Abandoning Natsuko’s team—maybe Daisy ought to call it “declining to intercede”—should’ve felt like a load off Daisy’s back. It didn’t. Not that she’d lied or anything. Her exact words were that she would, “catch up with them as soon as she could,” and that her “teammates would intervene soon.” She hadn’t made anything resembling a concrete promise of help for the simple reason that she didn’t know how things would shake out yet. It wasn’t her fault that they’d shaken out in a bad way.
That didn’t make her feel any better.
Daisy crossed one leg over the other. She was sitting in a wooden chair decked in white fur on her room’s balcony which overlooked the main street of Ariunuul. Her muddy boots lay against the wall and she had crawled under a thick fur blanket to read her book. The night was cold and windy, as all nights were in the Sibe-Lands, and the wooden pagoda that functioned as her team’s headquarters swayed and creaked.
Under flickering lamplight, Daisy’s eyes scanned the words of her light novel without comprehending them. Prisoner of the Fox Goddess should’ve been exactly the kind of salacious read she liked to unwind by, but she’d read the same passage now about four or five times. Even when she did make progress, it felt more like a chore than pleasure reading. After an hour of this she closed up the book with a huff, drew her knees up, and sat rolled up in her blanket like a hibernating bear.
“Dammit, Zhidao,” Daisy muttered to herself.
Her teammates were right. She needed to stop letting the Yishang dump missions on her. The trouble was that, out of the four of them, she was the least interested in chasing number increases and slaughtering mobs for experience and spending afternoons crunching through dungeons to get a bunch of lower-tier crafting items to upgrade her weapons and accessories.
Failing that, the only other way to continue guaranteeing her top spot was to make herself indispensable to the Yishang. Usually that was fine, sometimes it was even fun depending on the event, but now it had entangled her in a web of complications. In retrospect, it seemed obvious her teammates weren’t going to let her drag them in along with her.
With the fur blanket still wrapped around her, Daisy stood up from her chair and drew closed the tassel curtains that partitioned her bedroom from the pagoda’s balcony. She returned her light novel to her bedside table, got into her nightclothes, and snuffed out the lamp. But despite how exhausted she was, and how soft the bed, blanket, and pillows, it took her no less than three hours to finally fall asleep.
The next morning came faster than expected and Daisy would’ve spent it going right back to sleep had there not been an ominous note on the floor with Boulanger’s handwriting. All it said was, “Level 90 by the Sunday after next.” The punishment didn’t need to be stated. Daisy would be off the team.
Getting the message, Daisy threw her boots on, slipped into her fur coat, grabbed her pocket watch, and hopped off the balcony onto the back of Peng rising out of the ground. She steered the great stone bird due north, straight into the Sakhal forest.
Grinding for experience wasn’t Daisy’s idea of fun under normal circumstances, but it also didn’t help that her kit wasn’t great for it to begin with. Unlike Ailing who could carpet bomb everything with moon beams, or Boulanger who could set the entire forest ablaze and spend the rest of the day sitting on passive experience income from a giant wildfire, Daisy had rocks.
Fewer, higher-quality enemies seemed like her best course of action in lieu of her preferred method: Having other people do the fighting while she soaked up experience for being part of the fight.
After some flying, she found what she was looking for: In the middle of the forest there was an ancient stone temple with a Medingradian Animaton pegasus guarding it. There were supposed to be a couple treasure chests for beating it, but Daisy’s team had already cleared them out.
Passing over the perimeter of broken pillars, the animaton awoke with the spinning and grinding of steel gear on steel gear. Humming into motion, it rose to meet the stone bird diving for it.
Peng slammed into the pegasus, two titanic forces colliding. Daisy flexed her leg muscles to stay on the stone bird’s back as the momentum of the steel pegasus jarred her all the way to her teeth. Damage inflicted, she slid down Peng and leapt into a tumble onto the granite amphitheater below. Her golem crumbled to the ground as she released the ability.
The pegasus swooped towards her. Daisy clicked her pocket watch.
Granite from the ruined amphitheater’s seating reformed into the shape of a bear whose craggy paws swatted the pegasus out of the air. Steel clanged loud enough to make Daisy wince. She really did not like frontline fighting. That was for Boulanger.
Exposed cogs turning, the pegasus righted itself and charged at Daisy again. This time it rammed straight through her stone bear and knocked Daisy aside with its head. Pain flared in her ribs as she stumbled to her feet. Maybe there was something to what Boulanger was saying about “qualitative experience,” because she certainly felt sluggish and out-of-practice. The last thing she’d fought had been that crab chasing Zhidao, and her attacks had been strong enough to chain-stagger it.
“Alright, ya stupid machine, c’mon now,” she said, thumb hovering the crown of her pocket watch. The pegasus made a wide circle, treating the air like a banked turn, and spun to face her. In an accelerated charge, it darted, steel neck extended.
She clicked her watch. Stone stalagmites burst from either side of the pegasus and impaled it through the space between its gears. But a moment later it beat its wings and snapped the intruding stalagmites in half.
Things went on like this for another fifteen minutes as Daisy’s support abilities beat on the HP-soak of the pegasus. It wasn’t that she was underleveled, the pegasus wasn’t giving her any trouble, it just took a long time to kill. Still faster than chasing down ordinary mobs, she supposed. Eventually, the gears of the pegasus animaton ground to a stop and it collapsed in a pile of screeching metal. Disappearing in the next moment, it left behind a hundred thousand Ying and an indication of experience earned.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
125,000 EXP gained!
Daisy groaned. This was going to be such a slog.
She repeated her solo feat on several other mini-boss-type enemies around the Sibe-Lands, eventually having to fly all the way out to the Eastern part where the Sibir River marked the end of the steppes and the start of the deciduous forests of the Medingradian region. The river flowed with shedding red-and-yellow leaves of oak and maple trees from the Medingradian side. Daisy would’ve liked to stop and write a poem about it except it was getting towards late afternoon and she hadn’t cleared the Undine enemy that spawned near an old watermill.
She set Peng down on a short cliff overlooking the river-straddling mill. The Undine lay out across a rock as a shimmering patch of clear water with leaves circulating through it. As Daisy approached, it switched into its hostile mode and sent lashes of water at her.
In uncharacteristic slowness, Daisy couldn’t get her rock defenses up in time and took a direct hit from the buzzsaw-like liquid. It hardly did damage, but it was still an unpleasant surprise. She would’ve assumed after a day of fighting she would be back in shape, but things just weren’t clicking into place. It felt like the combat equivalent of trying to read her book the night before.
The Undine dove into the river and easily evaded Daisy’s barrage of kamikaze stone bats. Feeling numb, she went through the motions of trying to hit the evasive water spirit for a few minutes before deciding it wasn’t worth it. She could kill the thing, but the minutes of whacking and running and whacking and running were too much.
Daisy hopped back on Peng and flew out of the Undine’s attack range before finding a shallow river bank to land and take a short break for her mental health before she made the two-hour flight back to Ariunuul.
She tugged off her boots and rolled her riding breeches up to her knees and waded into the river. Freshwater fish and leaves ran past her calves in the crystal clear water of the Sibir River. Reminded of Pechorin’s explanation of the literary theory behind Sibe-Lander poetry, she thought she would try her hand at it.
The aesthetic notion behind the terse, martial style was to gather up everything in one’s eyes and distill it down to bare essences, stripping everything except pairs of nouns and verbs. It wasn’t Daisy’s personal preference for how to construct a poem, but Pechorin seemed to like it, so why not give it a shot?
She began the poem looking down at her feet.
“Rushing pike, swimming trout,
Rocks, leaves, shells.”
Her voice passed on this information to no one. Her eyes raised to the shore.
“Discarded boots, forgotten— fudge! That’s an adjective.”
She made some popping noises with her mouth and tried again.
“Rushing pike, swimming trout,
Rocks, leaves, shells.
Boots watch, trees sway,
Mill, Maple, Monster.
Clouds flow, sky crowds,
Shapes, linings, ends.”
Finished, Daisy let the poem linger on the lapping shore and die in the sand. She supposed the fish weren’t listening despite their cameo appearance. She wondered what Pechorin would’ve thought of it, and whether or not she’d have the chance to tell him it at some point after things had… well, they’d probably hate her by then.
Daisy cupped water in her hands and splashed her face with it. Time to get home.
Two hours later she was landing outside Ariunuul as the sunset was turning the steppes into a sea of burnt orange. She trudged up the hill back to the lodge to go get some dinner.
The resident chef was back at work when she arrived, this time practicing a different dish of braised, spicy meat. Outside of combat and exploration, cooking was one of Boulanger’s only hobbies, since it wasn’t technically a waste of time to keep yourself stocked with the necessities of adventuring. No one would ever catch him reading a light novel on his break, or even just resting outside of the four hours a night he shut his eyes.
“You’ve been grinding for experience?” he asked in his quietly domineering voice.
“Yeah,” Daisy said, shrugging off her pack at the door.
“Good,” he said. “And since you asked about them yesterday, Ailing and Jouchi have both returned.”
Daisy could hear them talking upstairs, and specifically Jouchi’s excitable, scratchy voice regaling Ailing with some tale or another. After grabbing a bowl of braised meat, Daisy made her way upstairs to where her two teammates were chatting out on the balcony.
“—the trapdoor right after you get past the electrogate. So the kid runs in and immediately eats shit— oh, Daisy’s back.”
Jouchi turned to her, black-furred pauldrons over silk robes swishing. His dark purple spellbook lay on the table between him Ailing with cups of tea on either side and a steaming pot in the middle. He produced an unglazed cup from his robes and held it up.
“A cup?” he asked. Compared to the other two, his voice was full of vigor. Loud, and somewhat brash. It was the voice of someone who was always having a good time and wanted everyone around them to have a good time too, provided they were the correct type of person. His tone with Non-Heroes and Sub-40 Heroes was harsh and barking, the polar opposite of Boulanger’s voice.
“Sure. I guess I can use a nip of tea,” Daisy said, sinking into a wicker chair between the two. She rubbed her cheeks and eyes as Jouchi poured her out a cup. Ailing reached out and rubbed her shoulder.
“Hard at work grinding, dear?”
Daisy nodded, her brain too cloudy to form words. Jouchi passed her a cup and she took a sip of the bitter, fortifying brew.
“I was just telling Ai about my field trip to Deco-Imperia,” Jouchi said.
Daisy’s stomach sank. His field trips only involved one thing, and she wasn’t in the mood to hear about it.
“I had another crop of triples paying me to walk them through a dungeon. This time it was the Arc Forge. Lotta crispy bacon. No survivors.” Jouchi laughed.
Just like Boulanger cooked and Daisy wrote poetry or read light novels, this was how Jouchi filled his spare time: Lower ranked Heroes paid him to help them complete quests and dungeons to get ahead, and he turned their failure into a comedy routine while encouraging them along the way. It was only barely more ethical than the Heroes who paid for lower ranks to find all the traps in newly de-Misted dungeons by dying to them.
Something felt like it was crawling up Daisy’s throat as Jouchi tried to bring her up to speed on what he’d already told Ailing. Usually, she would listen politely while ignoring him, but today she was tired and cranky and there was that thing in her throat she kept trying to swallow back.
“I’m sorry, Jouchi, I’m about to pass out. You can tell me about it in the morning,” she said, setting her cup of barely-touched tea on the table.
“Fair enough. Hey, Boulanger was telling me you got your own stable of triples to play with. You gotta tell me what you’re having them do,” he said.
Ailing raised an eyebrow and glanced at Daisy who tried again to swallow that irritating lump. Rather than correcting Jouchi, she grunted some vague confirmation and slipped off to have another go at reading her light novel.