Surviving The Game As A Barbarian Novel - Chapter 621
Chapter 621: Glorious Return (4)
It was foolish to expect anything much from it, really. I had a total of twenty tries. That wasn’t even mentioning that the essence drop rate was extremely low and its color also needed to be green—a one-in—three chance.
But if it does drop here, I don’t have to go off and try to get the Hipramajent essence.
As things stood, I didn’t know the stats or the passive of Hipramajent. However, I had a sneaking suspicion that said combination would be better than whatever the original had to offer.
Arbet’s pure stats were similar to that of a rank two monster, and it had a special stat that was made for a tank build. Oomdal’s passive was great too.
Yeah, with this combination, the essence will be leagues above any regular rank two essence.
Maybe it was because I truly believed it was possible.
Ba-dump!
My heart began to beat harder. Even as I tried to temper my excitement, I couldn’t help but think about the possibility of it really happening.
Then with a flash, the machine activated and created the combination monster in the center of its stage, and our first try began.
“Behel—LAAAAAA!”
We encircled the monster, and after letting our damage dealers finish their casts, we began the fight. Perhaps we were too thorough with it, as the battle itself wasn’t all that difficult. Not to say it was too easy either, though.
Anyway, the first one is a dud.
The battle took around fifteen minutes, and since I was acting as the reliable main tank, we didn’t have any casualties.
Ugh, my shoulder is aching.
I had my set of skills and equipment, as well as the heals and buffs from the priest, to help me endure the attacks, but it definitely wasn’t an easy foe to face.
If this is how strong a combo monster of rank four, three, and five is, then fighting one any higher than this is going to be extremely difficult.
With that, I resolved to be careful not to raise the average rank of the monster beyond rank three. But that was something I could worry about later.
Flash!
Second.
Flash!
Third, fourth, fifth.
Flash!
Even after our sixth straight attempt, the essence unfortunately refused to appear.
Please!
After the seventh raid came up empty, I stopped things there. My gamer senses were speaking to me, and they were telling me that now wasn’t the time.
As the saying went, nothing was free in the world-it operated on the principle of equivalent exchange. The thing was, I hadn’t made any offerings to the world yet.
“Let’s postpone this for now and focus on something else first.”
“What?” Raven balked. “We’re going to stop here, so suddenly? I was just thinking we’d gotten the hang of fighting it.”
“Nothing we can do about it, even if you don’t understand. Commander’s orders.”
“Wait, why are you talking as if it’s someone else’s problem?! Mr. Yandel, you are the commander!”
Heh, she was too smart for her own good.
I just laughed off Raven’s point like a barbarian before moving toward where we kept our mana stones organized. There were thousands of mana stones, each of which had been categorized and labeled over the last few months.
Let’s try Ainar’s one first.
After rifling through the mana stones for a bit, I returned with three buckets full of stones.
“Bjorn! Can I put them in this time?”
“You want to put them in, Ainar?”
“It makes a funny sound when it rolls in!”
I wondered what was funny about it, but I let her do it. I mean, this one was her combination.
“…Eh? It’s going to be mine?”
“Yeah, so put them in nicely. If an essence appears, we’ll store it in a magic vial and feed it to you as soon as we leave this place.”
I should explain that I had three essence combinations prepared for Ainar, the most among any of the expedition members, namely because she had changed her class to spearman. There were a lot of essences she needed to switch out to re-spec her from the bottom up.
Statistically, we won’t get all three custom essences, but I hope at least one of them drops. That’ll help her catch up again.
For the passive and active skills, I chose the ones appropriate for a spearman, but for the stats, I chose the ones that gave the most Aggression, even if it marginally decreased the general stats.
“I’ll do it!”
With that, we resumed our formation, and Ainar happily put the mana stones into the machine.
Clack.
Into the first machine, which determined the essence stats, went a rank 3 mana stone that prioritized Aggression and combat stats.
Clack.
The second one determined its passive skill so that one was the rank 4 combat support skill War Machine.
Clack.
Finally, I chose the rank 4 combat buffs Indomitable Soul and Agitate for the actives, so it wouldn’t ultimately matter which one we got for the combination.
“Oh! Give me your essence!”
Ainar seemed motivated after hearing that the essence was hers. Instead of grabbing her spear and running away, Ainar cheered us on from a fair distance away.
The first battle took around twenty-five minutes.
It’s gotten much tougher because the average rank increased by 0.6.
Someone also got injured in this battle, and because the machines nearby were damaged in the process, we had to wait for the drones to fly in and repair them.
And yet, astonishingly…
“Oh! An essence! It’s an essence!”
We got the essence on our first try. It was a blue color, meaning it had premium choice Indomitable Soul.
We got it on our first try…?
Honestly, I still couldn’t believe it. And I felt a little betrayed at the same time.
…Should I have just held on and kept trying for mine?
If we had continued to fight my combo monster, then this essence would have been mine.
That thought continued to circle in my mind.
“…Then should I collect it?”
Raven approached the essence and sealed it in a magic vial, and with that, the first custom essence was obtained.
We then waited for the drones to repair the machines before trying the second combination.
Clack.
Since we had mana stones left to spare thanks to the essence dropping on the first go, I just used the same one I used for stats again.
Clack.
The chosen passive was the rank four defense skill Perseverance, which could greatly boost the effect of Curl Up.
Clack.
The active was Focus Strike, a rank five core skill of my spear barbarian build similar to how Giantization was a core skill for the shield barbarian.
“I-it’s out!”
The combo monster looked pretty strong, perhaps because it was a mix of three decently sized monsters. However, since its average rank had decreased ever so slightly, the battle was pretty easy, and we were able to quickly go through our reserve of mana stones.
One try, two tries, three tries, four tries…
It was around the fifteenth try.
“A-an essence!”
Although the essence dropped, unfortunately, it was the wrong color so we only stored it in a magic vial and put it aside.
Hah… Still, this is normal.
I clicked my tongue. Still, since it would be a core skill for her, I had hoped the correct essence would drop. Maybe this is the time to be making a few more offerings?
Although the thought did occur to me, it didn’t sit well with my pride as a commander to suddenly shift gears again here and try something else.
Well, it’s just statistics in the end.
With that, we continued to eat into the rest of our supply.
Sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth…
The remaining tries quickly began to dry up until eventually, we had only three more tries left.
“…Oh! Bjoooorn! It’s an essence! An essence! It’s the yellow color you talked about!”
…Who was this woman?
***
Ainar had quickly obtained two essences, but it seemed the heavens weren’t so shameful as to drop her the third custom essence as well.
Hah, I even worked harder to create the best combination since the first two dropped well.
Still, the real shocker was getting three essences after only hunting a hundred of these monsters.
This woman… She’s going to be a monster when we get back.
Verdurous Giant Spear, Hipramajent, and now two custom essences of the rank three Speardipper. Ainar would become much stronger just by visiting the temple to clear out a few essence slots.
“Then are we going to fight the one we were fighting before?”
“No, it’s going to be something else…”
I didn’t have the courage to try and farm my custom essence after such a windfall of luck, so I kept summoning other combo monsters for a while.
Amelia, Missha, Erwen… I had the custom combinations for those three but there were many more combos we summoned.
The members of the expedition group each told me about their ideal essence, and I had a request from the deputy commander as well. Something about an essence that could be presented to the palace or whatever? As I continued to craft essences, one even came up that seemed pretty suitable for most knights.
…If we didn’t use the mana propulsion system, we could’ve had many more attempts.
I regretted using all those mana stones now. Most of the mana stones we used in the propulsion system were rank 6 and lower, but it wasn’t as if we had been particularly picky about holding onto every high-ranking mana stone either.
Still, we had been able to gather plenty of high-ranking mana stones from Library Island, and fortunately enough, the mana stones brought from the palace were high-ranking stones as well.
One day, two days, three days, four days…
The raids continued on for multiple days without rest, and through this process, I realized something.
The drop rate… Isn’t it actually higher than when we fight them normally?
Before when I was testing with the low-ranking monsters, the drop rate was so bad that I assumed it was low for all of them. Maybe that was just a stroke of bad luck for us, though.
I mean, all that luck was probably used as an offering for Ainar to obtain those two essences.
“It’s already been twenty days.”
It was now the twentieth day since we began to fight the monsters of the factory.
To give a brief overview of our situation, Amelia, Erwen, and Missha each got one essence they could use, and Myul Armin, who had been personally recommended by me, also received a custom essence. Also, other random expedition members used the random mana stones and obtained around eleven essences altogether, and a total of seven essences were made to be given as trophies to the palace.
“What the—? It still hasn’t appeared?”
“How many times has it been now?”
Surprisingly, that sentiment had continued for three days at this point.
“It feels like we’ve killed thousands of them at this point. Is the machine broken now?”
It was an odd phenomenon. So odd that practically every member of the raid party for these custom monsters had said something similar at least once in the last three days.
Now.
After getting the clear feeling that it was now the perfect time, I quickly put a stop to the raid. I then hurried over to take out the mana stone combinations for my essence…
“Ainar.”
“… Yeah?”
…before summoning Ainar from where she had been relaxing and chewing on a piece of jerky.
“You can put in the mana stones this time.”
“Oh? Okay,” Ainar accepted without asking for a reason.
I was a little worried, so I told her which mana stones needed to go in which machine, and repeated my explanation and checks multiple times.
Right. With this much explanation, even she shouldn’t mess up.
In fact, Ainar didn’t make a single mistake and put in the mana stones into the correct machines.
Eighth try, ninth try, tenth try…
However, putting the mana stones in properly didn’t guarantee an essence would drop.
Eleventh try, twelfth try, thirteenth try…
As the number of attempts steadily increased, so did my heart rate.
Fourteenth try, fifteenth try, sixteenth try…
As the saying went, a small leak would sink a great ship. And in that moment, I was the ship.
I now only had five more tries left for this essence. My brain was leaking so much from the stress that I started having ideas that I never would have even entertained under normal circumstances.
Goblin.
Yes. I was going to use Sven Parav’s intuition.
From what I could tell, it seemed that his ability only activated when he was right about to face some misfortune.
I’ll tie him up somewhere and threaten to smash his head in if an essence doesn’t drop.
Yes. If I did that, wouldn’t I be able to predict when the essence would drop?
It might sound nonsensical, true, but it also sounded oddly convincing.
That was the reason I ended up glancing over at Goblin.
What the? What’s up with him?
I glanced over just in time to see Goblin looking back at me from a fair distance away. However, he looked uneasy, as if he needed to go to the bathroom, and needed to go right now.
Maybe it’s because I considered threatening him, I thought, eying his odd reaction.
“Commander. Could I s-speak with you for a moment?”
However, when he called me to the side to tell me something, the reason was completely different from what I was thinking.
“…I-I got a f-feeling that we need to hurry and get out of this place.”
Goblin’s intuition had activated.
“A feeling stronger than ever before.”
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