Chapter 9 - 9. First Encounter With An Elite

Auxiliary skills? He called up his status window at once. Once it was up, he immediately noticed an additional page after the Battle Skill page. He turned to that page.

Auxiliary Skill

Gatherer

- Forage: basic apprentice

- Lumbering: basic apprentice

- Mining: basic apprentice

- Fishing: basic apprentice

Artisan

- Blacksmith: basic apprentice

- Alchemist: basic apprentice

- Cooking: basic apprentice – see available recipes.

- Scroll Making: basic apprentice

Support

- Lockpicking: basic apprentice

- Detect & Disarm Trap: basic apprentice

- Runecraft: basic apprentice

- Inspect: basic apprentice

Social

- Leadership & Teamwork: basic apprentice

- Diplomacy: basic apprentice

- Haggling: basic apprentice

- Influence: basic apprentice

He browsed the Auxiliary page intensely, but there was no explanation for each of the skills. He didn't remember to have read about these skills in the Beta Guide either. They were all at basic apprentice level, he guessed he would need to repeatedly use these skills in order to increase its grade, like the star proficiency of battle skills. If so, it must take a great number of usages. Even for his available battle skills Power Strike and Mana Bullet, which he had continuously used for two days, it was still not fill up one-tenth of its first star.

"What's wrong, young man? You seemed to space out. Was my fried rice that good?" Bill's voice disrupted his train of thought.

Hearing Bill's comment, he realized something.

"You didn't see my status window?" He asked him.

"What window?"

So we can only see our own status window, Jack pondered. That's good, it will avoid others from learning about his stats and equipment attributes if he inspected them in the crowd.

"Try opening yours," he said to Bill

"Open what?" Bill was at a loss.

"You can mentally call it up, but in your case, you can try it for the first time by saying status window."

"Status window?"

After he said the word, he immediately jerked up from his chair. He saw the empty air in front of him bewilderedly. His hand waved forward trying to touch something. Jack imagined his status window projection was floating in front of him.

"What's this?" He asked.

"It's the descriptions of your status," Jack explained. "The first page you must be seeing now is your attributes window. It contains numbers that describe the basic limitations of your body."

"Huh?" He seemed more confused after the explanation.

Jack sighed. He then asked him to sit down and continued to explain what he knew to him. He explained about his attribute, skill, and inventory system. It took him almost an hour on the explanation, with multiple questions which mostly he himself was also not sure of the answers.

"So, you are saying we are in a game world right now?"

"I'm not sure, but the rules governing this world do seem like a game world system."

"So, this is not real? Can we go back to the real world?"

"I don't know."

"What about my wife? She is not here, so she must be fine in the real world?"

"I don't know."

"How do we go back to real life?"

Jack sighed. This was getting out of hand.

"Let's rest for the day," he offered. "We will figure this out somehow."

Bill opened his mouth seemed to be about to ask another question, but then decided against it. He nodded. "All right, let's take a rest. If you really have been walking around town, you must be tired. Let's go upstairs, I have a spare guest room you can use."

Jack nodded in gratitude and followed him upstairs. They came up to a spacious room at the end of the stairs, not much furniture was in the room, there were two sofa chairs with a coffee table and rows of bookshelves along the walls. Many cookbooks decorated the bookshelves. It seemed like his host might be a professional chef. There were several doors on two of the walls. Bill brought him to one of them.

"This will be your room for tonight, that door beside it is the toilet."

Jack was about to thank him when he heard a beep from his God-eye monocle. He looked at his radar and was surprised to see a red dot that was slightly larger than usual in the vicinity. The red color on this particular dot was also slightly different. It was a darker red, like blood red. Its direction was around the front side of this house.

"Where's that door leads to?" He asked bill while pointing to a door in the other wall.

"That's my room," Bill answered.

"Does it have windows facing out to the street?"

"Yes. I didn't board them up, but don't worry, those things can't climb up to the windows."

"I need to see outside, please excuse my rudeness," Jack said while dashing to the door without waiting for Bill's approval. He opened them and went directly to the windows opposite the door. Bill followed behind with a dazed look.

Jack crouched down under the window sill and gestured for Bill to do the same. He gave him a sign that they should be silent. Bill complied and crouched down beside him. Jack then peeked out of the window in the direction of the unusual red dot. When he saw the thing that was outside, he was shocked. It was a three-meter tall monstrosity wearing thick plate armors, it held a humongous saber that emitted an eerie light. Inside its horned helmet was a grey skull with two abyss-like holes for eyes, they scanned the surroundings as if hunters stalking for prey. The aura he felt from this creature was completely different from those Zombies and Skeletal Thugs.

Bill gasped when he saw the monster. "Wh– What's that?"

"I don't know, never met this one before. Let me check." He used his God-eye monocle to identify it.

Skeleton Captain (Elite monster, Undead)

Level 6

HP: 1200

Level 6?! It was 3 levels higher than him, and it had an Elite description on its name. It was certainly much tougher than the ordinary Basic monster. It was not an opponent he should be facing at his current level. Not to mention its HP was over a thousand, it would take a long time to whittle down that amount of health.

"Stay in hiding, don't let it discover us," Jack told Bill.

He nodded silently to express his understanding. They stared at the Elite monster outside unblinkingly, fascinated and terrified at the same time. It was walking slowly along the street, when it was about to pass by the house they were in, it stopped. It turned left and right as if unsure which way to go, then it made a loud stomp that cracked the street floor and created a small tremor, then it looked to the sky and made an ear-piercing roar.

Jack heard a bump from his back and then a loud crash. He looked back and saw Bill was sitting on the floor with a broken bed lamp by his side. He returned his attention back on the street, and saw the Skeleton Captain was looking straight at where they were.