I did my best to distract myself while Sasha paid to do a strip tease right behind me. The first thing I needed to do was paint another Imbue Card card. I knew skills vanished if I used them outside of my heart deck but I didn’t know what would happen if I took them out. The last thing I needed was for it to disappear. Then I would lose access to a potent skill for good.
Once the duplicate was made, I felt comfortable removing the original from my heart deck. Luckily, it didn’t vanish. With only a single slot in my heart, being able to hot-swap abilities made things significantly easier.
I slipped the Power Thrust card into my heart and called out to Sasha. “Are you decent yet?”
“Just a moment,” she sang in a shrill voice.
Standing there while a potentially naked woman fiddled with her chest tempted me to turn around, or at the very least switch to semi-immersion mode and play with the camera angle. It took everything I had not to. Game or not, I thought my heart was going to explode.
After a lot of rustling which drove my imagination wild, she sighed. “Okay, fine. You can look now. It didn’t work.”
She was still shirtless, though she had the system-issued bra on. She handed me the card back, shaking her head.
“You can keep it,” I said, pushing the card away. “There may still be a way for you to use it.”
“What do you mean?” She asked. “I already told you my heart thing doesn’t work.”
“You can use skill cards directly,” I replied. “Just focus on the skill and say its name out loud.”
She walked over to the rock I’d been sitting on and held up the card. “Break Stuff!”
Sasha stiffened and slammed her head into the rock, shattering it. The display would have been very impressive in a karate dojo.
She grimaced and rubbed her forehead. “Ow! You tricked me.”
I couldn’t help myself and started laughing. “Ah hah. I’m so sorry. I probably should have explained that a little better. You need to have your weapon in your hand and think about how you want the skill to work. You weren’t thinking about head-butting the rock, were you?”
Sasha frowned. “I wasn’t thinking about anything but I had the card in my hand and I guess my head was the only thing available.’
“Good thing it’s harder than a rock,” I chortled.
She punched me in the shoulder, doing a pretty good imitation of my Wallop skill. Fortunately, it wasn’t, and I only took five damage.
Then she gave me a coy smile. “Well, I can confirm it’s all there under our clothes and looks pretty functional too. They even let you customize the, um, carpet if you wish to.”
“Your chest does look a little bigger,” I joked.
She punched my arm playfully. “As if! I did widen my hips a bit though. Oh my god! You’re checking me out.”
“No, I’m not!” I balked as I looked away sheepishly.
“It’s not like this is my real body,” she said, twirling and checking herself out. “Though it certainly feels like it.”
“It really does,” I replied, rubbing my chin thoughtfully. “What is it about this game that makes it feel so much more realistic than other games.”
“It’s a lot more customizable, for starters,” she said. “Most games make you choose a class at the beginning or give you a starter class. This one lets you walk around with nothing and, apparently, there are thousands to choose from.”
“Well, there is that,” I replied. “The world feels more real, though, you know?”
Sasha held up a hand to catch a passing breeze. “What would we know about the real world? It’s so messed up out there that it feels like I never go outside anymore.”
“I know,” I replied. “With the housing crunch, there are more mega-rises than ever springing up.”
“That’s true,’ she said. “But with a game like this, who needs to go out? We can experience everything here.”
“Everything?” I asked.
“Well, virtually, at least,” she admitted.
“Watch this,” I said, changing the subject.
I took another of the aquan spears out of my inventory. “Do you mind if I try a skill on you?”
“What skill?” She asked.
“The one you taught me,” I replied.
Her eyes widened. “Wait, you’re level eleven and I’m only three. Won’t that kill me?”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
I grinned. “Maybe but you won’t lose experience and you’ll respawn right over there.”
“Oh, right,” she sighed, squeezing her eyes shut. “Fine. Make it quick.”
“Don’t you want to watch?” I asked.
She shook her head violently. “No! Just get it over with.”
I sighed, putting the spear away. “It’s okay, I don’t need to test it.”
She opened one eye. “You aren’t messing with me just to get me to look, are you?”
“No,” I replied. “There’s just no point using it if you aren’t watching.”
“Oh,” she said, opening the other eye and perking up. “You said you had an idea how to find monsters. Let’s do that.”
----------------------------------------
I waited while she re-equipped her clothes. “Do you regret spending all that money?”
“Not really,” she replied. “You only have to pay once then you can strip as often as you want. If you think about it, it’s not that bad.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I thought they were going to make us pay every time. Those greedy bastards.”
“Me too,” she agreed.
My plan to find monsters was simple. I walked to a nearby mountain and used Ping. The mountain became transparent, and shiny bits of ore appeared all over and twinkled like stars in the sky. I was looking for darkness, voids that signified caves, or better yet, a dungeon.
Outside of obtaining a few conveniently placed chunks of iron, the first few mountains yielded nothing. My mouth fell open when I Pinged the third mountain. Inside was one of the most intricate cave systems I’d ever seen. It extended so deep into the depths that I couldn’t see where it led. The problem was, I had no clue where the entrance was either.
Fortunately, I had the key. I took out my trusty shovel and held it up.
“What are you doing?” Sasha asked.
“You might want to stand back. I call this power digging,” I replied, focusing on the words of my signature skill; Break Stuff.
Skill Modified. Break Stuff has evolved to become Power Dig when used with a shovel.
The earth trembled as I pushed all of my stamina into the move and sunk the shovel into the mountain. At first, it looked like I’d sunk a huge key into a previously invisible keyhole. Then the side of the mountain exploded around it. I fell inside, pulled by my momentum, and tons of rock and dirt blasted out of the cave behind me. Unfortunately, that was right where I told Sasha to stand. I ran over to the rubble and cleared it using my shovel but she was gone.
Sasha has died!
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t do that on purpose,” she grumbled as she stomped over from her respawn point several minutes later.
“I’m so sorry,” I groveled, begging for forgiveness. “I had no idea my new skill was going to shoot the dirt out behind me.”
“New skill?” She asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I thought about giving it a new name as I used it and the system responded by granting it.”
“What did you call it?” She asked.
“Power Dig.”
“Wow,” she replied. “Maybe I should go back at level five and get your class. It looks powerful.”
“For excavating,” I amended. “Let’s see how we do when we find some monsters.”
It took two more Power Digs before I blasted my way into the tunnel I saw with Ping. The skill fortified the walls as I went, so, unlike Break Stuff, there were no cave-ins. Only a trickle of light leaked in from the entrance but I had no problem seeing due to Ignore Darkness. Sasha, on the other hand, was a different story altogether. She clung to my side and still stumbled over every loose stone she passed.
The tunnel we broke into wasn’t natural. Well-carved stairs chiseled into the natural granite led up and down from the point where we broke in. A quick Ping told me that the path leading down spidered out like a root system while above was a single winding stairwell leading to the summit. I assumed that’s where the original entrance was. I was a little disappointed we didn’t get a dungeon notification.
“I can’t see,” Sasha whined.
I took out a copy of Ignore Darkness and handed it to her. “Hold this.”
The effect was immediate. She blinked several times and pushed away from me, doing a pirouette as she took in her surroundings. “Wow, look at all the glow bugs. Wait, why does this card say Ignore Darkness? You can’t make darkness go away by ignoring it. Ahh, no. I take it back. Make it come back.”
I laughed as the card disintegrated the moment she said she didn’t believe in it. I made another one while she panicked. “Try believing this time.”
She snatched the card and gasped. “Okay. I believe, I believe!”
Once she calmed down, I asked. “Do you want to go up or down? There seems to be a lot more below than above us.”
“Let’s go up,” she replied. “I want to save the big stuff for when Nelly gets on.”
“Fair enough,” I replied, though I was a little disappointed we couldn’t explore right away.
I huffed and puffed as we ascended. Stairs never were my favorite things in the real world. With elevators and grav-lifts, they were all but obsolete. Sure, some buildings had them for emergencies but nobody ever used them. Not willingly in any case.
There was a surprising lack of monsters in the stairwell. That didn’t stop me from Pinging every chance I got and stopping to chisel out any ore I found with my pickaxe. I held off on using Break Stuff as I didn’t want to kill Sasha again.
“This is boring,” she whined as we saw light up in the distance. “You promised there’d be…”
Her wish was granted as a gigantic green hand reached out and slammed her into the wall.
Sasha has died!
A message appeared as the monster emerged from around the corner.
Mountain Troll
Monster
Level 25
I focused all of my stamina into my pickaxe and slammed it into the wall next to the grotesque monster. “Break Stuff!”
It felt like the peak of the mountain crashed down on me. Tons of rubble flattened me into the sharp stairs. If not for my hard hat, I’d have joined Sasha back at respawn. As it was, I had a problem. I was out of stamina to Break Stuff. I could barely move, let alone claw my way out. Then a surge of energy burst into me followed by a system message.
You have slain a Mountain Troll!
Congratulations! You have reached level 12!!!
The rush had to have been my stamina pool refilling when I leveled. I slowly began the technique Gromnald taught me to clear cave-ins. “Break Stuff!”
Just when I took care of the last of it, I heard footsteps running up the stairs. “Veri? Are you okay?”
I dusted myself off as Sasha rounded the corner, still clutching the Ignore Darkness card. It had survived her death. That was good to know.
“You killed it?” She asked, gaping at the dead troll just up the stairs from me.
“Yeah,” I replied. “But this place might be a little high level for us. That thing was level twenty-five.”
“But you killed it,” she shot back.
“Barely,” I replied with a small laugh. “And you won’t like how I did it.”
She gave me a look while walking over to the dead body. “Do you think it dropped anything?”
I shrugged, following her over to the corpse. The only monster I’d looted directly had been the worm. Did they all have loot like that?
“Found it,” Sasha announced, flipping the troll over with relative ease.