The Golden Experience Point [Part 1]

Chapter 6: "Contemplating"

—Huh? What? "Tame"? I can tame her? An NPC?

The fact that it appeared she could tame a human NPC was of course shocking, but more importantly, there had never been any whispers of a taming system at all before. It wasn't available in the closed beta. Maybe she just never found out about it, but whatever the case, Rare was currently completely clueless.

She had no idea what kind of system it was, but based on the error message she received, something happened that caused a tame action to activate. Normally, you'd think it came about due to Kerry's request. "I want you to become our leader;" in other words, from a gameplay perspective, a "Rare wants to tame" expression of intent, or so she believed. However, because Rare didn't have a skill related to taming, the "Accept/Decline" part of the process was stymied which prompted an error message.

During the closed beta, she tried all sorts of builds in the character creator, using different combinations of skills and improving her character to see more skill trees. She discovered countless skills and the conditions for unlocking their skill trees. In order to try out that many builds, she had to reroll countless times, which meant she restarted the game that many times.

During all that testing, she had never found any skills related to taming. This probably meant that either they didn't exist during the closed beta, or their prerequisites couldn't be met with only the starting 100 XP.

If it were a new system that didn't exist during the closed beta, then if people rerolled now, there was a possibility they'd already be able to learn these skills. However, you couldn't skip the tutorial anymore. In order to test by rerolling, you'd need to invest a huge amount of time. Including the one-hour tutorial and the amount of time it took to actually create the character, if she wanted to try five different builds, it would require as much time as she'd spent in the game so far. Not to mention that she didn't know if she could find the skill in just five rerolls.

The other possibility was that taming had always existed, but that 100 XP was insufficient to meet the minimum requirements to unlock it. It was also hard to imagine any other players discovering this skill at this point in the game's life. After finishing the tutorial, they'd have to go earn more XP, and they'd be looking for a taming-related skill that they don't even know the prerequisites for. There probably weren't any players who would waste time farming XP for no concrete reason.

In either case, that meant there probably weren't any players out there who had information on taming-related skills; if there were, there wouldn't be many of them, Rare herself being one.

Rare was beginning to feel pretty excited about this situation.

In particular, she was stealing a march on other players and getting a leg up in the struggle for information. She wasn't planning on hoarding information, but being the only one who had this piece of info was terribly alluring. Without needing to consult with anyone anywhere about this situation, she could meticulously conduct investigations all by herself. It was also possible that, like her, someone could somehow meet the conditions and receive this error message, but considering how she got here, it was hard to imagine the stars aligning for another person.

"I guess... we're no good, huh," Kerry muttered sadly.

Oh crap. I ignored the all-important taming target.

"That's not it at all. I don't believe I have any qualms with becoming your leader. In fact, I should be the one asking you. It's just that... Right, I need to consider some things first. My apologies, but please make yourselves more comfortable. What about your meal? It slipped my mind, but you were in the middle of eating, weren't you?"

At Rare's suggestion, the four girls relaxed, allowing the tension to drain, and went about warming up their food at the campfire. Rare fell into thought, considering the implications of the [Subordinate] skill that the error message mentioned in relation to taming. The most likely possibility was the [Discipline] skill tree. NPCs that had been [Disciplined] could be [Subordinated]; that sounded logical. However, during the closed beta, the [Discipline] skill tree contained only [Discipline] and nothing else. Plus, the active skill [Discipline] was described as "When successful, allows you to command the target for a fixed period of time." For example, while battling monsters, the skill was used to turn one monster hostile to all other monsters. This didn't seem to match the idea of "taming;" it was just a kind of quirky crowd control skill.