Broken

Chapter 65

"I can think of a few more problems, our apparent luck aside." stated Alex. He'd been one of the few members of Chaos that had managed to get out of the last fight relatively whole. After the Avatar was summoned he spent most of his energy on protecting the other's retreat.

"Right." Agreed Bryce. "Not the least of which are the level's of the monsters in this instance. Initially, I thought we were having such trouble with the monsters just because our guild is so ill equipped to deal with elemental forces. But, after Aoife was able to read the monsters with her leveled up skill, it became rather obvious that the levels of the beasts themselves are beyond what would typically be found in a five-star instance."

"Normally a five-star would have monsters between levels forty-five and fifty, with the bosses ranging up into the high fifties if you're unlucky enough."

"Which we are- by default." injected Aiden, his eyes landing briefly on me with an amused smirk.

"That's true." continued Alex, warming his hands on a mug of coffee. "But according to Aoife's <Honesty> we are looking at basic monsters in the mid- to- high fifties, with boss monsters like that Agatha banshee being well into the sixties. And a named monster on top of it all."

"Those are almost at the level of silver-star mobs..." observed Knox with a grunt, tapping a finger against the leather of his bracers. "Even raiders like the Paladins are only encountering monsters of this level up in the highest reaches of the tower. Highest for us simple Earthlings, that is."

Monster and raider levels didn't, technically, correlate. There are human's out there- I've met a few now- that are already over level one-hundred, yet they may still struggle taking on a level sixty monster on their own. This was mainly due to the limited skill sets, and lack of attributes, amongst humanity. According to the experts at least.

Agatha alone had many skills. Enough that <Honesty> got bored half way through listing them and gave up. Yet, with a few exceptions like our Alex- and myself eventually if <Broken> and <Index> kept doing their things- that had a lot of skills. Most of humanity didn't have any skills at all, then there were the few who awoke an innate ability (like <Broken>), or found a skill stone and learned one that way.

The best way to get many skills at once was to obtain an attribute. Depending on your affinity, you could get a great many skills all at once. But less than a percent of a percent of humanity has gotten an attribute. It's one of the suspected reasons that Humanity has been taking so long to climb less than thirty levels at this point. Most of the progress has been made by only a small number of guilds the world over, making the way forward just a little easier for the rest of us.

"As odd as the levels are, I can't think of any way to explain it." I said, just as confused as the others. "Outside of my <Broken> that is... But as I said before, it's hard to say that it's completely my skills' doing. Not to this extent at least."

"That leaves the biggest piece of confusing information in relation to this instance." nodded Carson. He reached down to the ground and lifted up two items that he must have been keeping by his feet, setting them on the table between us all.

The largest item looked like a comical rendition of a sack of coins. Literally, it was a lumpy brown sack held together with twine. It even jangled and made a loud thud when it hit the table.

The other item appeared to be a necklace. This one wasn't so surprising, given accessories were the most common of drops from defeating monsters, outside of experience or mana stones. The biggest prizes we typically got from monsters was simply experience points and the monster's bodies themselves. From those bodies we could make weapons, armor, and much else besides. Almost never is any type of gear dropped. Meaning armor or weaponry. These can be found inside the tower from time to time, but never in an instance.