43: A Return to Nails

I joined back into the main gameworld and timestream with the roar of an oil fire doused with water. Rackids lay dead all around the clearing, while even more spilled out of the undergrowth to attack my party, who'd fallen into a loose defensive circle.

Mum pounded away with her punch daggers, muscles rippling as she drove them into virtual monster flesh. Beside her, Noah was throwing his weirdly flirtatious taunts out at any enemy that came within his sphere of influence. The air hummed with the sound of his radiant shields taking damage. When one snapped and broke, the smell of ozone and burning glass rushed out in a wave.

Elena took a hit a half second after I reappeared. A nasty slice down her arm from a hulking Rackid, which clicked its oddly shaped and vaguely insectoid mouth in triumph. Poor girl wasn't meant for holding lines like that. Thankfully, Ethan was there, and he muttered a quick prayer that pulsed over her body, bathing the battlefield in brief golden light.

My return to the chaos of the fight was like a silent grenade into a mosh pit. My friends needed a reprieve, and I had a new ability to abuse. Well, it was more like one and a half abilities, but that was splitting hairs.

Flutter Cascade—Oh, how I hoped it lived up to its name. With subtle finger gestures—Which at this point were merely a result of my mind working through the specific activation actions—, I activated Mind Flutter… six times. With each activation I imagined six ephemeral versions of myself, each one intent on slashing, cutting, or stabbing at an equal number of the most urgent targets on the field.

I fixed those targets in my mind, flicking mental fingers as I worked, miming the attacks out while the game read my neurological inputs. When I was certain I had them all in my head, I set my imaginary selves free and they became reality. In the span of the same thought, I shifted my stance to draw my sword. Around my fingers, I grasped at the threads that bound me to my sword, wrapping them around and around my wrist and between my fingers.

When I moved my arm, fast as a striking viper, my sword followed— But I was not touching it. The Tobubana Katana sang through the air, hissing, spitting and growling at every mote of oxygen it pushed from its path. Out from that irate arc of displaced air and driving steel, a wave of green energy rushed, trailing sakura petals in its wake.

All across the battlefield, my illusions struck. Their phantom blades bit into unsuspecting rackids without mercy, and they were joined by three more who rushed past me, swirling leaflitter in their wake. Those three rushed from foe to foe, cutting, slicing, and stabbing. Their contribution to the spray of damage numbers was far higher than their six weaker sisters—Their damage was one to one with my own. Not even half a heartbeat into the onslaught of illusions made temporarily real, the green wave of my Larkspur Strike washed over them.

The end result of my combo was a sudden and violent explosion of damage number gore, followed by limbs, bodies, and weapons dropping useless to the forest floor.

Silence reigned over the clearing for several long seconds, and all I could hear was my own laboured breathing. Heart still hammering in my chest, I plucked my sword out of the air and carefully sheathed it.

Many of the rackids still stood, but this wasn't some old game with mindless AI that had no concept of fear or retreat. They wavered, as if waiting for one of their number to take charge and give them direction.

Into that silence, Paisley yelled, “Heck yeah! Death to gross buggy boys!”

Then she brought her pan flute to her lips and blew, emitting a high pitched screeching sound that summoned a lance of red energy. It ripped through one of the rackids with such force that the game decided to just disintegrate it rather than attempt to reconcile it with the gore settings.

“You had that in your pocket the whole time?” Noah asked incredulously. “Would’ve been nice to evaporate that tanky dude just before!”

Paisley laughed into the flute, causing it to make an odd warbling sound before she pulled it from her lips. “Yeah. I’ve been trying to focus on low damage and buffing spells so the game is more lenient with the experience debuff. The more I contribute to a fight, the less you get because of the level difference between us.”

"Typical," Mum grumbled, walking over to casually punch a wounded Rackid in the face. Pretty sure that wasn't good form. Face bones are stronger than hand bones. Normally. Of course, then the dead enemy made a gross slurping sucking sound as it fell backwards, and I remembered the punch daggers. Did the devs really have to leave the foul sound effects in?

Regardless of gross sound effects, we finished off the wounded rackids in short order. The experience proved to be enough to bump several of our lower level players up a few, and Elena actually took a few daggers from the loot.

While she was stuffing them into her inventory, I proudly told everyone about my new evolved class.

“So yeah,” I finished, “That’s why I suddenly reappeared and made nine copies of myself.”

“It was so fucking cool!” Paisley gushed, bouncing over an enemy corpse to stand beside me. “The many transparent Keikos all stabbing, and the way you timed it all to hit at the same time, oh man.”

Smiling with a mix of pride and modesty, I found myself deflecting back to her. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen that red lance ability. I remember you turning yourself into a gatling cannon—Firing like twenty of those in ten seconds.”

“Mana Lash?” she asked, surprised. “Honestly, it’s a kinda bland ability from before my Eldritch Bard evolution. The really cool part is the fact I’m casting it with all the bonuses from my evolved class. Turning it dark red, then giving the enemy a fear debuff that makes it deal more damage the more of them that hit. Then there’s— Well, I have a lot of ways to increase the damage, but, you know…”

I nodded and reached out to stroke my knuckles down her sleeve affectionately. When she looked up from my wayward hand, our eyes held one another for a couple of seconds longer than normal. My heart thumped in my chest, louder than it’d been during the fight, but it was like a calming backing track while I was looking at those big brown eyes. She blinked first, then smiled demurely and looked away, and the small moment was broken.

“That Aite person sounds bloody awesome,” Elena remarked, going all starry eyed for a second.

Meanwhile, Noah’s expression was sitting somewhere between hyperactive excitement and unfettered jealously. “I can’t wait… I’m getting so close—Level twenty one, after this fight.”

“I feel so baby,” Elena complained, coming back to us with a pout. “I’m one level behind Noah.”

“We’ll get you to max level soon enough,” my mum said, patting Elena genially on the shoulder. “Then, a month after that, you’ll have forgotten all about ever being a newbie. Such is the way of MMO’s.”

So much had happened during the fight that it took me a minute or two to remember what I'd even been doing beforehand. Something about smithing? Oh, yeah!

"I guess I'll see if I can turn all these weapons into metal stock for us to use later," I announced, staring down at the pile of Rackid weaponry we’d stacked near the tree.

You know how sometimes you look at a task, you think you understand it, and then you declare in your head that it'll be easy? Then you find out the harsh reality, and that easy thing is actually super hard?

Well, so was the steel that the Rackids' weapons were made of. No matter how hot I tried to get my little forge, it just wouldn't soften the metal up enough for me to work it effectively. Maybe I'd have been able to work it regardless of the malleability issues if I'd had a bunch more strength and a race that didn't penalise me, but no—The task was seemingly impossible. Until, that is, Paisley very gently suggested that I google the problem.

That was the day I learned about the molecular mechanics of my chosen trade, and how a huge portion of blacksmithing was basically just abusing a piece of metal until the molecular structure was what you needed it to be. Fascinating stuff.

To my relief, the process that I needed to follow to make the metal usable was very simple. I had to slowly heat the steel up, keep it at that temperature, and then slowly lower it again. It was very time consuming, however, and so the job that I’d figured would take an afternoon turned into a three day slog.

Meanwhile, everyone else got busy with the various other tasks that would lead to our treehouse becoming reality. We had three main issues to address before we could get to building.

The first issue was that we needed the tree to reach maturity. The growth of a young tree turned out to be too much for any building to occur. So, that meant feeding it more and more enemies, along with more of those strange unseelie stones. Wait, what had Aite called them? Elsyian?

Anyway, the stones were imbuing the tree with some powerful magic, which the undead heart of the tree was using to fuel its growth at a staggering rate. Five days after the rackids attacked, it began to show signs of maturity.

It was that speed that had Paisley scrambling to complete her preparations to combat the second issue. Basically, we needed a much more permanent and robust method of control over the massive creature. That control came in the form of an elaborate set of intertwining enchantments that would later be linked to a control room of some kind.

The last major challenge that we faced was much more mundane than the other two. We needed a design. Luckily, mum was there to solve that one in no time at all. How did she solve it? Well, she hired an architect, of course!

Granted, she went for a freelance student of architecture rather than someone who’d gotten a full degree—But, it’s not like they’d actually kill someone if their building didn’t work out, so it was a nice way for them to test some ideas, be creative, and get a bunch of money on the side.

The design they came up with had two cylindrical bottom floors built on the flat area at the top of the main trunk. From there, towers and additional rooms could be built on top like some sort of mediaeval jenga tower. Normally such a design wouldn’t have worked, what with gravity being a thing and all, but with the help of Paisley’s enchantments, we could get away with a lot of gravity-defying shit.

We had the stone for the bottom floors, and we were well on the way to getting all the wood we needed from the surrounding forest. I was finished with the nails all the nails I estimated we’d need after a few days, and I moved on to other mundane metal items, like hinges and door handles. Those two were actually Apprentice and Journeyman level Patterns, respectively. I currently needed five Apprentice level Patterns to get to Journeyman rank, so grinding hinges until I had full proficiency in the Pattern would be important. Unfortunately, since door handles were considered Journeyman, I couldn’t craft using the Pattern to make them easier. Each one had to be painstakingly crafted without any video-gamey help.

At least all this repetitive crafting was allowing me to get better and better at working metal with a hammer. It was amusing too, how as I progressed I realised why certain things about the craft were the way they were. For example, the big horns you see in anvils—If you needed something with a certain curve on it, you chose the part of the horn that matched it, then hammered your work piece to get a similar result.

The whole process was very satisfying, and I was excited to eventually turn to making that naginata I'd set my sights on, so long ago.