Master of None

by Shane Walker

  The brothers, who went by Oak and Shot, had nearly caught up to my Armorsmithing and Weaponsmithing skills as well as my Smithy Job level. One more week of this and I they would possibly be producing a surplus of equipment with the temps’ help. It would free me up to build up my other crafts or branch out.

  “Morning, boss!” they greeted in unison as I entered the forge area. No matter how much they acted the part they weren’t twins, but instead were actually a couple of years apart. When I walked in it looked like they were in the middle of finishing up some swords.

  “Morning, guys. How’s everything been going in here?” I asked, curious as to whether a Tier II forge was still enough for them.

  “It’s pretty good, for now. That’s assuming Oak pulls his head out of his ass and stops trying to argue with every idea I have.” Shot said glaring at his brother.

  “Well, I would stop arguing if your ideas weren’t complete shit, little brother.” came Shot’s response. Oak’s counter to this was to smack his brother in the face with the hammer he’d just been working steel with.

  In hindsight, the idea I had to take the enhancement from the dojo that prevented player death and spread it across the entire building was a terrible mistake. I’d done it in an effort to prevent the brothers from killing each other while horsing around, but instead all I’d done was take away the consequences of their violence.

  “Settle down, boys!” I said with as authoritative a voice as I could muster. “If you two have different ideas, how about you have a little competition to see who’s idea is better? I’ll add two more Tier I forges to the building and you can each do your own thing for a week. Whoever has the better results wins. How’s that sound?”

  “That’s actually not a bad idea, boss.” Shot said, releasing his grip on the hammer I just knew he was about to try loosening Oak’s teeth with.

  “Good. They’ll be ready tomorrow and you two can try out whatever new forge ideas you want. Till that’s settled, don’t fucking hit each other, ok?” I said and bid them farewell.

  Harry and Carol, my resident Alchemists, had already surpassed me in skills. Never underestimate the power and dedication of bored retirees. They had started brewing standard Health and Mana Potions that were much stronger than the Minor Health and Minor Mana potions I’d been creating. A single Health Potion of theirs could bring me back from the brink of death twice over.

  “Oh, good morning, Jack. How are you doing?” came Carol’s greeting as I approached the lab. “Harold, can you come in, dear? Jack just came by.”

  Harold was outside in their new greenhouse. Like Destreza, they’d figured out how to spend their own points to add upgrades, so they opted to start their own grow operation, of sorts. “Hey there, Jack.”

  “Morning, you two. I hope you’re still enjoying your work! I haven’t had a chance to really chat since you started.” I said as I greeted the two of them. I was genuinely concerned they wouldn’t enjoy this sort of thing long-term, but apparently I shouldn’t have worried.

  “Oh we absolutely love it, Jack! We’ve been dying to tend a garden again, but it’s been far too cold for that sort of thing where we live now. This gives us a chance to do something we love, even if it’s all digital.” said Harold with a smile on his face.

  “Harold is right, Jack. You’ve given us a tremendous opportunity. I just wish we could see our kids in-game more. They’ve left on some big quest in the Elven realms. Something about an alliance?” Carol said.

  “Doesn’t ring any bells for me, unfortunately. I stay out of politics. Although, I’d love to get us some trade deals with those Elves. Do you think your kids could get us some contact information in that region for some traders?” I asked. Already, I was filling my head with dreams of grandeur thinking about moving more products into an entirely new kingdom. “I’ll even give them a finder’s fee if they come through for us.”

  “Wonderful idea, Jack. I’ll shoot them a message now and ask.” Carol said. “You remind me of Harold when we were younger. He was always looking for new business opportunities and ways to network, too.”

  “Don’t sell the boy short, Carol.” her husband responded. “I never had the skills to pull off something like this. He’s got seven real world employees and heaven knows how many of those NPCs working for him, and that’s just after a couple of weeks. Heck, we won’t recognize the place in a year, I bet.”

  “Thanks for the votes of confidence guys. I really appreciate it.” I said. “I do need to be on my way, though. Let me know if you hear back from those kids about traders!”

  Talking to them brought back some bittersweet memories of an older couple I used to know. It wasn’t worth thinking about at the time, though. I had things to worry about other than painful memories and broken promises.

  Haydon was my tailor and the last of the first batch of employees. Honestly, I wasn’t really sure how to gauge his progress except seeing his levels increase. Apparently, all of his accomplishments as a Tailor so far were from natural talent and intuition. He said he was a costume designer and amateur cosplayer in real life, so he was used to improvising materials and methods to achieve a desired look or effect. Now, the in-game mechanics were racing to catch up to what he already had a knack for.

  Additionally, I had received a message from an Enchanter. She went by Syndey. I thought it was a typo, but apparently her real name was Cindy and she just liked spelling it like that in-game. It was weird to me, but then again my name was a pun so who was I to judge?

  So far, she couldn’t do much beyond enhancing weapon damage by adding or improving ratios or improving the damage reduction of armor, but it was a good start. I made a note to talking to Rowan about selling enchanted weapons and armor to the military. Normally in these games and settings, such things would be reserved for higher ranking officers due to cost, but I believed we could start mass producing them.

  Sadly, neither of them were in. Nik popped out of his workshop just long enough to tell me that they were out in town researching materials together. That was about all he had to say to me, though, as he quickly turned ducked back into his shop and locked the door. I wondered if he was mad at me about something and made a note to ask later after I got back from Rowan’s.

  Speaking of Rowan, I also needed to see if he had opinions on new skills for me and possibly diversifying the company, too. I didn’t know what was really out there skill-wise, so it was hard to say what I should look for. I just had that feeling that there was a lot more we could do with this company of mine.

  Before I left for Rowan’s, I saw the remainder of the shipment of Iron coming in and remembered to spend my Management Points on the Mine! I’d pulled in over 50,000 gold in profits in the last week with no idea how to spend it. The mine had generated 50,000 Management Points as well. I added two floors to the mine and expanded neither. The first floor was another silver vein and was double the size of the previous. Without even upgrading it. The last floor was Mythril! It was a small vein that only allowed ten miners, but I put out directions for it to be shipped directly to All Trades HQ and spent management points to have a vault built to store it in. Literally no one had the skill to use it yet but I was already dreaming big.

  Rowan was, as always, chipper when I showed up. I guess everyone loves seeing their golden goose.

  “Jack, my boy, how are ya today?” he said when I walked into the store. Things were slow this morning so it gave us time to chat.

  “Great, Rowan! I picked up the Thief Job last night so I’m ready for this quest of yours. I guess you want me to be some sort of messenger for you?” I said hoping to move things along so I could find something new to focus on. My attention span was eternally lacking.

  “Well, I wouldn’t quite say ready, lad.” he replied after studying me carefully for a few moments.

  “Wait, what?” I was ready to scream when he said it. He’d explicitly said I needed the Thief Job and I’d unlocked it.

  “You just got the Job bu
t I think there’s some more skills you could stand to pick up. I hate to change the requirements, but I promise it’s for your own good.” he explained. “You’ve already got Tracking, Dual Wielding, Herbalism, and Stealth, which hits four of the six skills for Ranger.”

  “Ranger? What the hell?” I asked, incredulous that he wanted me to pick up a seemingly unrelated Job. “Why would I need to be a Ranger? Are the Thieves Guild members hiding in the forest Robin Hood style?”

  “Listen lad,” he began. Oh fuck, I’m about to get lectured. “I appreciate that you’ve learned to craft so many things. Gods know it’s lined my pockets and will for quite some time. That said, sometimes you’re going to have to fight for what you’ve got. You have to be ready to kill a few fuckers to protect what’s yours and what you care about.”

  That caused some odd flashbacks to my younger days. Thoughts for another time, though. “Okay,” I said, resigned to his plan. “What else do I need to learn?” There were apparently two other skills to pick up.

  “Oh, the missing two skills are the easy part. You gotta pick up Longsword and either Bow or Crossbow.” he explained. “Crossbow is my personal favorite as it covers Heavy, Light, and Hand varieties. I like having options, obviously.”

  “Let me check something real quick.” I said as I messaged Poppil to check something with El. I hadn’t forgotten I told her I’d only train weapons with someone else if she didn’t have the skill.

  Thankfully, for the sake of convenience at least, these were outside her areas of expertise. She never went longer than Shortsword and preferred Bow as an elf. It would have been a pain in the ass to travel four days round trip to learn a couple of weapon skills.

  As soon as I gave my agreement to train with him, Rowan was dragging me to a section of the building I hadn’t been to yet. It was a fucking shooting range! There was some sort of pulley system hooked up to the targets that let Rowan cause them to pop up and drop. It even allowed some targets to strafe side to side to a certain extent. He wanted me to start with stationary targets first. Thank goodness he did, too.

  “Well, so much for the ‘easy part’ bit.” Rowan said with a sigh as another crossbow bolt whiffed by the intended target.

  I sucked with a crossbow! I went through an entire bundle of bolts without hitting anything! “Holy shit, why is this harder than using my Arm Crossbow?” I asked, completely frustrated.

  “It’s because that contraption on your arm just requires you to point your arm straight out and shoot. It’s a little bit different than lining up a shot down the sights of a typical Crossbow. That and it seems the Skill to use such a thing is natural to you since you started out with it. Tell ya what,” he said as he started looking through the equipment racks towards the back of the room. “try this and see how it works for you.”

  What he handed me looked like a wooden pistol with a tiny bow sitting on top. The game information said it was a Hand Crossbow. The damage was lower and it wouldn’t punch through armor quite the same, but Rowan assured me it was easier to aim with the instincts and techniques I had already grown used to. This time, he was right. It was like shooting a handgun with almost no recoil and much shorter effective range. I hit my target first try.

  “Do you have some more of these? I want to try something.” I asked. He nodded and proceeded to produce around nine more. I loaded all of them up with the special, shorter bolts made for them and laid them out in a row. Once I had everything set up I grabbed one in each hand and took out two targets almost simultaneously.

  Rowan let out a long whistle at that. “Well, lad, seems like we found what works for you, didn’t we?”

  The game seemed to agree with his assessment as I was rewarded with the skill for Crossbows.

  New Skill!

  Crossbows

  Level 1

  +1% Attack Speed & +1% Damage per Level

  Not surprisingly, the attack speed increase functioned slightly differently for crossbows than swords. With melee weapons, the attack speed increase allowed you to recover to a ready position more quickly after you attacked something. With crossbows, it was a combination of both reload speed and sighting a shot. For whatever reason, Light Crossbows just didn’t click with me the way the Hand Crossbows did. They were so different it felt like it should be a different skill.

  “Alright, lad, ready for the real training?” Rowan asked as he went over to a lever and pulled. Immediately, the thrum of magic and slow, steady grinding of gears filled the room. The squeak of pulleys moving followed shortly after as targets started popping up and down as well as moving side to side. “I figured you could use the most difficult version of this since you’re a natural shot with those and can use two at once.”

  “Gee, thanks.” I replied. I started watching targets looking for a pattern and found none that was discernible. Instead I picked up the first two crossbows on the table, took a deep breath, and prepared myself. “Alright, let’s do this.”

  24-Padding the Resume

  The pop-up targets were easy enough to hit. The trick with those was that you had a limited time to aim and fire before they would drop again. These targets, much like the ones used by the military, were designed to make shooting instinctual as well as heightening one’s reflexes. Eventually, you’re conditioned to fire without thinking when you see a hostile target.

  I’d spent about an hour focused on these targets and ignoring the strafing targets and the targets that could pop up, drop, move, and pop up elsewhere. It was admittedly difficult at first to ignore the movements of the targets I wasn’t looking for, but the hour had paid off.

  Your Crossbow skill has increased to Level 5!

  “You’re going to have to change it up to keep improving, lad. Start working the strafing targets next.” Rowan said as he walked up next to me and helped reload the line of hand crossbows on the counter in front of me. While I worked on improving my skills he’d been upstairs tending to his shop. “You’re also going to eventually need to get used to quickly reloading these, which means you won’t be able to shoot two at a time anymore.”

  I gave him a knowing smirk in response. “I’ve got a plan for that after we’re done here, so I’d like to keep practicing with Dual Wield.” I said. Rowan carefully studied me for a moment as if he was reconsidering some previous assessment. His only response was an approving nod as he walked back to what passed for the control panel for the range and reset it.

  Strafing targets were a different animal altogether compared to pop-up targets and required development of completely separate techniques. Whereas pop-ups were stationary with a small window to shoot, moving targets had a larger window, but you had to know where and when to aim and fire. Otherwise, your shot would land where the target used to be instead of where it was at that moment.

  After a couple of shots I started learning how to properly lead targets. Something like this would have been simpler with modern firearms due to the faster projectiles, but with a Hand Crossbow you had to lead a bit farther thanks to the slower travel speed of a bolt.

  Of course, once I started getting into a routine after the first hour, Rowan came down and watched my progress. Realizing I’d become complacent, he flipped another switch before heading back upstairs and the targets started moving at different speeds. Some would even stop mid-strafe, leading to shots missing completely.

  I worked the targets like this for another two hours. It was much more mentally exhausting than the pop-up targets just because I wasn’t able to judge lead distance based on movement speed from instinct and experience yet. Not only that, my arms were killing me from holding them out for so long. I guess even someone with my respectable stats in Strength and Endurance had his limits.

  That exhaustion, combined with the fact that I finally hit Level 10 in Crossbow meant I was more than willing to accept Rowan’s offer to take a break and chat. It seemed like his opinion of me had graduated from “useful and profitable acquaintance” to “potential friend and ally” because he
opened the conversation with trying to learn more about me.

  “So why are you working so hard to make all this money, lad?” he said to me once I was nice and comfortable in the seat he offered me in a back room of the shop. It seemed to be his personal library as the walls were absolutely covered in books and there was a desk in the back with stacks of notes.

  The question caught me off guard, honestly. It was unusual for an NPC to be curious as to a Player’s motivations. I thought they all would assume we were fueled by dreams of glory and riches and that’s why we were Adventurers.

  “I want a better life for both myself and my family. We’ve always been on the edge of poverty and my parents have worked themselves half to death to make sure that we never tipped over the wrong side of that line. I want to make sure they don’t have to struggle anymore, I want to make sure I don’t struggle anymore, then I want to help people.” came my word vomit reply. I guess I had been holding onto that for awhile and he seemed to be the first person really interested in why I was doing what I was doing.