The Empire's encampment, a tent.
"Return and open your eyes!"
The group finishing the wolf ritual opened their eyes.
The meatheads avoided Big Bro's gaze, feeling somewhat uncomfortable after experiencing a vision of being murdered by him so helplessly.
Instructor Apari raised his sword. “With this new power, you may—“
“Let’s end it there." Henry got to his feet. “I know the rest already.”
Using the wolves as a model, players would learn the game’s group-mechanic. This would allow them to share messages, experience, and monitor each other’s health.
Henry'd actually unlocked these functions already through the Commander ability set of the Peopleworker class, which came with even better group-features, such as being able to view the perspectives of troops and estimate an army division’s health pool. In the end, this laborious wolf segment of the tutorial had rewarded him with nothing except one negligible level - unlike the over-sized boar, the over-sized wolf hadn't even dropped any Legendaries, none turning up in its ashes.
But Henry didn't care about these low-tier items.
As for the tutorial's next boss, even if it would be ten times more difficult, he hoped with his friend’s help that it wouldn’t take as long as the wolf section had. It should be fast. As The Wolf Emperor's prophecy had mentioned, only one king should survive to sunrise, which was set to occur in about fifty in-game minutes. Whether Henry won or lost, this annoying questline should at least be over soon.
While the bald trainer and his friend were packing up the tools of the ritual, Henry went outside to offload the wolf corpses onto the friend’s wagon.
As he emerged, someone called out to him.
"Big Bro!" Dan was running handsomely over. “Big Bro, what should I do with–WHOA!”
The meathead tripped on a root.
Two furry objects he'd been carrying in his arms went flying and landed directly in Henry's arms.
Henry looked at them blankly.
Staring up at him was a pair of newborn wolf pups, so young they were unable to open their rose-pink eyes fully.
He sighed.
His earlier suspicion had been right. Ten times more difficult...no, the challenge between these questline's stages would rise a hundred-fold.
“Ewu!” One of the wolf pups tried to howl for help.
"Ewwu, ewwu!” howled its twin.
Henry heard a distant click and a spiteful voice filled his ears.
"FIRST, THOU MURDEREST MINE HUSBAND! NOW, THOU HAST THE AUDACITY TO DRESS UP AS ONE OF US AND ABDUCT MY KIN. BRING THOU HITHER!”
What a poorly-paced quessssssstttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt, thought Henry, his mind and body stretching as they were sucked into another interdimensional warp portal.
A forest.
After an indeterminate period of tumbling and psychedelic sensory distortion, Henry was eventually spat out of the portal.
He arrived in a frost-covered woodland, a chill breeze sweeping through his summer robes, the sky pure white and snow clinging to everything.
The wolf pups in his arms bit at the falling snowflakes, and, finding the texture too foreign, nestled closer into his chest.
The winter scenery reminded him of the harsh tundra landscape he might've ridden through on the Trans-Siberian Railway had he not cancelled his holiday plans prematurely. One notable difference, however, were the trees here - a peculiarly tall conifer-like species, almost quadruple the height of a mature redwood. Their bark, while tough, was able to be scratched by his fingernails without employing
Henry, inspecting the damage to the tree, realised it was good game already, this fight won before it'd begun.
"Doth worriment hold thy wicked tongue, Tyrant?"
And there was the other difference from Siberia.
Several dozen metres away from him, a wolf lay atop a throne of ice, half the platform empty where her husband must have previously sat.
As large as a house like her husband, she looked almost like a twin of him except her fur was an 'imperial' red; no doubt, in a complementary pairing with her partner, the red signalled a fire-affinity, Wisguh mentioning being 'wedded to the flames'.
The giant wolf, her fur bristling, was leering at Henry quite hard. Her mood seemed a little frosty, as one would normally be after a person had just cooked your spouse.
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Henry acknowledged the angry widow, using the click language. "I guess you call yourself The Wolf Empress?"
The Wolf Empress howled haughtily. "Indeed, and this is my domain! Gaze thou upon it and despair, for thou wilt find nary of the conniving instruments with which thou slewest my noble mate. Where art thy walls of stone and flame and men? Where art thy bitch or her agile brand? Here, thou findest nought but I, Taynuh of The Wolf Flame, thy ruination embodied. After I am done with thee, thy skull shalt adorn..."
The Wolf Empressed continued to rant murderously at Henry, who ignored the rest.
His prior survey of the environment was enough to gain a sense of how the fight would play out, of how he would win.
Even if this boss had a fire-affinity, if she’d been cooped up here, chances were that she was still Level 3 and had yet to unlock the greater powers of her form. Thus, her ability set should be similar to the Wolf Emperor's when it'd first arrived: a few howl buffs, a claw attack, and a mysterious instakill bite, which devoured anything regardless of material or level.
Of course, on paper, Henry couldn't be said to be much stronger. In fact, if this monster had summoned him at the start of the tutorial, he might have struggled. Alas, between then and now, he'd brushed up on several skills: his archery, his spell usage, his boss fighting, his terrain manipulation, and even—in a sneaky moment before entering Suchi's wolf forest—his tree climbing. By a strange string of coincidences, as if consciously intending to help him, this tutorial had given him a refresher course in every skill he needed to make this fight winnable in this environment.
The only outstanding question was whether it'd given his opponent anything by which she might win.
Henry, surveying The Empress and her realm, couldn't see anything in her favour.
The sole complication was the length of the coming battle. Given the monster’s health pool and him being Level 4, it would take him several hours to grind her down, much longer than what was stipulated in the prophecy, suggesting perhaps that he would lose.
This, however, wouldn't necessarily be the case. Like with King Torc's Prison, this forest seemed to a timeless space, the minutes and hours that passed here corresponding with only fractions of a second in the real-world.
This concept of frozen time might seem fantastical, but there was a rather dry explanation for the mechanic. See, Saana's system had two methods for projecting the player’s mind into the game. The default mode, known by the general public and by which the game typically operated, entered one into a pseudo dream state. The second, more experimental mode involved the duplication of—
"DIE!" The Wolf Empress rose to her feet, shaking a layer of snow from her vermillion fur, ready to start their mort—
"Hold up, hold up," Henry interrupted her back. "I’m not trying to avoid the fight. I killed your husband, 'fate', etc. - I get it. But before we cross claws, let me deal with these pups."
The Empress, who was about to leap from her throne, tensed up in rage. "Despicable!"
"Settle down. Let me explain..."
He clicked out a concise explanation that the pups would not survive the cold during their fight unless The Wolf Empress allowed him to build a shelter. He used math to illustrate that, regardless of what she did, she could never reach him before he could teleport to safety unless she had a method for accelerating 3.8 times faster than her husband.
The Wolf Empress's anger burned fiercer at his flippancy. "These words reeketh of deceit! Wherefore wouldst thou, who hast slain in droves my kin, be concerned with the fate of a mere pair? Preposterous!"
Henry laughed. "I’m not that generous, wolf. The truth is once you reach my level, time becomes more valuable than anything else, and your Level 3 corpse is, in fact, insufficient compensation for this evening's troubles. Thus, these two will get to repay the rest by saving me having to fetch my slippers in the mornings until their fur turns white."
This was a total lie. The pups could have some practical value for his monster army plan; however, in truth, it just wasn’t his style to let infants die simply because they were the children of his enemies - even if they were digital monster infants. Such a callous decision might be necessary when ruling, but, in personal matters, he abided by much softer ethics to preserve his sense of humanity. This genuine motive of his he, he didn't explain to The Empress, as she seemed too high-strung at present to understand the moral nuances.
Also, he was secretly stalling, still checking around himself for complications.
"Wretched blackguard!" The Wolf Empress snarled, but, even if he were lying, she didn't want to be shown up in compassion by a filthy human. "Do thou as thou hast promised. Know, however, that thou wilt receive not the opportunity to domesticate my kin, for, I, Taynuh, will tear thine innards from...’
With The Empress continuing to throw out threats, Henry donned some shabby work clothes and got to business.
Using
Finishing up, he gave his new creation a proud pat.
The crafting system could be satisfying at times.
Henry faced the Wolf Empress, brushing the snow from his palms. "Anything else to discuss?"
"No."
"Then, ladies first."
The Wolf Empress shot forth from her throne, shedding another layer of snow that had accumulated during the wait.
However, as Henry'd predicted, she proved no faster than her husband, and, because of that, she would be joining him in the matrimony of oblivion.
Henry's equipment finished changing long before she could reach him. In addition to his former battle attire, one of the hatchets he’d lent to the meatheads was brought out, tucked under an armpit, leaving his hand free to spellcast.
“TRYGG!” he chanted, initiating ol' reliable
A moment later, the flames shooting him up and at a tree, the air in his lungs was punched out by his chest colliding with it.
The trunk was too smooth and wide for him to grip it, but, by slipping the hatchet out of his armpit, he was able to hack into it and create a hold for himself.
Below, past his dangling legs, he saw the Wolf Empress, who’d already altered her direction towards his new location.
From Henry's spatial bracelet, channels of light flowed out. One formed into his shortbow draped over his elbow. Another formed into a stat-scroll, which he tore with his teeth.
Along with those items, his other hatchets—the rest of the seven he'd leant the meatheads—condensed in the air around himself.
These tools, rather than plummet when they finished materialising, continued to float. Holding them up was a glowing layer of green axes around each, which flowed to his palms where splinters from their handles were being clasped.
Henry's eyes flicked frantically about, directing the movements of the floating hatchets.
When The Empress reached the base of his tree, her giant bulk wasn't far below him, Henry having only teleported fifteen metres above the ground.
"Come thou down and play, Tyrant!" The Empress opened her mouth in a similar motion to her husband, whose teeth had chomped through the fortress and one-shot Henry's hired Cutthroats.
In her stretching jaw, at the back of her throat, a tiny black hole could be seen which, upon making contact with the wood of the tree's trunk, instantly disintegrated it.
The tree, its base demolished by the attack, dropped a few metres from under Henry and began to tip towards the jaws of the waiting widow.