A fast three minute sprint made short work of the fifteen minute walk that had originally led us down into the temple.
Not wasting any time waiting for the knights and priests downstairs to catch on to our little disappearing act, Ascilla and I moved as fast as we could towards the hint of daylight in the distance.
At first I was worried that there would be guards or other parts of the area but it turned out that it really was nothing other than a really long overgrown tunnel. If this were still a normal game, it’s totally the kind of place I could see myself building a secret base in…
The real question, though, was where this place even was… from the direction we’d been walking before we were blinded it didn’t seem like we were far from Oaktree, but if we were out in the middle of nowhere then that would be a whole new problem… Not that there was anything that we could do about that now.
“The exit’s comin’ up!” Ascilla called. She was running a few feet in front of me. We were both still clad in the deep green cloaks we had looted from before. My hope was that if we ran into any guards our disguises would make them hesitate for at least a few seconds, allowing us the time we needed to pass through.
Sure enough, as we were about to break into the summer sun, two figures armed with spears stepped forward to block our path. Seeing the speed we were running, the guards’ expressions turned worried. They crossed their spears in front of the exit.
“H… halt! State your business!” A woman’s startled voice called as we approached the door.
“The ritual has failed! We are to inform the Verdant Knights at once, per Lord Olaive’s order!” I said, trying my best to put as much regality in my voice as possible. I was hoping that this was one of those instances where having the details of their plan would be enough to fool them. Sure enough it seemed like my words had the desired effect.
Sensing the gravity of the situation, both of the guards paled visibly and stood aside. They made no attempts to stop us or question us farther as we passed them and darted back out into the cover of the woods. The last I saw of them they had huddled together and were frantically whispering to one another.
I wasn’t sure if that was because of what I’d just told them had just happened inside the temple, or because they were suspicious of us, either way I figured it would be best if we spent as little time in this area as possible. And judging by how hard she was running, I was sure Ascilla felt the same.
She fell into line next to me and once the entrance to the tunnel was out of sight gave me a thumbs up.
“Nice.” She said. I let out a shaky breath to calm my nerves. As smooth as that sounded it was a miracle that I didn’t fumble over my words. It felt like my heart was about to explode!
The trees overhead bowed in at an angle that almost made it look like we were running through a natural tunnel of branches and leaves. The formation was too intentional to be an accident. The flattened dirt under our feet confirmed to me that this was some sort of secret road or path… speaking of… we needed to answer the most important question.
“Where are we?” I asked, collecting myself. Ascilla pulled up her menu while she was running and placed it in front of her. I was tempted to do the same, but instead I spent my time scanning the forest for any signs of knights, or priests… or sentient killer trees… or giant silver deer… you get the idea.
“Not far from town!” She said. “About a ten minute run to the southwest of where we are now. If we keep this pace we’ll make it back pretty quick.” She said, adjusting her trajectory to begin cutting through the trees and leave the pathway behind. I did my best to follow her, but now that there was no packed dirt, gnarled roots and small stones threatened to trip both of us up. It was a miracle that we were able to keep moving as fast as we were.
Rough terrain aside, getting off of the main road was a smart move. Who knew when the real messengers sent out by Olaive would make an appearance? We had gotten lucky enough as it was… The last thing that I wanted to deal with now were those damn knights again. As far as I was concerned as long as the average level of players in town was under fifteen, a single knight was nothing more than a death sentence. All ten of the ones we’d seen could probably kill half the players in the game before they either got bored or were outlasted. Making enemies with them at this point was the worst case scenario. Not that we were exactly on friendly terms…
Once Ascilla had finished with the map, I had her take over guard duty and pulled open my own menu. It was challenging running through the woods while reading, but there was something I wanted to check before we made it back to town. The thought of the knights giving chase had made me anxious to check to see whether or not the quest had been updated.
Sure enough, the [investigate] quest that we’d gotten from those corrupted trees had changed once again. The quest text was… as always… painfully vague. Unlike normal quests that we had experienced so far, this didn’t have any flavor text or instructions, just a cold, hard, order.
[Clear your names.]
I relayed the new quest description to Ascilla who let out a long groan.
“Ugh. Can’t this shit be over already?!” She said.
I understood the sentiment. Honestly if I didn’t have to look a this quest in… well… ever, it would be too soon. Although somehow it felt like…
“It feels like we just found the story quest for this whole area.” Ascilla said, deftly stepping over a long root that grew from the side of a tree as we dashed through the woods.
“Yeah.” I agreed.
Normally in games as big as MMOs there were multiple zones you could play in. And it was pretty common for each of these individual zones to have overarching stories with a “main quest” that brought the player up to speed in whatever was happening in the area. Sometimes all of these zones would have stories that connected, in which case you’d need to start from the first area and work you way up to the others, and other times it was a total free for all… Since I hadn’t done any serious quests when I was in Origin, I figured that maybe the story didn’t have to be done in order. After all…
“…ere.” Hm?
“Hey! I said, we’re here!” Ascilla grabbed me by the back of my armor causing me to lurch to an abrupt halt. I hadn’t realized it, but we’d run all the way to the outskirts of town and almost ran headlong into the side of the short wooden wall that surrounded it. Huh...
“Oh, sorry.” I said, which prompted her to let out an exhausted sigh.
“At least learn to look where you’re walking…” She said, starting to move over towards the front entrance to the town. I slowly plodded along a few steps behind.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
By the time we’d made it over the threshold of the safe zone it was already 6:00. The sun had started to set and once again not eating all day left me feeling super hungry. Still… at least in towns monsters weren’t able to attack players, so we should be relatively safe until we had to leave.
I desperately just wanted to go back to the inn, grab a bite to eat, then pass out for a few hours of rest, but I had a bad feeling that starting tomorrow Ascilla and I would be tackling this super terrifying quest chain, and so there was one thing I had to do first. I turned towards Ascilla who was also continuing on down the main road.
“Is the Levin crafting stuff set up yet?” I asked. I still had the materials dropped from the Alpacaraffes and the boss, as well as that single piece of tree bark from earlier. Upgrading my equipment was essential. In fact, I’d planned on doing it today, before I’d gotten side tracked and got the two of us wrapped up in this mess…
Ascilla thought for a moment before shaking her head. “Rain was planning to have it up tonight, but with all the players that returned to Origin it got pushed back to when he returns tomorrow morning. Why? Got some materials?” She asked.
“Just the stuff from the trip over. Figured getting something was better than nothing.” I said. She nodded.
“I’m going to the guild right now anyways to give a report about that quest and what happened… it’d be bad for other players to wind up in the same spot and wind up killed by those knights. Feel free to come along and I’ll ask around for someone who’s open for commissions.” She said.
“Thanks again… and sorry again.” I said. Ascilla looked back at me and let out a sigh.
“You’d better be… but it’s not like I mind that much.” She said. She flipped around so she was walking backwards and placed her hands on the back of her head. “Sure the dungeon shit was annoying as hell, but, well, we’d have to tackle some of these quests sooner or later, and I do owe you for yesterday, so we’ll call this quest payment and then we’ll be even.” She said.
I smiled, but I wasn’t particularly happy. The boss was something that we’d gotten ourselves into in order to help other players. This quest was entirely my own selfish desire to see what was around the next corner. Had we done things even a little differently we both could have been dead in a flash, or never stuck in this mess to begin with for that matter. That thought made me feel extremely guilty, but I guess if there were someone I’d want along for a bullshit quest like this, she’d be high on the list.
After all, even in that boss fight she…
“Aiight! Stay out here for a sec, gonna go bug one of our crafters to come out and square you away.” Ascilla said, snapping me out of my thoughts. I didn’t even realize that we’d made it all the way to the back of the town. She disappeared into the guild hall and left me standing alone in the odd plaza.
It didn’t take long for Ascilla to return with a crafter in tow. Looking at him I was shocked to see that I’d met him one time before.
“Wait, you’re?” I said, looking at the man who was walking down the steps. He was about my height, and wore a leather crafting apron in which his hands were diligently tucked away. His key feature, though, was his bald head which almost comically reflected the light of the setting sun.
“Oh? We met before?” He asked.
“You gave me a hand back in Origin when I upgraded my sword. Takuro, right?” I asked, holding up my +3 Wolf’s Fang. His eyes widened in understand and he gave an enthusiastic nod.
“Ahhhh yeah! I remember you! You were the guy who got hella lucky on his sword upgrades! The three people who came after you all tried the same thing and got super pissed when it didn’t happen for em. ‘Aww but that guy’s got a +3! This is bullshit’ ‘Man! Do you know how many of those fuckin’ wolves I had to chase down?!’ you shoulda heard em! Anyways, what can I do for ya?” Takuro the blacksmith said with a grin.
“I’ve got a bunch of stuff from the trip over and from the boss fight yesterday. Was wondering if you could make stuff out of it?” I asked. I knew that Levin’s crafters were diligently raising their skills at as fast a rate as was reasonable, but crafting materials from a level nine boss mob?
“Ohhh you were part of that, were ya? Makes sense why big A asked me to check this out personally.” He said, his smile turned into a pure devilish grin. “Since it’s you, I can do it. Let me see what you got!”
“Big… A..?” I asked, stifling a laugh and looking over to Ascilla who was leaning against the guild hall. Her face contorted in such an interesting and menacing glare that I’d imagined she was trying to get lasers to shoot out of her eyes and through Takuro’s skull.
Unfortunately for Big A, Takuro’s perfectly bald head was the perfect counter to laser vision, and it must have bounced off with no effect. And by that I mean he was way to distracted to even notice the fact that he was now in some serious mortal peril.
After a minute of shuffling, Takuro finally set up his small crafting station and the familiar menu appeared in front of me. I started inputting materials and shuffling some stuff around, and before long a list of cartable items appeared on my screen.
[KM Sword of Conquest] was the only weapon that I could afford to make that match
It was… different… than the weapons that I’d seen so far. I assumed that the KM stood for King Minotaur, and so it was definitely boss gear… but if I was reading this right the boss weapon didn’t have any reforge attempts, instead it simply had a default +5 to strength, and +3 to toughness. Still, a plus eight weapon with nearly double the stats of my Wolf’s Fang… the choice was obvious. Though I guess that was to be expected from a level nine boss monster. I was just lucky that it looked like I could equip the sword without reaching that high of a level first.
As for the armor, my options from monster items were fairly limited. It seemed like [Alpacaraffe Tuft] and [Alpacaraffe Hide] were both used to make sets of cloth and leather armor respectively, which wouldn’t work with my light-medium metal armor stat. Though there was one item under the armor section that did catch my eye.
[Warm Alpacaraffe Cape] the description said that it was a cape used to endure cold winter biomes, and that it gave a resistance to cold damage, but increased the amount of fire damage you took by the same amount. Even if it wasn’t useful now in the middle of summer, there was no saying when some extra winter kit would come in handy.
That wasn’t to say that there was no armor worth grabbing. The ores that Levin had gathered and stockpiled in the first town were able to make a set of gear one level above the basic light-medium metal armor I had equipped. Since I was selling off the rest the Alpacaraffe materials and some of the boss materials that I wasn’t planning on using I would easily have enough to cover the cost of the full upgrade. When in Rome, I supposed.
About an hour of watching Takuro work passed surprisingly quickly. The guy had definitely figured out a flow. The sword took the longest, and took the most of his concentration, but there were five pieces of armor, so each of those took some time regardless of how simple they were to make.
After finally collecting my new equipment I thanked Takuro again for his work and with one last wave to Ascilla who stayed leaning against the door I left back down the main road towards the inn where I was staying.
With my new, way too warm, Alpacaraffe cape tucked into my inventory and my new, rather heavy, sword attached to my hip, I made my way down the winding wooden path towards the inn. After last night and this morning it seemed like I was finally getting my head around the weird winding paths of the town, so luckily I was able to make it there without getting lost.
I pushed open the door and was surprised to see that nearly all the tables in the inn were now full of players all talking over food or maps. Part of me wanted to go and warn each and every group about that crazy spirit, but honestly all I could think about at this point as a hot meal and bed. Fortunately, both were close at hand.
I grabbed some food for myself from the inn’s kitchen, ate it in as ew bites as humanly possible, and then made my way up to my room.
It honestly felt like blasphemy going to bed at only eight o’ clock… but after the events of this morning, absolutely nothing sounded better than a nice long stint of being completely unconscious. Whatever this quest was, we’d be able to figure out the next part of it in the morning.
Clearing our names probably just meant that we had to find the poachers or whomever had actually killed that deer and turn them over to the knights… I wonder what kind of rewards a big area quest like this would give? Oh, speaking of loot, I should… give…
…Mmn… Something pulled me out of my sleep. I opened my eyes. An icon appeared in the corner of my vision… bright…
Ping!
Ping!
Annoying noise..?
Ping!
Messages?
Ping, ping, ping, ping!
Shut up… tired…
I tapped one… Ascilla? What did she want at… one in the morning?
[Run!!!]
“Wha..?”
The door to my room blew off its hinges and crashed to the ground.