Sword Art Online: Enhanced - Chapter 2.1 (Patreon)

To your utter surprise, alongside the Nepent Ovule, and the one hundred col you recieved, twenty from each Little Nepent, you got another essence. This time Essence of Nepent Meat. Though, for all it was called meat, it just looked like a big white radish.

You knew the lower level a monster was the easier they were to get. And having all these monsters to yourself upped your chances massively. But it was still a one in one thousand drop rate from the Boars, Dire Wolves and Little Nepents.

You've only killed nine monsters so far since you logged in. Pretty damn good for so early, but not exactly a lot. Not even enough to raise your chances to ten percent for just one essence, nevermind two.

Not that you were complaining at all mind you! You quite happily added it to your strength stat, raising it to seventeen. With that, you'd be able to one shot normal Little Nepents in one hit with Cascade.

You were tempted to go turn in the reward right away and get your Anneal Blade. But, you decided not to. Once you completed the quest, you'd no longer be able to hunt the Nepents. And with nobody else around, this was a literal experience farm for you right now. At least until you hit level 5 and the experience became negligible.

And with both you and Cu levelling up, plus the essence you got, taking them down would be a breeze.

Once more, you had Cu track down any monsters within the vicinity, and within five minutes, he had led you to another clearing. Ducking behind a tree, you keeked your head out and took a look.

1,2,3 5, 7, 10. There was a total of ten Little Nepent milling about the clearing minding their own buisness. The only problem was. 'There's four with the fruit.' you grimaced, and not one with an Ovule. Though, not that you expected there to be another Ovule so quickly.

You'd have to be careful to take them out without hitting the fruits. If you did end up hitting one, you'd need to teleport out right quick.

This time, you couldn't risk drawing aggro, mostly because of the fruit. If it weren't for them, you could just go full ham on them and spam your sword skill, with Cu at your side, you could take ten of them down in rush easily and shrug off any damage.

Instead, you circled around the clearing, keeping a keen eye on the Little Nepents. And only when one of them were looking in your general direction, one of the fruit bearers, did you step out a bit.

It wobbled as soon as it saw you and wandered away from its group towards you. It wound up its long whip like tentacle arms and rushed towards you.

You dipped around a tree, and waited for it to swing around the tree looking for you. As soon as it did, you swung your claymore in a side slash, gouging into its side, refraining from the overhead Cascade in case it hit the fruit. Your blade dug a massive glowing gouge into its side, and Cu tore into its flank with his teeth, and a moment later, it died and burst into polygons.

'One down.' you smirked.

You played it safe, and repeated the process three times. In total, it took you a good twenty minutes to lure the other three out alone and take care of them with Cu. You ignored the loot and experience notifications as you did. You'd go over them once you were done. The odds of you getting anything beyond col were pretty low though.

"Cascade!" you shouted, rushing out and jumping high to bring down your claymore in an overhead slash once the fruit bearers were taken care of. Your slash bisected the first Little Nepent with ease, you were capable of taking their full health bar in one blow with Cascade now.

Another let out a gurgling scream as Cu slammed into it full speed and slammed it into the ground, biting hard into the plant beast before mauling with his claws.

The last four, turned towards you in a whirl of tentacles. Eight lashing whips shot out like bullets towards you. A slash of your claymore cut the first one in half and you dodged all but three of them as you rushed forward, powering through the hits, one smashing into your cheek, one into your chest and one into your thigh.

The damage was pitiful though. About ten in total.

"Cascade!" you shouted, cleaving through the first with your glowing orange blade, just as you heard the sound of polygons shattering behind you. Cu must have taken the one he was attacking out.

You didn't let it distract you. Spinning on your feet, you turned and lashed out with a spinning slash of your massive blade, right into the side of the Little Nepent you had cut the tentacle off of. It screeched and burst into polygons, leaving two left.

[You have Levelled up! You are now Level 4!]
[You have 5 stat points available!]
[Experience: 117/225]

The experience notifications caught up to you killing them and you levelled up. You swiped your hand, dismissing it for now and just managed to get your blade up to block a whipping tentacle with the flat of it. The force of it still pushed you back a few feet though.

A howl above you signalled the arrival of Cu as he jumped over you and landed atop the Little Nepent that attacked you, tearing into its head with his fangs and beginning to ragdoll it around.

The last Little Nepent whirled around and wound up to attack your wolf, but you activated your sprint skill and exploded forward at double your usual speed and lunged towards it, raising your blade high up into the air, "Cascade!" you shouted, cleaving down with your glowing orange blade and cutting it in half right down the middle.

It burst into polygons and you turned to Cu, about to help out, when the Little Nepent he was atop followed suit and burst into polygons as well.

Cu landed on all fours and barked happily. And now looking him over, you noticed his level had increased as well!

You filtered through your level up stats and added three to your luck, and one apiece to agility and strength.

Then, you went about transferring your drops to your inventory. You got a total of two hundred col, but once more to your utter surprise. There was...another god damn essence!

"The fuck is wae ma luck the day?" you laughed, shaking your head and slipping into the casual slang you preferred. Honestly, you switched between both so much you could hardly tell you did it sometimes.

Your parents always got on at you about it. Going on and on about how it wasn't proper and shit. Man, you were Scottish, they could miss you with all that posh shit. You only kept to ir rigidly when dealing with shit regarding the family buisness.

Shaking your head and putting the thoughts of your stuffy parents out of your head, you pulled out the Essence of Nepent and took a bite out of it. Then, you increased one of your stats by its own.

That done, you stood up. "Should I..?" you wondered for a moment. you kinda wanted to try and get your hands on an another Ovule. Argo probably went by the same username she did in the beta. You could probably sell one for some decent money.

"Fuck it!" you decided. You'd have one more shot at getting another Ovule, plus, four more Little Nepent kills would get you to level five. Then, your experience for the next level would increase and the Nepents would drop down to ten. Roughly, you'd probably need around thirty five Little Nepent kills to get from level five to six. So getting to five would be a good stop point for now.

For the third time in a row, you had Cu track down some more Little Nepents. This time, it took a little more time to find them, an entire ten minutes.

Finally, you did find another small clearing within the forest, this one with six Little Nepents. Surprisingly, to your glee, there was one with an Ovule within the group of six.

You burst into the the clearing and took them by surprise, your wolf companion by your side. With Wolf Fang and Cascade, you took out one each before they even realised you were there.

By time they turned to react, another two fell to you and your wolf companion.

[You have Levelled up! You are now Level 5!]
[You have 5 Stat Points available!]
[Experience: 12/338]

The level up notification popped up as soon as you killed the fourth one. But you ignored it to spring forward with another Cascade, cleaving the fifth one down, and ducking one of the whipping tentacles of the Ovule bearer, only taking a glancing hit on the shoulder from the other before Cu was upon it with a snarl, taring a chunk out of its side with his teeth and bringing it down to the ground, prepping it easily for you to stab your sword down into its face and kill it.

"Oof." you kept your sword stabbed into the ground from where it went through the Little Nepent and opened up your status screen.

[Experience: 32/338]

As expected, the experience for levelling up had increased by more than a hundred, while the experience the Little Nepent's gave out had went down to ten. Once you hit level 6, they'd only give you one or two experience at most.

You checked the loot you recieved. This time, you didn't get any Essence of Little Nepent Meat. Expected, if a little disappointing, you'd been hoping for your luck to hold up once again.

'Oh well.' you mused with a chuckle, not that you could complain with how amazing your luck had been so far. RNJesus was on your side today.

And you got a second Ovule, so your luck was still going strong. You'd killed twenty one of them. Considering it was a one in twenty chance for an Ovule bearer to spawn, the fact that you got two in about the same amount was awesome.

You looked over to Cu to see, he had also levelled up. "Good stuff boy." you praised him, ruffling him between the ears. You quickly added your five new stat points to your stats, before depositing the second Ovule and one hundred and twenty Col from the six into your inventory.

Then, you and your wolf friend began making your way out of the forest. You were very pleased with your progress so far. Time to go pick up your new sweet sweet sword.

____________

It took you twenty or so minutes to arrive back in the village after stopping your hunt for the Little Nepents.

Once back inside the village, you immediately made a beeline for the quest givers home.

"You've returned," she noted from her seat atop her rocking chair, a surprised look upon her face, "Were you successful?"

You nodded and opened up your menu, pulling out the red flower ovule from your inventory and held it up, "Depends, is this what you were looking for?" you asked with a smirk.

Her eyes widened and she hopped to her feet, "Yes, that's it!" she cried joyously, raising her hands almost reverently towards the flower ovule in your hand.

[Give Little Nepent Ovule To Village Mother? Y/N]

You quickly selected yes and handed it over to her. "Oh thank you young man, you have no idea how much this means to me." she bowed profusely, tears dripping from her eyes.

A second later, she stood up from her bow and made her way over to a long box atop the fireplace, she popped it open and pulled a long heavy looking sword from the box and gingerly made her way over to you. "It's not much, but this sword has been passed down in my family for generations. I hope it can serve you well."

"Thanks." you said, holding out your hands and accepting it. As soon as you did, the mother bowed to you one last time, before making her ways towards the kitchen. Presumably, to create the potion needed to save her daughter.

[Please Select What Type Of Blade To Form!]

You wasted no time in selecting a claymore, and watched with rapt attention as the blade glowed white before thickening and lengthening before your eyes.

You unsheathed the blade when it was done and admired it. The silver pointed pommel, shining black grip, glowing silver hilt and a long and thick jagged blade mainly coloured a deep black the same as the grip and trimmed with shining silver along the edges. It was a lovely looking weapon, that was for sure.

[Anneal Blade - Claymore]
[Weight - 25]
[Damage - 6]
[Level - 1]
[Upgrade Slots - 8]
[Ability Slots - 3]

Perfect. It was already half again as strong as your normal Claymore. It was way heavier and took up a ton more inventory slots. But it was worth it. The fact it could upgrade and level up to a maximum of eight times made it one of the best early game weapons for the first few floors for that alone. But, not only that, it had ability slots. Depending on the material used to level it up at points, the weapon could gain extra abilities.

The first upgrade would be easy. Any NPC with a weapon shop could do it. It would require ten iron ingots, but with nobody around the weapon shops should have them in stock as well. Though, they cost a good ten col each, so you'd need to drop a good hundred col plus the service charge for the upgrade which was fifty col. But, the first upgrade was a guaranteed success from the NPC. The ones after, not so much, but with your Wolf Fang's from earlier, you could raise the success of pretty massively, and with Cu's luck added on to yours, the second upgrade would probably be pretty much guaranteed too.

You were broken from your thoughts by a notification popping up in front of you.

[You Have Completed The Quest - Secret Medicine Of The Forest!]
[You Have Gained 200 Experience Points!]
[You Have Gained 1 Vitality Point!]
[As The First Person To Complete The Quest, You Gain The Bonus Reward - Silver Ring!]

You blinked, "Huh.' you'd completely forgotten about the quest completion screen. It was all very standard. What you were not expecting though, was the bonus for finishing first.

You appraised the Silver Ring in your inventory just like the Anneal Blade before it.

[Silver Ring]
[Weight: 1]
[Armour Rating: +5]
[Level: 1]
[Upgrade Slots: 2]
[Upgrade Changes: 2]
[Ability Slots: 1]

Well now, you were not expecting that at all. What a useful little item. It even got two upgrade slots and an ability slot. You hadn't known you could even get accessory drops on this floor. But then, you hadn't been the first to finish any quests at all during the Beta Test.

With a smile and a whistle on your lips, you left the quest house behind happily and satisfied, your Dire Wolf companion trotting along beside you.