[You have slain Dark Moon Octopus and gained 114,514 EXP.]
[Level up! You have reached the current level cap: Lv. 60. Further levels are locked. Please await the next expansion update.]
[Achievement unlocked: You defeated a boss more than 10 levels above.]
[Special skill acquired: Giant Killer.]
[You defeated the final boss, Dark Moon Octopus, before the first major update and obtained the unique skill: Overlimite.]
[You defeated Dark Moon Octopus with a party of three or fewer players.As the party leader, you have obtained the unique title: Breaker of Convention.]
As expected, the game's developers were just as obsessed with disorder as ever.
Arthur had already figured it out—with how many hidden conditions and absurd trigger requirements those lunatic developers loved to cram into the game, there was no way something like killing the current final boss in the early phase wouldn't come with special rewards.
He immediately opened his reward panel.
Giant Killer: When fighting enemies larger than yourself, damage dealt increases. For every doubling in the target's size, damage increases by 10%, with no upper limit.
Overlimite: All attributes are doubled. Grants immunity to all status ailments and control effects.
Arthur exhaled slowly.
This wasn't just strong, it was ridiculous.
After assigning all newly gained free attribute points into Attack, his offensive stat surged once more.
Attack Power: 3,000+
At this point, even calling him a "player" felt wrong.
He was starting to look more like a walking raid boss.
At this point, Arthur's base attack power was actually only a little over 300.
The problem was that this game was packed with absurd hidden skills that multiplied attributes like candy. Just from his skills alone, his attack had been boosted to nearly five times its original value.
Add in the attack bonus from his weapon, and his damage output had effortlessly broken past the three-thousand mark.
That meant he could one-shot most current players—who generally didn't even have a thousand HP.
Even bosses wouldn't last more than ten exchanges against him.
Of course, that didn't mean he was uniquely broken.
After all, Maple had already unlocked a skill at level 18 that quadrupled her defense.
The truth was simple:
This game itself was completely unhinged.
Trying to level up and grow stronger by "playing normally"?
That was just asking to be left behind.
After Maple logged off, Arthur had nothing urgent to do and entered a brief lull.
Still, he hadn't forgotten his original objective—
A perfect dungeon clear.
Fortunately, achieving that wasn't especially difficult.
Two objectives had already been revealed.
The first was the event ranking competition announced at the very beginning.
As long as he placed within the top five, the dungeon would be cleared.
In theory, that wasn't too hard.
In practice… it wasn't exactly easy either.
After all, there were still reincarnators like him who also didn't need to log out of the game.
They could grind endlessly.
As for the second objective—
It was uncovered by sheer accident.
A Reincarnator who had already lost confidence in the event rankings chose to give up entirely and pivoted in a different direction.
Instead of competing, he became obsessed with figuring out just how many skills this game actually had.
He started collecting them obsessively.
Buying rumors. Purchasing scraps of information from other players. Chasing every possible lead.
And eventually, after reaching a certain threshold, he triggered a hidden quest—
"Skill Collector."
The requirements were brutal.
At least 20 common skills.And 5 rare skills.
With only three days available, the task was extremely demanding.
Not impossible, but close.
For most Reincarnators, gathering twenty common skills wasn't the issue.
The real wall was the rare skills.
Ninety percent of players got stuck there.
Rare skills weren't learned normally, they were unlocked through specific conditions, special events, or outright absurd circumstances.
Just like Arthur's.
Just like Maple's.
Information like that was priceless, and players who discovered it had no reason to share it.
And since Reincarnators couldn't conduct proper trades with native players inside the dungeon, buying reliable information was almost impossible.
That left only one option:
Trial and error.
And that came with a cost.
Dungeon failure carried penalties.
Serious ones.
Very few people were willing to gamble everything on skill collection alone.
After all, time spent hunting skills was time not spent leveling.
Reincarnators already started at a disadvantage compared to native players, falling behind in levels meant the event ranking objective would fail outright.
Compared to that, aiming for the rankings from the beginning felt far safer.
At least there was still a chance.
As for Arthur—
Most of the skills he'd obtained alongside Maple were rare ones.
By now, he had well over twenty rare skills to his name.
What he lacked were common skills.
Fortunately, those were easy to fix.
Common skills could be learned directly from professional instructors in the city or simply purchased as skill books.
And unlike rare skills…
No one cared if you had them.
Arthur planned to visit the city's auction house later and sell off all the high-level equipment he'd looted from those bosses.
He would use the money to buy a large stock of skill books.
The truth was, equipment in this game didn't mean much to him anymore. Keeping it served no real purpose.
With that, two of the dungeon's objectives were essentially solved.
Only one remained.
At first, Arthur had suspected it might involve something straightforward—reaching the level cap, or defeating the current final boss.
But thinking it through, that didn't add up.
Without a cheat-tier, defense-ignoring skill like My Style Swordsmanship, reaching max level or killing that boss within three days would have been virtually impossible.
He had tested it himself.
Without activating his skills, even with over two thousand attack power, his damage against the boss barely reached double digits.
And on top of that, the creature possessed absurd regeneration.
Even with an extreme stat build, defeating it was theoretically out of reach.
The same applied to leveling.
High-level monsters had an overwhelming statistical advantage over low-level players. The only reason Arthur had been able to bulldoze through them was because his S-rank skill completely broke the system's balance.
In other words... under normal circumstances, reaching the level cap or killing the final boss before the event simply wasn't meant to happen.
The developers must have assumed no one could pull it off.
Which was probably why they'd attached such an almost mocking title to it.
"If that's the case…"
Arthur's eyes narrowed.
"Then there's only one possibility left."
By process of elimination, the final hidden objective could only be tied to tomorrow's event.
The night passed in the blink of an eye.
And before long, the next day arrived with Maple logging in, as energetic as ever.
------------------
Another week has come to an end, and along with that, we've surpassed our previous ranking,, moving from 132 to 120. Thanks to everyone for the Power Stones. Because of that, I'll be releasing an extra chapter this week, most likely tomorrow.
I'd also like to talk about one of the 2-star reviews made by khirigaya_kazuto. I'm not the kind of person who deletes low reviews, even when I really want to — and even feel like telling them to fuck off. That said, this specific review doesn't explain at all why it got that rating:
Wow, what creativity! Another sword-wielding MC.
Wow, what creativity! Another sword-wielding MC.
Wow, what creativity! Another sword-wielding MC.
That's literally all that was written. I don't mind low ratings... hell, they can even be 1 star — but I do expect a plausible reason for it.
There was actually another review where R0B also rated the book 2 stars. Even though I didn't fully understand the reason behind it, I decided to leave it there. And I sincerely thank DBSH and MamutiGolaso for their messages in that same review section. Like it or not, low ratings do discourage me a bit, and your messages helped me keep going.
I know I wrote a lot, but this was more of a personal vent than anything else.
Anyway, see ya!