Chương 25: Rewards

Thankfully, there doesn't seem to be anything else in the cave. I'm able to get back my throwing knives and twenty one arrows, and we head deeper into the cave to hopefully find some treasure. I hope it's a good chest. Opening a good chest will level me up again. And then maybe I'll get another talent. What talent would I want next? Maybe I'll take the polyglot talent next. I'll be able to decide based on more than being trapped in an XP farm. I thought this was going to go a lot worse than it did.

I was really expecting that we were going to die. I didn't expect that we'd be able to wipe out the generator or that we'd be able to explore the caves beyond it. I half expect that we're going to run into an even bigger monster generator once we go down this passage. Like we'll run into the generator for giants, or for skeleton warriors, and have to deal with those. If it's giants, we can at least run away from them. If it's skeletons, I'm not sure we'll have the chance.

We go down the single large passageway that leads away from the room that had the generator in it, and I wonder if this means there will be these kinds of generators all over the world, just pumping out monsters at a constant rate and periodically releasing them out into the world. I hope not, as it would mean that enemies would have a tendency to swarm, but at the same time, it would make sense. There has to be some source of monsters to keep the world dangerous.

Otherwise, an ecosystem will form that will probably eliminate all but the most powerful monsters, because of survival of the fittest, and they would just wipe out humanity. Or whatever else there is. That's the other question that I keep coming back to. The tutorial ends in just under fifteen hours at this point, around nine in the morning tomorrow. When that happens, when we go to the next world, are we going to remain human? Do I want to remain human?

I mean, I've been human all my life, but at the same time, I've never had a chance to be anything else. And when I play video games or roleplaying games, I always tend to want to be something other than human. An elf, a halfling, a gnome, a dwarf, really anything other than human is always appealing. Do I want to be something else? Am I going to get a choice? I don't know if I want a choice. I didn't have a choice the first time. Maybe I do. I don't want to end up disappointed with my species.

I've had gender dysphoric moments, and those are pretty bad. I don't want to have species dysphoria. If I'm going to be something else, I want it to be something that I choose. Down the passage, we come to a second chamber. This one doesn't have a generator in it, thankfully, but rather seems like a sort of lounge area. There are furs on the rocks, stacked up on top of each other like bedding, and there are several weapons just laid across the beds. It's a treasure area.

There are spears, halberds, swords, knives, axes, and maces. There are bows of several different sizes and about a hundred arrows. If we had fled this way, we could have had a much more comfortable time waiting, or a more comfortable battle.

"Woah," El says. She looks at the axe in her hand, the blade chipped and practically broken. It makes me look down at my ranger's blade. It, too, has taken a beating fighting the shadow wolves. Maybe there is a condition marker, and they were just in really good condition before. But now, not so much. El walks over to a rack of axes and starts looking at them, eventually taking two of them down and twirling them around for a bit.

She straps one of them to her back and swings the other a few more times, getting a better feel for the weight of it, and leaves her old axe behind. That's encouraging. I go over to a similar rack of swords and take a look at what's there. Scimitar of speed. Uncommon weapon 10/10. Damage: 40-48. +10% attack speed. Shadow Blade. Uncommon weapon 8/10. Damage: 30-40. Deals double damage to light creatures. Scimitar. Common weapon 5/5. Damage: 20-30. All of those are good, but none of them are as good as what I have.

However, if I keep the handle from the ranger's blade and replace the blade itself with the blade from the scimitar of speed, and maybe combine it with the blade from the regular scimitar to just keep them balanced, maybe I can use these three to help me upgrade my ranger's blade once we get back to the park where the tools are waiting. I put the three swords wrapped in a wolf pelt and strap them to my back. I start to gather the other weapons together.

If we can carry them between us, we might be able to rearm everyone in the park. They might have something better, or they might not. I want everyone to have the chance to get an upgrade if at all possible. The weapons would, in my opinion, be enough of a reward. But there's also suits of armor in the corner. One suit is much like what the three girls started with, though not spread out among the three of them. There's a chain shirt under a chest plate and plate sleeves that lead down to metal gloves.

There are greaves that go with it, covering the top of the thighs but not covering the legs. The other suit is a leather jerkin with a pair of pants that are leather sewn into chain mail. Armor of the lancer. Rare armor 5/20. Number of pieces: 5. Bonus per piece: Armor: +5, Strength +3, Vigor +2. Chain Leather pants. Uncommon armor. 7/10. Armor: +7, Agility +2. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Leather shirt. Common armor 1/5. Armor: +1.

We definitely need to bring both of those back to the park. I don't know if El is going to want to wear the lancer armor, or if it will go to Ashley or Gigi, but she should be able to get at least part of it. For myself, I want the chain leather pants. The leather shirt I can take or leave; it's the same as my leather breastplate, just a bit more flexible. I suppose I want the more flexible option, but I'm not going to argue with Vinny if he wants it.

He might need to move around more to cast his spells; I'm not sure how that works. There isn't another exit back here, unfortunately. Which suggests to me that the cave will reappear when the sun sets. Which should be in another hour or so. Time enough for us to take a bit of a nap, I suppose. There are beds set out for us, so it makes a certain bit of sense.

"Do we want to bring these furs back with us, too?" El asks, looking at the furs set up like beds.

"Could be bedrolls for the others tonight."

"You want to go out hunting again tonight, after what happened today?"

"I'm not upset at how many levels we've gained," she says.

"So yeah, I want to keep hunting. Don't you?"

"I want to make sure my sword isn't going to break first, but sure," I say.

"Let's get everything back to the park and see where that leaves us." We wrap up the furs and tie them into bundles, carrying the bundles with us back into the main chamber of the cave and then back to where the entrance was. When we get there, the cave is there again, and we find ourselves back in Loring Park, just like last night. The sun is on the horizon, the sky is purple, and the park is all but empty. No more shadow wolves waiting for us, and no lynxith either.

This seems to be a safe period, and we make it back to the park without any trouble.

"Where have you two been all day?" Ashley asks. Her tone suggests that maybe we went off and had a bit of a tryst. Which I suppose would've been understandable. El's gorgeous, though I never really looked at her that way before. But the way her arm muscles are corded, the way her chest is almost bulging out of her armor, and the way her legs look when she's fighting, I can certainly see my way to thinking of her like that.

"We got trapped in a cave," I say.

"Been fighting all day long against shadow wolves." I tell the whole story about how the cave entrance disappeared and how we had an endless spawn of wolves to fight. How it took us the whole day of fighting to get to the spawn point and destroy it.

"All day?" Vinny asks.

"What level are you?" I look at him. He's level 14. I hope he spent the day upping his skills.

"Nineteen," I say.

"Almost twenty."

"Fuck me," Gigi says.

"I want to get trapped in a cave."

"No you don't," I say.

"At least, not tonight. What if you end up missing the end of the tutorial? We were stuck until dusk."

"Oh, yeah." She sighs and looks off. She's level 17.

"Still, would be nice if there were an endless battle like the one you guys were talking about. I wonder if we can find another spawn point and try to destroy it before the end of the night."

"You're welcome to try," I say.

"But count me out. I don't want to risk it."

"I'll risk it," El says, smiling widely. She pushes some of her blonde hair out of the way of her somewhat crazed smile and gestures to Gigi.

"Come on, I know what we're looking for."

"Before you two run off, let's look at the loot we brought back and make sure it goes where it's supposed to," I say. I do end up with the chain leather pants, putting them on and happy to find out that there are tights stitched on the inside so that chain mail doesn't rub up against my legs or against other parts of me while I move around.

I also take the leather shirt, which I improve by adding strips of the leather we've taken from stores around the arms and across the chest, improving it to level 3 and improving its armor value by the same amount. I put grommets through the leather of the breastplate, and end up upgrading it from a leather breastplate to a studded leather breastplate, which is uncommon and adds 4 armor when I give it to Vinny. My defense is at 83 now.

I don't know what his is, but I'm pretty sure it's lower than mine, so I don't mind him getting the better armor out of the deal. As for my sword, I get a whetstone and straighten out the dents, bend the sword back into place and do end up replacing the blade when I find a crack in the steel. It's not a failure point yet, but it looks like it could possibly become one, and I don't want my sword to break while I'm using it.

So I replace the blade part of the ranger's blade with a scimitar blade, changing the weapon in its entirety as I upgrade it. Ranger's scimitar. Rare weapon 12/20. Damage 39-49, +10% attack speed. I like having a weapon more built for speed than strength. It fits my agility built. I end up taking apart the maces we found and using them to secure Ashley's mace, making the haft more comfortable in her hand and even adding a bit to the flanges at the head of the weapon.

And I end up giving the shadow blade to Gigi, once I've upgraded it to do the most damage possible. I don't know if or when we're going to run into light aligned creatures, but when we do, she'll be able to fight against them more effectively. All of this smithing and scrapping and armoring improves my secondary skills. My armorer goes up to 9, my scrapping to 7, and my smithing all the way to 10. I wish those counted towards the skill savant quest, but they don't.

I wonder if there's a quest like that for secondary skills. I check my quest page, and there is. Secondary skilled: Gain 50 secondary skill points. Progress: 29/50. Reward: 5000 XP. El, Gigi, and Ashley head out to see if they can find another spawn point, but I don't want to go with them. I want to practice a few things first. I think my spells are close to leveling up. They should be, anyway. I used a lot of magic over the last day, and my spellcraft is still at ten, but it might improve soon too.

And I still need more points in tracking. I think that's the thing I should really be paying attention to. I should go out tracking, hunt something down and maybe sneak back away from it once I get close enough to get credit for sneaking up on it. I start heading out towards the basilica, figuring there will be skeleton warriors there that I can track and then run away from. I don't want to fight them unless I absolutely have to. They don't bleed, they take half damage from archery, and they fight in large groups.

None of those gel well with me being by myself. Still, I go out and see if I can find where their spawn point is. If I can, I can maybe find the girls and bring them with. We can fight skeleton warriors for a while if we have to. I don't like the undead because of the no bleeding thing, but Ashley is a terror to the bony monsters. I'd just have to provide support for her. And maybe I can provide that support with magic. Maybe Vinny and I can both provide that support.

I know he needs the levels, even if he seems content with practicing his magic on statues.