A Certain Middle-Aged Man’s VRMMO Activity Log - Chapter 57

Toaru Ossan no VRMMO Katsudouki

Author: Shiina Howahowa
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Traps and Thief

Now that I’ve finished the 7 Tools1, after putting out the street stall with the Potion Juice and the food I made, I’m set on diving into the Challenge of the Dead solo.
I’m avoiding battles to the best of my abilities. Because the goals I’m striving for to the bitter end are dismantling traps with the 7 Tools and improving my ability to unlock doors … my main role among Players.

Coming solo was the right idea; since it’s a completely different feeling to the first time I stuck my toes in, I triggered several traps and took some damage some dozen times.
Even so, I didn’t take long to grasp the handling and intuition with the tools; compared to dismantling them with my fingers, it looks like I’ll be able to cut down the time it takes to dismantle by 20% to 30%.

Of course with so many factors that made me uneasy, this is why I didn’t immediately go diving in with a Party; I want to get a little more used to dismantling traps. Not just simple traps, I also want to be able to dismantle traps with a high degree of difficulty or else it’s likely I won’t be any help on the levels further down.
Incidentally, there are also a large number of dangerous traps that cause chaos by inflicting Paralysis or Petrification along with damage … of course I took a Death Penalty many times, but I can’t just shrink away from just that much.

From time to time I’d dismantle traps together with Black from the Sentai Hero group, and we’d talk about all kinds of things.
Through small talk, we exchanged information on the state of the game and information about the traps. Two guys chatting while dismantling traps in a dungeon; it might look a little unnerving for others to see.
The times I’m together with Black, we also get into battles; neither of us have really great weapons abilities, so it serves as training. When a treasure chests comes out, in order to raise our trap dismantling and lock-picking abilities, we both examine the traps. The profits themselves aren’t much but when it’s done to raise Skill Lv it’s an extremely lucrative time.

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The Thief Skill Level has also reached 50, and I can advance the Skill but … here I’m compelled to make another choice. There’s the Advanced Thief path or the new Chivalrous Thief to choose between.

Advanced Thief is simply a superior version of the current Thief; the things you can do are the same, though of course the abilities themselves are improved … to upgrade it requires 3 ExP.

And then with the other 1, Chivalrous Thief, you can directly steal an item from a monster, and if you hide your form and do a Sneak Attack, a damage bonus seems to be added in.
To learn all that, the required ExP is, what the, an extraordinarily large amount, 10. Acquiring Thief used 8, to use an additional 10 is …

—  But for people like me (…lol), to be able to immerse yourself in feeling like William Tell and Robin Hood seems like it might be good, so I selected Chivalrous Thief, and pushing OK, I completed my selection. I can only pray that the results are proportionate to the ExP expenditure ….
Though, of course if I shot at a kid with an apple on his head, I won’t have the ability to shoot it off.

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Even if I have Chivalrous Thief now, the basics of what I have to do wont change; relentlessly practice dismantling traps.
It feels like whether you continue this so-called dull work or not decides whether you can make it in the MMO world. The 7 Tools already make the sensitive parts better; I should make clear notes on what parts should be changed to make using them even easier.

I’m spending pretty much all my play time in the gloomy Dungeon; when I went out I, who felt that the light was so bright, was a little dismayed; isn’t this like the life of a person who works all night straight through the dawn?
For me who has both the Stealth Skill and Night Vision, even if I’m in the Dungeon that usually requires a light source, I can still carry on my activities in the pitch blackness. Actually, this reason alone is the main factor as to why my encounter rate with monsters has largely dropped.

However you look at it, one of the ways these undead monsters running rampant in the Challenge from the Dead detect things is by seeing unnatural light; in other words, thanks to the detection abilities they carry, if you’re surrounded in light, it makes it easier for them to approach you.

With a single suitable light source, like walking through the Dungeon with the light coming from a torch, to say that the Zombies and Ghouls will find you better and more often isn’t a mistaken expectation to have.
Somehow I am the safest in the case where I plunge in solo, aiming to run through avoiding combat with monsters and reach the 10th floor, making me a proof to that theory. After I raise Chivalrous Thief a little bit more, I think I’ll give the Challenge a go.

According the web forums and talking with Black, the person who’s gone the furthest seems to have reached the 7th underground floor. But there the traps increased even more, and the hidden doors and trapped doors increased so it seems it was tough going.
Of course they were accompanied by someone who had the Thief Skill, but even so, the story continues that, even with spending time to dismantle the trap, it activated and wiped them all out.
Black and the Hero Team also pushed themselves, but it got tough for them on the 6th floor onwards.

It’s not just the traps; on the 7th floor, at last there was a Lesser Lich prowling about. Its name might have “lesser” attached to it but it’s still a Lich; you can think of it as a lower-ranked Lich, but if you think about it another way, this points to the possibility of a truly powerful Lich further down in the depths.
The Lesser Lich’s attacks were mainly magic; obviously 1 hit would really hurt, but it’s a nasty monster where a direct hit would give you Paralysis or Frozen statuses, and beyond that even induce Break Arm.
And that at that Lich’s side, a Soldier Skeleton is stationed. The Forums are saying that from the 7th floor onwards, it’s the real deal.

Even while continuing my trap dismantling practice, from now on I’ll have to think through my dungeon capture plane.
For now, from my several times solo, I should see if I can make use of the complete stealth style to reach the 10th floor or not; after that I wonder if I should do a pick-up group as someone with the Thief Skill, or should I go with Zwei’s Guild or the Hero Team … it will probably be something like that.
In the first place, there wasn’t any sort of official announcement on what’s on the 10th floor, and I have the inquisitiveness to want to see it before information starts getting passed around; in order not to end up in the situation where curiosity killed the cat, I have to properly hone my trap finding and dismantling abilities or else.

The Challenge from the Dead that will devour adventurers without mercy. The ones who made it to the depths are currently 0.

SKILLS

[Wind-Blown Hunting Bow]Lv7
[Kicking Assault]Lv20 ↑3UP
[Farsight]Lv48 ↑1UP
[Craftsmanship]Lv51
[Small Shield]Lv 5 ↑2UP
[Stealth]Lv38
[Physical Ability Reinforcement]Lv24 ↑2UP
[Chivalrous Thief]Lv2 (NEW!)
[Whip]Lv36 ↑2UP
[Fairy Language]Lv99 (Forced Acquisition) (Unable to be moved to Reserved Skills)

Reserved Skills
[Woodworking]Lv34
[Blacksmithing]Lv39
[Alchemy]Lv40
[Advanced Cooking]Lv3 ↑2UP

ExP 2

Titles Possessed:  The One who Charmed Even the Fairy Queen, The One who Defeated a Great Foe Alone

His second name from other players is “The Fairy Queen’s Husband-san”

A/N: Once you reach Lv50 in Thief, you have the possibility to choose to make either Bow, Throwing Weapons, or Daggers your number one greatest weapon Skill.
In addition to Thief ability, you get the abilities to steal items from monsters, increased Sneak Attack, and increased damage from quick-draw of projectiles and knives.
In exchange, the ExP required for the acquisition is a heavy 10 point expenditure.

 
7 tools – I didn’t know whether to point this out or not, since it didn’t seem to matter if you thought of it as “the 7 tools” or just that there were 7 tools in the set, but this time they used “7 Tools” like a proper noun, so here it is: there’s a Japanese organizational belief that everything has a core 7 tools that’s necessary to master an occupation.
What this implies is, now that Earth has the proper 7 tools, he can become a master lockpicking thief.
Other examples: 7 tools of the samurai- armor, sword, longsword, arrows, bow, back-of-the-neck guard, helmet
7 tools of Quality Control – graph, histogram, control chart, checklist, Pareto chart, cause-and-effect diagram, scatter diagram

T/N: A bit short, but somehow I enjoyed it. Even though not much happened … Nmaa, it translated fast, so no complaints.