Note
Killing the Mother Tree’s warriors for level progression will cause her defense to lose integrity faster.
“Crap,” Jake said, “We’ve got a time limit.” He turned away from the instance. “Come on, Will. We’ve got to go get our gear from my car.”
He was really regretting not thinking of bringing it out beforehand, but it wasn’t like he could have expected the instance to be time gated from past experience. If he had things his way, he’d have preferred to bring Will through things slowly with his first instance, but now that it was like this, it’d have to be a trial by fire. They’d just have to rely on Will’s Beginner Protection if worse came to worse and they wanted to win.
As Jake rounded the house’s corner from the backyard, he realized that Will wasn’t following him. “Come on, man!” he shouted back at him. “We’ve got to go.”
“I can’t see anything!” Will shouted back. “All I’m seeing are streams of numbers!”
“Look, I know I said it was like the Matrix, but didn’t mean it was literally going to be like the Matrix.”
Will ignored that comment. “It says I have Data Affinity.”
“Oh,” Jake said, realizing his friend was going through the same affinity discovery process he had gone through. “Of course you’d end up with Data Affinity.” He shook his head, smiling.
“What do I do?”
“Just give it a few seconds, I think. It should disappear now that you know your affinity.”
Just like he said, the sea of numbers disappeared within the next ten seconds and Will was swift to join him after rejecting the tutorial offered to him.
“What’s your disposition?” Jake asked as they ran over to the front of the house.
“Uh… Strategist, Data Addict, and Programmer,” Will responded.
Jake was surprised. “You’ve got three? I’ve only got one.”
“Maybe that’s because you’ve only got one thing on your mind,” Will joked.
“I’m not that obsessed with throwing out trash,” Jake lied as they stepped up to his car.
Heads Up!
Dispositions are determined by the parts of your personality that stick out the most.
Shut up, Jake thought, silently closing the message.
He popped open his car’s trunk, revealing the chaotic heap Jake had left within. Along with everything he’d already packed in it the day before and a few other additions, there was now a significantly large pile of LEGOs.
“Your grandma broke into your trunk or something?” Will asked.
“Here.” Jake handed him the camping bag from the heap. “It's got normal bug spray, wasp spray, pepper spray, bear spray, trail mix, a flare gun,” he said, going down the list of things he managed to stuff into it last night.
Will just nodded along and took the bag.
“You’ve got Beginner’s Protection, right?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know, you had me skip the tutorial.”
“Just ask.”
Will did and confirmed a second later that he did indeed have it.
“Good,” Jake said. “Still, don’t die just because you can, okay?” He didn’t want Will to start things off by building bad habits. “Just dump points into stats if you can’t handle it.”
“Got it.”
“Metal baseball bat or metal pipe?” Jake held up both.
Will shrugged. “Baseball bat, I guess.”
Jake handed a bat to him along with a hunting knife in a holster and a hard hat. “That should be everything.”
“What about you?” Will asked, adjusting his hard hat.
In response, Jake teleported the entirety of the rest of the trunk's contents into his Inventory.
Heads Up!
[Inventory] Storage Capacity has increased slightly!
“Ready to go,” he said.
They made their way back to the garden after that. There wasn’t much change from what they’d seen before heading over to the car, but Jake definitely noticed the difference in the defense’s integrity percent.
Mother Tree’s Defense Integrity: 93%
“You know how much time has passed?” Jake asked Will.
“A little less than five minutes since we went over to the front of the house.”
One percent a minute, Jake thought. With a deterioration rate like that, they had about an hour and a half left. Of course, they couldn’t actually trust that rate to stay constant. “Alright, let’s go,” he said.
“Right.”
Jake looked to Will as they crossed the border. He was obviously nervous, but even more than that he was looking excited.
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As they crossed the boundary between the instance’s dimension and their own, their vision warped, revealing a garden much larger than what looking from outside would have one believe. The hedges were slightly taller than either Jake or and Will and the fallen petals of the flower child were big enough to cover their faces with.
Jake turned around and saw green meadows in place of the backyard they had just come from. At the edge of the meadow, just before the paved paths surrounding and leading into the garden started, the land had been torn through by tunnel after tunnel.
If the tunnels had belonged to gophers, then the gophers would have been as big as dogs or more likely wolves in this case. He knew that there were types of wasps that build their nests underground, so he could make some educated guesses about where the holes had come from.
As if to confirm his suspicions, a straggler murder wasp flew out of one of the tunnels near them. It was big enough to wrap itself around one of their heads and thrust a stinger down their throats.
Jake ported a can of wasp spray into his hand and fired a stream of poison at the wasp. The toxic concoction proved more effective than the bug spray had been on the giant face eating spider from his bathroom. It brought down the wasp in half a second.
You have slain a Murder Wasp!
Enemy: Level 2
Only Level 2, Jake thought. It was barely worth the spray he had wasted on it when they had a whole swarm of them to contend with.
“Damn,” Will said, as he walked over to the wasp’s corpse, “That’s some strong stuff.”
“Read the item’s description,” Jake told him. “It's super effective against wasp type enemies.”
“Come on, let’s go,” Jake said, turning towards the path that the wolf had scattered the petals on as it dragged the wooden child through the hedge maze. He didn’t have any idea which way they needed to go to best defend the Mother Tree like the quest wanted them to, but he knew how games worked.
If this was a game, the developers would have put the fight between the wooden child and the wolf riding goblin there to draw the players to attention and lead the players down the ‘right path.’ Rather than following the white rabbit, they’d be chasing a dirt covered wolf.
They followed the dirt covered wolf’s path of petals further into the hedge maze until they came upon a small square intersection in the garden that had three new paths leading out of it with no new petals to lead them forward.
“Look,” Will said, pointing to one of the shrubs making up the hedge’s wall. The corpse of the wooden child riddled with teeth marks and missing most of its flower was being pulled in by the hedge.
“So what do we do now?” their friend group’s gaming strategist asked, taking the backseat to the veteran.
“Random number between one and three?” Jake asked his wrist brain.
Heads Up!
1
“Left it is,” Jake said, almost leading them down the leftmost path before he heard the sound of wolves barking over the hedge between the middle and rightmost path.
Jake squatted low to the ground, then jumped up to see what laid beyond. Surprising both Will and himself, he almost jumped high enough to clear the six and a half foot tall hedge entirely.
“Let me guess,” Will said, approaching Jake, “You’re about to tell me that those boots are super effective at jumping over bushes, right?”
“Ten points allocated to Strength,” Jake replied.
“You see anything up there while you were touching the sky?”
“There’s another intersection a bit bigger than this one down the path on the right.” Jake pointed at the hedge between the middle and rightmost path. “There’s a couple murder wasps hovering in the air over there.”
“Lead the way, Jump Man.”
The two of them charged down the rightmost path following its turns and corners as the path folded in on itself and then back out.
Like a rocket, one of the wasps Jake had seen in the air came crashing down into a hedge in front of them. It was dead.
There were three large puncture wounds running down its body. One of the wounds was in its eye.
As the path straightened back out towards the intersection Jake had spotted over the hedge, the two of them saw a wolf shoot up half a dozen feet above the hedge. It hung in the air, suspended in place by a thorned vine wrapped around its neck.
A loud repeated chopping sound began to ring out from the intersection. The vine lost its strength once Will and Jake made it to the garden’s opening. The hanged wolf yelped as it suffered a hard fall to the ground.
Connected to the other end of the vine was what remained of another wooden child. Standing above its currently limp body was what Jake assumed to be the same wolf and goblin rider pair that they had seen at the start.
The goblin’s axe had been buried deep into the plant child’s skull. Its wolf was busy tearing its corpse apart.
On the other side of the square intersection, there was a third wooden child. This one looked taller and older than the other two.
Around it stood two more wolves, neither one of them with a goblin rider on its back. The corpse of the other wasp Jake had seen was at its feet.
The wooden child stood its ground, ready to face the pair of wolves in a fight to the death. From the flower on its back it had sprouted twin vine whips covered in thorns that wrapped around its arms and extended further out. Its thorns looked long and sharp enough to rip away flesh.
Without a doubt, those thorned vines were the reason the wolves hadn’t pounced on the wooden child yet. But the plant child couldn’t hope to keep the wolves at bay once the goblin and its riding wolf joined them. Unless something was done soon, it would just be waiting for a death where it hoped to bring at least one of the invaders down with it.
“What do you think we should—” Will said as he looked to Jake. He cut himself off when he saw Jake tightening a hockey mask on his face.
Without saying a word, Jake charged forward towards the wolf and the goblin destroying the downed plant child. The goblin was too taken up in his task to notice Jake’s approach, but the wolf was not.
The wolf growled at Jake as he approached. Jake gave it a face full of bear spray in response. It set off running with a yelp.
The goblin turned around after that. He suffered a face full of bear spray just like its mount. As the goblin broke into a coughing fit and started rubbing at its eyes, Jake replaced the cans of wasp and bear spray he’d ported into his hands with his chainsaw. All eyes were on him once he revved it.
He thrusted the whirling blade through the goblin’s gut and lifted the little monster up. The remaining plant child, the two wolves surrounding it, and Will all watched, frozen in shock from the carnage they were witnessing.
You have run through a Wolf Tamer Goblin with a chainsaw!
Enemy: Level 4
“Will!” Jake shouted, throwing the dead goblin off of his chainsaw. “Fight!”
“Uh, right,” Will said, before turning to the wolves as he heard one of them whimper. The remaining plant child had taken the chance to string one of them up with a vine while they were still distracted.
Will entered the fray with some hesitation. It was a lot easier to get into the pace of murdering whatever monster was in front of you when you were attacked first like Jake had been. Naturally, Will was going to need a little more time to warm up to it.
He did his part, though, and helped the wooden child put an end to the two wolves attacking it while Jake took down the dead goblin’s mount.
You [Jake] have slain a Tunnel Wolf!
Enemy: Level 4
“You okay?” Jake asked, putting a hand on his friend’s shoulder once the killing was done.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Will said, taking a second to catch his breath after pounding a wolf’s skull with a bat. “I just…” He paused, sparing a quick glance to the hockey mask Jake still had on and the chainsaw he still had running. “It’s just a bit much all at once, you know?”
Jake nodded. “I’ve had giant spiders bite through my eyeball and maul my face, slime monsters almost drown me multiple times, taken arrows to my back and side, and been thrown back and forth through two windows and that’s only been the last two days,” he told him. “You’ll get used to it, buddy.”
The statement provided Will with no comfort at all.