Our first fight as a party, in a rain slicked clearing went…poorly. I had hoped it would be only one step up from the rats that Lucia and I had faced alone, perhaps a bit more difficult than that but with five of us working together, it would work out. What I found was that the powers of this world were quite a bit stronger than that. Balloons and rodents were fodder at best, dealt with only as something on the side, and given normally small bounties. They were still MONSTERS however, and I had merely lucked out with the rats in the sewer.

The first we ran into was a group of balloons, blue types rather than orange, which meant they were slightly stronger. For all that, my party members and I could take them down with ease, popping almost a dozen over the course of a few minutes, despite the speed with which the things moved, dodging our attacks, and spitting out some kind of resin-like material at us. It was all going really well, until that moment where it wasn't.

That had been…embarrassing, to say the least, as I shot at one, only for it to dodge my shot with ease, slip around behind me, and then fire, slamming a goo filled blast into my back, and knocking me forward and onto the ground. Lucia, seeing that, fired a bolt of lightning at the thing, a bolt that nearly struck Shadow as he tried to get in close to get me off the ground, forcing him to dodge, and her to turn the attack aside.

The bolt striking the tree caused it to burst out with steam, the rain soaked branches puffing it out into a cloud, and covering us all in it, before the thing caught fire once it was over, and began to crackle at us. The balloon, seeming to find this amusing, let out what sounded like laughter, before firing more resin at me, literally sealing me to the ground, then, once I was good and trapped, moving towards me like Pac-Man against a ghost while high on a power pellet with all its friends.

Luckily, Fast and Strong were on me a moment later, the former smacking a few of the closer balloons away, the latter literally ripping me from the ground, and then tossing me away like a sack of potatoes. Landing, roughly, outside the cloud, I had a good view as both Shadow and Lucia cast wind spells, obviously intending on blowing the cloud away, only to be doing it from opposite sides.

I shouted about that, too late to stop them, as the pair of winds collided, and created a small whirlwind, not strong enough to do damage, but it did cause all the balloons to swirl up with the cloud, and then scatter as they reached the apex, leaving us alone in a clearing that looked like a great battle had taken place in it, with torn up dirt, a destroyed tree that was still on fire, and the ruffled fur of the two fighters.

It was sobering to see that…especially since, if we'd been facing some actual opponents that would have probably been a lot worse than some bruises on my part…and it was my failure to be fair. The others had been doing okay, in their own little fights, when I'd been jumped by the blue balloon. Still, it showed that our casters needed something to coordinate their casting, so our fighters could get in there.

With a water spell…ninja water spell, from Shadow, I was freed of the goop, meanwhile I checked the bag I wore on my belt, my current (Loot Cache) destination. Combined with (Auto-Loot) it had gotten all the pieces of the balloons we'd collected, which I soon dumped into the green gem on my weapon, letting it consume them. Not enough to unlock anything yet, but it was a start, and when I rose, I told them to follow me.

Our next encounter went better. Using (Sense) this time, I was able to count our foes, some rabbit-like things that Lucia identified as usapils, common monsters, maybe a step above the balloons. Given they were Beast-Types, I decided to try out my new Bow, the (Beast Bane Bow), while giving some actual strategy this time to the encounter, having Strong and Fast loop around them, while Shadow, Lucia, and I would drive them towards them, rather than getting bogged down in different melees.

This worked marginally better. I had them cast wind spells again, this time from the same angle, adding the two together, which drove the rabbit things back, while I fired at some stragglers that tried to run, finding out 'more effective' in this case meant my shots had some tracking to them, though they fired slower, and cost me almost twice the stamina of my normal shots, which was disconcerting as I'd come out here before getting back to full.

Still, twenty-six usapil were driven back by wind and Bow shots, and when they reached the other end of the clearing, Fast and Strong struck, the rabbits going down in one bloody claw rip from the latter, and going still after the former kicked them a few times. It was all together a much goreier scene than the one with the balloons, but gaining a bit more than just 'scraps' this time, as I found my bag now flush with…well dripping meat and bits of bone and fur.

That was…disconcerting, and I called a huddle afterwards, to go over what we'd gained. For myself, the Usapil were worth twelve EXP a piece, and the balloons had been worth five. Better than the rats in most cases. However, my (Auto-Loot) skill, according to Fast, was terrible at its job, as he went over the meat and pelts, talking about how it was amature level stuff, passable, and only just at that.

Strong, meanwhile, was smiling, as he said the usapil had been worth over twenty EXP for himself, and the same for Fast and Shadow, though slightly less for Fast, and even less for Shadow. For Lucia, they'd been worth eighteen, which said we all gained, when something died at the hands of a party member, but our gains were not the same. It was still enough that Fast, Strong, and Shadow had all gone up a level each, while I was still at eight, and Lucia hadn't broken twenty.

Gains were coming slower then, possibly exponentially, but it was hard to tell because my EXP bar was percentile based, though close to the next level. Scratching a few numerals into the dirt with a stick, trying to keep in mind the numbers, I wished aloud that I'd had a calculator on me before coming to this world, only for the Status Screen to pop up in my vision, and helpfully scroll to such a function.

It was…shockingly convenient, but given there were notes here, just like the help menu, I could only guess that one of my predecessors had made this somehow, and soon enough I was deep diving into the numbers on our gains, looking over stat sheets while Fast and Lucia made use of the meat to cook us a passable meal, as the sky began to darken above us, the sun finally setting behind the clouds.

By the time we'd finished eating, with me wishing for some fast food back home, or at least wishing I knew how to make a pizza to teach them how, I ordered us home. My stamina bar was running low, and the regeneration rate of it was, at best, pathetic. Was that because it fueled the regeneration of the others bars AND my own attacks? Or was it because my stats were, to put it bluntly, not nearly as good as the others.

My highest stat was only a bit over half of the lowest one in the party of the same stat. That…I saw ways of buffing it in my menu, and other stats besides, some of the skills and transformations came with them, but I needed time to plan, as I had no way to 'refund' spent points, meaning if I screwed my build up, it would cause all sorts of problems later for me during the Waves.

Making our way back into the city, just as night fell, leaving Shield still flailing against the orange balloons, we made our way back to the inn. There, I asked if they needed rooms of their own, or could share one to my Beastmen companions, and they agreed to share one. The innkeeper objected, until I laid three times the cost of the room for a night on his counter, and got to watch biases and desire for financial stability war in his eyes, until the latter won out.

I had now, thanks to this, burned through far more of my capital than I'd wanted, leaving me with barely two-hundred silver left. A hefty amount in a general sense. From what I could see anyway, as coppers were far more commonly used for transactions, and what few payouts I'd heard of for labor were in those terms. Still I needed it for adventuring, and that was by no means a cheap prospect.

Retiring for the evening, I sat on the floor of my room for hours, using the notes page I'd discovered, which was how you added help topics apparently, to slowly list out what I knew about the combat system this world operated on, and realizing that it was…well, the real world in a way, which should not have been surprising in the least, given I'd decided to treat this place as reality, but it was.

The numbers, the character sheets, the way I learned attacks, it spoke of gaming to me, but the monsters were real creatures in a way. Sure, you could overwhelm their 'Wave' infection and kill them that way, like empting an HP bar. That would work, and they'd fall over dead after a while once they had no more energy to power those malformed bodies of theirs, and that was how most Adventurers worked in this world, simply hitting them until they died.

For some, that was required. After all, the Wave infection animated skeletons and those balloon things had no anatomy to speak of, they were just vicious balls of gas. You had to overwhelm the energy binding them together. But animals infected, or people weren't all like that. Some were still alive in a way, and if you killed them normally, they'd die, the HP bar going straight to 0 and not passing go. The infection not being enough to animate the corpses once again, at least without them being way more powerful creatures.

That was how we'd killed the Nest Mother. If we'd tried to empty its HP bar, at our level, to kill it via random attacks, we'd have failed, and probably gotten killed ourselves. But by using fire focused via the tunnel right into it, the thing had literally killed itself for us. That was…not likely to happen again. Environment and luck had won us the day, and unfortunately I wouldn't be in control of the former, and the latter was not as stat I could upgrade.

Of course, it COULD work the other way too, according to some topics. Some enemies could stack defenses, turn any attack you could do into piddling damages or even no damage at all. One entry in the help topic made specific reference to 'Mirrors' , some kind of reflecting monster that couldn't be damaged normally, and required special skills to take down, mostly advising that they were more trouble than they were worth.

"Gods, in Dimensional Sign I could get some numbers on these attacks," I complained aloud, trying to rack my own brain for the memories of the damage formulas of the game. It would have given me a starting point at least. I remembered a few things, and how the HP bars my interface showed for the others went up and down over the course of the fight, but it was all too vague.

"Okay, you can't respec yourself, so you need a game plan that lets you do more with less," I told myself, looking over the sheets before me, finding my party was already in the 'rest' state, though Shadow was having bad dreams according to his, which gave him a debuff, and Lucia was wearing…why the freak was it telling me that?! What pervert designed this system…it was even giving me her measurements and…I blushed and quickly banished the whole thing.

Then I stopped and brought it back. Not to look at her stuff…well not the clothing or the other things, but instead to look through her sheet for buffs and debuffs, measuring their effects on her stat block. It worked out perfectly. The same for the Beastmen, the buffs directly correlated with what they said. No guesswork in them, and that had me smiling to myself as I went through some of my skills menu.

I then began to surf through all the menus, going over the help topics, and reading everything I could. Even found I could open multiple windows at once, keeping them all in front of me, collating the data, just like I'd done back home. I was up until the wee hours of the morning, going over all of it, and when I finally felt my stamina bar run out, I was happy, shifting my bow between a few unlocked arrow types, each one glowing a different color or shade.

"Okay world, tomorrow, you're gonna meet a real power gamer," I said to no one in particular, slipping out of my leather armor, and then settling in for a good night's sleep. The last thing I saw in my vision was my own stat sheet, which pinged at me, giving me a stat buff called 'Sage's Insight' for a few hours, which made me smile as I drifted off.