Sword Art Online: Enhanced - Chapter 4.1 (Patreon)

Surprisingly as far as loot went, you managed to score another essence. which was amazing considering the drop rates was increased to even higher with the strong versions of the monsters.

Dire Wolves were pretty agility specced, and agility was by far your lowest stat and it was a pretty important stat. All of them were really. So you added the level 6 Dire Wolf's agility stat to your own, raising it from your lowest stat, to your second highest.

And the two hundred and forty experience you and your companions got for beating the six dire wolves was nothing to sneeze at either.

From there, you continued on towards Tolbana, liberally using your sprint and acrobatic skills as much as you could to power level them.

It took about an hour or so before you Tolbana came into sight. A decent bit quicker than if you had gone back to the Town of Beginnings and then took the route from there. And you got the essence on the way, so you were quite happy.

"What the hell is that?" Agil pointed, eyes wide at Tolbana in the distance. Or rather, the massive gargantuan tower jutting up from the back of the city. It was so huge, it was nearly a third as wide as the city of Tolbana was and so tall it peirced the clouds.

'The labyrinth hasn't moved, thank fuck.' you breathed a mental sigh of relief. You were. You were half expecting it to be moved somewhere else and made into just a small hole in a forest somewhere you had to enter. Kayaba Akihiko seemed dickish enough to do that.

No doubt the route to the boss chambers had been totally changed though. And the labyrinth itself was massive. It would take a long ass time for you to find the boss chamber.

"That's the labyrinth, the first floor boss should be somewhere inside there." you explained, "But our destination isn't inside Tolbana quite yet."

"Oh? Where we headed then?" Agil asked curiously.

You pointed to the side of the entrance gates of the massive city. "We're winding around, the quest I wanna take, Cow Counterattack should be on the outskirts of the city around there, within the farm is still considered a safe zone though."

"..Aw man, more running?" the muscular man groaned.

"Only a little more." you consoled him with a laugh and pat on the shoulder.

___________

"Man this is a pretty sweet place, I'm not gonna lie buddy." Agil whistled as you entered your new base of operations. It was a first come, first serve kind of thing. As long as nobody stayed in here currently and you had completed the Cow Counterattack Quest, you could rent this place out.

You had no idea how long it would take to pass the first floor. So you dumped 80 col to pay for a month stay, it cost twenty col a week.

Honestly, it wasn't bad. It was a small little cottage on the edge of the farm. It had four bedrooms, a bathroom with a bath, a kitchen with a stove and a fridge that spawned ten jugs of milk a day that you could take as you pleased, and the living room was pretty swanky with a book case with various books about the lore of SAO in it, a coffee table in the middle of two comfortable and large couches and another pair of soft armchairs beside the fireplace.

"Way better than any of the inn rooms." you replied.

"Damn skippy!" Agil laughed, throwing him down onto the couch and relaxing into it with a great big sigh of relief.

You smiled, yeah, this place was worth rushing the quest. It wasn't even hard at all. All you had to do was speak to the farm owner to find out Dire Wolves kept attacking his farm and killing his cows. When you accepted the quest to take care of them, in the beta, four Dire Wolves would spawn one hundred feet from the farm and rush it. You had to kill them before they killed any of the cows or you would fail.

The only problem was, only the player taking the quest could attack the wolves. Still, it was quite easy for you, since you had Cu to draw their aggro. And you took care of them real quick, even levelled up after the first one.

Agil could draw their aggro too, but he had a bit more of a problem since he was a much slower build and had no beast companion to help him out. Still, you could physically interact with the Dire Wolves, so blocking them and attacking them physically to throw them off balance and keep them off of Agil and give him time to finish other ones off worked well enough, even if he took a few hits in the process, but in the end, it was all good. And all three of you hit level 6.

The reward from the quest was pretty decent as well. Two hundred experience, four hundred col that would go along way, and since you were the first to complete the quest, you got an infinitely refilling bottle of delicious cream that really upped the taste of the shitty stale bread only available on floor one besides boar meat.

"..So what now?" Agil spoke up, lifting his head to look you in the eye and breaking you from your thoughts.

You were silent for a moment, "..Relax?" you shrugged, "We've been going full autist in this all day, I could use some shut eye."

"Works for me." Agil replied, letting his head dip back onto the headrest of the couch and closing his eyes.

...As for you, you were gonna check out which room was the biggest and had the best bed.

_____________

The next morning, when you woke up, it was to a notification from Agil. He had headed out already to explore Tolbana a bit and start out levelling up his smithing. After all once a player reached above level ten smithing, they were superior to any NPC smith on the first floor. And the NPC smiths didn't even have any perks with the skill on this floor either.

You lounged about in the comfortable modestly large single bed within the room you picked out for yourself before going to sleep last night. Then, once you got up after a bit, you sent Agil a message telling him you'd be out grinding your skills for a bit and to contact you if he needed you.

For breakfast, you got a loaf of bread topped with cream, and gave one to Cu as well. And honestly, it was so, so much better than just plain old dry bread.

You made your way out of your current home base after that, though not before grabbing the five leftover jugs of milk within the fridge. Last night you'd grabbed five, as had Agil, so you both had ten each.

There was a certain skill you wanted to gain today. Battle Regeneration. It was usually a skill earned much later, and only a few had it by time the beta came to an end. But, you had a crazy work around for it.

It was possible, to self harm. And the only requirement for unlocking Battle Regeneration, was taking part in extended periods of time in combat while your health points were at ten percent or below.

So, you made your way outside the cottage, and then, you used Cascade twenty six times. On yourself. While applying your Armour Pierce skill.

Over and over you did it, until you drew your health down to under one hundred points. And when you had done that, you had Cu spam his Howl skill, to drag any monsters within the vicinity towards you.

Thankfully, it wasn't long before a Dire Wolf came running at you, bounding towards Cu from the tree line. Then quickly switching targets when you ordered Cu within the safe zone of the farm.

'Here we go.' you grinned, pulling out your claymore and readying yourself. After all, there was another skill you could train while you were attacked.

___________

It took quite a while before you got the Battle Regeneration skill. The outline of getting it was pretty simple. But it still fell into a random number generator. Still, even then, you think an hour was a pretty good time to get the skill in.

In the process though, you parried eighty seven different attacks from the single Dire Wolf. And man was it relentless. It never gave up no matter how many times you knocked it bac. By time you unlocked the Battle Regeneration skill, your Parry had already risen from level four, all the way to level eight. And in the process of weakening yourself through self harm, your two handed had hit level ten, your light armour level five and your armour pierce jumped from level one all the way to four.

Well, all in it was a pretty lucrative hour. And at level ten in any skill, you got the chance to pick the first perks for it. You ended up choosing the ability that halved the cool down time on your sword skills, halving the cool down from five seconds, to two point five seconds.

Once you acquired the skill, you quickly took down the dire wolf with a single slash, netting you a whole three experience points alongside forty col and a wolf fang.

Just as you were depositing them into your inventory though, you noted something interesting. There was a notification on your friends list.

Opening it up, you noted the name Argo now no longer had the word pending beside it, and was now replaced with the word 'online'. And you had a message from her.

You sheathed your sword on your back and grinned, "Oh, wonder wit she wants?" you mused. You opened up the private message chat with Argo and looked at the message you received.

'Tavish Finnegan Degroot? Really? You couldn't come up with anything better than that? Even your old Conqueror username from the beta was better than that! The only reason I even knew it was you is because I alongside everyone else heard the angry Scottish kid shouting at Kayaba and he named you outright.

Still, you messaged me at a good time Cae-bou. Things are getting hectic back at the Town of Beginnings, over a hundred people jumped to their deaths and commited suicide last night. There's constant riots in the middle of the town square where Kayaba revealed it all.

Somebody needs to calm these idiots down before more die. Could you give me a hand over here to cal a few people down and spread it along? I'm writing a book right now for everything I remember from the beta for floor 1, if you've noticed anything different about monsters and the like and any changes they went through, I'd be grateful! I won't even charge you for the next piece of info you ask!'

"Wit the fuck?" you blinked in shock. You gave yourself a slap up the head and read it over again just in case, but nope, still there. Over a hundred people had commited suicide in the last night alone! Holy shit!

You'd planned on searching out the NPC crafter and seamstress in Tolbana. You wanted to get your silver ring upgraded and your leather boots and vambraces too using the wolf fur you had.

It wasn't really your job to look after all these mad cunts. But your mind flashed back to that little girl last night, she might have been one of those so scared out of her mind she just committed suicide last night in the hopes of getting out and returning to her parents.

...That hit you hard in the chest. Upgrading your gear could probably wait a bit. You had no idea if the Crafter and Seamstress were still in Tolbana after all.