Talent Freak
The clear goal for this 4-star dungeon was fifteen elves.
It wasn't a hard mission. The monster count wouldn't break twenty at the outside, and there didn't seem to be a boss anywhere in it. I'd worried that a village might mean an elder elf, or something a little special, but while there were elves loosing arrows, lifting swords, and slinging spells, none of them was outrageously strong.
Every moment was still dangerous. I'd just cleaned up three of them and was about to savor the win when I realized five minutes had already slipped past, and a second clash—this time against six elves—was already on me.
Twice the numbers did not mean twice the difficulty. Triple. No—four times, at the bare minimum. There was simply no way to dodge every attack pouring in from every side. And honestly, what dodging I managed wasn't some extraordinary gift for seeing a strike and slipping it. The elves lived in the forest too; the trees just got in the way.
The one small mercy was that more bodies also meant a better chance of landing a hit. They kept their spacing and held a formation, so the more of them there were, the less room each one had to move. With the magic control I'd only just learned, picking them off one by one got easier, and once I mixed in Fireball, the elves playing through the branches became a good deal simpler to handle.
Slam a Fireball into a tree and set it burning, and an elf has no choice but to bail for another. Throw a Fireball at that next tree ahead of time, and the instant they touch down, there's nowhere left to dodge an Ice Arrow.
In the end it became a race against the clock. Don't die to the attacks coming in from all sides, and you win. High-grade health potions did an enormous share of that winning.
The chat filled up with how much I'd spent and whether it was a loss. Money didn't so much as cross my mind.
"Long as it was fun."
Once nine of them were dead, cleaning out the elves left in the village was easy. If they were living as a village, not every elf was built for a fight. Three scouts, six combat elves. Most of what remained could barely manage a clumsy bit of self-defense, and to me—already a little used to magic control—they were very easy prey.
"Kehehe. Drop dead, every one of you!"
By the time the village looked so wrecked I started wondering if I'd done something wrong, the exit opened.
"Ha. This is seriously fun."
Someone had already tallied it.
4-Star Clear Time: 74 min 51 sec
The chat caught fire.
It isn't just 4-stars. Most dungeons are built as a single instanced map, each one humble, each one carrying a theme. A 1-star—a meadow where slimes bounce around—mostly feels like an open-field hunting ground. An elf village like this one, or an orc settlement, is a different story.
Try to take on a crowd of monsters all at once and the difficulty spikes so hard that users budget hours for a single dungeon, sometimes days. They camp inside. They scout. They raid. And plenty of times the monsters spot them first and raid them right back. That is what clearing a dungeon means.
The higher the grade, the wider the gap between you and the monsters, so the hunting only gets more careful. One at a time, if you can help it. Pull two, and most people run. You can drag in a huge party and steamroll the place with headcount, but the cut at the end shrinks whether you like it or not. The real money only shows up when an item drops, and there's no reason to swallow a loss like that while staring at a single drop that may never come.
"Clear one a day and I'll catch up in no time, yeah?"
Clearing the 4-star bumped me another two levels. Before I knew it I was level 7. Six stat points had piled up, and I slammed every one of them into magic power.
"Oh yeah. One more magic cycle."
Mana rose by thirty—enough to run one more cycle. No item had dropped among the dungeon loot, but I hauled the materials to the material shop, sold them off without haggling, and walked out with about three million won.
"Whoa. Three million a day, and that's about a million in real cash... run it the whole month and that's thirty million?"
A little over an hour. Count the time spent finding the dungeon and traveling, and on a heavy day I could probably clear four or five. Maybe pouring tens of billions into Haven Online—hundreds of billions—isn't even a loss.
I was still turning that over when the chat showed up to dump cold water on it.
"Ah, come on. Clearing through 4-star is enough. I really felt myself grow today. Right?"
"Huh? I did a ton."
"Seriously? Feels like I went fifty. Yaaawn. I'm wiped. I'll go live tomorrow."
The moment the tension let go, fatigue came flooding in. The clothes I'd sweated through inside the dungeon were uncomfortable, too. I ignored the viewers howling in chat, killed the stream, and headed for a nearby hotel.
"I'm telling you, this game is unreal."
It was my first time in a dungeon, so I'd never had the chance to feel something like sweat-soaked clothes. Now that I'd been and come back, I understood why people called it another reality. Wet clothes dry, but they don't vanish just because you walked them out of a dungeon. That unpleasantness stays soaked into them.
It was a lot like the army—summer, training outside all day, then that feeling when you got back in the evening. The sweat's already dry, but there's still the cling of cloth that stiffened as it dried, rubbing against your skin. A feeling you can't stand until you've rinsed it off in hot water.
That's why so many users in Haven go looking for a house. You can wash up and get your clothes laundered at a user bathhouse nearby, but for people who spend more hours in Haven than they do in real life, having a place of your own is simply easier. I found hotels easier, so that's where I went. No need for a suite. I took a reasonable deluxe room, showered, and got dressed.
"Would be nice if reality had conveniences like this."
They copy the uncomfortable parts of reality straight across so it feels real, then turn around and offer convenience for the tedious bits. Laundry costs money, of course, but Haven currency is worth about a third of real money, so it doesn't feel like much of a burden. Being able to put the clothes straight back on was a nice touch, too.
"Hup."
I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. It had been a long episode. I'd drawn my class, rolled the unique option up to three stars just to test it, picked up skills and items, and somewhere in the middle even taken the Dragon's Descendant quest. The shy little not-quite-date with Lim Sarang—the kind that still felt sweet when I thought about it alone—had been good, too. And to finish it off, dungeon hunting.
Thoroughly satisfying.
Haven Online. At the start I'd had one vague idea and nothing else: nothing to do, nowhere to spend the money, so I'd put my name on the masterpiece Windy had made. I'd gotten hooked.
"Let's hit the top. Just once. Haven."
And the drive burned hotter.
I slept like a rock, woke up, worked out for the first time in a while, crushed a sauna, and went to a restaurant to destroy a full course—only to find I was a controversy on the community boards.
"What. Why?"
Had spending too much money turned into a scandal? I opened it up. Posts of every kind, and comments piled on comments.
"What the hell."
Was this supposed to be hard? It hadn't been easy, exactly, but it hadn't been hard in any special way. If I had to file it somewhere, it was the annoying kind—the kind where you have to concentrate a little.
"Right?"
A few comments were thinking exactly what I was thinking.
"Huh. Maybe so."
Then I read the other side and found myself nodding. Probably because it put weight behind the idea that my control was actually good. A controversy, sure, but it felt great. Opinion split pretty cleanly, and still, plenty of people said they'd never seen a talent freak like this among the ones who spend.
"Perks of being young."
The food went down smooth. Confidence came with it.
"Before level 10, I should take a swing at a 5-star."
Praise made me want to dance.