Chương 3: Powerful

Melia stepped into the road, curious to see where it would take her. Traveling through the forest was nice, but a forest, in reality, had far more undergrowth than it did in a video game. She was glad to escape the tangling bushes that were half as tall as she was, especially with the amount of skin she was showing in her not-so-protective outfit. Perhaps she should have considered stepping onto the actual road a little more carefully as she was nearly run over by a passing wagon. Twice.

Melia could easily admit to being at fault the first time it happened; she was still under the effects of [Stealth] and nobody could see her who wasn't an equal level with applicable detection abilities. She had to dive out of the way from a horse's clomping hooves… not keen to test whether her body could withstand getting trampled and then being run over by a wagon wheel. The second was most emphatically not her fault, even if technically it still was.

There was a bend in the road, which wasn't curved enough to be a hazard to drivers, but enough to inhibit a bystander from immediately seeing what was around the corner. No longer stealthed, Melia walked around the bend and turned just in time to dive out of the way of giant hooves once more. The horse–let alone the driver–had not even seen her! She was so small and short.

Feeling slightly miffed, Melia burned with a mixture of plain annoyance and outrage partially because this body was a direct result of her actions and partly due to the driver's obliviousness. Melia got up and shook her fist in the air.

"Hey, watch it!" Her voice came out high and squeaky. She was sure that no matter how mad it sounded, people would only laugh. The driver barely heard her, peeking around the edge of the driver's box, looking around, and appearing confused. When his eyes fell on her, they widened comically as if he hadn't seen her. On the other hand, he was far enough away that she could barely hear his muttered and mostly incoherent apology. Melia kept herself to the soft grass beneath the roadside fence after that.

The sun rose steadily higher. By Melia's guess, it was around 8 o'clock when the roadway path suddenly forked. Both directions were still covered by the gentle canopy of trees, letting ample sunlight descend onto the hardened, dirt path. However, one of the paths continued traveling west while the other took a sharp turn due north. There was a large, wooden signpost planted in the "T" intersection and inscribed with scrawling, looping letters, and Melia was greatly surprised to find that she could read it.

North: Abbyton East: Hammerfall Melia paused to rest underneath the lowest rail along the fence, placing herself in the nook against a pole. It wasn't that she was tired, which surprised her after walking throughout the night, but she rested simply because she could. She watched a handful of carts and wagons travel up and down the road, including a large coach-like thing resembling a bus with many passengers.

Most of these vehicles, including the bus, continued west toward Hammerfall, while only a handful headed north to Abbyton… mostly simple carts full of supplies. Hammerfall was a name Melia recognized, being the second town of the Human lands. It was still generally considered low level but not a starting zone. Most mobs–in the game at least–were still in the mid teens to early twenties. It was also the place that most human players discovered their first dungeon.

Melia wondered how dungeons worked in this world and about the current state of Hammerfall. Since there was a sign pointing in that direction and there were people traveling toward it in bulk, she assumed it existed and that it must be reasonably safe. Hammerfall was added to her ever-growing list of places that she wanted to visit, which Melia admitted, included pretty much the entire world beyond the game's map too. However, she knew her roots, and these grew deep in the abbey.

She wondered if the previously unnamed church building was actually called Abbyton here or if a town sprung up around it. Maybe it was both. She picked herself up, dusted off her shorts and thigh boots, and continued. An hour later and still during the early stages of the morning, she came across a strikingly familiar sight that stopped her in her tracks. It made her legs wobble and her lip tremble.

It probably meant nothing to the players in the game or people of this world, but there, rising before her, stood an arch, a massive wall 30-feet high, connecting the closest points of the small mountain range that trapped the abby. Overwhelming nostalgia threatened to pool tears in her eyes, but she smiled brightly and held them back. She passed a board-looking guard standing at the foot of the gated arch who didn't exactly do a double-take when he spotted her, however, he also wasn't so subtle with his staring.

"Good morning!" Melia chirped, still pleased to hear that her voice was high, bright, and bubbly…nothing at all like the synthetic thing she was forced to use for years when her lungs began to erode.

"A good morning to you, Little One," the guard eventually mumbled cheerfully in response. And that was it. Melia's first interaction with a real person and it was blissfully normal. No great confrontation. No revelation from the gods regarding some hidden purpose. No blaring alarms calling for her to be put down like the monster she was. Her first interaction amounted to a simple, bored guard waving on a small, strangely dressed traveler.

He had used the term "Little One", which Melia thought she would find annoying or patronizing, but she didn't. Races in the world came in all shapes and sizes from big to small where dwarves and halflings were considered "small" and gnomes "tiny". Nobody dared to call a dwarf "little", but Little One was the polite address to somebody whose full height was significantly less than the human standard.

Melia was certain that she would run across someone who looked down on her figuratively and metaphorically, using the term "Little One" derogatorily, but the guard's greeting was innocent because he was simply happy to see somebody on the road. She passed under the arch and immediately found the source of all that hammering and scraping. Though the wall itself looked to be in good repair, about 2 dozen men were doing work on it.

Several of the wagons that had passed Melia on the road revealed themselves as shipments of heavy brick and mortar. Melia, curious as any gnome, wandered over.

"Wahtcha doin'?" Several men were caught off guard, looking up and around before looking down. One of the workers audibly gawked at her clothes and Melia could feel his eyes raking over her. She fought to keep up her smile but felt it grow brittle. Yes, she needed a change of clothes soon. Another surly mason simply nodded down at her, cracked his neck as if craning it down to her level was tiring, and went back to work, grunting with exertion as he lifted a 20-pound block of stone.

The last man wiped his brow and squatted into a crouch, an acceptable way for the taller races to converse with the shorter ones rather than bending over.

"Makin' repairs," he said gruffly but not unkindly, as if the work itself should have been obvious. And it was, but Melia asked anyway.

"Makin' sure she's steady in case we get a stampede."

"Stampede?" Melia bubbled, intensely curious. She guessed that a stampede was the instance when monsters crossed over zone lines in huge numbers…but this wasn't a mechanic in the game. She wondered if this phenomenon was exclusive to reality. One of the men snorted and kept working while the man kneeling in front of her gave her a curious look.

"Just in case any big beasties decide to try their luck down here instead of the other side of the mountain. Don't want to be caught unprepared." In the game, the Human Capital and the Dwarven Stronghold were low level, protected zones in the west and central parts of the map. These fortified zones were meant to show their strength in game, as if to say that no monster could penetrate these bastions of Humanity. However, the southern side of the mountains dividing the two cities were the human starting lands.

In the far north, there was situated the starting lands of the dwarves. And there was a zone straight in the middle, a sort of massive protected valley and home to an endgame zone of max level monsters. Melia, like most players, found the contrast amusing and engaging, especially while flying overhead on the game-controlled taxi mounts, because they could look down and see huge, powerful monsters waiting for them to grow in strength.

But here, however, where the world and the people were real, it didn't seem so amusing.

"Why would monsters do that?" Melia found herself asking.

"Come to this side of the mountain, that is." In the game, monsters didn't leave their zones. Even if a level 50 lava spider patrolled a route next to a level 10 lush forest, it wouldn't stray into the treeline and start burning everything down. The man who she considered the foreman looked at her funny and barked out a short laugh.

"Lassie, are you daft?" A few of the other men chuckled in agreement.

"Did you not hear tha' great roar two days ago? Bloody dragon come home to roost, most like. Monsters might be monsters, but they're not brainless. Even the ones that are have some sort of survival instinct. What do you think they feel is safer? Risking coming down these mountains or sitting in the shadow of a dragon?" Melia felt her heart sink. Of course she heard the roar… She had made it herself. It was one of the first things she did, in fact, after waking up.

She was so pleased and happy to be alive–not to mention the joy of discovering that her new body was the one she lovingly created and shaped over so many years–that she couldn't contain herself. She never even considered the repercussions of a roar from a dragon of her power level.

"And," Melia added hesitantly, trying to gauge how strong a normal dragon might be in this world, "You think this wall will stop a dragon?"

"Of course not," he snorted.

"Nothin' save a party of Heroes can stop a dragon from going where it pleases." Melia nodded at that. It was sound advice. It didn't give her any new information to help her place her own standing among dragons, but it did confirm her suspicions that she was a firm tier above most mortals–and dragons–at the very least. With the conversation finished, the men turned back to work… but Melia hesitated to leave. She was here now and found that she had a strong attachment to the abbey.

She didn't want monsters ravaging it, especially given the revelation that any stampede coming their way might be caused by her. The least she could do was help fortify their position to make up for her carelessness. She glanced up at the men who had already gone back to work. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

"Need any help?" Two men gave her a quick glance and a dismissive scoff, saying nothing else. But the man who'd bent down to talk with her raised an eyebrow.

"Aye, if you're offering. What can yeh do?" Melia credited the man for not dismissing her outright. He was probably a higher level than the rest, which she already gathered from listening to him give instructions to the others. He likely knew that looks weren't everything when it came to people of her appearance and size, and didn't want to judge her prematurely… at least not to her face. But Melia had to think. What could she do? If this was her old life, her old body… then nothing.

In her former existence, she was less than useless as an actively negative agent in every situation because somebody had to watch over her. But in this world? She had options. The goal was building a wall. If this was all that needed to happen, and if she was given no other instructions, then she could build one from scratch all by herself. In fact, she had multiple artisan and production classes, each of these maxed, including [Carpentry], [Masonry], and [Mining].

Not only could she dig the stone on her own, she could shape it, set it, and reinforce it into a bastion that would survive a siege designed to break castles. It's not as if the game allowed players to build anything they wanted wherever they wanted: the number of blueprints were small and allowed only in player-housing areas. But this was real life and she had no such restrictions here. She glanced at the bricks and blocks of stone in the cart and frowned.

None of them were poor quality, but none of them were good. Crafting materials were often measured by their quality rather than their level. Yes, a piece of craftsmanship was usually "better" when it was made with rarer ingredients, but if a lower quality item was created with skill and precision, then it would always outshine a poorly crafted, "superior" item… barring, of course, the gap between the material's quality and skill wasn't an ocean in size.

For example, a perfectly crafted iron sword would always be better than a mediocre steel sword or a poorly forged mythril sword, but none of these could ever be better than even the worst piece forged from precious orichalcum or adamantium. Finished products were assigned a star rating by the system and could be viewed by crafters or scholars with the appropriate level of inspection. As a veteran of many crafting professions, Melia [Inspected] all the bricks.

The bricks before her were all 2 to 3 stars, which was common for normal materials bought from npcs. A 4-star item was a one-in-a-hundred craft worth saving for just the right time, while a 5-star item was the prized craft of the month. As with other dedicated crafters, Melia spent hours perfecting her methods, creating the right synergy of skills, and grinding millions of crafts over hundreds of hours so that she could consistently and reliably have 5-star outputs.

So, while she was disappointed by what she saw, she wasn't too surprised. Nevertheless, she didn't want to cut into the work and start stepping on toes, so she did what she knew always needed to be done but nobody ever wanted to do: manual labor. She approached the stack of blocks–the 20 pound version more than half her size–and lifted one up. At first she felt a moment of strain before her monstrous strength kicked in.

She hefted it up and down to get a feel for it and proceeded to take it from the cart to the wall. The first two bricks that she moved went unnoticed until the men at the wall looked down and realized that they didn't need to walk all the way to the cart to get more supplies. Then one of them saw how the bricks were getting there and his jaw fell to the floor.

His partner to the right, who was annoyed by the slowed productivity, went to yell at him, but his eyes fell on Melia who was now carrying two stones, which effectively made her look like a tiny wall with sprouted feet. A tiny wall with a weird sense of fashion for shoes. By the time she had made a dozen deliveries, she unwittingly created a decent backlog for the workers, and work on the wall had all but stopped. Concerned, Melia nervously glanced up at the foreman.

"Seems she's got some sort of physical class," he chuckled to himself, likely unaware that gnomes had better hearing than humans. He turned to his group of men gawking like idiots.

"Alright, men! The Little One has graced us with her generosity, and it looks like she's got more muscles than you lot have brains. Get back to work so her gift doesn't go to waste! I expect double time since you don't have to waddle your sorry butts back to the wagon!" Melia had come down the mountain intending to visit the abbey, however, she didn't mind her small detour to help the men reinforce the wall in the slightest.

If she truly was a dragon in this new life, she was all but immortal with the benefits and drawbacks that came with it. She didn't want to think about staying young while the world grew old around her, but she also didn't want to shy away from making new friends and building new relationships. She had seen her family and Brandy watching over her at the end, and she recalled their tears of sadness and great grief… but also their tears of joy.

Her time on earth may have been short, but she knew that none of them would have traded it for anything. Several hours passed and the men suddenly found themselves out of materials right around lunchtime, so each of them crouched respectfully to thank Melia in earnest, deeply touched by her help. She waved them goodbye as they piled into the wagon and headed to wherever they were going. She then turned toward the towering building in the distance with the great steeple and bell.

Melia heard the pleasant sounds of rustic life all around her. What little she knew of suburbs and rural communities came before she was cognisant of such things, and, by the time she was aware, her entire world was trapped inside a tube. But even with zero expectation, she was unprepared for both how loud and how quiet it was. There were no cars, no motors, no electricity.

Yes, the game had magic, magical tools, magitech, and amazing artificers who created wonders, but it was not the same as this thriving, bloated, urban jungle. If she strained, she could practically hear the silence around her, the rustling of the leaves, the swaying of tree branches, the chirp of a distant bird. Through the hush and near at hand, yet somewhere out of view, children laughed and played. It was a distinct sound.

"Quite a lovely slice of life we've made for ourselves, isn't it?" Melia jumped and was relieved that she didn't suddenly let out a great gout of flame in panic.

"Oh, forgive me, Little One," a mirthful voice giggled.

"I didn't mean to surprise you." Melia turned to face what could only be a nun. A sister? A lady of the cloth? Perhaps they had many names. She was tall, as all races were now to Melia, who had to strain her neck to see above the woman's knees. The woman crouched down in a similar manner as the foreman. And as Melia looked into her face, she saw that the nun had a warm, if not a timeworn, smile. If looks could be believed, this woman was likely in her late thirties.

"Hello!" Melia bubbled, putting the awkwardness behind her.

"I'm Melia! And you?"

"Grace," the woman responded, sustaining her gentle smile while offering a hand. Melia could only guess that 'grace' was the woman's name and not a new type of greeting, so she put her small hand atop the woman's and shook it.

"Well met."

"Indeed! And I must agree. This place always gives me that sort of…homely feeling, I guess?" Melia tilted her head thoughtfully.

"It just feels…right."

"Oh?" Grace asked.

"Have you traveled to Abbyton before? I haven't heard of any gnomish gardens passing through recently… certainly not in my time." Melia's smile faltered slightly. A "gnomish garden" was simply the name for a community of gnomes as a different sort of community was called a "grumble of dwarves". That wasn't what bothered her; it was the mention of time.

Melia didn't expect to recognize any of the NPCs from the game here, but she was familiar enough with the NPCs around the abbey in the game that she'd recognize their names in this place. Grace was not one of them. Again, the difference struck her because it felt like summer outside. The morning was cool and crisp, but the afternoon was getting hot enough to sweat just from moving about.

When Melia had last logged in, it was during the Winter Veil holiday event, which ran the month of December and ending January 2nd. Time had clearly passed.

"I…don't know?" Melia answered honestly.

"Or rather, I know I've been here, but I don't know you. Have you lived here long?"

"All 29 years of my life," Grace smiled. Poor woman, Melia thought as her eyes darted away from her aged smile, she must work with a lot of kids. But that answered Melia's questions… or started to, at least. She gave another look around the square in which they happened to be standing: the splendid church in front of them with its towering steeple; to their left, stables and several semi-permanent carts with vendors; and to their right, a very familiar vineyard. Melia felt her lips twist into a lopsided smile.

She tamped down those strange, gnawing feelings of nostalgia and bygone days, and eventually tore her eyes away from the vineyard. Grace was waiting with her patient smile, and Melia's visage quickly returned to normal… though it held a hint of irony.

"I thought about making a joke," Melia said, waving a hand behind her toward the fields of grapes.

"But that no longer seems appropriate. Is it still called Miley's Vineyard?" Grace seemed surprised at first–perhaps forgetting that size and stature did not imply age–before assuming her bright smile and nodding.

"Indeed it is! Though few refer to it as such any longer. Most people simply call it the vineyard these days because it hasn't really belonged to any one person since…" her smile turned thoughtful as her voice faded.

"I figured as much," Melia sighed.

"She is gone then, is she? So much seems the same, and yet…so different." Melia meant to mutter that last part to herself, but the sister heard her.

"She lived a full life or so I'm told," Grace said diplomatically.

"In truth, I never knew her. That was a hundred years ago." This revelation stunned Melia. She was prepared to accept that this world was entirely different from the one she knew, or, maybe the same, but time had passed. Even expecting this change, hearing somebody from this world tell her to her face that a hundred years had passed since the world she knew made her feel…things.

"A hundred years…." Melia said this quietly to herself, but the sister must have heard her. Not only did she hear, but Grace must have picked up on some deeper meaning in the sigh because the nun's voice turned somber, offering gentle condolence.

"Did you know her? Were you friends?" she asked softly. Melia snorted. Technically she didn't know anyone, but she felt she had a measure for the woman. She'd read her quest text boxes enough times to assume a personality.

"I wouldn't say we were enemies or anything, but I don't think you could label what we were 'friends'." She let out a rough snort that turned into a high-pitched giggle, which suddenly broke the somber air. Melia shook her head as a wide, mischievous smile took over her face.

"The amount of grapes I must have picked for that lady…!" she cried out dramatically, falling into her race's tendency for emotiveness. What was left unsaid was each of those bundles was for a new starter character when this world was only a video game, but she had to have run through the starter zone two dozen times. This meant she'd harvested at least a hundred and forty bundles of grapes, minimum! The sister smiled and offered a small chuckle of her own.

The bell from the steeple rang and the sounds of children drawing closer rose around them. Grace stood up and brushed off her robes.

"Will you be staying long?" Grace asked.

"Midsummer isn't here for another day or two, and I'm sure you don't take up much space." Melia let out a loud laugh, appreciating the joke for what it was. She could spare some chuckles at her own expense. Besides, she was interested to see what kind of festival Midsummer would bring. The game always presented unique goodies during seasonal events.

"Perhaps I will," she decided on a whim. Her plans were forming on the fly.

"A lot can change over the years, if you're not paying attention. The last time I was here was a hundred years ago…but when you're something like me, it hardly seems like it's been a day."

"And what are you?" For a second, Melia thought about telling the truth…saying she was a dragon. Eventually it would come to light, and she didn't plan on hiding away forever. But that same mischievous smile crept back as she smirked.

"Powerful."