Really? Then maybe I’ll try asking August for something....”
“August? That picky hunter?”
“Picky?” Tae-hyun asked, puzzled.
At this point, August was an NPC who greeted him warmly whenever they met.
“Even when I say hello, he ignores me, spits on the ground, and treats me like I don’t exist....”
“......”
Tae-hyun immediately understood what had happened.
Ji-su’s skill level was so poor that he hadn’t built up any favorability with August at all.
“I’ll ask him for it. Come on.”
“Th-thank you!”
“So how are the players doing right now? Anything interesting?”
“No, sir. Not much has changed since the last time you checked.”
“Tch. Why’s everyone so spineless? They ought to be pushing harder, finding Legendary classes and shaking up the system. Nobody’s discovered one yet, right?”
In the class hierarchy—Normal, Rare, Heroic, and Legendary—Legendary classes were the rarest and most unique of all.
They were difficult to find, difficult to fulfill the conditions for, and once someone claimed one, nobody else could ever change into that class again.
That was the biggest difference between Legendary classes and anything below Heroic.
Fantasy Online 2 maintained a fixed number of Legendary classes in the world, and each time someone changed into one, a new Legendary class would be generated somewhere else.
But since not even one had been discovered yet...
“By now, one of the old Fantasy Online 1 rankers should’ve found one. What about Lee Se-yeon?”
“She’s the most likely to find the first one. Her pace is incredible. She’s already cleared about half the quest line.”
“Well, of course she has. She’s a genius.”
Team Leader Choi Myung-sung nodded as he recalled what Lee Se-yeon had shown back in Fantasy Online 1.
People who didn’t know better were obsessed with her looks, but what had impressed Choi Myung-sung was her instinct.
Sure, she had been overshadowed by Kim Tae-hyun, who went around cutting down rankers as a blacksmith, but she too had been a pioneer in a realm no one else had touched.
She had analyzed the weaknesses of Necromancers in one-on-one combat, discovered the Cursed Necromancer path, and built her fame in PvP around it.
And she was the one who had beaten Kim Tae-hyun.
Of course, Choi Myung-sung refused to acknowledge that.
In his eyes, Kim Tae-hyun had been the real winner of that fight.
I can’t accept luck like that!
“Looks like Lee Se-yeon’s going to clear it all, huh?”
“Probably.”
“So she’s going to take Successor of the Necronomicon.”
Successor of the Necronomicon was the highest Legendary class in the Necromancer line.
A Legendary class with brutal conditions and an overwhelming volume of quests to clear.
But Lee Se-yeon was moving through it quickly, accompanied by the old guild members she had played with in Fantasy Online 1.
Choi Myung-sung and the rest of the staff knew that the Legendary class at the end was Successor of the Necronomicon, but Lee Se-yeon herself did not.
She was simply making judgments based on the information she’d gathered inside the game and pushing forward.
It took nerve—real nerve—and mental toughness to do that.
“Have the others given up on finding Legendary classes?”
“There are a few trying, but unless it’s Lee Se-yeon, the odds look really low. Most rankers seem happy settling for a Heroic class and leveling.”
Heroic classes were much easier to find than Legendary ones.
And Legendary classes were far too random in performance.
If someone busted themselves half to death chasing one, only to end up with a class worse than a Heroic class, they’d feel cheated beyond belief.
Because of that, not many people were willing to stake everything on Legendary classes.
“If Lee Se-yeon changes into Successor of the Necronomicon, won’t she dominate too hard?”
“Nah, I don’t think it’ll be that bad. Even if they’re not Legendary, there have already been a lot of really good Heroic classes discovered. Those players changed class before she did, so they’ve got a time advantage too. She won’t overtake them that easily.”
“Most rankers are around level 100 right now?”
“Want me to list the people who’ve already changed into Heroic classes? Do Dong-su, for one, has changed into Shadow Dancer.”
Shadow Dancer, a Heroic Rogue class, was an excellent class specialized in stealth and ambush.
“Do Dong-su? Oh. The guy who got wrecked by Kim Tae-hyun.”
But nobody remembered Do Dong-su as a ranker from Fantasy Online 1.
He was remembered as the very first Rogue player Kim Tae-hyun had crushed.
“Why are you telling me about him?”
“Huh? Do Dong-su’s still a pretty good player.”
“A close-combat Rogue specialized for one-on-one fights who lost to a blacksmith—what kind of—... Ah, what about Kim Tae-hyun?”
“There are too many Kim Tae-hyuns. That’s the problem.”
“You know which one I mean.”
Choi Myung-sung had been one of the people most thrilled when Kim Tae-hyun first appeared in Fantasy Online 1.
That unmistakable instinct. The exhilaration of watching him take a weak class to its absolute limit and use it to bring down stronger classes.
Of course he was curious what Kim Tae-hyun would be doing if he played Fantasy Online 2.
But Kim Tae-hyun hadn’t been seen at launch.
Kim Tae-hyun has logged in.
“Oh, Kim Tae-hyun logged in?”
“What?! Where?!”
He ran straight to the monitor.
A glowing point had appeared over the Salz Kingdom.
“Salz Kingdom? He started there?”
“He likes weird stuff.”
“That place was designed as a trap zone, wasn’t it? Why’d he pick there of all places? And there’s no Legendary class in that kingdom either, is there?”
“There’s the Heroic class Tyrum Ranger. Isn’t that an amazing class?”
Tyrum Ranger, a Heroic archer class, was one of the best-performing Heroic classes around.
“It is good. Kim Tae-hyun would do well even as a Tyrum Ranger. He’s got natural close-combat sense, and his aim is incredible. But honestly, I hope he doesn’t take it.”
“What? Why?”
“Because Tyrum Ranger is just... normally good. Maybe if he found a Legendary class, sure, but a Heroic class... that’s....”
While Team Leader Choi was checking Tae-hyun’s window from every angle, Yoon Ju-hwan noticed something and spoke up.
“Uh, Team Leader. Have you looked at Kim Tae-hyun’s screen?”
“His screen? Why? He’s still low-level, so there can’t be much to see.”
“Look at his stats. The stats.”
Choi Myung-sung’s mouth fell open.
“......”
“Guess it really does have to be Kim Tae-hyun....”
“This maniac put everything into Luck?! No, wait, something’s off. Even if he dumped every point into Luck, it shouldn’t be that high at his level. What is this?”
“Uh, right. Let me check... Ah. It’s the rabbits near Tyrum City.”
“Huh? What do the rabbits have to do with anything?”
The rabbits around Tyrum City had been scaled up along with the kingdom’s difficulty.
The place had been designed to make beginners cry.
Still, it wasn’t supposed to be literally impossible. Players just had to somehow reach level 10 and then move to another kingdom.
That had been the whole point of the place from the start.
If they felt confident enough to stay, then they could clear the local quests.
“We decided to give players a little compensation because Tyrum City’s difficulty was so high, remember?”
“Ah. Rabbit Foot?”
In exchange for the higher difficulty, players who started there were meant to get small benefits.
Rabbit Foot was one of them.
A stat-boosting item with a very low drop rate from rabbits.
At first, they had planned to make it increase important stats like Strength or Agility, but they’d quickly spotted the problem.
If they did that, players would flock to Tyrum City immediately.
Raising stats was difficult, and if players had even a chance to do it, they’d do anything.
Forget difficulty—high-level players would all come swarming in just to hunt rabbits, and the whole point of a starting village would disappear.
So they’d settled on Luck instead.
If it had a very low drop rate, and all it raised was a stat like Luck?
Players wouldn’t care much.
They’d just think of it as a minor perk and move on.
That was exactly what the dev team had intended.
“Yeah. Looks like that’s what raised it.”
“No, but how many of those could he possibly get? They barely drop at all.”
“Well... every time he levels up, he puts all his stat points into Luck, and then the Rabbit Foots raise Luck even more... so his Luck keeps going up, which also keeps raising the item drop rate....”
“......”
Choi Myung-sung’s mouth dropped open all over again.
What kind of nonsense was this?
Every level-up, he invested his points into Luck. Then Rabbit Foots raised Luck more, which raised the odds of more Rabbit Foots dropping. Then he used those Rabbit Foots to raise Luck again.
It was an infinite loop.
“Th-there’s a level restriction, isn’t there? You put one on it, right?”
To preserve balance, they had chosen Luck instead of Strength or Agility.
And they had also added one more safeguard.
Once a player passed a certain level, the item stopped dropping.
“We did, but back then we said, ‘How far could anyone possibly take this...?’ So we set the level cap at 100.”
“100?”
That meant Rabbit Foots would keep dropping all the way up until level 100.
“Ah, but come on. Once he hits, what, level 20 or 30, won’t he start moving to do quests? He didn’t start this game just to hunt rabbits forever.”
“That’s what an ordinary person would do.”
Choi Myung-sung swallowed.
“That guy is that Kim Tae-hyun.”
He knew exactly what kind of things Kim Tae-hyun had done to win as a blacksmith in Fantasy Online 1.
The results looked flashy, sure, but getting there had involved truly insane grinding and impossible stubbornness.
He was the kind of man who spent three straight months swinging a pickaxe in a mine for a single piece of metal.
The kind who ran errands for a blacksmith for half a year just to make a single trap.
And they expected a man like that to hit level 20 or 30 and get bored enough to leave?
Absolutely not.