[NR] Normal Monsters? - Chapter 755

Jason turns to look at the left side of the road. “Oh, the insects are silent. Get ready for a fight.”

This wasn’t going to be their first fight on the road. In fact, in the transitional space between the Deep Wilds and NeoRealm, the roads were quite dangerous. While the natural forests that connect to the Deep Wilds aren’t all that special, areas where kingdoms are actively conquering new land have a fun little problem.

Their efforts do push back the Deep Wilds, but it isn’t perfect. Like the ocean, the Deep Wilds ebb and flow, tides rising and falling. And places being conquered are like nearly flat areas where the rising tide of the Deep Wilds can travel far. With the monsters acting like the seaweed that gets left on shore when the tides recede.

Except the Deep Wilds is so kind as to remove what is already there. So if the kingdom isn’t careful, not only does the monster population build up, but as they fight each other over too little space, they have a chance to grow and evolve beyond what would be normal for the area. Which is dangerous all around.

So yeah, the group was expecting a fight. They’d been slowed down over the last bit of time because of having to fight multiple times in a day. What they weren’t expecting was the type of monster to attack them.

From the tall prairie grass jumped out six two-eyed goblins.

Yep, regular, no frills or mutations attached, goblins.

They died pretty quick once the shock wore off.

Now Rosha is poking at one with the arrow she just retrieved from said corpse. “Why are they so normal?”

Jason shrugs, “I don’t know. I think this is the first base model goblin I’ve seen in months!”

They loot what they can, which isn’t much. Just a few coins, not even bothering with the crude daggers, one of which wasn’t even metal, instead being carved from stone.

Then Courtney laughed, “I get it!”

The other two look back at her with eyebrows raised.

Courtney wipes a tear from her eye. “Of course they’re normal goblins! We’re officially out of the Deep Wilds! Oh sure, we might still find some of the stranger beasts, but the System likely prevents its own monsters from entering. Therefore, we are completely out of there.”

Jason, “Huh.”

Rosha, “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.’

Jason, “But why did they attack us? Like, they’re way lower level than us. I’d expect a group of goblins like that to attack us only if they had a hobgoblin in charge or some such.”

Courtney shakes her head, “But this is what happens on roads, don’t you see? We just had our random encounter as mandated by the System so that even if not a threat, traveling between places never gets too monotonous and there is always a touch of danger. We’re back in the game!”

Jason groans, “Right, the world does literally revolve around us again. Well, not us exclusively, but we’re literally main characters out here. Can we just go back into the Deep Wilds? I’ve had enough of seemingly omnipotent beings playing chess with reality for three lives!

“I’d say two, but literally my first ended because of this nonsense. At least NeoRealm has enough safeguards in place so it can’t turn into one of those stupid stories from before FIVR. I mean seriously, ‘if you die in the game, you die in real life’, is catchy, until you’re the one who gets caught.”

Though despite saying that and tempting fate, the rest of the day goes by peacefully enough. They even find a good campsite. Well, find is a little bit of an exaggeration. They’re back in NeoRealm proper now, and so there are campsites along the side of the road at regular intervals.

Which now that they’ve been in the Deep Wilds for a while, sticks out to them.

Rosha, “This road doesn’t get enough traffic for the campsite to be this well maintained. Not only that, but we’ve been on some middle of nowhere roads, yet they’re decent enough.”

Courtney, “Well, part of a good adventure is sitting around a campfire with your friends and chatting.”

Jason grimaced, “Huh, I bet if we measured things out, we could figure out in what order the System-approved roads were laid out.”

Courtney raises an eyebrow, “And how would you do that?”

Jason gestures at the campsite, “The System will have spaced these out, well, had the locals space them out, at regular intervals. Now, I’m sure there are some places where the roads meet exactly in a grid and you couldn’t notice. However, I’m willing to bet that at forks in the road where one side was added later? The road that was added later will have a campfire ‘off the grid’ compared to the other two directions.”

Courtney looks down at the campsite, “Huh. I uh, yeah, that seems likely.”

Rosha blows a raspberry, “Yeah, yeah, now that we’ve been around a truly untamed area, all of the unnaturalness of even the ‘wilds’ of NeoRealm feel curated now. At least the growth of plants and what not are natural enough. Remember, if our theories are right, NeoRealm wasn’t procedurally generated, but rather formed wholesale and has been growing on its own ever since.

“We need to take it as it is, because we can’t just live the rest of our lives in the Deep Wilds. Our plan from the start was to use them as a place to train up and fix our foundation. This trip into civilization won’t be the last and eventually, we’re going to have to let go of even our clearing.”

Jason sighs, “True, but I must admit. Being out there? By ourselves? Yeah, I like that. I don’t need a bunch of people around. If anything, I like the isolation. Especially since it is the kind of isolation, I can break at any moment. Though admittedly, with how closed door cultivation was a thing, there might be some quirks in my mind that predispose me towards long periods of being alone.”