Chapter 89: "The Golden Experience"

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"Foo... foo... hoooo..."

She finally calmed down.

She still retained her frustration and her burning-hot anger. Even now, just thinking about the fight caused her eyes to tear up. However, it was no longer accompanied by an anxiety attack so intense that she couldn't even scream.

She was the type of person to cry whenever her emotions ran high, even if she wasn't in pain or feeling sad. She had always hated that part about herself, and in the real world she did her best to lead her life in a way where she would never get emotional. She had exploded over games many times before, but never to this degree. She couldn't believe even this aspect of herself had been replicated here.

But wow, when was the last time she had broken down this bad? She would absolutely never forgive those players, but it was hard to cry this much in real life given other people's gaze. For that much at least, she was grateful to them. And she had of course already decided how to repay them.

"Woo...ayne—! ...That was Wayne, wasn't it. He... I thought I had erased him along with Erfahren... But since he's a player, no matter how many times I grind him to dust, he'll just rez somewhere. He must have turned up outside the capital."

Rare didn't believe that it was Wayne's fault that she died. That was mostly due to Rare's arrogance tempting fate. However, that wasn't the sole reason.

There was an incredible gap in raw power between Rare and those players. But they filled that gap with numbers, items, and strategy. Rare had indeed been careless, and she made a lot of poor decisions, but by the end she had been fighting at full strength. Yet she still lost. While she had some choice words about that "debuff field" thing that she knew nothing about, she wouldn't make any excuses. Rare was the fool for falling into their trap. Thinking over it again, those players' every coordinated action led to that final, momentary opening. Truly a well-constructed plan. There was no other way to put it than "magnificent." Since there was no way they knew what Rare's stats or skills were, by random happenstance they developed the perfect scheme, and by random happenstance they had the perfect items that worked on her, but above all else, they were able to pull it off because they believed wholeheartedly in their gamble.

Each player spared no effort to achieve their one shared goal. Strength had nothing to do with it.

After breaking the one player's neck, Rare had used that player's overall strength as reference when launching a palm strike in order to blow someone away. Despite that, her hand pierced into him instead. Considering that, among all the players who had faced her, Wayne was particularly weak. Regardless, he had still been the one standing there in front of her. Even in death, he had continued to hinder her.

She had utterly forgotten about the player named Wayne until today. He was someone she had killed a really long time ago, and the only player to have ever driven her into a corner. But his actual strength wasn't all that impressive. Therefore, she forgot about him.

Rare didn't believe her death was Wayne's fault. However, he undeniably had a role in the scheme that killed her.

"Gnnngh..."

It was fine. She was calm now. No more crying.

"...For starters, healing magic. Whatever my next plans are, that's the first step."

Whatever came next, she really needed to fix up her face first.

Now that she knew about [Healing Magic], she wanted to get it as soon as possible. Getting the [Barehanded] skill, which improved stats in combat when not using a weapon, along with [Pharmacy] and [Disassemble] unlocked the [Treatment] skill. [Disassemble] was actually a skill the catkin girls all had. According to the forums, it required a certain amount of DEX to unlock. This was why it hadn't been in Rare's original list of learnable skills. Back then, she had dumped all her XP only into MND.

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