by Arthur Stone
He roasted some more meat, and then fell asleep right next to the furnace.
Chapter 14
Ros woke up at dawn. He felt like sleeping for another hour, but made himself get up and headed toward the bind point. Danger Babe still had the same unseeing eye, so he headed back and got to enchanting the rest of his gems. The process was rather mana intensive, but his near limitless mana pool proved more than up for the challenge.
Danger Babe made her presence known in an hour. Her character didn’t move, but she messaged him in the party chat.
“Hey, Ros, are you around?”
“Sure am.”
“Hi. Where exactly are you?”
“Heading right towards you.”
Danger Babe turned around, saw him, and looked surprised.
“What were you doing over there?”
“Having breakfast.”
“Very funny.”
“You still don’t believe me, do you? The joke’s on you, then. Here you go.”
He gave her a piece of roast meat.
“What’s this?”
“Can’t you see? It’s meat.”
“Where did you get it?”
“You don’t want to know. Have a bite.”
The girl took a small bite and screwed up her face.
“Not my favorite dish.”
“You can always exchange some gold for Agythric’s soup.”
“Thanks a lot! I don’t think I’m hungry anymore!”
“Didn’t you say the meat was bad?”
“No, it’s just that I’ve never been particularly into roast meat. Sorry, Ros. But thank you. I could eat a raw hedgehog, needles and all. My vision was already getting blurry. Now I won’t die of hunger, at least. How much more meat have you got?”
“I roasted some cave mobs, so food shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Mobs?! Yuck! Disgusting!”
“They’ll have to do. Don’t be fussy.”
“Hey, can’t you see me stuffing my face? I take it you have Cooking leveled up, too?”
“A little.”
“Why am I not surprised? So, what happens next? It’s too boring to sit around like this. A waste
of time.”
“Why do you reckon we should sit around?”
“What else can we do? Can you think of something?”
“We’ll mine for gold.”
“Why should we? The sludge they serve in those dirty bowls is inedible, anyway.”
“A friend of mine, who is rather intelligent, theorized that we’ve been given a very hard quest. Think for yourself. They capture a bunch of players, most of them below level 100. Then they take away all your stuff, issue primitive tools, and tell you to mine high-level resources. There are very few workers with decent Mining & Quarrying, but even they find that the required resource level is too high. It’s hard to find, and takes a long time to mine, especially with these tools. But that’s not all. The mine is infested with mobs with levels in mid-100s, all of them aggressive, tough, and with excellent hearing. They can hear you tapping from a mile away, making death far more likely than actually getting that resource. There’s nothing to defend yourself with. The players have no weapons, armor, or accessories, so survival is a challenge. Some have tried to use the forum to coordinate their actions. Eight players have formed a party and descended into the mine. Half an hour later, they all respawned, wiped out by a single mob. They didn’t even manage to get its HP bar halfway down with their pickaxes. The local beasts all have high physical defense, so most of the HP were taken off by a couple of mages rather than the fighters, but they instantly drew the mob’s ire, and once it had finished them off, the rest were goners. One of the dwarves managed to meet the production quota. I have no idea how he did it, but what they gave him was the very same inedible gruel that you’ve already seen. Do you find all this a little strange?”
“The quest has been designed to be impossible. Or near impossible.”
“Exactly. You can do virtually nothing. Even if you meet the quota, you’ll get famished, lose Vigor, and die of hunger. That means you won’t be able to work. If you can’t work, you won’t meet your quota. Then you won’t complete the quest, and won’t get any food. Seems like a no-win situation in every respect.”
“But we’ve managed it, haven’t we? I’m talking about what happened yesterday.”
“We have. We’ve managed to find a solution. But this is just the beginning—we need to get a minimum of three hundred pieces of ore per person. If we meet the conditions, or, better still, manage to produce more, we’ll get some reward, and it’s likely to be valuable. Although this is all pure conjecture.”
“A tough quest should yield a nice prize. Especially one as long and intricate as this one. A month is a long time. So, the reward should be worth it.”
“That’s what I’m counting on, too.”
“So, shall we go and explore the mine a bit farther?”
“Well, unless you know any other places where we could find gold ore…”
“If the mobs are like the one we fought yesterday, we should make it. We’re stronger together, even without equipment. Let’s go.”
“Wait, before we head out...” Ros produced the agate staff from his bag, and gave it to the girl. “You’ll find it much easier with this thing—better healing, quicker spellcasting, and fewer misses when you attack.”
Danger Babe studied the present and shook her head.
“Where did you get it?”
“I made it.”
“Is there anything you can’t do, Ros? You’re like a walking treasure trove. Full of surprises.”
“That’s good. I like to be full of surprises.”
“Well, I like surprises of this sort, too. You have no idea how hard it is to work empty-handed.”
“I know it perfectly well. I made myself one, too.”
“Wicked cool! Can you show it to me? Hm-m-m… Mine is a lot better. Why isn’t yours as good?”
“I’m a lowly noob—too lowly wield one of those. I need simpler stuff.”
“You could get something for level 40 instead of this piece of garbage.”
“I’ll find something nicer later on. I was just in a rush.”
“So, what’s the plan? Are we going down there?”
“We are. And don’t forget your pickaxe.”
“I didn’t leave it anywhere. But what would I need it for?”
“Today, you’ll have to work a little, too.”
“Didn’t you say we couldn’t work side by side? Simultaneously?”
“I’m still saying we can’t. But there are lots of cul-de-sacs down there, long enough for you to work at the very end, and me, at the beginning. The mobs would have to get through me to get to you.”
“They’ll kill you.”
“I don’t intend to just stand there. I’ll start running right towards you, so keep you ears pricked. Once I get to you, we finish off the bastard and get back to work.”
“I won’t find any gold on my own, at any rate.”
“You won’t have to. You can mine for some of the lower-level ore—I’ll mark the veins with a hit or two.”
“What are we going to do with all that ore?”
“Would you prefer to keep running around in filthy rags and without any equipment? Your character needs stuff. If you count on the trophies dropped by mobs, that’s not very realistic—their levels are too high to drop anything that would suit you. But I can craft items of different levels. So, we might get out equipment, after all.”
“Sorry, I get it. It’s just really peculiar, all this.”
“I’m glad you get it.”
“I’ll use my pickaxe wherever you tell me to.”
“Just keep an eye on your Vigor. It will suck if it’s near zero when some mob comes our way. Save your energy for the battle.”
* * *
The new pickaxe made work feel like a holiday. An hour later he saw that Danger Babe worked at a ridi
culously slow pace, took pity on her, and gave her his pickaxe. Then he created another one for himself from iron bars of his own production and other ingredients. It wasn’t quite as good as the first one, but good enough for his purposes.
They worked as follows. First Ros would take Danger Babe to the end of one of the cave’s side tunnels. He would look around and mark the resources he’d spotted by tapping on them. Then the girl would take care of the mining. With her experience, only copper, quartz, and jasper wouldn’t break so often that mining them still made sense. But she still kept grinding away, and stuffing her bag with some of the resources.
Ros would return to the beginning of the tunnel, and then move toward the girl, mining all the gold and amethysts he could see. Occasionally, he would also find the rare tantalum ore. When he didn’t work his pickaxe, he’d cut and enchant gems. They didn’t break very often at all—only two pieces had disintegrated over all that time, despite forum posts claiming this should happen a lot more often. His finicky luck must work better than he had thought, after all.
The mobs didn’t attack all that often, and it was much easier now to fight them off—the staves Ros had made really helped.
Around noon, Ros went back to Danger Babe, still tapping at the rock frenziedly, and asked her:
“How about a lunch break?”
“Sure, I’d love it. But let’s keep it short—I have a lot of tapping to do here.”
Ros sat down on a rock, gave the girl a piece of meat, and got another one for himself. Then he asked her, with his mouth full:
“Is your Mining & Quarrying stat growing at all?”
“Sure. It’s at three already.”
“That’s quick.”
“I wondered about it myself. The best results are from mining resources better than copper. But they often break, and you get nothing. How are you faring?”
“Sixty-three pieces of gold ore.”
“Wow!”
“I’m not in any hurry, either. I spend a lot of time practicing Enchanting.”
“That’s even cooler.”
“It’s a very resource-rich mine. I’ve checked the forum, and it appears no one’s ever seen gold mines with so much gold anywhere.”
“I agree. Otherwise gold wouldn’t be quite as expensive.”
“I wonder whether any of the top guilds could take control of this place if they found out about it.”
“I’m not sure. According to the forum, the situation in Rallia is critical. The new mobs destroy player parties and the emperor’s troops with equal ease—they might as well be toy soldiers. The only places where they managed to stop them were wide rivers—the mobs have an aversion to water, as it appears. But even there mages, archers, and catapults are required to keep them at bay. And they still try to break through.”
“Rallia is becoming a perfect location for high-level players. And it used to be such a dump…”
“That’s to be very likely. Hey, Ros, how long have you been playing?”
“Around three months,” he exaggerated a little.
“Just three months? You’re weird. Your level is low, yet you have so many skills… Magical Transmogrification is one of the rarest abilities. A lot of people would love to have it. You must be able to turn a profit here, right?”
“I shouldn’t complain.”
“The symbol next to your name says your character’s appearance is based on how you actually look. Is that how you look in real life?”
Ros had no idea how he looked in real life by this point. He didn’t even know if he could call it life. He was but a charred stump of a body in an induced coma. He’d been feeling more and more distant from it.
But he still remembered who he was and what he was doing here. So he didn’t regard their forced labor here as a waste of time. Some special prize in the end would make his character stronger. And he didn’t have anything else left. It was his prison sentence, as well as his ticket back to normal life. He needed to do everything to enhance his virtual body—it would pay for itself eventually.
“No, Danger Babe, I have edited my appearance a bit.”
“Well, so have I. I have a different hairstyle and hair color—my eyelashes are longer here, too. You cannot change your eye color, but I made mine more vivid. Do you think it looks nice?”
“It sure does.”
“Do you have a girlfriend in the game?”
“I have no time for girlfriends. As you can see, I’m leveling everything I can and a few things I can’t. There’s hardly any time for anything else.”
“And still you’re only 45…”
“My level is the least of my concerns.”
“Well, that makes sense. You don’t always need it. Wow! Weren’t you 44 yesterday? You were, weren’t you?!”
“I also lost a level running around here on my own. I got it back before you noticed—I didn’t need that much XP for it.”
“I totally didn’t notice. Congratulations! Ros, if you managed to get sixty-four pieces of ore before lunchtime, and manage to get as many afterwards, you can get to 120 or more today.”
“That’s right.”
“And we need 300 to get out of here. A week should be enough.”
“We can also get some loot from the mobs in the meantime, and make some money.”
“Nobody knows anything about the loot you find here. How would one use it?”
“I’ll experiment. I can use it to craft different items. If I’m successful, some of the object’s hidden properties will be revealed. Some of them might turn out to be useful.”
“What if you fail to craft it?”
“The loot will disappear. It rarely survives the crafting, anyway, unless you get really lucky. And I’m working without a Transmogrification Cube, too—I’d save a lot more resources otherwise.”
“That’s a pity… But you still need to keep doing something. Keep trying.”
“I need a Transmogrification Cube to reduce the probability of losing objects considerably.”
“I get it already. Can you craft something right now?”
“Sorry, Danger Babe, I’m busy enchanting right now. I might make something in the evening or in the morning.”
“What exactly are you enchanting?”
“I’m training with gems.”
“You cannot enchant gems.”
“That’s only true for uncut gems. Take a look at your staff—all the amethysts are cut, and the agate fragments are all polished, just like the big agate in the middle.”
“You’re a Gem-Cutter, too?”
“As you can see.”
“I’m starting to feel a huge inferiority complex… Pity about the gems, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“Don’t they disintegrate during a failed attempt?”
“They do. But it doesn’t happen all that often. I have to get back and mine for more gold. Have a rest if you’re tired.”
“I’m not. I still intend to get this piece of iron ore. I’m feeling pretty incensed about it, as a matter of fact.”
“You should have leveled up your Mining & Quarrying.”
“Female characters get no mining bonuses.”
“Oh? I had no idea.”
“Have you ever seen any female miners?”
“I haven’t.”
“Might have worked it out for yourself. Dwarves make the best miners. But their racial bonuses are divided between the sexes—males get mining perks, and women are good at jewelry and minor blacksmithing. That’s why they like to make accessories and ceremonial armor with all kinds of adornments. I had originally intended to level a dwarf character, but decided against it. The initial investments would be too high, and I just don’t have that kind of money. Hey, Ros, someone’s running this way.”
“I can hear it. Get up. Let’s get the bastard and get on with our work.”
* * *
Once Ros got his one hundred and thirtieth piece of ore, he returned to Danger Babe, helped her with
her resources, and they started toward the exit together. They had gotten pretty deep into the mine, but he hadn’t lost his way in the maze of winding passages even once. Indeed, it would be hard to get lost with Cartography leveled up to nine.
