Sword God Kim Suhyun
Farming World is a farm-management simulation. You take a vast, untouched expanse stuffed with resources and cultivate it from your bare hands, pushing civilization forward until a cramped little hut has grown into a kingdom of your own—and from there, all the way into running a city.
That is why the place is full of NPCs, each with its own AI and its own interesting side quests and stories. It is also why more than half the players never adventure at all and simply enjoy managing the farm. Anyone who actually wants adventure, exploration, and monster hunting has no reason to come here in the first place. RPGs, MOBAs, FPSes—there are plenty of genres, each with its own appeal.
Which is why the combat abilities in Farming World are nothing excessive. Most of them are auxiliary skills for hunting monsters efficiently. A player who is clumsy in a fight triggers an active skill, it piles on extra damage, corrects their movements, and swings for them. That is what the majority of the skills amount to.
Of course, once you climb to something like SS+ Rank, you can use techniques that belong in a martial-arts novel—Telekinesis Flying Swords and the like. But by the time your progress has gotten that far, you are not really on the farm-management side of things anymore. You are launching spaceships, importing something that looks like modern civilization, driving cars around Farming World, dressing the place up like a city of the future. Any sense that it does not belong has long since worn off.
So putting on a flashy fight in the early game is no easy thing. The combat patterns themselves are monotonous, which is exactly why I take it as a matter of course that holding Master of Melee Weapons means nothing more glamorous than dodge, stab, and cut. This is simply how you hunt in the early stretches of Farming World. Roll, tumble, go for the vitals. Fierce rather than flashy.
My stats are overwhelming enough that I am still killing them one-sidedly, but monsters this big and this tough are not something you drop in a single blow just because you happen to be holding a decent weapon. That is probably why it feels even better.
"Crazy..."
Do you know that thrill—the one that hits when something you only pictured in your head becomes real?
This time I did not fire Leap Slash in a straight line. I cut a diagonal through the Big Rats standing in my path and sheared through every one of them as I blew past. So long as I stayed inside that hundred-meter limit, I could arc, I could yank a U-turn—however I moved was fine. That was what made it possible.
If there was anything to regret, it was that I could only kill five of them in a single pass. A few more Leap Slashes took care of that soon enough. In a blink, fifty-one Big Rats became thirty-three.
"Whoa... Master... you're so strong."
"Comes with being master of the Rift Dimension."
Even Ruru was looking at me like she had fallen for that swagger-soaked Leap Slash.
Yeah. The previous master probably never managed to show her anything worth seeing. He would have spent the early days wheezing and dragging himself around, and here I was flying from the very start. Of course I looked different. Then again, I had never actually hunted like this in the early game either, so even as I shrugged it off I was buzzing.
This was fun. Hunting was fun.
"Told you it isn't the mode that's the problem."
Coming here, I felt like I finally understood the players who drop the difficulty and just play. This was not some illegal difficulty hack, and it was not a cheat mode that guts the fun of the game. I was following rules this map had laid down, not ones I had chosen—and because I alone had grown strong enough to break the balance, I was having an even bigger time of it.
There was no reason to feel uneasy about the lack of armor. The Big Rats could not keep up with me in the first place.
"Die!"
Hunting Big Rats did not even rise to the level of tension. The moment one showed itself, I put it down while cringily reciting some anime technique I had seen somewhere. And so exploring this foul-smelling, lightless sewer dungeon stopped being a minefield packed with danger and turned into a plain old maze game about finding the path.
"Ugh. It's way too big, Master."
"I'll hold the torch. Head straight down the right and see if there's anything."
"Eh? By myself?"
"If you spot a Big Rat mom, scream. I'll be right there. You saw, right? I'm fast as hell."
"..."
"Earlier you slipped snacks into my backpack on the sly, didn't you? Saving them to eat alone tonight?"
"I'll be right back!"
Had my little performance stirred even a scrap of duty in Ruru—the feeling that she ought to be doing something too? It was half coercion, granted, but she beat her short wings and set off from the fork to scout exactly as I had told her.
She was back almost at once.
"Kyaaa! Master! Over here, there's a really... a really huge rat!"
From Ruru's point of view, every rat was huge. A Big Rat was already two or three times my size; for her, that hardly needed saying. Still, we had to have seen thirty or forty Big Rats since entering the sewer, and if she was making this much of a fuss, it was probably the one I was looking for.
"Let's go."
I had been wondering how she had managed to come back without something chasing her the whole way, and then three or four Big Rats came barreling in behind her. I drew the wooden sword and met them with Leap Slash exactly as they came, cleaving the lot in half.
Taking only the head is just to make butchering easier. When I want something more dramatic—especially the look of splitting a space clean open and blowing straight through it—cutting the torso in two is far cooler. I also travel far enough on the pass that the blood spraying off the bisection never touches me.
We reached the spot Ruru had scouted. The end of the sewer. A vast, open chamber, and at the far side of it something like an enormous hole, stopped up with trash, branches, and whatever else had been shoved into the gap.
"A water outlet."
Later, once the sewer was hit with Purify, clean water would pour in through here and open a way out. And Big Rat Mom was waiting in that chamber.
"It's too big...!"
Ruru blurted it in a voice pinched so tight the words could have been taken the wrong way.
"Say what's big. That sounds weird."
"How are you supposed to catch something like that...?"
"Don't chicken out. It's all size."
Calling it all size was generous. A B- rank was practically a calamity in the Level 0 Biome. To me, though, it was nothing but a cute balloon-muscled rat.
"It is big, though..."
Of course, I had to crane my neck until it hurt just to meet its eyes, and beside it the other Big Rats looked like ordinary rats again. Those glinting eyes and the bluish light burning in them were eerie enough to raise the hair on my arms, and the two enormous incisors looked hard enough to crunch stone. Worst of all was the gray fur. Disgusting.
"Ugh. It's gross."
Bulk is a kind of power that does not change. I was not killing that thing in one hit.
Splash. Splash.
And for a body that size, Big Rat Mom came charging at a speed that did not match it at all.
"Kya!"
Ruru ducked behind me. I triggered Leap Slash the way I had been doing and swung the wooden sword. This time I left the swagger out of it and, as I passed, cut one precise spot five times.
The passive lifted my attack power by 1,000 percent. Leap Slash added another 100, and strikes at 1,100 percent landed five times in an instant.
Kiiiiiii—
Big Rat Mom thrashed in pain. However huge it was, however much a B- rank, it had picked the wrong opponent. The sole proof that it truly deserved the rank was that my attack had not killed it outright. And that was all the proof it was going to get.
I had only about twenty mana left, but that was plenty.
Kekekekek!
Thud!
Spitting childish, brain-dead nonsense while stabbing the same spot twenty times—if that is not the height of cool, what is? Apparently I still have a bad case of eighth-grade syndrome. Well. So long as the meat tastes good, what does it matter?
Quest Complete!
The D-rank dungeon fell as fast as the time it had taken me to sprint this far. The reward came in.
Rumble, rumble—
The mountain of trash plugging the hole melted away, and clear water came pouring through. Standing atop the corpse of the enormous Big Rat Mom, I watched it rise until it nearly covered my ankles. A first-timer might have panicked. For me, it was just one early game among countless others.
And when you clear a dungeon, there are things you have to do first.
"Butchering can wait. I need the chest past that hole opened first, so go see where it is."
A dungeon reward—not the same thing as a quest-completion reward. This was the prize waiting inside the dungeon itself, claimed only on a clear. They usually took the form of a chest, and in an ordinary F-rank sewer there had never been anything worth expecting. If your luck was good, maybe some early farming tool that was hard to come by and actually useful. Still, this was a D-rank dungeon. Surely I was allowed to hope for a little more.
While Ruru buzzed off into the air, I split the thick hide along Big Rat Mom's back. The other rats could be butchered later, but this one—treated, in its way, as the boss of the dungeon—needed its belly opened right away. I was not sure whether something like this was guaranteed to respawn here, but in the original dungeons a boss appearing at all was a matter of probability. They showed up rarely enough that taking down a boss with real difficulty dropped surprisingly good items more often than not.
"There we go."
The moment I opened the belly and Butchered it, meat far finer-looking and far more plentiful than ordinary Big Rat meat came out already wrapped and bobbed on the water, and more hide came with it. Beside all of that appeared a pair of gloves and a single crude dagger—things I had to wonder could really have come out of this damn rat.
"Master! There's a chest here!"
Items, and a dungeon reward on top of them. For the payoff of a torn-up vegetable patch in the front yard, it was more than enough. It overflowed.