[Wave 2 begins in: 4:02:30:15]
[Average player level: 6.4]
Once the Phase 2 post went up, every single player on the server had one number in their head, and it was 8.
The problem was that there was only one place to level fast, and it was the river.
I'd watched the original five fight two slimes on the first day and take ten minutes to do it. They'd gotten a lot better since then. They had real weapons now, potions, Nana Jo's stew, and about four days of practice. But there were still thousands of slimes in that river, and slimes in this world were not the cute little blobs from the games the players grew up with.
They were hard. Like, physically hard. The blue ones felt like hitting a rubber tire, according to Eat Dirt. The red ones burned. The green ones split in half when you hit them wrong. There was a purple one that nobody had touched yet because Detect said its level was "???" and Peaches had taken one look at it and walked the other way.
The players had already made a forum thread about it. They called it Hard Slimes: A Survival Guide. I only knew that because Gummies kept quoting it out loud.
[Eat Dirt]
Eat Dirt figured out the salt thing by accident.
He'd been carrying a stack of rock salt in his inventory since the first day, mostly because Day liked salted fish and reputation was reputation. During a pull at the river, a blue slime knocked him flat, and the salt bag in his hand burst open all over it.
The slime shrank. Not a lot, but enough that its HP bar dipped and it went from "rubber tire" to "wet sponge."
Eat Dirt lay there on his back for a second, staring at it.
"Guys," he said. "GUYS. Slimes hate salt."
{Valefor} "wait like snails?"
{Eat Dirt} "LIKE SNAILS"
{Gummies} "Dirt you have been carrying the strat in your pocket for four days"
{Eat Dirt} "I was saving it for Day's fish!!!"
By that evening, the pond's rock salt had become the most valuable thing in the settlement after stone, and Eat Dirt had appointed himself the official salt guy, which he thought was very funny. He also wrote a new post for the forum titled I'm sorry, the salt was for Day, which got more likes than his first one.
[Day]
With salt and proper pulls, the leveling went fast. Too fast, maybe.
Peaches ran the river like a raid leader. One rogue tagged one slime, pulled it back to a cleared beach, and a party of five killed it with salt and spears. Next. It was boring, and it was safe, and it worked. The average level went up a tenth of a point every couple of hours.
Then, on the afternoon of the fourth day, a party from the second batch got bored.
I watched it happen in the chat logs. I wish I hadn't.
{TurboNoodle} "this is so slow, there's like 2000 slimes right there"
{Peaches} "Don't. Pull one at a time."
{TurboNoodle} "we have salt, we have spears, we're level 7. aoe them"
{Peaches} "Noodle I'm serious"
{TurboNoodle} "LEEEEEROY"
Six players charged into the shallows. Three seconds later, the whole river woke up.
It didn't look like a monster attack. It looked like the water itself stood up. Blue, red, green, all of it rolling toward the bank at once. Peaches screamed for everyone else to get back, and to their credit, everyone else got back. The six in the river didn't.
I didn't need the party frames to know what happened. I could see their names going gray on my map, one after another.
[TurboNoodle has been destroyed.]
[Clementine has been destroyed.]
[Fork has been destroyed.]
[Mossy has been destroyed.]
[GrandpaGrumble has been destroyed.]
[Lagspike has been destroyed.]
Six. In under a minute.
And for one of them, Mossy, it was worse than the others. A big red slime had rolled over his whole body and just… stayed there. The players on the bank watched it sit on top of him for a long time while his HP drained slowly instead of all at once.
I was in the workshop before the last name finished going gray.
Ninety seconds each. Six bodies. That's nine minutes of people sitting on a gray screen that says Awaiting Reconstruction, and I built them as fast as my hands would let me. TurboNoodle came out first, laughing, saying it was "so worth it for the clip." Clementine and Fork came out laughing. Lagspike came out swearing about his drops.
Mossy came out quiet.
He sat on the workshop floor and looked at his hands for a while. Then he looked up at me.
"That one was a lot," he said. "Like, the pain was fine. It was just slow."
Then he shook it off, grinned, and said "10/10, terrifying," and went back out. Because that's what gamers do.
I sat down on the workshop floor after he left.
I'd made a promise. Nobody in this town gets eaten by something I could have seen coming. And I'd seen that river every single day. I just hadn't done anything about it, because I figured the players had it handled.
That was the thing about gamers. They had it handled right up until they got bored.
The next quest was the first one I'd ever written that had rules in it.
[New Mission: The Leveling Grounds
Day has designated the east beach of the river as the official Leveling Grounds. Pulls must be one slime at a time, led by a designated Puller. Parties that follow the rules earn bonus XP.
Parties that aggro the river will lose reputation with Day.
Rewards: +15% XP at the Leveling Grounds. Title for the first 10 Pullers: "River Warden."]
I'd never threatened reputation before. Neither had the system. The chat logs went quiet for a second when it went out. Then Peaches posted a sign-up sheet for Pullers, and it filled in four minutes.
TurboNoodle signed up too. Third slot. I approved it.
[Cool Spoon]
It took three red slime kills, nineteen jars, one burned hand, and True Elixir swearing that she would never touch red gel without gloves again. But at the end of the fourth day, Cool Spoon pulled a Gnawling Incisor out of a bath of reddish acid, set it on his anvil, and hit it.
It bent.
Just a little. But it bent.
He worked it for an hour, and when he was done, he had a spearhead that was orange, slightly curved, and sharp enough that he cut his own thumb testing the edge.
[Item Created: Gnawtooth Spear (Uncommon)
Damage: High. Bonus damage to wooden enemies.]
"Wooden enemies," Spoon said quietly. "Huh. Why would that be a bonus?"
He looked around at the settlement full of wooden golems. Then he decided he didn't want to think about it too hard, and he put the spear up for sale at 200 GC.
It sold in six seconds.
[Day]
[Average player level: 7.3]
That night I remade the map again. Lil Bean and the scouts had pushed the fog back almost three miles in every direction except east.
Nobody wanted to scout east anymore. Not after the claw marks.
I drew the eastern edge of the map as a blank space with a single line of text in it, in my own handwriting, because I couldn't think of anything better.
Something big lives here.