Chapter Text
Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.
Discord: A3dTszc
(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)
Out of curiosity, Kirito talked to the quest NPC again, as sometimes, they would offer post-quest rewards or other useful information.
This particular NPC did actually do that.
He gave out larger and larger Nepenthe slaying contracts, and if the player he gave them to completed them, he'd give an experience reward and he'd upgrade the Ring of Acid.
Which actually made Kirito a bit excited.
The NPC handed him the next contract, and it was for 5,000 Nepenthes. But it reset to zero, as Kirito had killed that many a long time ago.
So, he handed the empty sheet back.
And he gained a fifth of a level from that one contract alone. That was a massive chunk of experience.
The ring had also been upgraded to an Enchanted Ring of Acid. Granting it a slight increase in its STR and AGI stat boosts, and also giving it the ability to hold multiple charges at once.
It had started out with the ability to only hold a single charge, but now he could stack them by applying that giant Nepenthe's acid to the ring, while it already had charges stored up on it.
Kirito talked to the man again.
20,000 this time.
Which again, he had killed. Though admittedly, the numbers on those contracts were starting to get out of hand. Even for him.
Now he was almost two thirds of the way to the next level, after getting that xp drop. Another huge chunk of xp, which blew his previous expectations of where his level would be at by the end of the floor right out of the water.
There was a good chance he'd make it to level 17 now. It was 18 that was looking unlikely.
His new ring was also turned into an Imbued Enchanted Ring of Acid. Which again, despite the overly cliched name, increased its stat boosts a significant amount.
But it made him wonder. What was next? The 'Supreme Imbued Enchanted Ring of Acid?' How many more fancy descriptors were going to be tacked onto the thing by the end?
'I guess I'll just have to wait and see…' Kirito thought to himself.
He wouldn't be surprised if his ring was currently the best ring in the entire game.
Those stat boosts were incredible for a ring.
It was actually the best ring he had ever seen, now. Even in all his time in the beta. Even out of all the rings he had seen on the higher floors. Granted, he hadn't seen too many rings in that time, but it provided something like a five percent dps increase just with those stat increases alone.
Was there going to be more of them? More upgrades?
Kirito talked to the man again.
This time, 100,000 Nepenthes. And Kirito was pretty sure that he didn't have that yet.
Sure enough, when Kirito grabbed the card, it switched from 100,000, to around 80,000. Which meant that he had killed just over 45,000 Nepenthes in his entire time in the game so far.
The contracts were cumulative after all. Meaning that the 100,000 he had just been assigned did not include the kills that had been counted for his previous contract of 20,000.
So when it had dropped to 80,000, to calculate his total kills in the game so far, he took that 20,000 difference, and added it to the 20,000 of his previous contract, and the 5,000 of the one before that, etc.
Which technically gave him somewhere around 46,000 kills, if his math was right.
And he had 80,000 left to kill in order to get whatever the next upgrade was. It was also the last upgrade. So whatever it was, it was probably incredibly useful.
46,000 kills, though. Technically just over that, but still. That number simply blew his mind. That was a lot of Nepenthes that he had killed. If his math was right, that averaged to just over 3,000 per day… though that average was skewed severely. There's no way he would have gotten that many kills per day during his first few days out here, but he could easily see himself getting that many post-escape-velocity. And recently, he had probably had days where he had killed over 10,000 of them, after he had gotten fast enough to kill them all before they could pool up.
But now that he really started reflecting on his time in the game so far, if he was being honest... he was getting pretty sick of these Nepenthes.
A hundred thousand Nepenthes was a lot of Nepenthes to kill, just to get a ring upgrade. And he still wasn't even halfway there. Still 80,000 more to go.
He was debating whether he should just grind it out.
But that would severely delay his Hiding training, he realized. And he really needed that cursor hiding ability if he ever wanted to check in on the rest of the players and see if they were close to the boss room yet.
He needed that Hiding ability first, he finally decided.
And that decision came with some relief. He really hadn't noticed how much he wanted to take a break from endlessly grinding on these Nepenthes.
He needed to get that Hiding ability, he needed to check in on the rest of the players with it, and then he needed to get that final ring upgrade.
He also needed to pick his next skill slot.
He was pretty sure he knew what he would pick next, too. It had always been down to either Blacksmithing or Mixing.
The first one would allow him to repair his weapons, and the second would allow him to make his own health potions, poisons, antidotes, and paralysis cures.
And that one was the one he was leaning towards the most at the moment. Mixing.
It was another avenue that other players could take to try to kill him. He had no other means of getting potions other than by making his own or by getting them as drops.
And since getting anti-poisons and the like was all RNG based if he were trying to farm them from monsters, he couldn't expect to get very many that way. He didn't even know which monsters he needed to grind on to get those, either.
He had gotten a few in his training so far, but not very many at all. He'd only received a few, which led him to believe that they were actually on one of the rare drop tables, not one of the lower tiered common ones.
Which meant that he couldn't cure himself if he were ever poisoned unless he could start making them himself.
They just didn't drop from Nepenthes often enough to be reliable.
If he were ever poisoned, that could be it, as he was now. That could kill him easily. He'd have to enter a safezone to save himself if he didn't happen to have the antidote, and people would see him when he did.
If he made it into a city while poisoned, he wouldn't take damage anymore, since players couldn't take any, there. So even if he had been afflicted with an unbelievably strong poison and didn't have the cure, it wouldn't actually damage him there and he could just wait while the poison timer ran out.
But the only city he could make it to quickly was the Town of Beginnings, the only one with a teleport gate on the first floor. Cities with teleport gates were the only places he could get to with a teleport crystal. And all cities with teleport gates had guards in them. Which obviously posed a problem...
To avoid finding himself in that sort of situation, he had to make sure that he had a method to counteract all types of poisons on his own in the future. And having a highly levelled Mixing skill was potentially his only way to do that reliably.
The skill also had an edge over Blacksmithing because he also had a method to power level it, and-
Okay, he was definitely picking Mixing.
A game changing realization had just suddenly struck him.
Mixing was leveled solely by manipulation of the menu. Which could be done while he was using Hide.
Instead of doing nothing while he was grinding out his Hiding skill, he could power level his Mixing skill at the same time.
It was perfect. And while he didn't know a lot about what the Mixing skill could do himself just yet, he did know someone that did have that information.
Argo.
Kirito winced internally.
She knew everything about the skill that he didn't.
She was also the one person he truly hoped to never meet again in person. She would probably murder him right on the spot.
They had met in the beta test, and she had become a good friend of his. She was a very good info broker and had the answers to basically everything... for the right price.
On the first day of the game she had tried to add him as a friend.
Friend requests could be sent to anyone in the game, no matter if they were standing in front of you or not. All you had to know was the username of the player you were trying to add, and you could send a request from anywhere in the game. And since they had known each other from before, they had known each other's usernames at the time.
Problem was, he had been orange when he had received her friend request. And friends could see the cursor colours of each other right next to their names on the friends interface.
If he had accepted her request, she would have found out about his cursor colour, and that would have opened up a conversation that he really didn't want to have with her.
'So, Ki-bou, why's your cursor orange?' She would ask.
'Oh, that's because I murdered a green player, of course. It's no big deal.'
So, as much as he wanted to talk to her again, he really didn't want to talk to her again.
Part of him truly wanted to believe that she would understand his situation if he simply told her the truth.
But another part of him recognized a simple fact of all the MMOs he had ever played.
Friends online were not actually friends. You could not truly trust them with anything important.
And Argo was like this as well. The stakes were real now, and people were dying.
You could have deep conversations with them on a lot of things, and could sometimes even connect with them on a far deeper level than anyone in the real world could, because there was that barrier of anonymity that allowed anyone to simply walk away from any interaction at any time.
There were no repercussions for saying whatever you wanted to.
You were safe in the knowledge that if you gave out your darkest secrets, they could never be traced back to you as long as you left out any personal details, and you could seek advice and other opinions on topics that you could never bring up in a real world face to face interaction.
But the moment that anonymity barrier was gone... suddenly, all these things became traceable. Everything he now said to Argo could be pinned on him and it made him feel incredibly exposed.
He had a face now, and so did she.
But more importantly, it was all real. People were dying now, and Kirito didn't know what his relationship to Argo had even been in the first place. They talked to each other a lot, sure, but how many times had he heard her say 'I'll sell anything for the right price?'
Well… his cursor colour was a thing. What if someone wanted to buy a list of known orange players from her?
The truth was, that Kirito simply had never understood where he stood with Argo. Was she his friend, or did she see him more as a frequent customer? He had considered her a friend... but did she think the same of him?
She was an info dealer. Which meant that, for all he knew, she could have met him back then and 'befriended' him for the sole purpose of trying to get him to give up something incriminating about himself that she could then sell.
Kirito had been a popular player back then. There were around a dozen of them in total that had been really well known for a variety of reasons. He and a few others were known for their in-game feats of skill, usually involving soloing a particularly challenging monster or boss.
He had been one of the usual winners of the races that all the best players had always found themselves in whenever a new boss or challenge opened up. They would all compete to see who could take it down first, and the winner would have their name spread around.
He almost always won those races himself, and that's why his username had made that list.
Others were known for being famous guild leaders, or just for being a popular public icon. There had even been a few well known livestreamers who, with Kayaba's permission, recorded their experiences in 3D video format and uploaded it for anyone with an internet connection to see.
Free advertisements for the game and all that...
But that handful of players that found themselves in the public eye, whether they wanted it or not, became mini-celebrities.
Now, he wasn't a fan of the spotlight himself, and as a result, he would avoid interaction with others as much as possible, fans included. This caused people to view him as some kind of mysterious figure that would only show up when an important battle was taking place or when something important was happening, and as a result, a lot of people tried to get to know him even more than usual because he was never around.
It all resulted in his name being very well known, despite the fact that almost nobody knew what his avatar looked like.
So when he put himself in Argo's place, and tried to think the way she would, he was able to see what an opportunity that would provide.
Befriend the mysterious Kirito who is never around, and get him to give up something incriminating. People would pay top dollar for something like that.
There was a market for that in the game, just as there was in the real world surrounding celebrities.
And she had commonly threatened him with that back then. It had probably been in jest, but sometimes, whenever she wanted things her way, she would subtly threaten that she would sell some of his secrets if he didn't comply with whatever ridiculous demand she gave out this time.
But this was serious now. He was orange, and he had killed someone. Those secrets could be pinned on him, on Kazuto Kirigaya, after all of this was over, and he didn't truly know what Argo would do with them if she knew.
He just wanted to get out of this game. That was all.
He didn't care about making friends, or about keeping secrets, or even about being lonely, if he could just get out at the end.
He had had a lot of fun with Argo, and Kirito really wanted to believe that he could trust her, but bringing up something like that was a needless risk.
There was a chance, a non-zero probability, that she would rat him out. The odds were probably incredibly small, but he couldn't call them negligible given what he knew about her.
Simply adding her as a friend was potentially life threatening.
So while some part of him would regret not getting to know her again, he had to do what was logical. Not what felt right. And the logical thing to do if he wanted to get out was to reduce the odds of anyone ever finding him by as much as possible and to find ways to help clear the game from the shadows.
He was so thankful that you could only send private messages to people on your friends list. Otherwise, he'd imagine that she would have tried to chew him out for ignoring her requests.
She was… vicious like that. Vicious and pushy.
And he could see a little bit of that in her steadfast determination to get him to accept her requests.
When he hadn't immediately added her back then, she had revoked her request... only to send it again a few moments later, just to ensure that the standard bell-like ding that rung out whenever a player received a friend request had in fact been heard by him.
And when he had ignored that too, she had spent the next ten minutes or so, stubbornly forcing his interface to ding endlessly, as she repeatedly sent him request after request to add her as a friend.
Argo would like to add you as a friend! Would you like to accept?
Yes / No
...
No, Argo. He didn't want to accept.
He just couldn't do that.
Every night since then, she would try again for a few minutes, causing his interface to ding again, repeatedly... but he never answered her.
He wasn't going to lie, if he never heard that dinging noise again, it would be too soon. It was so annoying to hear it on repeat, especially when he was trying to sleep.
But he had no choice but to deal with it.
Well... he could stop her from repeatedly sending those requests, but only by blocking or muting her.
But she would not be happy at all if she suddenly received the message:
You have been muted by Kirito. You can no longer send messages to this player.
It would be even worse if she were blocked.
Knowing her, she'd probably immediately mobilize her entire spy network to hunt him down.
So, to avoid that, he had decided to go all in on 'plausible deniability.'
She couldn't be absolutely sure that Kirito was still his username, or that he was even in the game at all, for that matter. It was definitely likely, in her mind, but she couldn't be certain.
One of the most common annoyances that players had with the game was the fact that you could send friend requests to players that didn't exist. Which meant that you weren't given feedback if you mistyped the name of the person you were trying to add, for example.
It was a consequence of the fact that you could send requests to players that weren't online, though, so it couldn't really be fixed.
The system simply didn't know if the player you sent a friend request to was just offline at the moment, or if they didn't exist at all. It couldn't make that distinction. Because what if the player was signing in for the first time ever, for example?
The system would have no data of the player's existence yet. But it was also desirable to be able to just send a single friend request to that person, if you knew that they would sign in eventually, instead of having to wait for them to sign in for the first time to do so.
That way you could just send the request and forget it, and when that new player signed in for the first time, they'd immediately get the friend request.
But the consequence of this was that it was possible to send requests to players that didn't exist by either mistyping their usernames, or by typing a username that no player had.
So, from Argo's perspective, if Kirito did absolutely nothing in response to her requests, neither muting, nor accepting, she may conclude that he simply hadn't signed in on that first day.
Eventually, if he did nothing for long enough, she would keep doubting herself that he was even in the game, and she'd give up eventually.
Because why else would he ignore her requests? She would think.
Hopefully, that's what she would think.
So, if she suddenly found out that he was alive and in the game, and had just been ignoring her for weeks... she would not be happy at all.
And he honestly didn't think he could face her reaction to him being an orange player either.
But none of that meant he couldn't still get information from Argo.
If he mastered the ability to hide his cursor, he could sit in a bar or a restaurant, so long as the place wasn't in a town that had guards.
That realization had struck him during one of his grinding sessions a few days earlier.
He could do that because when a player was indoors, the game didn't show the player's cursor colour. Since it was a safe zone, PKers couldn't hurt anyone so it was pointless to show one for them, and Green players would be stuck eating at a restaurant, having to stare at giant floating green cursors over everyone's head.
Because of that, SAO was programmed so that in certain locations, a cursor wouldn't be shown for any player.
Which meant that if he had his own cursor hidden, nobody would notice the difference. And this meant that he could go into a bar to hire someone to get the information he needed as long as nobody saw his missing cursor before entering, or after leaving.
While he was inside, everyone else would think that he was just another player who had had his cursor hidden automatically by the system.
And as long as the money he paid this hypothetical player wasn't sent over a trade request, the person he hired wouldn't notice that he was orange at all.
And there was a way to do that too. It was a little risky, but he just had to relinquish his control over the money and spawn it in game as an item.
He'd spawn in a bag of cor, relinquish his control, and give it to the player.
And if he got scammed, and the person simply ran off with the money, he had loads more to try again with. He couldn't use cor to buy anything. So he had a whole bunch of it just sitting in his inventory.
He'd hire a middleman to get the info out of Argo, and then he'd return to his cave.
Simple as that.
But first, he had to power level both Mixing and Hiding. That meant he had to go into his cave and stay there for a few days.
It would be a mindless grind, but he was prepared for that. He had pulled all nighters in other MMOs before, on those.
He knew what to expect.
Since he knew so little about the Mixing skill, he only knew of two ways to train it with the items he had on him at the moment.
He had figured that he could use his massive stockpile of Nepenthe parts in his inventory to make something, but he hadn't known what at first.
After placing the Mixing skill in his fourth slot however, he was granted the ability to use an ingredient log.
Which was, essentially, a list of potions that could be made with various items. The log started out empty, but would gradually fill in as he experimented with mixing ingredients together.
With it, and the few things he did know about the skill from the beta, he had learned that he could make two things with the items he had on hand.
He knew that he could make a very weak antipoison from the various Nepenthe drops that he had collected, and he knew that he could make a decently strong poison from the ovule that the special type of Nepenthes dropped.
Just like the fruited Nepenthes, the ones with the flower had also radically increased in spawn rate as he hit escape velocity, so he had a lot of ovules on him.
2500, in fact. Which was crazy to see, considering how rare he used to consider them.
And with each of those ovules, he could make ten potions. Each of which generated a significant amount of experience.
Mixing was what most beta testers referred to as a buyable skill.
You didn't need a large time investment to level it up, and instead, if you happened to be rich, you could buy a large stockpile of the best ingredients beforehand and max it out it in just a couple of days.
The Nepenthe ovule was a very expensive ingredient. And using it for making potions was typically a pretty stupid move unless you were filthy rich, as a result.
It was usually just better to sell them.
The potion they produced wasn't very useful, the ovules were very expensive, as they could be traded for an Anneal Blade, and even the xp for making the poison, while very good, was not the most cost effective method of training the skill in the game.
There were better methods.
Ways to level up the skill cheaply, which took longer, and ways to level up faster, which cost more. It was always a trade off between time and money, but the ovule method wasn't an optimal one for either, though it leaned much further towards saving time then it did towards saving money.
There were ways to get faster experience if he just had access to player owned shops, but since he couldn't trade with anyone, and because as rich as he was, he was nowhere near rich enough to use the really fast methods of training, he was stuck with the ovule method for now.
But perhaps 'stuck with' was a bit of an unfair description for the current situation. Because the method was fantastic for experience, even though it wasn't optimal. Especially considering how many he had on him at the moment.
He could make 25,000 potions with the amount that he had, as each ovule produced ten of them, each. It was not enough experience to max out the skill on its own, but it was enough to get him about halfway there, he was pretty sure.
Mixing wasn't a very useful skill for most players, so it was actually one of the cheapest buyable skills in the game. Though 'cheapest' was a relative term, as it was still unaffordable to pretty much every single player in the game at the moment...
Crafting, another buyable skill, was much more expensive to max. Probably a hundred times more than Mixing, in fact. And that was because the skill just had so many uses, and was so profitable to have a high level in.
In the beta, buyable skills had been the only ones that people had been able to successfully level to a thousand. All the others had been too time dependent to be maxed in just one month.
Most players would never use an ovule like this in this situation. They would probably sell it because they were just so expensive.
Nobody else knew about the fact that you could make them so much more common by just grinding and grinding Nepenthes endlessly. Nepenthe escape velocity was something he had discovered himself. In a location that nobody else had ever been to before.
If he were green, and he sold off all of his ovules... he'd probably single handedly break the economy with the sheer amount that he had. And he'd be stupidly rich after, too.
So, when he started mixing his first ovule potion, a small part of him felt like it died, after watching the amount of wealth he was throwing away, suddenly vanish.
Kirito woke up in his sleeping bag.
He took note of the time, and glanced at his levels.
One handed sword: 52/1000
Hiding: 701/1000
Mixing: 841/1000
Acrobatics: 91/1000
He was very satisfied with what he saw.
Combat skills were, almost without exception, the longest skills to level up, and buyables, the fastest.
He was a bit surprised at his progress with Acrobatics, too. It leveled up very fast during his fights now, considering all of the flipping and spinning he did in the middle of them…
It turned out that his new fighting style gave out a lot of Acrobatics xp. He'd have to get some more information on what the higher levels of that skill unlocked. He had only known about the flexibility enhancement that it provided when he took it up originally.
But were there actual sword skill like abilities that he could do with it too? Or any other useful abilities he needed to know about?
He still had a lot that he needed to learn.
He yawned, and glanced at his Hiding skill in the interface.
He still had Hide active, and he was still getting experience drops every couple of seconds.
Large ones too.
They were the largest experience drops he had ever seen in a skill before. And they would only increase in size in the future, as he continued to leave the skill active.
He had tried to maximize the efficiency of his time in game recently, so he had decided to pull a couple of back-to-back all-nighters.
He knew that future Kirito would thank him for making so much progress when he was done, so he had spent the last eighty-five hours straight, before he'd finally crashed, grinding out the Mixing skill.
In that time, he had gained 840 levels in it, after sinking the equivalent of about fifty million cor of wealth, into the skill.
That was roughly the price of 2,500 Nepenthe ovules at this stage of the game, assuming each one was being bought for about twenty thousand.
So, he had burned through a lot of wealth, but he had nearly maxed out a skill.
But he didn't really know what he'd unlocked yet with his levels.
One of the best and worst things about this game was that most unlocks were kept a secret, and had to be discovered by the player.
Which meant that his 841 / 1000 in Mixing didn't suddenly mean he knew how to make any crazy potions. In fact, he knew almost nothing more about the skill now than he had during his painfully tedious multi-day grind session the previous few days.
He knew that he had unlocked an ability at some point that granted him a small chance to make twice as many potions as normal, or to save an ingredient, because that had started happening during his grind, and it had happened more often the higher his level rose, but that was about it. Other than that, he was starving for Mixing information, and he'd have to get it from Argo.
The grind had been tedious.
Cook the ovule over the fire. Squeeze it out over a pot. Use ten empty vials on the liquid. Dump the liquid out. Repeat.
Endlessly repeat.
He had kept the empty vials that had been left over from drinking his health potions over his grinding sessions, and he had used them for this power levelling process.
Thankfully, he had decided to keep everything, including typically useless junk items like vials, and had decided early on to recycle everything he used as much as possible.
If he hadn't, he would have needed to pick up a skill that allowed glassblowing to make them, or he would have had to dump out his emergency stash of potions to use the empty vials from those instead.
Which would have sucked.
Due to the fact that he had unlocked the surprise ability to save an ingredient every now and then too, he had actually levelled up much more than he had originally planned with those ovules.
He had made over 30,000 potions with them, and was finished in about 40 hours.
Since he had only predicted that he could make 25,000 potions with that supply, he had been pleasantly surprised with the extra 5,000.
But then he had to switch to his other method of training. And this one, annoyingly enough, required water.
He had the containers for it though. Twenty four of them, in fact. From the Boar Stomachs he had picked up early on.
Luckily, it had been night time at the time, so he had been able to travel around outside his cave with his Hide ability still active, with minimal risk of it being broken by sunlight.
He had walked to the stream he usually got his water from, filled all of the containers up, and returned to his cave.
Each full container could make 400 potions, and water was always the limiting factor. He had so many Nepenthe parts that could be used in the potion that he would likely never run out of them.
So he had used all 24 water containers in a similar process as with the ovules.
Pour the water in the container over his fire. Put in the Nepenthe parts. Cook the mixture. Use the empty vials on the mixture. Dump them out so they can be reused. Repeat.
All the potions he made went to waste, but all he cared about was the xp so it didn't matter.
This type of training was much slower than when he had used the ovules. And he had to make multiple trips to the stream to refill on water, which forced him to have to get creative in his methods of getting there when the sun came out.
He really didn't want his Hide ability to cancel, so he had been very careful. He stuck to the shadows whenever he had to step outside during the daytime in order to avoid the light and stay out of sight of any NPCs.
Even though it was unlikely that his Hiding level was low enough for Hide to be broken so easily, he didn't want to risk losing such a high rate of experience. So he had been extremely careful anyways.
He had lost count of the number of water refill trips he had had to make during that grinding session because he had been so tired and unfocused. He really didn't remember a lot of anything during the last day or so of the grind, but there had been a lot of them.
And he still had a lot left to do.
With a clear head after crashing for ten hours after the session, he had decided to do it again.
He had done the math, and he knew that he had the materials on him to max out the skill. It would take him a lot of water trips, but again, future Kirito would thank him for it.
Leveling up was not linear. Going from level 800 to level 801 in a skill took considerably more xp then leveling up from 400 to 401 did.
As a result, the halfway point to maxing wasn't at level 500 / 1000. It was somewhere around level 750. So he was past the halfway point, but still a long ways off from maxing, despite his already impressive 841 in Mixing.
This would be another very tedious grinding session, he realized.
After doing the math, he knew how many trips he needed to take to the stream, and based on his average time per potion from the previous day, he figured that this grinding session would be about as long as the previous one.
Another 80 hours or so.
He was not looking forward to it at all.
He woke up to the sound of his interface dinging.
'Dammit Argo, just give up,' had been his first thought.
But then he noticed that the tone wasn't quite the same as the friend request one, and he looked at his screen, and in particular, at his levels.
One handed sword: 52/1000
Hiding: 1000/1000
Mixing: 1000/1000
Acrobatics: 91/1000
The interface had been ding-ing because sometime in the middle of the night, his Hiding skill had finally been maxed out.
He could finally turn it off and do stuff again.
He had been too exhausted to hear it apparently, and had only just woken up now.
Kirito yawned and looked at the time.
That grinding session had probably been the worst grind he had ever been on, out of all the MMOs he had ever played.
95 hours straight.
His math from earlier had been off. He had made the assumption that he could continue making potions at the same rate regardless of how tired he was. Which was unrealistic.
He was 15 hours off in his estimate as a result.
And it was a miracle he'd even made it through that at all. He had crashed for twelve hours after he had finally finished.
It was now day 24 of the death game. His grind had eaten up a little over eight days. Almost one month had gone by since the start, and he had yet to hear any announcement declaring that the first floor had been cleared.
And that honestly made him wonder what was taking so long for the other players to beat the first boss. Surely the beta testers could have beaten it by now, so what was the hold up?
Was everyone just being overly cautious?
He'd have to go check out the situation there after he figured out how to use that cursor hiding ability, first.
Kirito stood up and exited his cave.
Skills only listed a limited amount of information to the player at first.
But as a player experimented with the skill a little more, more and more data would be available in the skill description.
His Hiding skill worked the same way, and he had had to try out a bunch of stuff before he finally learned what he needed to do.
He had activated his Hide skill and walked right into the middle of a group of Nepenthes at first. And he had learned that, as he had anticipated, a player with an advanced Hiding skill could hide themselves from NPC's that didn't use eyes… sort of.
A maxed Hiding skill gave the player a very advanced interface.
He could see a meter on ambient brightness, the amount of noise he was making, and even the wind direction.
And if he always stayed downwind, the Nepenthes wouldn't find him since they relied on smell.
Doing this had also filled out the corresponding information in his Hiding skill menu, too. It now explained that there was a new class of monsters he could hide from by taking into account wind direction while hiding.
In his Hide interface, one of the other things he immediately took note of was just how good the skill actually was now.
He was in the middle of a field, standing upright, in broad daylight, with no cover, and with enemies all around him, and still his camouflage hadn't broken.
He could even make a little bit of noise, and be perfectly fine.
It was a very powerful ability, now.
And it took him a while to find it, but on his new interface, he finally managed to find a toggle that hid his cursor from view.
It had no restrictions either. It could be hidden indefinitely, even in combat.
When it was active, however, he had an indicator showing how well hidden it was. If someone with a high searching level looked in his direction, the hide rate of his cursor would decrease, and might in fact, cause his cursor to reappear if it went to zero.
And players would obviously notice that something was off with him if he was walking around without a cursor at all. So the ability was really only useful in a handful of situations. But that was enough.
He was pretty sure that there was more to the skill that he just hadn't learned yet, but he'd find it all out eventually.
It was time to test out the ability for real.
He was going back to Horunka.
Improvements:
Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly