World Tree Online: The Duchess of Hammers: 2nd Dive Begins

by M. A. Carlson

  Standing yet again after refilling my SP pool using the water from the nearby barrel, I tried again. This time I didn’t want to use the ‘Body Control’ skill. It was a great skill, but clearly not made for this, at least not in its current form. I knew how SP felt, I needed to try to send it throughout my body, similar to the ‘Pacing’ subskill in ‘Body Control’ but more akin to ‘Sudden Boost’, a combination of them both.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to relax. I felt for the heat of the SP, lying dormant in my muscles, just waiting to come to life. I needed to feel that energy, not just in one group of muscles or another, but in all the muscle groups at the same time, kind of like when I was holding the buckets of sand.

  And there was my epiphany. The buckets were right where I left them, just waiting for me to pick them up again. With a bucket in each hand and the same stance this all began with, I let my body strain, all of it at once. Once more I got the ‘Over-Burdened’ debuff, even though I had just hit my level cap for strength. My carrying capacity should have been more than enough for the 445 lbs.

  Over-Burdened – You are holding more weight than your current capacity is capable of holding. -20-Stamina per Second until Unburdened. (495/475 lbs.)

  Now I was confused, even as I strained to hold the buckets. How had they gotten heavier?

  I shook away the thoughts, focusing again on feeling the burn. I knew I could sooth the muscles, give them a boost to their strength temporarily if only to make this easier, but I couldn’t do that. I needed to feel this strain. I needed to feel my stamina working through my whole body at the same time. When I did feel it burning through my muscles I focused on just the feeling of it. The feel of the heat moving and circulating through the muscles, moving from one muscle to the next at a steady pace.

  I had an idea, if ‘Pacing’ slowed down the rate that SP circulated through my body, making the SP more efficient, what would happen if I sped it up? So, I pushed the SP to move faster, my body strained harder for a moment as I felt my muscles suddenly tighten and flex hard as the SP started moving faster. I pushed the heat again, willing it to move even faster, I could feel my muscles bulge suddenly, my clothes feeling tighter.

  You’ve learned the ‘Body Control’ subskill ‘Amped Up’

  Body Control

  Level: 28

  Experience: 91.41%

  Subskill: Amped Up

  Strength Boost: +1.28-Strength (additional stacks reset timer)

  Skill Stamina Cost: 100 per boost

  This was exactly what I needed. While ‘Sudden Boost’ would be great if I used it in conjunction with a single attack or just to jump, maybe even run, ‘Amped Up’ would increase my overall strength, it was more expensive to use but the results were better than I could have hoped for.

  I dropped the buckets, hoping to preserve the +12-Strenth boost I currently had and leapt, pulling my spear out as I did. I struck at the dummy. My spear cut through the plate armor like wet tissue paper only to stop suddenly, becoming lodged in the metal post that supported the target. I watched the largest number I had ever seen from one of my spear strikes float up from the dummy. In bright red, -476-HP floated up from the dummy. I had done damage close to that when my spear had ‘Lesser Holy Imbuement’ applied to it and mixed with ‘Power Thrust’ but this was in another league. And given I hadn’t learned a skill after all that, it suggested the finished product would be that much more powerful . . . if I could learn it.

  “Very good,” said Saaya, nodding approvingly. “Now, do it again,” he added, smiling at me, his fanged grin still looking more threatening than not.

  Chapter 16

  “Do it again, he says,” I complained under my breath. I had done the same thing a dozen more times, but nothing happened.

  “Good, I am satisfied,” Saaya finally said, stopping me before I could leap and attack again. “I will walk with you to your friend. I believe she has been waiting for you in the mess hall, reading according to one of my men.”

  “But I didn’t learn the skill,” I protested. I may have been frustrated with what I felt was a lack of progress, but I wasn’t giving up.

  “Walk with me,” Saaya insisted, motioning for me to join him.

  I frowned but joined him, I couldn’t really argue with the man too much. This was basically his barracks. Once we were away from the training field and Vari was out of sight, Saaya spoke again.

  “I may have misled you earlier. My skill, it is not a warrior only skill,” the lieutenant started, much more serious than the doting father he had been just a few moments prior.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “My skill is unique. I am the only one that will ever learn it,” Saaya stated, almost sounding sad.

  I was not sad though. I was very quickly becoming angry. I was promised a unique skill. “What do you mean?” I asked through clenched teeth.

  “The second step,” said Saaya, holding up a hand to stall me. “I told you, the second step is the ‘Tiger’, but you are not a tiger or a tigerman. It is not how you see yourself, nor should you. You are you and I am me. The secret of the second step is embracing who and what you are. I am a tigerman with a proud heritage, descended from the greatest of hunters the World Tree has ever known.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, my anger fading slightly and replaced by a growing confusion. Why would the quest offer a unique skill then?

  “Who are you?” Saaya asked.

  I could have answered flippantly but I had a feeling he was asking for something deeper than my name and class or something like that.

  “The second step is all about your mindset,” explained Saaya. “When you know who you are at your core, then you will find your unique skill. Think about it, I do not expect you will understand immediately.”

  “Have you told Vari this?” I asked.

  “No, she is not ready. She does not know yet who she wants to become. She is torn by her past, uncomfortable in the present and uncertain of her future. She thinks to please me that she must become the perfect soldier, never wavering in the face of evil. She is trying to make me proud of her but does not realize, I am already proud of her. She chose to become a cleric to help others, trying in her own way to undo the damage her father has caused. She refused to become a priestess because she is angry with the Gods for all she has been through and has even cut herself off from her dwarven heritage as well. I worry so much for her. It is my greatest hope that she will find her way with a little more time. So, no, I have not told her yet. When I think she is ready to listen, I will tell her,” Saaya answered. “Then she will find her own unique skill.”

  “So, my suggesting she use magic?” I asked.

  Saaya shrugged. “It could work just as well with magic I suppose.”

  “Could you use both?” I asked.

  Saaya let out a bark of laughter. “You say crazy things, my friend. Trying to use mana and stamina together is like mixing gnomes and ogres to make gnogres. This cannot be done.”

  Challenge accepted, I thought to myself. Even if it wasn’t possible, I was still going to try. And I had the blueprint for learning to use my mana in the same way as my stamina thanks to the earlier training.

  “I have to ask before I forget, what is with the sand in those buckets? How did they get heavier?”

  “Sand? That was not sand. That was an Iron Slime, it increases its density and weight automatically, it wishes nothing more than to be in contact with the ground. But, their magic limits the amount of weight they can apply to just 25-lbs. above the capacity of whoever or whatever is lifting them. Why? You wish to buy a few for pets or something?” Saaya asked.

  “Slimes? As in the weakest monster in the history of monsters?” I asked, surprised.

  “Monsters?” Saaya asked, another bark of laughter followed. “Maybe in the wild, many centuries ago. Now they are domesticated, it is very common for a family to have at least one household slime. They are great for getting rid of p
ests. In many of the wealthier homes, they will have Cleanly Slimes, they eat dirt and dust leaving whatever they come in contact with very clean.”

  “Don’t slimes leave behind . . . you know . . . slime?”

  “Why would they leave part of themselves behind? You adventurers have some crazy ideas,” said Saaya with a shake of his head. “Well, it would seem we have reached the end of the line.”

  I hadn’t noticed we were already inside the main building, more specifically in the mess hall. Sitting by herself at the end of one table was Rose, flipping the page of a book while one finger errantly curled a strand of her blood red hair. She didn’t look as banged up as the night before, but I could still see a number of dents, dings and scratches in her armor that weren’t there after getting it patched up this morning on our way here.

  “Here is where I leave you, good luck with the last step. Once again, you and your companions are free to stop by anytime you wish to make use of our facility for training. If you seek instruction, please be sure to come during that training time,” said Saaya.

  “Training time?” I questioned.

  “Yes, the schedule board has all the available training sessions. Just be sure to arrive on time for any scheduled training you wish to attend,” Saaya said, pointing to a massive bulletin board at one end of the mess hall, it was huge, each day had eight different columns and each column had a field designation and 16 time slots below it. Each time slot had a name and brief description of what was being trained. The training was everything from weapons, to kinds of combat movement, even a few class specific training sessions. “Anyway, I should get back to work. There is no telling how much paperwork has built up while I was playing around with you and my daughter.”

  “Thank you again, I appreciate the help,” I said. I was still feeling a little frustrated that I hadn’t learned a skill. But I wasn’t completely upset either. It sounded like this skill had a lot more to it than I had originally believed.

  I glanced at my game clock and was surprised to see it was already after 2:30, meaning we were going to be late.

  “Rose,” I said urgently, snapping her out of her book. “We’re going to be late.”

  Rose looked up at me in surprise, then cursed under her breath. Snapping her book shut and stuffing it into her bag, she stood and stated, “Don’t just stand there, we need to run.”

  And run we did. I was very tempted to use ‘Amped Up’ to move faster, but I wasn’t going to risk leaving Rose behind.

  “So, how did the training go?” Rose asked, dodging around a large orcish man in brown robes.

  “Not bad, learned a new skill, not the unique skill,” I answered, flipping over a pair of gnomes in my path.

  “Bumber, will you be going back for more training?” Rose asked, continuing to run.

  “I don’t think so. The rest of the skill is up to me to figure out,” I replied.

  “Good luck then,” Rose added.

  “How about you? Learn some good skills?” I asked, running alongside her now.

  “Yeah, I picked up three ‘Shield-Wall’ subskills, ‘Double Slam’, ‘Shield Edge’, and ‘Trap Weapon’, and I got ‘Resist’ to Rank II,” gushed Rose happily.

  “Congratulations, that’s great,” I said, happy for her. Rose really was a hard worker, always pushing herself to get stronger, it was something I admired about her.

  “Thanks,” she replied, a hint of a blush on her face, though that could have been a flush from the running.

  We entered the manor about fifteen minutes late to see a very unhappy Duchess glaring at the pair of us.

  “You are late,” Mardi stated, making sure to pause after each word.

  “Sorry, training ran a little long, it’s my fault,” I said quickly apologizing.

  “Yeah, it was Jack’s fault,” said Rose, grinning and trying not laugh when I glared at her.

  Thankfully, Mardi did laugh. “So unprofessional,” she tried to recover, but it was too late.

  “Don’t let the little lady fool you,” said Olaf, he had been waiting with the Duchess when we arrived. “She only came down stairs from changing about a minute before you two got here.”

  “Olaf Crushhammer, do not tell them that. You are ruining the effect,” complained Mardi, giving up the feigned anger completely at this point.

  Olaf shrugged.

  Mardi shook her head and laughed. “I suppose I can forgive you for being late . . . but just this once.”

  “So where to today?” Rose asked.

  “Back to the temple. I have got to keep pushing my skills if I want to reclaim my status as a Goddess,” said Mardi. She seemed more confident than she was the first time we met, and she was very confident back then. The little dwarf seemed to have grown quite a bit since we first met her. I was looking forward to seeing what she produced as time went on.

  It didn’t take long for us to get to the Temple of the God Ivaldi and once we were there, Mardi pretty much ignored us as she went to work.

  Rose and I sat on one of the many benches that were spread throughout the temple, we made sure we were in view of the Duchess at all times. As soon as Rose cracked open her book on ‘Enchanting’, I opened my book, ‘Portals of the World Tree’. I had maybe 20-pages left to read and then I could start on the next book the Goddess Issara recommended.

  The last 20-pages were much like the first 200, filled with complex formulas and advanced mathematics, though advanced may have been an understatement. I recognized some of what this explained as quantum mechanics, something Humanity had still barely started to crack. I couldn’t say I knew how far the research into such sciences went. Before I knew it, the book was done, and I had filled several more pages of my notebook with calculations and formulas. I was surprised by how well the book tied everything together, but given the book was created by a very advanced artificial intelligence, I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised by its complexity and completeness.

  With the heavy math book done, I grabbed the next book, ‘Reading the Patterns’, and hoped to the Goddess Issara that it wasn’t as complex or math heavy.

  This book started out very esoteric in its material, about finding meaning in the stars and tea leaves, which was more of a preface. Once I got to chapter 1, it was intense again. After reading the first few pages, I took a moment to skim through to see what I could expect. There was a ton of pattern recognition exercises, optics and light spectrum interpretation, predictive algorithms, and even Einstein-Rosen Bridge theories, though the book called Einstein, ‘Alby Einschnitzle’, a famous gnome theoretician, and Rosen, ‘Natronimus Rosetta’, a not as famous goblin physicist. Then the book veered into calculating wormhole trajectories based on the gravimetric fields and finally into the patterns of the gravimetric fields transmitting data from one end of the wormhole to the other and how those patterns could be read to find out information about the environment on the other side. It made my brain hurt just thinking about it, this just might be worse than ‘Portals of the World Tree’.

  Going back to the beginning of the book, I started Chapter 1 all over again. As I mentioned earlier, the book started with pattern recognition exercises. There was a pattern of symbols or numbers and I needed to figure out the next in the sequence. Sometimes it was like the hands on the face of clock, where I would need to rotate the symbol to complete the pattern. Those were easy. There were some that were rune-like symbols with what looked like random geometric shapes but were in fact a looping pattern, where the next symbol relied on the symbol three prior and then took a specific part of the following two patterns. It was mental gymnastics trying to adapt my brain to reading and relaying the next pattern. When that first chapter ended, my brain felt like mush. Taking a breather to look up from the book, I saw Rose was buried in her book, but now, she also had her own journal out and was jotting down notes.

  “Time for a break,” I said, calling Rose from her book. She and I both needed it . . . I needed it, I couldn’t be sure Rose did,
but a break never hurt.

  “Sure,” said Rose, setting her book down on top of her journal. “How is your reading going?”

  “Mind melting,” I replied, sighing heavily. “How is yours?”

  “Pretty good, I think I’m starting to figure out how to break an enchantment. I’m not quite ready to try yet but I’m getting close,” Rose said proudly.

  I scanned the room, it had been a bit since I looked around. Mardi was hammering away, making who knows what.

  “How do you think Baby is doing?” Rose asked.

  I looked back to see the slightly concern look on Rose’s face. I smiled reassuringly, “I’m sure she’s doing great. She’ll come back in a few days with all kinds of new spells to keep us all healthy and whole.”

  “I hope so,” said Rose. “I can’t help but worry about her. I know my sister is strong in her own way, but she is just so small in this world. I wish she would have chosen a large race, or at least something human size. That stupid fiancé of hers just had to play a small race so she did too.”

  “You said he was a pro gamer, right? Anyone I might have heard of?” I asked out of curiosity.

  “I would totally tell you, but Baby would probably be angry with me if I did. You can ask her, but there is no guarantee she’ll tell you either. As protective of me as she is, she’s an absolute pitbull when it comes to protecting his identity and hers,” replied Rose.

  “That’s perfectly okay, I was just curious. So, do you like her fiancé?” I asked.

  Rose kind of shrugged her shoulders and gave me a ‘so-so’ motion with her hand. “He’s a smart guy and nice enough, but I don’t care for the way he left Baby behind. He didn’t even help her when she started playing a month after he did. Baby says she’s fine with it because for him, playing the game is a job and for her it just something to do for fun and a way to stay connected with him.”