Chapter 20: Forums
Arthur looked around the kitchen before taking a seat opposite his grandfather.
Normally, he would’ve gone through the same routine he did every morning: flip the restaurant’s sign, check the register, clean the tables, and go through the logs.
But not today.
Instead, he just turned to his grandfather and said,
"Good morning, Grandpa. How did you sleep?"
Luke gave him a glance over his mug and shook his head with a smile.
"Well enough, kiddo. Don’t start worrying about me before breakfast."
Arthur frowned a little, but Luke had already pushed the toast rack toward him.
"Eat something before you head out. ...Are you going to Leonard’s?"
Arthur hesitated for a moment before he shook his head. "No. Not today."
Luke raised an eyebrow. "You are not going to school?"
Arthur pulled a slice of toast from the rack and nodded.
"Campus is probably gonna be closed for a bit. Even if it’s not, I don’t think anyone else is showing up today. Most likely, none of the other students or even the professors will have time for lectures."
Luke’s brow twitched as realization seemed to dawn on him. His grandson was probably right. With the threat of death looming over people’s heads, pretty much every single person on the planet should be focusing on the same thing: Zenith.
In the end, the old man let out a sigh and muttered in a low voice,
"I guess this place is gonna be empty too."
Arthur got up and patted his grandfather’s shoulder as he said,
"Don’t worry. Just give it some time and people will start flocking in again soon."
Luke looked at his grandson, and slowly, his expression broke into a smile.
"Flocking in, huh? You make it sound like they’ve been lining up outside for my soup all these years."
Arthur grinned.
"They would if you stopped glaring at anyone who asks for extra salt."
Luke let out a quiet huff. It wasn’t quite a laugh, but it was close enough.
"Brat," he said, reaching for his coffee again. "Eat your toast before it gets cold."
Arthur smiled, grabbed a piece of toast, and slipped into the hallway, already fishing out his phone.
Finally, the kitchen felt normal again.
..
First things first, he checked his messages.
Leonard had sent him two while he was asleep.
[Yo. You alive?]
[Call me when you wake up.]
Arthur tapped ’Call’ and put it on speaker.
To his surprise, Leonard picked up almost instantly.
"Hey! Tell me you tried the game yesterday!"
"Good morning to you, too, buddy," Arthur answered back. Honestly, he was a little relieved to hear Leonard was alright.
Leonard paused, and Arthur could practically feel the imaginary middle finger his best friend gave him before he continued,
"Bro, I’m telling you, this thing is rigged. I’m an enchanter! A damn enchanter! Why would I, the best rogue in all of WoW, ever play the damn ’portable buff’ class? Do you know how useless this shitty class is?"
Leonard was basically half-shouting, half-crying as he went on,
"Fuck me. I don’t even have a single spell, you know. I’m like those useless mages and healers who beg to get carried."
Arthur cringed as he listened to his friend’s rant. In reality, he knew exactly what Leonard was going through. After all, he was one of those ’useless mages’ Leonard was talking about, and had gone through the same thing he had yesterday.
After pausing for a moment, Leonard continued, this time a bit calmer than before,
"Luckily, I found a group of people and we’ve been hunting together since yesterday. It took me the whole day, but I finally hit level 2. That’s what I wanted to tell you about. If you find a group to hunt with, you can hunt so much faster! Ah, right! I almost forgot. Art, what class did you get?"
Arthur didn’t bother hiding it.
"Mage." he said. And when the word ’mage’ left his mouth, he could hear a long, sympathetic exhale on the other end of the line.
"...I see." Leonard muttered.
Still, Leonard’s silence only lasted for the briefest of moments before he quickly continued,
"Still, don’t worry about it. There should definitely be some groups that will be willing to take you in. No matter what you do, just don’t go to the mines! It’s not worth it!"
Leonard paused again, as if thinking seriously about something and then added in,
"Actually, you wanna try meeting up? Honestly, I’m not sure if we’re even in the same city, but we can give it a shot. If we are, I’ll introduce you to the guys I’ve been farming with. Trust me, they won’t have a problem adding one extra member."
Arthur thought for a moment before nodding.
"Sure. Let’s try meeting in the city first. I also made a friend yesterday. Maybe we can all hunt together."
Leonard hesitated for a second before agreeing.
"Alright. I’ll try to convince the leader to add another person. It shouldn’t be too hard, I think. So let’s meet by the city gates in about an hour?"
"Yeah, sounds good to me," Arthur said.
That was about the same time he’d promised to meet up with John, so it worked out perfectly.
Judging by John’s friendly and easy-going personality, Arthur doubted the big guy would object to an extra person joining their party, either.
Their call ended with a soft click, and Arthur glanced at his grandfather in the kitchen who was still sipping his coffee, before letting out a breath.
He was ready to dive back into Zenith. But before that, there was one last thing he wanted to do. It was to check what the rest of the world was doing.
Arthur didn’t doubt that there would be some people who’d spent the entire night playing while he was asleep. He didn’t know what level those people had reached, but some of them should be nearing level 10, probably, if not already there.
So Arthur opened his browser and headed straight for the world’s most popular forum site, Reddit.
The top post was pinned with more than a hundred thousand upvotes, even though it had been posted less than an hour ago. The title alone pulled him in.
"There’s a massive obelisk in the city center."
Arthur tapped it.
The poster claimed to have found a massive black structure at the heart of the city, easily dwarfing most of the other buildings around it. They’d tried to approach it with their group, but they couldn’t get within ten meters of it before a squad of city guards rushed in to stop them.
Apparently, according to the guards, no one was allowed to approach the obelisk until they reached level 10.
The comments below were already flooded with dozens of speculative comments. Some people thought the obelisk was a dungeon entrance, others claimed it was some kind of portal, and a few insisted it was an event hub. Arthur didn’t know which was more likely, but the ’level 10’ requirement stuck in his head.
The second most upvoted thread had a title that was impossible to ignore.
"I found a skillbook."
Arthur felt his heartbeat quicken.
"A skillbook?" He clicked on the post almost immediately.
The author explained they’d killed a level 6 monster called ’Iron Boar’ in the mountain range located right past the goblin forest, and it had dropped a skillbook called [Roar]. According to the skillbook’s description, it was supposedly a Warrior skill that ’attracted enemies in an area around the caster and removed all debuffs of the same level as the skill’, but the poster, who was also a Warrior, couldn’t use it for some reason. They’d tried everything they could think of, but despite successfully ’absorbing’ the skillbook and seeing the skill appear in their status window, they still couldn’t activate it.
The comments below were full of theories, too: from hidden stat requirements and unannounced subclass systems, to simpler theories that maybe the Original Poster (OP) just didn’t have enough mana to use the skill.
Arthur lingered on that post for a few seconds longer. He wasn’t really intrigued by the ’Roar’ skill, but rather the existence of skillbooks in general. At the very least, he now had confirmation on how to obtain skills for his ’Mage’ class. He assumed those with the ’Enchanter’ and ’Healer’ classes were also elated to see this post.
In the end, he moved to the third thread. This one had a much simpler title.
"I killed a slime."
Arthur tapped it out of curiosity.
The post described how the OP, some person called Zook_51, had used flint and dried grass to light a makeshift torch, then stabbed the fire into a slime until it finally died. It had taken nearly ten minutes, but they’d earned 10 EXP and even a rare title called [Innovator].
Arthur raised an eyebrow. He’d tried fighting a slime, too, only for the creature to start corroding his [Goblin’s Fang]. Had he been a bit slower to react, he’d probably have lost his weapon during the fight, too.
But according to Zook, it seemed the creatures were weak to fire, at least.
Well, he wasn’t really planning to spend ten minutes burning a slime down, but it was good to know those things weren’t completely unbeatable. Honestly, Arthur had started to suspect slimes were a type of ’trap monster’, so getting confirmation that they could at least be killed wasn’t bad. He was sure some of the enchanters, healers, and mages out there would start using this tactic to level up safely, instead of risking their lives to fight goblins outright.
The fourth thread... was the most peculiar one of all. It had the highest number of downvotes but also the most comments out of all.
"Buying elemental stones."
Arthur clicked it open. The post itself was very simple: if anyone had elemental stones they didn’t need or were willing to part with, the OP would pay them $100 USD per stone. Real-world cash. It included a phone number and an e-mail, but nothing else. Location didn’t matter either, apparently.
The comments below... as expected, were a battlefield.
Half the replies mocked the OP, calling them insane, a scammer, or delusional, pointing out that nobody would be stupid enough to sell stones when the game had just started. After all, there was only a month until it was time to pay tribute. The other half, however, seemed tempted, doing the math out loud and openly debating if a quick payout now might be worth the risk for some people.
Even Arthur thought those people were insane. Still, despite the offer being absurd... he understood why it would turn heads. A hundred dollars per elemental stone was a staggering amount. The OP must be someone disgustingly rich; there was no other explanation.
In the end, Arthur locked his phone and set it aside. It was time to log back into Zenith and meet up with John, and hopefully, Leonard.
