Lucas blinked. He hadn’t expected this outcome. He’s actually a new player . . . He’s too poor to buy a weapon back, and his friends aren’t online, so he can’t borrow theirs during the weapon switch phases . . . “So, what? You thought you could kill me and take back the staff you lost if you waited out here? You know, even if you kill me, there is a much higher chance I’ll drop something besides your staff, right?” Even flagged for PVP, which meant that he would most likely drop two items when he died, he had a ton of other equipment on him aside from just the two staves that he was carrying. The odds of him dropping the exact right combination of items that Nick wanted was extremely slim, and if he managed to pull out both staves, it’d also prevent them from dropping altogether. The game made it so that anything on a player was fair game when it came to loot drops when he died except the weapons they were using. Theoretically, if one went around stark naked with only their weapons in hand and no money on them, they’d lose nothing but EXP when they died.

Nick’s beady eyes narrowed as he stared at Lucas. “I know. That’s why I haven’t killed you yet. Just hand over the staff and the coppers that dropped, and I’ll let this slide. You’ll be killed by some other player on the way to town.”

You know, this spiky-haired weirdo is incredibly annoying, but he actually has a point. Talking with people in town is not only going to be tedious, but it’s also going to be risky—not to mention that trying to convince someone to do a good deed and help me out will be even tougher with the red PVP-tagged name.

“Look, stop stalling and hand over that garbage beginner staff, you dirty, mayonnaise-mouthed, muffin-munching milkman!” Nick shouted.

Lucas didn’t bother stopping himself from laughing out loud this time. He knew he shouldn’t be taking potshots, especially since he was completely in the wrong, but Nick’s red face and insistence on speaking like a teenager who had just been grounded was amusing. “Relax,” he said, reaching toward his coin purse. He couldn’t help but think about how fortuitous this encounter actually was. He had a problem with no solution, and here a solution appeared before him in the form of an angry, whiney, annoying little man. “You said you need a staff, which means you don’t even have the five silver needed to buy one, right?”

Nick’s eyes left Lucas’s coin purse and remained glued to the two gold coins he slowly took out. Nick closed his agape mouth and nodded, watching Lucas’s face. “Yeah,” he answered, his eyes still occasionally flickering back to the coins.