Double Slash (SSS+)
What was the best way to survive in Farming World?
From where I stood, it was a healing sort of game—farming, estate management, resource grinding. New players picking it up for the first time almost always called it extreme survival instead, and they weren't wrong to. They didn't have a choice.
Come in from the kinds of games where a couple of clicks solve everything, never having touched a genre like this, and the volume of information you suddenly have to swallow multiplies by tens. Sometimes by hundreds.
Would they even look at the heap in front of the house and recognize resources? How were they supposed to clear all that trash? Once it was cleared, were they meant to keep any of it? The questions about what any of it was for never stopped. Most people, faced with something that wasn't useful this second, sold it or threw it out. Early chests had almost no slots, every new find was a different kind of resource, there was nowhere to put it, and dumping it on the ground looked like a mess. Tell yourself you'll gather it again later, when you actually need it, and the moment arrives you end up thinking, Wait—what was that thing? I swear I picked one up once, digging through a warehouse where it isn't, then failing to find another. That was the trap waiting for everyone.
Above all, the hunting in this game was genuinely difficult. Only I knew, now, that Farming World had been something like a test server for the Rift Dimension, and that the hunter system of reality and the game's hunting system were the same thing. That was precisely why players got to feel what it was like to become a hunter and take monsters down themselves. Anyone unused to fighting hit a wall there. No way around it.
The systems did soften the blow. Plenty of people played by planting skills around the farm and doing nothing but defend it, and even that wasn't as easy as it looked. Survival meant thrashing for every inch, and the most basic law among those struggles was simple. In Farming World, the first principle was this: never hoard your resources.
It isn't a rule that stops at Farming World. Pinch a thing long enough and it turns to shit. Whatever the resource, time rots its value, and in a game where materials arrive in stages, the first things you pull from the Level 0 Biome are worth the most in the exact moment you get them. Setting some aside against an uncertain future isn't stupid. But if spending them now makes you stronger, or pushes a tech tree up a tier, you don't hesitate.
Climb from an F-rank tool to an E-rank one and the difficulty of the Level 0 Biome collapses into something almost insulting. Farming stat points work the same way. Farming, mining, hunting—however you earn a level, the points that come with it should go into something useful as fast as you can spend them. Rush it and you might misallocate, or unlock a better ability the day after and eat the loss. Even so, before you commit to any real plan, the smart move is to dump the farming stats you've been sitting on, drag your specs up, and only then move.
That applied to me too. From the moment I started raising the rift-dimension farm, I had never once sat on farming stats for the sake of sitting on them. I did bank them ten points at a time, but only because ten was the minimum required to learn an SSS+ skill. Better to pool them for that than sprinkle them anywhere else. That was the judgment I'd made, and this time was no different.
The Corrupted Ogre was not a monster I could swat the way I'd swatted Big Rats' Mom or the goblings. Draining its mana wouldn't drop it in a hurry, either. My Strength, Agility, and Endurance all sat at S, which meant I had to assume the ogre's Endurance, at the very least, lived somewhere between S and S+. Preparation had to be solid.
Fortunately, there was nothing to agonize over. Of the SSS+ skills I could buy for ten points, only one remained.
Spent 10 Farming Points to purchase the skill Double Slash (SSS+)!
I bought it without a second thought. Another ten Farming Points, scraped together the hard way, vanished on the spot. A legacy the goblings had left me, technically.
"I'll put it to good use, kids."
◈ Mana Cost: 4
◈ For 10 seconds, an additional attack is applied to every attack.
◈ Additional attacks deal 200% bonus damage.
◈ 10% chance to inflict Bleed (SSS+) for 10 seconds. (Reduces vitality by 1% per second.)
Double Slash and Leap Slash were an obscene match. Calling the pair a combo skill wouldn't have been a stretch. Leap Slash scaled its number of cuts with Agility, and if I opened with Double Slash first, every one of those cuts carried the extra strike. The damage didn't rise. It ballooned.
"Percent-damage options are legendary-tier, aren't they?"
Among players, any option that shaved life force by a percentage got called legendary. The size of that percent mattered, sure, but the cut ignored defense entirely, and the efficiency was hard to argue with. Options existed that reduced even percentage damage, but they were miserable to obtain and only covered part of the effect, so they rarely saved you. Double Slash, totaled across its full ten seconds, came to a clean ten percent: a ten percent chance to carve away ten percent of a target's life.
The odds weren't high on a single swing. Pair it with Leap Slash, though, and I was landing ten hits in a blink, which made at least one bleed practically guaranteed.
"Absolutely busted."
If I had to name a flaw, the mana cost ran high for a melee-weapon skill. Firing Double Slash and Leap Slash together ate nine mana, and milking a buff that lasted only ten seconds meant cramming as many Leap Slashes as I could into that window. My pool was all but guaranteed to hit empty before the timer did.
A twenty percent reduction to mana cost was already riding on me, so I'd hoped it might take the edge off. It didn't. For the reduction to register at all, the amount shaved off had to be at least one, and twenty percent of Double Slash's cost was only 0.8. Four mana stayed four mana—a quirk of a system that refused to count decimals.
I'd thought bumping my total mana to eighty left me comfortably flush. Learning Double Slash made "comfortable" a generous word. Still, stronger was stronger.
"I can't sit on this."
I wanted to swing it at something. A single test against empty air was enough to drag a sound out of me.
Shk-shk-shk-shk-shk!
The number of swings didn't change. Five cuts of the sword, ripped through in the middle of a leap.
Whoom— whoom— whoom— whoom— whoom—
Then, laid over the path those cuts had already taken, something else tore open, as if the air itself were splitting.
Pat! Pat! Pat! Pat! Pat!
Nearly simultaneous. A tenth of a second, if that. I didn't have to swing twice. The extra strike burst on its own, in the exact place the first one had already cut.
That was the monstrous part. If the follow-up landed in the wound I'd opened and hit for three times the damage—if I put the same attack into one body five times, and all five extras landed with it—
"The ogre might make a very fine sandbag."
Only at this level did picking a fight with an S-rank ogre stop feeling like a joke. Tomorrow I'd head south and scout, and if a monster happened to cross my path, I'd put the skill through its paces while I was at it. Leap Slash had been clumsy the day I first got it. Catching big rats and goblings, burning it as a movement skill until the experience sank in, was what had smoothed it out. This combo would be the same. Use it enough, and I'd come to understand how to spend it efficiently, and whether I could make it feel natural.
A satisfying bit of shopping. A ten-point skill hit harder, dopamine-wise, than a department-store bracelet worth a few hundred thousand dollars.
"Ah!"
Lost in the skill store, I'd nearly forgotten.
"The house needs expanding, too."
The ten base points from clearing the gobling village still had to be spent. Not that the territory was waiting on me—measured from the hut, another ten points of range had already been added, and everything inside it now fell under the base's influence. If I wanted, Build Mode would let me reshape that territory into something else entirely. From there, the shape of the base decided the rest: stretch the house, shrink it, or raise something separate. Genuinely convenient.
Freely, of course, only if the materials were on hand. Luckily this map wasn't stingy with timber or building stock, not even this early. There was enough to work in comfort.
"Expand it. Now."
Raising a grand mansion is the kind of moment that demands an architect's agonizing. Stretching a little hut, it turned out, demanded a smaller agony of its own. I switched Build Mode on and started pushing the walls outward.