Crazy Zombie Human
In the Level 0 Biome, I was at least a zombie that didn't die. A Stamina grade of S granted a vitality that, short of actually having your head cut off, refused to let you die from anything ordinary. Hitting Stamina S took a mountain of points, of course, but an absurd SSS+-grade base ability was propping me up, so the rank was within reach. Even without armor, then, I mostly didn't have to worry about surprise attacks — not here, at least. That didn't make me invincible, so a measure of caution was still in order.
I had no idea how strong the Corrupted Ogre would be, but I had to treat it as an A-rank monster at the very least. Big Rat Mom had been B-, so if this thing was the final-boss tier of the Level 0 Biome, A-rank or A+ was the grade that actually fit. At that level, even Stamina S wasn't something I could afford to get careless with. I had to grow as much as I could before I faced it.
"Doping potions, packed."
The good news was that clearing a subquest handed out a generous pile of Farming stat points, and the levels I gained from hunting were nothing to dismiss either. Before I took the Corrupted Ogre on, I meant to roam the Level 0 Biome as thoroughly as I could, stockpile points, pick up skills and sub-abilities, and only then go in for the clear.
What mattered was speed. As fast as possible. A blitz. I had overwhelming power, so I needed to drive them hard enough that they never got the chance to answer. For that, I'd packed ten lesser recovery potions.
These were a follow-up brew, different from the mid-grade recovery potions Lee Jihyun had brought me — made from C+-grade Recovery Herb berries. The night before I left, I'd told her I wouldn't be back for a while, and she'd made them just in case, with a word to take care of myself.
The amount they restored fell short of the mid-grade, but 28 percent was still considerable, and above all they carried a mana-recovery increase of 5 percent. For me, that was what made them such excellent doping potions. Stack the Blue Wave I was wearing on top of that, and for ten minutes a recovery potion would push my mana recovery to 30 percent a minute — enough to charge into the middle of an enemy camp and still run wild.
The problem was that I didn't know where the Gobring village was. I'd asked Ruru for a rough location, but she didn't know everything about this map either. I could have pressed her — hadn't she covered the whole Level 0 Biome with the Previous Master? — but the map was too vast for that to mean much, and I'd already seen that her memories were sealed.
I could have walked her around and scraped the information together in scraps, the way her memories returned once she reached a certain distance. I meant to move fast, though, so I picked a direction and committed to it.
It was a mapping method I'd used all the time back in Farming World. Rather than circling a map that was pitch-black in every direction and peeling it a full three-sixty like an apple, you shot out in a straight line and confirmed where the biome ended. Do that, and relative to the distance you actually traveled, you got a pretty efficient read on how far the Level 0 Biome extended, where the boundary shifted, and what came next — what kind of biome, and what level.
That kind of exploration had been the original plan. Then an achievement quest popped up, and I'd switched to the apple-peeling route because of it. Now I was blending the two: push out only as far as the Level 0 Biome's edge, then spiral back in while I searched for Gobring territory.
The scenery whipped past. A hundred and fifty meters vanished under me in a blink, and the cabin fell away behind.
Heading east, I came on a river linked to the sewers. Fish darted through the clear water, and on the far bank of the fairly wide channel, Gobrings were bathing.
"Lucky!"
Wasn't this a little too lucky? My mood lifted. If my luck had been genuinely rotten, days of searching wouldn't have been the least bit strange.
Right now my mana came back to full every four minutes, and on that clock I was covering nearly three kilometers a cycle. Even after refilling it three times and traveling in a straight line, I still couldn't see the end of the Level 0 Biome. That meant the radius alone was over ten kilometers.
Finding the biome's edge wouldn't be hard. Filling in the whole circle off that radius until I found a Gobring village was another problem entirely. That was exactly why I'd steeled myself and set out to cover ground fast — and I'd found them on the first pass. How lucky could one person get?
"Ruru's got good instincts."
Of course, it was too early to conclude I'd found the village from this alone. Gobrings being here meant this was their territory; the village itself might still be a long search off. Even so, for someone who'd played Farming World as long as I had, finding a village once you'd spotted the Gobrings wasn't a particularly hard problem.
"Hmm."
First I had to cross the river. There was no chance of a bridge in land where no one lived, so I'd either swim or find a narrower stretch — but I had no idea when the Gobrings might leave, and they might spot me and bolt while I was in the water. The span was too wide to clear in a single bound, besides.
"Think it'll work?"
Fortunately, my mana had recovered. I decided to try a technique I'd only ever worked out in my head. If it flopped, it flopped — but I didn't think it would.
"Hoo."
Leap Slash
I hugged the bank as close as I could, and in a blink I was standing in the middle of the river. A single Leap Slash had jumped me 150 meters. More precisely, it felt like teleportation.
This next part was what mattered. I was hanging in open air, so I'd drop straight into the water. The river was wide and deep enough that once I fell in, the current would simply take me, and no matter how high my stamina and strength were, swimming alone wasn't going to get me out of that easily.
Tak!
Right as my feet were about to meet the water, I took that point of contact as a foothold and fired Leap Slash again.
Splash!
A faint hollow feeling came with it, nothing like solid ground underfoot, but the leap had gone through. That was what counted.
Every skill fired through mana once its conditions were met. Water, empty air, sky, earth, even the heart of a fire — it didn't matter.
Another leap ate the distance, and the Gobrings that had looked like specks far off drew sharply nearer. Once more. Once more. On the fourth Leap Slash, my feet finally hit the ground, and I cut three of them down.
"Kieeek!"
The strike had come out of nowhere, vicious and ghost-quick, and the Gobrings flew into blind panic. From where they stood, something had gone pop-pop-pop off the far bank and then sheared straight through them. Of course they were dumbfounded.
Six Gobrings had become three, and the survivors fled in a stumbling scramble. As a species, Gobrings sat closer to prey than predator — low-tier monsters. Living in the Level 0 Biome was already proof they were rock bottom, and they were what players hunted right after rats, so even in that company they were nearly last. There was even a saying that a Gobring couldn't win a one-on-one against a rat.
So three of them dying in a single instant didn't spark any rage at the ambush. It sparked terror, and they ran. Survival instinct came before any paltry, stupid notion of dragging their comrades' corpses home. That instinct was why they'd lived this long, and as I watched them scatter in every direction, I didn't bother chasing them down. I'd left some alive on purpose.
I picked one of the three and followed. It left the bank, slipped into the trees, wandered this way and that, and before long pushed into a fairly deep stretch of forest. Barricades stood there — crude, but stacked with a certain intention — and other Gobrings showed themselves.
"Bingo!"
Today was a lucky day. Chase a different one, and it would have looped around and come back to the village anyway.
I drew a lesser recovery potion. Sword in one hand. Potion in the other. Then I triggered Leap Slash and charged straight into the Gobring village.
"Kieeek! Intruder! Kieeek!"
Gobrings shrieked and made a racket, and others rushed in, scrambling to hit back. The gap in stats was far too wide for any of that to stop me.
"Hold him! It's a monster!"
I'd come crashing in from the front, so they lobbed spit at me from every side. With Leap Slash up, anything short of serious reflexes would have a hard time landing a hit — but my mana had its limits, and once I was standing still I couldn't dodge every attack coming in.
Watching my life plunge, I knocked the potion back at once.
Life surged back up, and my mana recovery climbed with it. From behind whatever cover I could find, I let their attacks glance off and put on a one-man musou.
This was fun.
Glug, glug. I was cracking a bottle and chugging it about once a minute, like some kind of potion junkie, but the Gobrings were thinning out just as fast.
Crazy zombie...
That was the whole of the Gobrings' last words.