EXP Is Golden: Volume 1

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7183-5652-8
Verlag: J-Novel Club
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 250 Seiten

Reihe: EXP Is Golden

The long-awaited launch day for the VRMMORPG Boot Hour, Shoot Curse has finally arrived! As a dedicated VR gamer, Leah eagerly rolls up her character, excited to make her mark on the grand tapestry of this virtual world. A chance encounter at the start of the game leads Leah to a fateful discovery: a hidden skill called Retainer allows her to tame any NPC in the game and pool their experience points with her own!

Combining Retainer with her powerful enchantment spells, Leah steadily builds an army of retainers made up of formidable unique boss NPCs from the game. With the experience points pouring in, Leah establishes herself as a force to be reckoned with...only to be branded a living natural disaster!

Well, if the NPCs want to crown her Queen of Destruction, who is Leah to argue? Opportunities to speedrun the destruction of humanity don't come around very often, and Leah has no intention of letting this chance go to waste!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Harajun

Weitere Mitwirkende

Fixro2n

Akimoto, Noboru

Leseproben

She had no idea how the system worked, but the fact that the game displayed an error message meant that someone had tried to activate the taming system. The only possibility that came to mind was Kelli’s request. “Please be our boss” was interpreted by the system as the NPC expressing a desire to be tamed by Leah, but because Leah had no skills related to taming, the request couldn’t be processed and produced an error message.

During the closed beta test, testers had spent a great deal of time theorycrafting: using the character creator to test out a variety of builds, checking skill combinations and mapping out skill trees, revealing the existence of a large number of skills and skill trees that were locked behind prerequisites. Testing so many different builds required repeatedly creating new characters, which had set off a cycle of rerolls among the beta testers.

Yet, despite the enormous number of combinations that they had tested, they had never been able to find any taming-related skills. That implied that taming hadn’t been implemented during the closed beta, or that it had been implemented in a way that made it impossible to unlock with the 100 starting experience points. Regardless, there were either no players who had any information about taming skills, or, if they existed at all, they were an extremely small and secretive group. Leah was now a member of this select group of players.

Leah couldn’t hold back her excitement. It wasn’t as though she had wanted to be the first to discover a certain skill tree, or become some sort of secretive information broker for the game. Still, there was something exciting about the possibility that she was the only one who knew about a game system.

While there was no guarantee that there wasn’t some other player who had somehow fulfilled the prerequisites and gotten the same error message, considering how she had come across her own particular situation, that was extremely unlikely. Leah had fulfilled the terms necessary to trigger the error message by earning the trust of these NPCs. There couldn’t be that many players who were willing or able to build a good enough rapport with NPCs from scratch, given that the game had only been up for five hours.

“Are we...askin’ fer too much?” Kelli murmured anxiously, casting her gaze downward. Leah chastised herself for getting caught up in her musings. There was no point in figuring out the mechanics if Kelli felt rejected and withdrew her request to be tamed.

“Not at all. I have no objection to becoming your boss. If anything, I gladly welcome it. However, I...um, right, need a moment to think through a matter that’s just come to my attention. Would you mind if I took a bit to think it over? Go ahead and finish the meal I appear to have interrupted, yes?”

Leah’s words appeared to have put the four at ease, and they took their now-cold meals and started warming them by the campfire. Leah watched them out of the corner of her eye as she resumed thinking about skills related to taming, specifically the skill described by the system error message. The most likely candidate was the skill tree. Leah guessed the concept behind it would be to use to make an NPC into a .

However, as far as Leah was aware, during the closed beta, the skill tree only had a single skill: . The skill was an active skill that, when used successfully, allowed the user to control the target’s actions for a short duration. For example, when fighting monsters, could be used to take control of one of the enemy monsters, forcing it to fight the others. In that form, it was a tricky skill for use in combat and only marginally related to taming.

That limited use of didn’t even provide a unique effect. It was perfectly possible to replicate the effects of that skill using the spell from the spell school. While didn’t allow the user to specify the exact actions taken by the target, confused targets defaulted to attacking the nearest creature, which effectively allowed the user to replicate the effects of for a lower activation cost.

The skill tree also included spells like and . While these skills cost more to acquire than , they also had a higher success rate. They were even more effective when combined with , the prerequisite spell in the skill tree. Furthermore, once the target was charmed or frightened, the player could cast the higher-ranked spell—

Enchantment

It was certainly possible. In particular, sounded like a good candidate, but acquiring required spending at least 150 EXP in the tree. This made it impossible for a freshly rolled character to obtain. If the prerequisites for taming NPCs also included specific in-game actions or making connections with particular NPCs, there wasn’t a whole lot of hope for Leah. But if choosing these spells led to a dead end, Leah was just out the EXP cost of those spells, and all she’d have to do is make that EXP again.

Since Kelli and her companions were driven by highly complex AI, even if Leah couldn’t tame them at that particular moment, they would probably at least continue to accompany her. After all, they intended to make Leah the boss of their bandit group.

Still, even if there was some room for error, Leah wanted to carefully consider the possibilities before committing to the plan that had the highest probability of success. She decided to file away the tree as one of those possibilities and consider some alternative approaches.

While the meaning was slightly different, there was a similar skill called . Like the skill tree, the skill tree consisted solely of the base skill. The skill would summon a random member of the specified race or species to appear next to the user. The summon would remain with the summoner until either it or the summoner was killed or the ten-minute duration of the skill expired.

According to the helper tool that described the details of available skills, when the skill was activated, the NPC or monster it summoned was forced to choose whether or not to obey the summoning. If they tried to refuse the summoning, they would roll a resistance check against the summoner, and if it succeeded in resisting, the summoning would end in failure.

Since the summon was a randomly chosen individual and attribute scores varied within each race and species, the chance of success for the summoning changed with each try. This meant that was saddled with the structural flaw of a highly variable and unpredictable failure rate. As a result, beta testers treated it more as a joke skill than a seriously useful ability.

The whole concept of single-skill trees like and was an oddly inefficient design choice. Leah found it difficult to believe that there wasn’t some sort of hidden meaning behind the decision.

A notable example of another single-skill tree was . However, if the player acquired the skill from the skill tree, then the skill , which allowed the player to create magic potions, would be added to the tree. The skill description for itself more or less revealed the existence of additional hidden skills in the skill tree by outright stating: “Required to activate alchemy-related skills. Provides a bonus when rolling for success for alchemy-related skills.” The skill was useless on its own.

If and had similar functionality to in terms of hidden skills, what was the key to unlocking them? For the moment, Leah chose to add those two skill trees to the list of possibilities, under the assumption that both trees contained additional hidden skills that would be unlocked by meeting the right prerequisites.

Next, Leah decided to approach the problem from a different angle, going off the specific skill name rather than the broader concept of taming. In terms of creating retainers, the closest example among the starting skills was . The common view of necromancers was that they enslaved the poor souls of the dead to serve them as unwitting retainers.

Furthermore, like and , was another tree that had only a single skill. The skill turned a corpse within a medium distance from the user into undead, a loyal slave that followed any commands given by the caster for five minutes. Once the five minutes were up, the undead would crumble to dust, leaving no corpse behind.

It appeared to be a useful skill at first glance, but if there was a soul remaining in the corpse, the soul could resist the caster, just like with . While a corpse without a soul in it could be instantly turned into undead, the resulting creature was so weak that a single blow would destroy it. These two factors meant that was only a...