As I was charging my magic up, Luntra was making questionable signs and I thought she was about to start rapping. But apparently those signs were not necessary and even I noticed some sort of dark aura around spiders and slimes that were slowly approaching us. It was likely some debuff so I instantly shot at spiders and slimes there. Both fucking shots missed. I just curled up and told Luntra not to look at me. Never feeling even more pathetic, I heard Luntra's scream:
"Just shoot more times! Not like your mana is limited."
"Well it technically is..."
"It regenerates," I heard something that sounded like a facepalm but she was right.
I then stood up and decided to charge my water bolt once again. Luntra seemed to maintain the aura and it was also likely that she did not have a lot of mana left. That time I closed my distance and hit both slime and spider at the same time. Each shot dealt exactly 20 damage and it was thankfully enough against 10 HP of slime and 15 HP of spider. I noticed an interesting detail though: those creatures with dark aura around them were moving slightly slower than the rest. But killing two of them was barely enough and if I wanted my mana to regenerate I should not have any spell for at least 5 seconds. But I decided to go all out and we managed to kill 3 slimes and 4 spiders this way. We were then getting slowly outnumbered and decided to return to forest, hoping that they would not risk chasing us. Our sprint only lasted for roughly 2 or 3 seconds though.
"Curse the stamina!" I shouted as I was walking nervously and hoping the spiders did not have enough speed to catch up.
"Provide some cover with your bolts at least!"
"Your curse could help as well!"
We both then made the creatures realize that we were not a good prey and soon enough they turned back. As we made sure we were save, we decided to check the contents of our inventories. I was the first:
"I got 2 slime and 6 web."
"2 slime and 1 web here."
"Now we just need something that's classified as a sturdy stone."
"Does thing classify as one?" Luntra then pointed at a huge rock that was probably twice as tall as me and was insanely thick.
"Your progress astonishes me."
"Quit mumbling and get to work."
"Just because you're not as useless as Aqua doesn't mean you get to order me around."
We both then opened our crafting menu and approached the rock. Neither of us could craft working blade because that thing was not classified as "sturdy stone". We both looked at each other in silence and disappointment. But then Luntra suddenly thought of something.
"Oh, could you mark this place?"
"What for?"
"I believe this can be used to obtain a lot of small stones or something. Maybe that's why it wasn't classified as the station we needed."
"Eh, sure thing."
As I opened my map though, I glimpsed at something and forgot that I actually completed a side quest. I then checked Quest menu after marking the place on my map:
Main Quests (2)
Survive A Night
Reach Level 3
Side Quests (1)
Build A Shelter
Hidden Quests (0)
I then decided to check my profile again and found lines I was looking for:
EXP: 545/1000
Gold: 107
So I got some experience and gold. That was a neat bonus. But I still another notification left from Crafting sections. I opened a new section called "Materials" and decided to click on it.
There I only had 1 recipe:
String
It required 3 web and 1 slime. It was likely to be used in building and weapons like bow. Luntra also checked some stuff in her profile.
"Now I like where this is going."
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
"Don't get too carried away. It's likely that we'll get to grind a lot more. Alright, I feel like trying to beat some more fuckers."
"I guess I could help."
"Yeah, provide barely any support and cry in hopes to invent ultrasonic magic."
"I get EXP for doing that shitty aura, retard."
"That's called a fucking assist and not kill. I bet most of EXP came from a fucking quest."
"I mean I completed the killing slime one."
"How the fuck did you do it?"
"It was written "Assist in killing or kill a slime"," her smug and shrug gave me a desire to slap her back into reality.
"Sigh... I guess for now we still have to find sturdy stone to make proper tools and shit."
"Sounds like a good idea to me."
"You don't say?"
"You can quit mocking me."
"You can quit making retarded statements."
"Let's just fucking go already."
Both of us decided to continue going around and looking for that sturdy stone. My map did not show anything special as we were walking around.
"Do you think sturdy stone will be shown on map?"
"Probably not. It just happens that map exploration doesn't depend on whether I see shit or not. It has a fixed radius at which exploration happens and ahead of us is river."
"We need to get there very fast."
"Of fucking course we do."
I then closed my map and dashed with a short sprint that had annoying cooldown of more than 12 seconds. I then managed to trip on something and fall. I even managed to lose 5 HP. 5 HP from tripping on some stupid shit.
"Don't," I told Luntra as I knew she was about to burst into laughter.
"I won't laugh I promise," she responded, barely holding it.
I then found the culprit responsible for this. Just a rock. But then some words appeared above the little stone:
Use Sturdy Stone To Make Working Blade
We both were sitting in silence as we just made the working blade and then mixed everything into stone axe.
"Well, it sure is sturdy stone if you tripped on it like that."
"It still has more use than you do."
"Oh shut up already. We are yet to finish at this point. What's the time anyways?"
I checked my profile. 16:19. Luntra saw the time and without further question we just proceeded to the river. This time I did not feel like annoying myself with shortness of a sprint. On our way we saw some bushes with red berries.
"Are they poisonous?" Luntra wondered.
"Who knows. Barely any game takes this matter seriously, but they might help us slightly with hunger and thirst."
"I'd still not let curiosity peak."
"Whatever," I mumbled as I took several branches and in my inventory there were 5 branches of "red berries".
"How close are we to the river though?"
"We're not that far away honestly. We should be there in 5 minutes or so."
"We can chop down some wood while we're walking in a forest."
"Oh... I've almost forgotten about that."
We then each tried to chop a huge tree but it failed. The words I saw were:
This Tool Is Too Weak!
"So what can we even chop down?" I felt retarded as usual.
"I guess a tree like that," she pointed to a relatively thin and its height was not much bigger than mine.
There were not a lot of trees there like that. But it should do for now. And indeed, in couple of swings I was getting 1 to 3 wood in my inventory per. At this point I got curious how big my inventory can be. I opened the tab and found out that I had 14 wood. But to count my overall inventory space I counted 10 horizontal and 6 vertical rows. With simple maths that even someone like me could do, I counted 60 inventory spaces.
"So that's how you do it," an unkown male voice was barely heard in the woods.