Frontier Online

The Party (1) Part 8

Rydr heard the snap of wood behind him and whirled around, ready to fight. In front of Rydr was a woman in leather armor with blue sleeves peeking out. Long blonde hair covered her gray eyes and stretched down past her shoulders. In her hands was a bow with a nocked arrow ready to be drawn. Rydr stepped forward with bared teeth as he raised the wolf's jaw as an impromptu weapon.

"Come on, if you're going to!" Rydr growled at her, still lost in his adrenaline rush. He moved away from the wolf that was dying of blood loss on the ground. It flailed at him but was too weak to stand after it received a fatal blow from Rydr.

"Woah, hold on, Red!" She immediately raised her hands and pulled the arrow off her bow's string. "I'm not here to hurt you. I just heard the fight and came to see you go full caveman on that wolf." She slipped the arrow behind her into the leather quiver on her hip.

Rydr panted as her words registered. He swayed on his feet, physically and mentally exhausted from his fight with the wolf. His red teeshirt shirt was half torn off where the wolf had ambushed him on his neck and shoulder, plus he was drenched in blood. First time I've been glad I made a red tee. He giggled to himself.

"You okay there, Red?" The woman pulled his attention back. A bloody guy giggling to himself was probably concerning to anyone.

"Red?" Rydr frowned in confusion.

She gestured up and down at his body, "Red eyes, red shirt and covered in blood," she shrugged, "so...Red." She talked to him with an ease that seemed strange, given how she found him. Rydr figured that she had experience from other VR games, and finding him like this wasn't the strangest thing she encountered before now.

To be honest, I may be one of the only people in this game that hasn't played a VR game before now. Or any video game for that matter. Rydr absentmindedly corrected his thought.

"Okay, that makes sense, I guess. My name is Rydr. Can I get your name?" He felt introductions were in order. Weirdly, she had seen him in a way nobody else ever had, violent and screaming his head off. Rydr blushed at the thought.

"Syrna. So that you know, the fight isn't over. More wolves will come if we aren't surrounded already." Syrna then proceeded to pull what Rydr suspected was the same arrow out of her quiver and nock it on her bowstring. The motion was smooth like she practiced it. 

Rydr nodded and then jumped to his left as the wolf finally died and exploded into light. In its place was a pelt, a couple of teeth, and a few copper coins. He put his hand over his heart to calm himself before he swiped all of them off the ground and dumped them into his inventory. Rydr heard a cough behind him but manfully ignored her amusement at his noobishness.

He shunted his notifications to the side since he assumed they would all be about the wolf he just defeated.

A system notification chimed in his head, and he saw that Syrna sent him a friend request and a party request. Rydr accepted both after reading them. Two people sent me friend requests already; nice! The giant failed to consider how casual other people were. Rydr placed too much emphasis on the gesture, so he never initiated anything. 

"Let's go before more attack," Syrna said and turned around to leave. To her, it seemed obvious that Rydr was as experienced as she. In Syrna's mind, no normal person could rip a wolf's jaw off as a finisher.

"Wait for just a second; I nearly forgot about this." Rydr summoned the pickax he received from Lynn out of his inventory. Syrna stopped dead and stared at him intensely.

"You had a pickax and decided to fight that wolf with your bare hands? That was a level 5 creature, dude! There's a line between doing things the hard way and the stupid way, you know?" Syrna was flabbergasted at his blatant idiocy. "Level suppression in Frontier Online divides your damage by the difference in levels."