Rise of a Tank: A LitRPG Adventure (Getting Hard Book 1), page 10
“Yes, sir. Is there anything else you need help with, sir?” The classic signal that it was time to give a tip.
I whipped out a wallet stuffed to the bursting point with one-hundred-warbler bills, took a few without looking, and gave them to him. “Here you go, Phil. And thank you again.” Bear the word of my magnanimity and spread it among your co-workers.
Cash wasn’t used much nowadays, and neither were wallets. People mostly paid using their WeeCees. However, I always had a thick stack prepared in case I needed to do something just like this.
Sure, I could’ve swiped my WeeCee over his. But it was undeniable that tipping with cash had more oomph to it while also appearing more personal. Swiping WeeCees to tip was business-like to me.
“My pleasure to be of service,” he said with a slight bow before leaving.
Jimmy had delivered five boxes, each one about twice larger than the VR Helm box. Two were from the time my family moved out of our original house. The other three were filled as years passed.
Mum brought them all along—my sisters also had their boxes—as we transferred from place to place, piling them on the back of our cranky, second-hand pick-up truck. We should take care of them because they held precious memories, that’s what she always said.
And when the renovation of our house was completed, all of these boxes were going up in the attic, never to be moved again. A fitting end to their journey.
A satisfied grin crossed my face. A decade and a half later, many things were coming full circle—these boxes, our old house, me returning to this city, I was even playing an MMORPG again.
The story of these boxes would be such an inspiring opening for the speech I was going to give at Gadwall High, my old school, for their career day next week. I never found that kind of event helpful, but with my attendance, perhaps I could lead those ambling kids on the right path. Herald Stone, the Pied Piper—hang on, that guy led children to their deaths…
Let’s go with, Herald Stone, Career Consultant Extraordinaire.
Perhaps I’d find something interesting in these boxes to add to my speech. I needed a connection with the kids to grab their attention. I could hardly recall what was in these boxes, which mildly piqued my interest.
The oldest one, with crumply sides and seams held together by peeling duct tape, was filled to the brim with old toys Pops bought for me. More digging unearthed various souvenirs from the Penduline Provincial Fair, a yearly event for our whole family—it was more for Pops than for us. His dream wish was to be licensed as a food vendor at the fair.
Nonetheless, I also enjoyed the experience. I was a kid, it didn’t take much to entertain me. Our family was complete, the rides were awesome, and the food was great.
And although Pops wasn’t able to fulfill his dream, my sisters and I did it in his stead. Goal #91. Selling our products at the Provincial Fair for a couple of years helped plenty in making our restaurant famous. The inspiration for our signature product, Dolly, a hotdog with peanut butter and jelly in a croissant, actually came from Provincial Fair food items which were always over-the-top with literal heart-stopping calories.
Below the toys and knickknacks were books, my favorite fantasy books. I couldn’t believe I’d almost forgotten about these. Stories of magic, supernatural characters, and mythical creatures were my go-to, which was why I played fantasy RPGs. I always spared the time to read even after I got into gaming—or addicted, as Mum insisted.
And what was this at the bottom?
“Why is this here?” I whispered in amazement as I pulled out a notebook. It was full of creases like it’d gotten wet and then dried off in the sun. I thought I had thrown this away. Mum must’ve kept it but didn’t mention it to me.
Diaries weren’t my thing. There were no written records of my embarrassing moments or thoughts as a kid. What I did have was a personal notebook where I put all the theory-crafting for my tank build in Nornyr Online. Now that I think about it… This was magnitudes more embarrassing than anything I could’ve written in a diary.
Several pages of the notebook were stuck together, writings smudged because of the ink running, courtesy of a leaky roof of our hole-in-the-wall restaurant at Myna. There was a storm that night. I came home from a part-time job at the convenience store to take my shift at the restaurant and found this notebook, among other things, drenched. It was already ruined and I had no use for what was written within it, so I dunked it into the bin.
I had no idea Mum saved and stored it.
A glimpse of all the calculations and notes was a time warp bringing me back to my childhood, when my biggest worry was making the strong tank character in Nornyr Online. Goal #1—the first time I decided I’d devote myself to accomplishing a target and complete it. And not just those generic ‘goals’ nonsense written on the career assessment form in school or the answer spewed to my uncles and aunts when they asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. There was never an intention of completing those goals.
If anyone heard of my Goal#1, they’d dismiss it as dumb, childish… trivial. And people would be right, objectively speaking. But it was important to me, Herald Stone. That was all that mattered.
And it wasn’t like it was an easy task because it was a game.
A very tall order rather.
I didn’t have the resources of the so-called whale players: money, both in-game currency and cold hard cash, plenty of time to grind, the support of strong guilds, and so on. It was a monumental challenge to poke my head into the competitive level with next to nothing… like real life.
“There are plenty of life lessons in games,” I mused with a raised brow as I carefully peeled apart two stuck pages.
It was all coming back to me. The sleepless night spent staring at the ceiling of my room, brainstorming what the heck I’d do with the little I had—a very useful skill, if it could be called as such, that I eventually applied in growing our family business.
My ingenious plan to be competitive in Nornyr Online was to go with a non-meta build. Choosing a sub-optimal strategy or an ineffective way to play didn’t sound like a bright idea, and it wasn’t. Meta is meta for a reason. But there were plenty of advantages going the other way.
The best gears for meta builds were hard to farm because every player and their grandma’s second cousin was looking for them. As a result, the prices of said gears both on the in-game auction and the black market would be sky-high—simple demand and supply interaction.
In comparison, items needed for so-called gimmicky strategies were considered trash and valued as such. The rarest pieces of legendary equipment dropped by the most powerful endgame bosses could have backyard-sale prices if they weren’t used in a meta build.
Some people would even sell those to the NPCs to free up inventory space. Pages of my notebook were filled with theories and various combinations of those dirt cheap legendary items, cobbling together a build that actually worked.
Another benefit lay in my opponents being unfamiliar with how I played, since it was unlikely they’d encountered it before. Furthermore, the meta builds warped the whole game into countering themselves, ergo, there would be fewer counters against me.
“Would you look at that? My kid self was already a genius.”
Genius might be too strong of a description, but I couldn’t help but be proud of myself, and rightly so. This counter-intuitive strategy-making was applicable in business as well. Innovating and advancing in unexplored directions, offering novel products. It was also useful in stock investing, going against the market decisions of the masses and profiting off of being ahead in a trend.
And Mum said this was all a waste of time, I thought with a chuckle as I peered at my writings, trying to decipher them.
I continued flipping through the pages until it was all blank. No more calculations, illustrations, or scribbles about Nornyr Online. And I finally reached the last page—well, where the last page should be. A piece hanging on for dear life on the notebook’s seams was what remained of the page that was torn off.
I touched the small piece, recalling what was written on it. This should be the page where I wrote my first seven… six? I wasn’t sure… Goals. The first List. Did I tear this page off before I binned this notebook? Must’ve when I copied the List to another notebook. At present, the much-expanded List was in my WeeCee files.
As for the missing page? I most likely threw it away afterward.
A big, hotdog squeaky toy was the first thing I saw when I opened the next box. Mason’s name was written on its side with a permanent marker. Giving it a squeeze, it let out a weak fart-like noise. I wasn’t sure if it should sound like this or it did because it was old. Either way, Mason would’ve found something funny with it. Seriously, that guy… He’d given me the hotdog toy as a parting gift so ‘I wouldn’t forget him.’
This box was filled with gifts from my friends and classmates before my family moved away. I rummaged through it with a smile and a watery eye—could just be the dust floating in the air.
I couldn’t recall who gave what in this box—they didn’t have names like Mason’s gift—but I could guess. The baseball cap for sure had to be Paul’s. He always wore this outdoors and indoors, getting detention multiple times for wearing it in class until he finally decided to follow the school’s rules. There were several CDs, probably mix CDs, or whatever the hell these were called back then. One of them had to be from Jefferson. He’d burned a playlist of the songs we always listened to while playing at Vanguard Gaming.
“This has got to be Boady’s gift.” I fished out a huge physics book. Sure enough, written across the edge of the pages was his name.
Boady had asked what I wanted for a gift, but I refused anything from him since he’d already helped me by buying my Nornyr character for more than what it was worth. In the end, he gave me one of his college books as a gift—or more like a joke—so I wouldn’t feel guilty accepting it. He explained he’d no use for it since he had no plans of going back to college, but it might help me as a reminder not to follow in his footsteps.
If what Eclairs said was true about Boady, then maybe I should follow in his footsteps now.
“Huh?” A piece of paper fell out of Boady’s physics book. “What is—the List?”
I raised a brow. The missing page from my notebook? It wasn’t horribly wrinkled like the other pages and was clear of any ink blotches. I must’ve torn this off long before the notebook got wet.
My brows furrowed. I reread it several times to make sure I had it right, forehead wrinkling in thought. I closed my eyes for several seconds, opened them, and read the first List again. It was still the same.
“Goal #1…” I whispered. “It… it never mentioned being a tank in Nornyr Online?”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The first six items on the List in my WeeCee were the same as those enumerated on this piece of paper—all except for Goal #1’s end part that it should be completed playing in Nornyr Online. The original List only stated:
I will become the best tank, crush everyone, and remain standing after every battle.
“Is this the original?” I held it up against the light as if that’d tell me something. What was I doing? Checking a counterfeit warbler bill? There was a better way.
I grabbed my old notebook, flipped it over, and opened its back cover. I positioned the torn paper and pushed it to the remaining piece of the last page, doing it slowly for dramatic effect. The tear perfectly fit like a jigsaw puzzle.
And it was inside the physics book that came from the second box, so the timelines also lined up. I hadn’t opened that box since the day we left Egret City, avoiding my friends’ mementos because they’d remind me of the life I left behind. That was all in the past. Seeing them now brought happy memories—I was glad to have made peace with that part of myself.
But why was this missing page there? I wracked my brain and couldn’t recall why. I must’ve absentmindedly slid it inside the physics book after copying the List somewhere else.
And I didn’t even correctly copy it.
Probably just rewrote the List from my faulty recollection—that’d explain the error. It was akin to singing a song from memory and checking the actual lyrics, only to realize you’ve been singing it wrong the entire time. I may never know how this huge mistake came to be, but that wasn’t important.
“I can finally complete it!” I triumphantly yelled, drumming hard on the table before pumping my fists in the air. “Woooh!”
Since Goal #1 wasn’t specifically locked to Nornyr Online, in keeping with the spirit of the Goal, I could, and should, complete it in Mother Core Online. Back then, the biggest MMORPG was Nornyr, now it was MCO.
When AU Corp. started developing their VR Helm, they also planned to make a game for it. I’d read on the news they acquired the parent company of the developer of Nornyr—which had long shut down by then—to help them with the development.
In a way, MCO was the revival of Nornyr Online.
Things are indeed coming full circle.
I fell back on the bed with a deep sigh, staring at the ceiling, processing everything. The ends of my lips curled up in a wide smile. Raising the torn page with the original List, my hand trembling in excitement, I reread it again and again to make sure it wasn’t a hallucination. A promise to myself that I resigned to never fulfill. Well, it was now possible.
Completing it was another matter altogether.
Nothing that Herald Stone can’t do.
A notification beeped. “Already on the way,” I said as I checked my WeeCee. A projection of the city map unfolded and zoomed in on a tiny blip that just left Phoenix Wings. Mr. Armand’s wings were so good I ordered them for dinner.
When I planned my builds in Nornyr, calculating away on my notebook while checking the details down at the PC Café, I usually snacked on fast-food—burgers, pizzas, wings, fries, you name it. To commemorate those ancient days and celebrate the start of my journey of completing Goal #1, I decided I’d relive that experience. My WeeCee indicated it’d take the delivery guy about twenty-three minutes to get here in this heavy evening traffic, so I turned my attention back to my research.
Twenty-six base races had so far been unlocked in MCO. After half an hour of reading up on them, I was no closer to deciding which to pick.
Their variants and how hard they were to find presented another factor to consider. Furthermore, there were Ocadules, including very good ones for tank builds, obtainable only through questlines of specific races. Captain Edmund, the Amberkeld Guard NPC, did say all Ocadules could be used by all races, but he omitted that not everyone could get everything—another life lesson from a game.
How about narrowing down the choices by searching on the internet, Which race is the best tank?
The top answers were secret variants I likely had no hope of obtaining. Like the trump card giants of Victores Sors guild.
“This is useless,” I said with a sigh. I could try something more specific like, Best beginner tank race and build and work from there.
An overwhelming number of matches popped up, including dozens of guides and videos. I clicked my tongue in annoyance. I didn’t have any experience in MCO to discern if these were correct.
False advertisement and fake news were rampant in this age of internet hyperconnectivity. That undoubtedly also applied to these MCO guides. Nornyr players also made guides with wrong information. They were either scammers intent on affecting the price of items on the market or hapless players who genuinely didn’t know any better.
Only with hundreds of hours of game time under my belt could I confidently sift through those guides—not that I needed any at that point—and say which ones were useful and which were bullshit.
“Ugh, right. Those bastards…” I massaged my head, recalling a group of Nornyr whales who made guides touting new meta builds that were actually rubbish. Turned out they only wanted to sell trash items they hoarded after wiping them off the market at floor prices.
Investing in financial instruments also had similar lying parasites. Those supposed ‘analysts’ using clout to entice people to buy their ‘recommendations,’ pumping up its price and reaping tremendous profits. I could spot them from a mile away. Funny how I applied a lot of my learnings in computer games to real life. Maybe I should tell that to Mum, I jokingly thought.
Anyway, what was I doing browsing meta guides?
I should take a page from my younger self and go the other way!
The food delivery guy came and left a happy man, a couple hundred warblers richer—I did my no-looking-at-the-wallet tipping schtick. As for me, I was also happy with a dozen chicken wings, fries, and a large soda. Unlike before, I didn’t have any paper to get grease on because I was typing in the air.
With the power of chicken wings—they were delicious, but I couldn’t say if they were the city’s best because I hadn’t tried other places—I’d narrowed down my choice to two base races. And they were the ones mentioned by Bonk, the Expeditionary Legion guy.
The Aviarii and Mardukryon.
These two were included in the original ten races available when MCO opened. More than a year later, as Bonk had mentioned, their respective Gates still hadn’t been Linked to the Warp System because their respective players couldn’t find a way out of their starting areas.
The harpy-like Aviarii lived on top of the giant trees of Gogmagog.
These trees were massive, each one having a trunk circumference wide enough to fit Amberkeld Town inside it, and grew high into the sky. The clouds gathering around the tree trunks held magical properties—they’d occasionally shoot bolts of lightning that instantly killed anyone coming close, housed endgame level boss monsters, and had mysterious puzzles yet unsolved that trapped players.
