It was one thing to fight billions of creatures digitally, but another to murder something that breathed just for the glory of the kill. Or just because the quest text told her to do it.
“You’re being silly,” Tanisha said, and the sound of her own voice gave her a fright. “This creature will be used for materials. Not in the same way, sure, but it will not die in vain.” She glared at the blue crabstrosity. “You just don’t want to admit why you’re really upset.”
And she didn’t.
She wasn’t anxious at all about what she was going to do to the creature. In her heart of hearts, Tanisha was worried about what it was going to do to her. Sure, in game, they only did… what was it, twenty damage per swipe? Nearly negligible, even for a Level 1 character. It would be only about a tenth of her HP bar. But what would that do when it was serrated shell striking soft flesh, instead of pixels against pixels?
“You have no choice,” she reminded herself, before wiping her sweaty hands on her skirt again. “Regardless of your fears and questions, the tutorial has you trapped. Just engage. You’re one of the top dARkness players. Combat comes easy to you. Just avoid it’s attacks like you do in game, and you’ll be fine.”
The pep talk didn’t make her feel much better, but she still gathered what little courage she had in response and directed the chair forward. It was slow at first, but she built up speed by leaning in the direction she wanted to go, and moving her hands faster.
Up close, Tanisha was surprised how unnatural the creature was. Not just in form, but in mannerisms. It was completely oblivious of her in a way that was… wrong. It didn’t even turn to acknowledge she was approaching, making it seem like it was an animatronic dummy. That helped, if only a little.
Tanisha’s axe came down, aiming for the creature’s right claw. She wasn’t sure if she could actually break the limb, but she was going to try.
The blow connected, and the force of it almost knocked her from her chair. She felt a tug of resistance as she struck the creature, but it didn’t thunk against the shell and stop completely. Instead it passed through, leaving no visible damage.
But there, hovering in the air, was a little red number six that floated away from the crabstrosity.
“Six? Wait—seriously? Six?! That’s it?” Tanisha cursed aloud as she instinctively dodged away from the crab’s lumbering form as it turned towards her. The crab, naturally, seemed as upset as she was. Though for a different reason, of course. It vocalized a rhythmic chattering noise, and it turned to face her fully. Thick blue claws were raised over its head in what Tanisha recognized as it transitioning from an idle pose into a threatening combat stance.
Tanisha didn’t have time to recover and strike again before it attacked her. So she threw her hands out to her sides, directing the chair to lunge to the right. There was a sweeping sound, and the crabstrosity’s enormous left claw passed a hair’s breadth from striking her. A new player’s instinct would be to then stop and attack, but Tanisha had fought enough crabstrosities to know she needed to keep moving.
As if on cue, the right claw swept through the air, missing her by more than a few inches at this point. If she had stopped to witness the wind up, it would have absolutely hit her. But as soon as the second strike was past, Tanisha stopped the chair and whirled around to face the creature. Her first strike had taught her that it didn’t matter where she struck—the blow would pass through and only leave the floating number behind—as long as she actually hit. So she didn’t waste time with strategy.
She flailed the weapon against the closest part of the crab’s shell, and was able to get four more little red sixes to float away before it raised its claw again. Tanisha almost dropped her axe in her haste to give the chair the order to skitter away, but there was really no need. It wasn’t like she needed to grip wheels. She just had to build up that muscle memory.
Unlearning it would be fun.
Tanisha dodged the crabstrosities first attack, and continued circling right to avoid the second. She had circled almost all the way around the creature before it returned to a non-threatening position, and Tanisha went to work lunging back in again.
The gamer part of her brain, while unoccupied, tried to remind her of the details of the crabstrosity. Its attacks did twenty damage—or, at least, she thought they did—but she couldn’t remember for the life of her how many hit points it had. It wasn’t like she could look it up on the wiki, so she’d have to guess. Somewhere in the low triple digits?
On this round of attacking, Tanisha tried to focus on getting as many swings out as she could. She didn’t need to focus on power, since her damage seemed to be independent of any outside factors. But the axe was heavy in her hands, and slow to change direction. Not to mention that she was fighting against the chair, completely due to her being unfamiliar with it. As such, she only manage to get another four more sixes before the creature’s claw came up again. The whooshing of the claws behind her alerted her that she’d only just made it out of range again, and Tanisha wondered if the chair was actively harming her ability to do this. Would an able-bodied person be unable to react as fast as the responsive device, or was the need for her to move her arms slowing her down? She wasn’t sure, and there wasn’t really a way to test it. Lack of functioning legs, and all.
After the second claw came down, Tanisha turned back around and dove in against the crabstrosity with her axe.
“One six, two six,” she sang to herself. “Red six… uh… also red six.”
And she skittered away. It was by reflex, falling into the same comfortable pattern despite the panic she felt pounding in her chest. Whether by design or happenstance, the crabstrosity’s attacks came out slightly slower this time, and Tanisha was able to avoid the strikes with a much more comfortable margin. It was nearly a foot off to her right, instead of mere inches behind her.
The panic began to subside.
She had this under control.
The relative attack speed of both her and the crab meant she could get four strikes off, easily. As long as she stuck to that, and didn’t push her luck, she could get out of this untouched.
As it was, the crabstrosity seemed to be on its last legs. Perhaps that was the reason the last round of attacks had been easier to dodge. By this point, most of the mud had sloughed off the shell, and the revealed blue surface was scuffed and battered in a way that didn’t reflect how Tanisha had hit it. The damage was evenly spread across the surface of the shell, despite her blind flailing being focused on its front and left side, with her constantly circling in front of its attacks.
With a whoop of excitement, she attacked it again. Once. Twice. Three times. A fourth. She was already moving again, ready for the next sweeping claw, but the crab didn’t make an attack. Instead, its six legs quivered and collapsed beneath it, the rhythmic chattering falling to an uncanny silence.
Tanisha stared down the creature for a moment, her axe still raised. A notification passed by the top of her UI, telling her that she had reached Level 1 in axe skill. Did that mean she had killed the crabstrosity? In the game, weapon skills were gained from doing damage, but not necessarily killing targets.
Before she could worry too much longer that it was playing dead, the quest text in the upper corner of her vision flashed. Tanisha let her panicked breathing slow down for a moment before she opened the quest.
Welcome to the False Lands: Craft a sword. A sword is the simplest, most all-purpose weapon in the game. You will require a stick, a rope, and a blue crab shell. To recover the blue crab shell from the defeated crabstrosity, you will need to butcher it. This will give you its shell, as well as other drops from the creature, which will include a random amount of meat. Swords and other weapons are crafted at a metalworking workbench. Because the materials required to craft it are outside of the scope of this tutorial, one has been spawned in for you. Once this tutorial step is complete, the metalworking workbench will despawn.
“Oh, that’s no fun.” If the benc
h stuck around, Tanisha might have been able to use it. Which was exactly the reason the quest worked this way. But she still felt cheated.
Behind her, in the edge of the grotto near the stone wall, Tanisha could see a low shape in the shadows of the trees that she didn’t recognize. But before she could go and investigate that, she needed to butcher the crabstrosity. No use letting it despawn and go to waste.
With a grimace, Tanisha directed her chair to lower itself down so she could properly attend to the potentially unpleasant task.
As much as she didn’t like it, the reward was motivating enough. A sword would provide her with real damage, and unless Otekah had something up their sleeve, a real way to get ahead in this realistic version of the game.
The tutorial had directed her to craft armor, and now it was having her make a sword. She could see where this was going. And if she was right, she would absolutely need the weapon.
Chapter 14
Tanisha maneuvered down off her chair and dragged herself across the unmarred grass to the blue-shelled crabstrosity. It was awkward to do, while still holding her axe, but she wasn’t sure if she was going to need it or not. The quest had described the activity to come as “butchering,” and so she expected it to be unpleasant in some way. Tanisha wasn’t really big into crabbing, and so she wasn’t familiar with the process of taking a crab apart. Didn’t people just boil them alive? Did she have to gut it or…?
“Ugh, so many questions and no answers. I never thought the one thing I’d miss would be a wiki.”
She reached up and opened her inventory and navigated to the crafting blueprints. There wasn’t any section for butchering, and so she dug through randomly looking for any blueprint where it looked like a dead crab was a material. She didn’t find anything, though. With a sigh, she dismissed the window. “Guess we’re doing this one live.”
Tanisha set aside her axe and set about examining the crab. She grabbed it and shook it, doing little more than confirming it was fully dead. “Alright. Well, I know the part I need is the shell. And there was mention of meat. So maybe I just pry the shell loose and move on?” She didn’t really need to collect anything else. Just enough to get her out of the tutorial.
And she didn’t really want to dirty her hands by peeling out any slimy, uncooked meat.
She grabbed the edge of the shell and tugged a little. The corpse rocked with the force, but the shell held fast. Tanisha wrinkled her nose. She could see a seam where the upper half of the deep blue shell met with a more eggshell-colored underside. But she wasn’t able to wiggle her fingers into it. A shifted grip didn’t seem to help, either, and Tanisha had to wrestle with the dead crab for almost a full minute. She maneuvered her legs onto the crabstrosity, holding it down with the weight of her body as she hooked her fingers under the shell and pulled upward.
Trying to wrench the shell off at an angle that would separate the shell from the body without just tearing the legs off under her weight was difficult, and Tanisha strained against the crab.
She didn’t want to pull with all her strength, since she didn’t want to be sent flailing into a faceful of disgusting crustacean innards. But she felt her muscles begin to heat up, and she became less and less sure that she could tear it open without applying herself. She grunted and redoubled her efforts, and was rewarded with a wet crackle as the shell began to come loose. It was slow at first, but then, with a louder crack, the tension released and Tanisha cried out in triumph as the shell came away entirely from the crab’s body.
It took a moment for her to catch her breath, and while she waited for her arms to stop burning, Tanisha shoved the crab shell into her inventory. It was nearly three feet long and two feet wide, making it too bulky to move around easily, with or without the chair.
When she was feeling a bit more calm, Tanisha surveyed the crab corpse, now that it was de-shelled. The aftermath of her “butchering” was a sight. She’d known some butchers who were very skillful in separating and preparing the cuts of meat from the animal after her successful hunts. The art of butchering was irrevocably injured by the comparison to her attempt.
To her surprise, the crab was not a disgusting, slimy mess inside. The lower half of the shell was still attached to the legs in a way that looked a bit awkward, but inside the cavity, under where the shell had been removed, was basically scooped out. There were no guts or goo, but instead four recognizable white chunks of crab meat. They were roughly the size of both of her fists put together, and smelled just faintly of seafood. The four chunks didn’t nearly equate a realistic amount of what would be in such a large creature, but each one would still be a full-meal worth of crab. It even looked cooked, as if she could just pick it up and eat it right away.
“I’m not going to be here long enough to eat all this,” Tanisha said aloud, as much to the dead crabstrosity as to herself. “But it seems like a terrible waste to just leave food lying around. Especially crab.” Tanisha loaded the four chunks of crab into her inventory, stacking them together in a box. “And who knows—maybe this trip will be longer than I expect.” She frowned and looked up in the direction Otekah vanished. “Not because I plan on staying. And not because I’ve accepted crab as a bribe to play along here.”
That second bit felt pitiful, even to her own ears. She loved crab. And she was feeling a bit excited in anticipation of having so much of it in her hands. Maybe she could find a way to craft butter somewhere in the menus…
A flashing text prompt alerted her that her butchering skill had increased to 1. It didn’t appear until she had picked up the last chunk, and she frowned at it. Did this version of the game not actually count skill progress until she actually obtained the related item? That seemed a bit odd. She was tempted to drop the chunk of meat back into the hollowed-out corpse, just to see if she could cheat the system. But if she was going to do that, she didn’t want to do it with crab. What if it fell through the corpse and landed in the dirt and grass? She couldn’t have that.
With her spoils collected, Tanisha dragged herself back to her chair and climbed aboard. She paused for just a moment—what was she doing again?—before the presence of the quest text caused her to evaluate the situation. The new crafting station waited for her over by the rock wall. But she’d need rope, wouldn’t she? And sticks…
Tanisha reached under herself to where a handful of loose sticks and rocks she’d gathered had collected in the corner between the seat and the lower arm of the chair. She shrugged and opened her inventory, putting them away in an orderly manner. Over half of the slots were empty still, so she didn’t really see any harm in tucking everything in there. When she added her axe to the mix, eight of the slots were full.
Her inventory told her she had six sticks, so she wasn’t worried about that. But she needed at least two more grass to make a rope, and then she was likely going to need more than that before the end of the tutorial, with how things were going. The nearest clumps of tall grass were near to where the crabstrosity had spawned, so she directed her chair that way. She collected eight more handfuls of it, pausing just long enough to take the last three and weave rope together. Instead of throwing the rope in her inventory, she draped it across her shoulders like a tailor with a measuring tape. She then set off towards the mysterious metalworking workbench that had been provided.
The bench itself didn’t come into full focus until she was also beneath the pool of shadow it was in. It was made of logs, like her woodworking workbench, but one of the logs had been chopped and sculpted into a bowl and filled with red coals. She could feel the heat off them, and wondered if her own workbenches would be similarly warm. Would fuel be needed? Tanisha looked over her shoulder, to where her campfire still burned. The thing was burning down, but it still held a small fire. Enough for now.
The metalworking workbench also included what appeared to be a crude anvil made of stone, and a wider selection of cut-stone tools than its woodworking equivalent. There was even a particularly large hammer. She wonder
ed what “rare materials” had gone into this that she didn’t already have access to. It looked like there was something lining the inside of the coal-filled log, so maybe that was it. Something fireproof to make sure the whole thing didn’t catch fire and burn to ash?
She clicked into the blueprint menu and easily found the sword under the weaponmaking tab. Right where she remembered it being. She grimaced at it for a long moment. Tanisha had always been of the opinion that weaponmaking and toolmaking should have been the same skill. She went on long rants on the Eris server about it. Hosted forum discussions. DeKR didn’t care, of course. They didn’t read community feedback—at least, never that she’d seen besides copy-pasted form emails from customer support—so of course nothing had come of all her blustering and complaining. But now… now it actually impacted her. These two skills would take time to level, and she didn’t have time or the desire to actively play Otekah’s game.
“Don’t exactly have a choice though, do I?” Tanisha sighed, long and heavy, as if it would do something. “Just make the sword, get back into combat, and get out of this tutorial.”
The actual crafting of the sword was more of the same that she’d come to expect. This version required her to heat up the shell and fold and beat it into a rod, much like she’d seen in documentaries about sword smithing. It wasn’t exactly as she’d seen, but this was shell, not metal. Tanisha was surprised the crab shell didn’t just shatter under impact.
All told, she folded and beat the crab shell about five times, constantly reheating it in the coals. The rod in her hands was about three feet long, but only two inches thick. After the final round of heating, prompted by the spectral blueprint, Tanisha set about pounding the rod into something that was roughly flat, almost like a wedge. She could see how she would get a single-edged blade out of this process, and was very impressed.
Darkness Named Page 10
