by Nikita Thorn
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
Bushido Online
BOOK IV: Pacchi Festival
A Work by Nikita Thorn, for LitRPG Freaks
Bushido Online: Pacchi Festival
Copyright © 2021 by LitRPG Freaks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.
PROLOGUE
The door to the small apartment slid open with a gentle buzz, letting a wave of the slightly warmer air from the interior escape through the entrance. In the doorway stood a young man dressed in a casual dark blue t-shirt and jeans, whose initial expectant look was perhaps a little too eager for the occasion of a random visitor.
Tom smiled. “Morning, Seth. Hope this isn’t a bad time. I sent you a message about fifteen minutes ago, but it wasn’t read, so I thought you were logged in.”
“Hi…” The young host’s enthusiasm turned into surprise as he figured out the identity of his guest. “Tom? Okay, uh, come in.” He stepped aside to make way for his former coach. “My phone was charging and I must have been in the shower. I didn’t think you were going to be back till next week.”
“It turned out they expected me to be physically there at least three days a week, even when I clearly said in the call I wasn’t willing to do that. So it was a very quick interview.” Tom cast a quick glance at the interior of the room, pausing to look at a plastic box half-tucked under the bed. “Are you in the middle of something?”
“I’m tidying up a little,” said Seth. “So, they were trying to rope you in, huh? Sorry it didn’t work out.”
“They could have said so earlier and saved me four hours of driving.” Tom chuckled as he walked over to the side cabinet, tapping the document bundle against the wood surface to show its location before setting it down. “Anyway, I got the things you need to sign for the car. It’s quite a bit to go through. I’ll leave the folder here, all right?”
“Oh, thanks,” said Seth. “I’ll need to go into the office and get their scanner, and they… don’t open till Monday.” He sounded a little distracted, as if he had more important matters on his mind at the moment.
“Take your time.” Tom paused to glance around some more. Apart from the box the young man appeared to be wrestling with, the room was in a neater state than usual. On the small pantry were two ceramic cups set side-by-side. Next to it was a kettle, which was already boiling and filling the corner with thick warm vapor. Laid out behind the set was also an unopened box of fruit tea.
Lifting his eyebrow, Tom squinted to read the upside-down label, which said ‘Premium Red Berries Infusion’. He walked over to the table by the window to set down a paper bag he was carrying and stole a quick look at Seth, who was crouching down to tuck the storage box under his bedside table. “Expecting someone?”
“Yeah. Lindsey’s dropping by with some patch updates.” Seth then perked up as he heard the sound of Tom’s paper bag clanging on the table, a grin on his face. “Please tell me you got me beer.”
“These are all from your mom,” said Tom. “And since when did they let you drink?”
The young man apparently decided not to venture into the subject. “All right. More pasta and corn soup.” He laughed as he dragged another storage box out from under his bed, felt for the label, and decided to cram more unwanted stuff in it. “I didn’t know you were going home.”
“Yeah. The registration was back at your folks’.” Tom slowly sorted the contents of the paper bag into neat piles on the table. “Your mom said something about how you’re looking to move back there after the program?”
At the lack of an immediate answer, Tom glanced back to check the young man’s expression.
Seth was grimacing. “Well, not exactly. I told her I would think about it. I’ve still got more than a year left, so it’s not like I’ve got to decide right now.”
“You’ll be closer to family,” said Tom. “And most of your friends are still back there.”
“Yeah.” The young man let out a sigh. “So what, I can say, yo, come over tonight and watch football?” He chuckled grimly. “You know, Tom, it’s just…It’s not like I’m on my own out here. I’ve got friends online.”
“Your game friends?”
“Yeah.”
“And they’re… real people?”
“At least some of them.”
A brief silence followed, and Seth added, “All right, that was a joke. Don’t worry, Tom. I can tell the difference. If you try the game, you’ll know what I mean. It’s realistic but it’s not like…” He bit his lip. “Well, never mind.”
Tom took a long breath as if to say something, but then decided against it. “And Lindsey…you mean that lady, Lindsey Miles from VirCo’s customer service?”
The question seemed to lift the young man’s mood. “Yes, the one you gave your spare key to so she could come drag me out of bed,” said Seth in mock accusation, although he made no effort to hide the eagerness in his tone. “Her job’s more like hardware calibration, so she comes in every other week or so to check the equipment and install updates, to make sure the, uh, what are they called, the neural interpreters and some other interpreters are up-to-date, especially with this upcoming patch.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Yeah, it’s great to talk to someone who knows what it’s all about, and… I guess, doesn’t think this is a huge waste of time.”
“Seth, I don’t think it’s a waste of time, it’s just…well, we’ve talked about this before.”
“Yeah, I know and I get where you’re coming from. It’s not real. It’s a fantasy. Yeah, it’s true. But there’s… Things are just… I don’t know, things are normal in there somehow. When I told people that this accident happened and the doctors said the chances are slim that I will ever be able to see again, you know what their answer was? ‘Oh, damn, I’m sorry, that really sucks’… and then they looked at me and said, ‘well, wanna go grind some River Kappa for XP now?’”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda my point, you see.” He shook his head. “Out here I…”
“Out here you have a date.”
That caught the young man off-guard and he nearly choked. “What?
It’s not—”
“Oh, she’s a fine girl,” Tom interrupted casually. “Much prettier than those gold-digging groupies who used to trail you around. No plastic. Well, either that or really, really good plastic. You know what they can do now.”
Seth opened his mouth but failed to come up with a protest as he was perhaps suddenly confronted with prospects of the future he was not ready for and things he could not yet trust himself to judge. Still, it took him only a second to recover. “The least I can do is give her something nice to drink while we wait for the update to finish. She said it’s going to take a while, since it’s an important patch. It’s… common courtesy.”
“No ring that I noticed,” continued Tom. “That was a few months ago, but I can stay to check again.”
A horrified look washed over Seth’s face, before he finally broke into a laugh. “Okay, I know you’re grinning over there, Tom. But, no, I’m not gonna blush, and this is none of your business.” He waved his hand as he pushed the last storage box under the bed, trying hard not to smile. “Please just go away before she gets here. I’ve got a Festival to get to.”
CHAPTER ONE
The glass wind chime sounded from outside the windows of the fourth-floor room, two bright high-pitched notes ringing clear above the constant clamor rising from the city below.
Glancing up from the pile of loot he was arranging, Seiki recognized the familiar shape of the incoming post pigeon on the window, and he quickly leapt to his feet to admit the bird before it could start flapping against the paper screen.
Since its official start about eighteen hours ago, the Pacchi Festival had raised Shinshioka’s level of noise to a new standard. While the soundproofing shoji panels around the private territory could muffle the ruckus to an inconspicuous hum, it was an all-or-nothing Enchantment effect. As soon as Seiki cracked the window open, the sounds from the ongoing Festival flooded into the room, increasing the overall volume by at least another twenty decibels.
Widening the gap to let the gray pigeon land on the windowsill, Seiki detached the message and let the bird fly back out over the Festival crowd. Despite having spent much of that afternoon gazing out his window, the sight of the vibrant Festival still caught him by surprise and he decided to slide open the window all the way for the full view.
The Pacchi Festival had transformed Shinshioka into a large tapestry of moving colors. Seiki’s newest private territory gave him an elevated vantage point over Trade Street and the green-roofed Mani Shrine, although neither landmark was recognizable under the current layer of Festival decorations. Yellow and black flags—symbolizing the Rogami Clan—lined the majority of roof edges, creating crisscrossing patterns across the whole city, like spines of intertwining dragons that heaved in the strong afternoon wind. Filling the spaces between the yellow outlines were cloth banners, some yellow, some black and white, some crimson and gold, hanging from shops and public walls. Shrine gates were decorated with dyed shimenawa ropes and strings of paper lamps, which Seiki was looking forward to seeing once they lit up at night. In the streets, patches of Shinshioka’s original red and black motif marked signposts and guard stations, visible amidst rows of vendor stalls that had magically popped up over the course of a few hours. Between the temporary structures, people flowed through the streets in a stream of multi-colored specs.
Seiki still found it difficult to believe this was the same city he had come to know so well. The familiar sounds of passing conversations, horse hooves and occasional brawls had been completely replaced by a symphony of novel noises from a thousand different activities. The crowds in the streets were constantly buzzing, with time-limited items being bargained for, traded, packed, unpacked, mixed in with a good many excited exclamations from players who had just discovered something new. Occasionally, through a sporadic lapse in the hollering from street vendors, a random phrase of music would lift from one of the frequent city parades, sometimes a soaring melody from a bamboo flute, sometimes the lively rhythmic beating of drums—clear against a backdrop of distant bells from the city’s numerous temples.
On a different plane of senses, the constant cool wind that blew through Shinshioka now carried with it a rich, complicated aroma. It was mostly the appetizing smell of food, both sweet and savory, the strongest right now being that of deep fried dough from the street stalls right outside his window, but beyond that Seiki also noticed faint incense and lamp oil, and perhaps even firecrackers.
Seiki had briefly been at the stalls earlier, and he had been utterly fascinated by the range of products on offer, which included everything from consumables to traditional wooden toys to art prints and territory furniture. Most of them were probably there as fillers, like twenty different versions of decorative vases that did nothing special, but the sheer volume and variety were still impressive.
Seiki let out a long, satisfied sigh. It had been the Rogami Clan that had triggered the event, and as annoying as it was, he could not find a reason to gripe. The Festival had brought about a kind of bustle he had never seen before even in Shinshioka’s peak hours, and it made him feel intensely awake and alive, a feeling he always craved.
He finally turned his attention back to the message and read it aloud to Ippei across the room. “Yamura’s coming right now, and he asked how long the meeting would take, since he’s in the middle of… uh, something long and important. He didn’t say what.”
Ippei [Level 15] looked up from the tea table where he had been working on his own series of correspondence. “Ten, fifteen minutes, if people are efficient. But that depends on how reasonable the White Cranes are with the negotiations.” He nodded toward the pile of loot from the Shussebora cave, which Seiki had been arranging in the middle of the room. “Quite a few attractive pieces in there, and at the very least they’re worth a lot of gold.”
“Okay, fifteen minutes but most likely longer, then,” said Seiki as he wrote a quick reply to Yamura. “I’ll ask him what he wants from the pile and we can maybe negotiate for him if he can’t make it.”
Normal loot division etiquette gave the instance owner full rights to distribute the spoils. Last night’s case, however, was a little more complicated. It had been the White Crane Order’s treasure poem that had led to a treasure hidden within Seiki’s personal instance, but then it had been Kentaro who had finally ended up with the mysterious Level 32 Tailoring Recipe, so afterward no one was sure what was fair.
“To be honest, I’m happy for them to take almost everything,” said Seiki. Now that he had turned his attention back to it, he still could not quite believe it had been less than twenty-four hours since they discovered the hidden cave and the treasure. The Festival seemed to overshadow even that.
Ippei laughed. “Do you want to just tell them that and call off the meeting? I know you’re dying to go explore.”
Seiki chuckled but made a face. “Let’s do this properly.” This was his first official loot division meeting and he somehow felt responsible for it.
The loot pile consisted of a total of seven Enhancement Scrolls, which equaled the exact number of players present in the Shussebora instance, and this made it pretty clear who they were meant for. Of the two that dropped for sword classes, one offered rather significant reduction of energy cost for Focused Strike, while the other allowed a free first Parry in three minutes. Ippei seemed to be on the fence about both. “Nice, but not essential,” the samurai had said.
There was also an additional Modification scroll for the ronin class. Seiki had studied the description so many times he had almost memorized the exact wording:
Ability Modification Scroll: Debilitating Slash – Upslash no longer has a wind effect but instead upon connection applies a Disarm with an added 2-second stun on up to 3 targets. Read the scroll aloud in the Swordsman’s Shrine to apply the enhancement.
Modification Scrolls, like what the label suggested, changed the way a standard ability worked. This was the first decent Modification Scroll Seiki h
ad seen, and it had the potential to be extremely powerful, especially in close combat. Still, it meant he would have to sacrifice the anti-projectile effect of the move. Seiki had been pondering this one for a while. Being so used to how Upslash worked, he wondered if he really wanted such a drastic change to his toolkit. Should he choose to apply it, it would also take one of his Enhancement Slots, so he would need to decide whether he would rather give up the reduced energy cost for his Slides or the one-second extension on his Vertical Spike stun, both of which he had learned to rely on.
Ippei had been surprised by his reservation.
“Imagine this,” the samurai had said. “You’re going to have a one-second stun and a two-second stun on multiple targets. Can’t ask for anything better than that. And modified abilities don’t translate to troop abilities, so your troops are still going to have the original Upslash wind shield.”
“I’m just going to have too many stuns,” Seiki had answered.
Ippei had laughed at that. “You can never have too many stuns, considering we might have the Kano Castle to worry about now.”
His friend was right, and stuns were especially precious in PVP. Seiki promised to think about it.
Among the loot there was also another non-combat Free Slot scroll, which gave players a 25% chance to double their Honor rewards from military missions and war events. While this would definitely be useful if he ended up losing a lot of Honor points from fighting Rogami griefers out the West Gate, there was no reason to waste time considering it. He and all his friends knew exactly what was going to immediately go into his Free Slot once it unlocked at Level 16.
The majority of Free Slot scrolls had no class restrictions. Most people went for the popular Disarm, the guaranteed wrist slash that would force your opponent to let go of whatever they were holding at the cost of temporarily parting with your dagger. Non-PVP players often went for quality-of-life abilities like Caution, which alerted players to the presence of nearby monsters. Or Memory, which would create a mental guide trail to help players find their way back to any particular spot. Class-restricted Free Slot abilities were rarer, and, of course, class-restricted Free Slot abilities from an unlabeled quest that led to a mysterious instance, like the one Seiki had received from the Shussebora, were practically unheard of.