S+ Agility
A single grade on a stat changes how it feels by an enormous margin. From A-rank upward, people even say one grade is the difference between being able to do a thing and not being able to do it at all.
I was proof enough. S-rank stats had me—someone who had never exercised a day in his life—putting out endurance and agility no untrained body had any right to. At first I hadn't even adapted, so I couldn't use them properly. Lately, though, I could feel it without a doubt: my body had become something superhuman.
And from there, my agility had climbed one grade higher still. From S to S+.
How wide a gap would that be? Would I even be able to feel it?
Agility was the stat that felt closest to dexterity in the game. The higher it ran, the more you could slip a fast incoming strike, block it, or simply move quicker than you had any business moving. So the "feel" of it was abstract. You could measure, physically, where a reaction was possible and where it wasn't—but I had never bothered to check with a machine, and honestly, even at S-rank, I hadn't known where my limit sat.
What was clear, though, was that the feeling itself had changed, enough to make my earlier doubt—would I even notice?—look foolish.
"Fast."
I could feel my body had grown lighter.
The Black Monkeys up in the trees were probably sneering at me. No matter how strong I was, even if I butchered them one by one in a single thorough blow, this was their territory. The countless tall, thick trees were the ground they had grown up on and lived their lives in. There's a saying that even a junkyard mutt is halfway to winning inside its own room—and these weren't mutts. They were A- rank monsters, on home ground.
More than a hundred Black Monkeys, swinging through the branches as they pleased, and the thought that they might lose was a joke. If it weren't me standing here but an A+ rank monster, or even an S- rank one, wouldn't they figure that here, at least, they could hold their own?
Of course, that arrogance only existed because they didn't know I was something worse than any of those: an SSS+ rank monster.
"Kieek!"
The moment my foot left the ground, I was already standing on a branch of a tree that had grown a full ten meters high.
"Get lost. This spot's mine."
The three Black Monkeys on the branch had their necks split halfway through and dropped straight to the forest floor.
They don't die in one hit? Then two will do it. I even had eight swings in a single exchange, which meant I could finish as many as four of them at once. A Black Monkey's build wouldn't let many of them crowd a branch, and only so many could latch onto me at a time—so for me, the conditions were actually ideal.
Hundreds of Black Monkeys? So long as my mana and stamina held out, it was only a matter of time.
"Kiki..."
I picked them off at an easy pace. Hopping from branch to branch didn't matter even when the gaps ran to dozens of meters. I would cut a few down, they would pinpoint me and race across the trees to reach me, and by the time they arrived I had already shifted, dropping the ones left behind in the stretch I'd vacated.
"Kiek. Kiek! Human! Coward!"
"Filthy human."
"He has to die."
Fight while buying time, and mana might as well be unlimited. Among the accessories I had gone out of my way to buy this time, I had added one with a mana option.
A Mana Stone Ring was a gem that dropped from dungeon monsters at a low rate, holding mana refined pure in proportion to the monster's rank, and it traded at an outrageous price. Mana already had uses everywhere, and this was that same mana worked into jewelry. Even a low-grade Mana Stone Ring was something hunters who burned through mana carried as a matter of course, the same way they carried a Glass Stone Ring.
The A-rank Mana Stone Ring I had bought was treated as nearly the same tier as a Glass Stone Ring. The Glass Stone Ring's options were better, since it came from the Rift Dimension, but I had paid nearly eleven billion won for this one, and it performed to match: maximum mana up 30 percent, and mana recovered per minute up an additional 10 percent.
"Kill him! Kill him!"
The Black Monkeys' frenzy only worsened as time went on. I could see their tempers boiling over. Their numbers were overwhelming, and from the outside I was one pathetic, frail-looking human who had walked into their territory and was cutting down their kin like a predator. If that didn't make them furious, nothing would.
They had to wipe me out.
It wasn't only rage. Fear buried in instinct mixed back into that instinct and drove them harder. If they failed to stop me here, they might go extinct. They had already watched dozens of their own hit the ground with heads and necks separated, and the knowledge that they could be next was a powerful spur.
They had a kind of confidence, too. Not once, so far, had a Black Monkey laid a hand on me.
Their greatest strength, and their greatest weakness, was that their base stats—strength, agility, endurance—were simply good. Black Monkeys didn't use weapons. A solid frame, quick movement, raw power: those were the weapons, and their advantage was crushing an opponent with force. You could call that a strength or a flaw. That the moments it was a strength outnumbered the moments it was a flaw was obvious just from how widely they had carved out territory and gone on living in the Level 2 Biome.
Right now, though, those strengths were turning into nothing but frail weak points. At least the Goblings had spat at me and landed a blind shot or two that cost me a recovery potion. These things were being beaten more helplessly than that.
To them, I was a natural enemy.
This wasn't a mob-against-mob brawl. I fought with overwhelming S+ agility and Leap Slash—an attack on the order of teleportation—chewing through physique and everything else while I kept the fight moving, and hundreds of them had no way to break that.
Not that there was no way. If they simply mobbed the way they were doing now and piled on, it was a simple problem with a simple fix. That only worked, though, when their advantage—high base stats—actually landed on me.
"Ki... scary human..."
The reason the Black Monkeys didn't flee, and kept fighting even unto death, was that they were predators. There was nowhere here to retreat. Once you abandoned your territory and started dropping into a lower-level biome, there was no end to it—and if they went down a biome, their strength would weaken with them as a matter of course. A natural ecosystem clearly held in this place, but if you thought about the systems of the Farming World, a biome was assigned its level precisely because that was the level of what lived there.
A fierce clash that neither I nor the Black Monkeys could back down from.
I was fighting it as something half experimental, but it was fierce enough in its own way.
If I land all eight cuts at once, does even more damage go in?
Hitting the same spot again dealt bonus damage. It was subtle, but Farming World had that setting. A wounded place was a weak point, so the logic was sound enough—which was why I always cut the exact same spot.
The moment I realized this wasn't merely a game mechanic unique to Farming World was the test, back in reality, against Team Leader Kim Jinhyeop of the Hunter Association. The shield that shattered to pieces the instant I broke it at a single point gave my theory weight. Of course, you could also argue it had simply taken more than a certain amount of damage at once and broken for that reason. So I kept experimenting until I was sure. Conveniently, the Black Monkeys were sturdy enough, and spread out in all sorts of ways.
Around the time the day darkened, I finished the cleanup—half venting, half sweeping—and headed back.
"See you tomorrow."
Had I taken about a hundred? I had been killing them a few at a time, so the numbers hadn't thinned as much as I might have expected. If I set my mind to it the way I had with the Goblings, I could wring my mana to the limit and slaughter every last one. I hadn't, because I needed to fill the empty slave slots.
The moment I saw the Black Monkeys, those vacant slots came to mind. Slave or NPC, packing every permitted space to the brim and working it was what made a farm run well. If I could, I would have expanded the slave slots first—but well-statted slaves had walked in on their own two feet, and I couldn't just kill them all on a whim.
And it wasn't as if I could stroll up, tell a Black Monkey to be my slave, and hear yes, Master in reply. I had to brand thorough terror into them.
The Goblings had accepted slavery more easily than I expected because they were the lowest monsters of the Level 0 Biome. They yielded quickly to a fear already carved into their bones. Black Monkeys were monsters of the Level 2 Biome. An overwhelming existence they had no hope of opposing—they had to recognize that, and accept it, before I could use them as slaves. So even if it took a little time, I was etching it in slowly.
There was something else I wanted to test, too.
Slave slots are limited, but if I only keep the ones who can control the rest as slaves, could I put the ones beneath them to work through those?
They had intelligence, and they lived as a pack. Maybe it would work. The experiment had come out of that thought.