Golden Experience

Apparently, the game staff had made edits to the commercial footage to align with what Rare had proposed.

“A certain player stumbled onto a way to dramatically power up, then decided to participate in the event and show off. This method was considered acceptable by the game staff, and they thought it would be good advertising for the game, so they slapped together a video to release publicly. However, that player didn’t want to reveal the method to anyone and just holed up in the great forest.” Hopefully the way the video was cut or comments on the video would lead to that kind of misunderstanding.

Management must not have found any problems with this type of misdirection, so her suggestion was accepted. In fact, Rare had entered the event in order to gauge the progress of other players, and she hadn’t meant to show herself off. Rather, if she had wanted to show off all her cards, there wouldn’t have been enough time in the event to do so, something no one could have possibly fathomed if Rare stayed silent.

In addition, that Wayne guy released everything he knew about Rare on social media. He explained about Kerry, another player with the same appearance who had done nothing wrong and was obeying Rare, and a bunch of other stuff; since pretty much everything he wrote was completely wrong, she had no problem with it at all so she didn’t do anything about it. In the first place, even if she wanted him to correct anything, if she went ahead and reached out to him directly on social media, that might render all his hard work moot. The mastermind should stay silent. The only time she needed to confess was after she’d been cornered. Right: just like what she had done the other day.

Anyway, her plans were proceeding smoothly… Well, not that she was doing anything, but it had been a week since things had kicked off. Right now, more and more players were gathering at the Great Liebe Forest—she had only recently found out that was the name of this forest. The nearby city of Erfahren—another name she only just learned—was experiencing a surge of unprecedented economic prosperity as a consequence. It was as though they were preparing for war against the great forest. In other games, this many players would only gather around raid dungeons.

If all these players misunderstood that Rare obtained her strength within this forest-turned-dungeon, then she could consider her ploy successful.

To help sell the dungeon setting, Rare was actually playing another game, a dungeon management one, and bringing her experience from there over here. The engineer ants produced low-rank metal weapons and armor with materials from the ore vein, which were planted in the outer areas of the forest. If a player found one and took it with them, another item of the same quality would be hidden somewhere else. And it wasn’t only weapons and armor: low-rank potions; lumber, nuts, berries, and fruits from trees in the middle layer of the forest; monster pelts; and various other materials were strewn about at random. They were more than sufficiently stocked on supplies gathered from the middle layer nowadays; since it was a lot of trouble to have everything brought back to the queen’s chamber to give to the transporter ants, the ants who collected them were being told to just hang onto them. Scout ants were constantly tracking both the distributed items as well as player movements. Because there were so many players, they urgently needed to start producing more scout ants and form specialized monitoring squads.

After letting the invading players kill monsters (mostly ants) and collect treasure to their hearts’ content, the bloodthirstier ants like the cavalry and snipers would then kill a moderate number of them. This was what Rare realized: if ants killed other ants, they wouldn’t earn even a single point of experience. However, if players killed ants and earned experience, then those players were killed by other ants, Rare’s group could gain much more XP.