If I was reading this correctly then I could basically spark an industrial revolution in the game. I could pass off my Spellcrafting skills to others I trusted to do the work for me and mass-produce items then sell them to a gaming population who’d already proved more than willing to buy my stuff.
And there was also the Combat branch of Spellcrafting. There were all sorts of interesting magical ways to make things dead in the game that I couldn’t wait to try out, but a lot of those abilities required some level of skill in weapon and armor crafting, so that was going to have to stay on hold along with everything else for the moment.
Right now I needed to concentrate on getting items on the Auction House and waging some good old fashioned economic warfare.
I felt that familiar tingling. The one that came when I was onto something. That hit me when I was close to figuring out a way to break a game and bend it to my will. Only I was looking at something here that could potentially break the entire game’s economy rather than something small like discovering a combat loophole that would let me kill a gamemaster.
There was still a lot to work out, there were still lots of puzzle pieces that had to come together, but a master plan was starting to coalesce in my mind at long last. A plan that involved more than pissing off the local guild that represented Horizon.
Maybe.
Either way my plan still involved fucking with Horizon Dawn and, by proxy, Horizon. It’s just that this was something that would allow me to hurt them on a scale I’d never imagined before. A scale that went beyond even the fallout they had to deal with when I’d tricked one of their GMs into admitting knowledge of people being killed by their modules and insinuating he thought those poor people deserved it.
"You okay there?" Keia asked.
I blinked and came back to reality. The trees around me were completely different. I must’ve been on autopilot for a good little while.
"Totally," I said, looking to my companions. “I’m… What the hell happened to Kris?”
Kris glared at me as she clutched her bleeding arm. I immediately looked around to figure out where the attack was coming from.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“It’s okay,” Keia said, giggling in a way that put me at ease. I figured she wouldn’t be giggling if this was an emergency.
"I'm not okay," Kris said. "This has to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard of!”
Keia rolled her eyes. "Do you want me to get any better at this?"
"I do," Kris said. "Anything that has you not firing arrows at me is A-OK in my book, but do we have to train you this way?"
Kris looked to me as though she was expecting a rescue.
“Um, what the hell training are you talking about?”
“Watch and learn,” Keia said. “You’re not the only one who can come up with workarounds and loopholes to game rules, though I don’t think this loophole is going to last for long once the devs figure out people can do this.”
She reached out and wiggled her fingers over Kris’s wound which healed up rather nicely. There wasn’t even a scar.
“Okay, so Kris hurt herself and you healed it. What’s the big deal?”
Kris sighed, then put her dagger to her arm and sliced. I winced, that had to hurt considering how realistic the pain simulation was in this game, but then Keia did the wiggling thing again with her fingers and the wound was gone after a sparkling light show washed over it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Powerleveling on a convenient target!” Keia said. “You didn’t hear Kris swearing?”
“I was preoccupied,” I said. It said something about how preoccupied I was with that plan that I’d missed Kris slicing herself open so Keia could heal her.
“Must be working. You're already getting better at that!" I said.
When she’d first started the healing hadn’t been nearly so instantaneous. I well remembered Kris gurgling as Keia’s healing did next to nothing to help with the arrow stuck in her neck.
“That seriously works?” I asked.
“Yup!” Keia said. “She’s damaged. I heal. Why wouldn’t it work?”
“I wonder if that’d work with combat,” I mused.
Keia and Kris’s miniature party portraits disappeared from the edge of my user interface. I looked around in confusion, then the world went dark around me. I woke up a moment later staring up at trees with a strange tingling running over me.
Keia stood over me with a frown.
“That wasn’t funny,” she said.
An invitation to rejoin the party came up. I accepted and pulled myself up on my elbows. Kris stood with her hammer in hand grinning down at me.
“That took out a big chunk of your health but I didn’t get a skill point,” she said. “Want me to try again? We could test whether I didn’t get a skill point because I didn’t try enough, or if friendly fire skill leveling really isn’t a thing.”
“Please don’t,” I said.
“You’re probably right,” Kris said, though she sounded disappointed “I think as far as powerleveling goes, whacking each other isn’t the best even if it does work considering how much of your health you lost. You’re so squishy I wouldn’t be able to get in more than a single hit without killing you.”
“But I’d get some experience healing him,” Keia sai, hitting me with a considering look I didn’t care for.
“Yeah, but it’d still be faster to kill some low level stuff,” Kris said.
“You hit me,” I said.
“Only a little,” Kris said.
“On the bright side I got a whole skill point from healing you!” Keia said. “You were on death’s door there.”
“I’m so happy for you,” I said, pulling myself up and glaring at Kris.
“Hey, you’re the one who’s always going on about how we need to test systems in games and figure out how to exploit them. I just figured out we can’t whack each other to level efficiently,” Kris said. “You should be happy!”
“You’re enjoying every minute of this, aren’t you smartass?” I growled.
“Maybe,” she said, whirling her hammer down and leaning against it.
“At least it works for healing," Keia said. “Doing this is really helping me level those skills!"
Kris grumbled as she sliced her arm again, and I went back to scouting the woods around us for flowers I could pick or a random goblinsteel ore vein I could mine.
It’s not like I could spot or hear any danger before Keia did. Her listening and spotting skills were way better than anything Kris or I had.
“Come on,” I said, not seeing anything worth gathering around here. “Try not to make too much noise while you’re powerleveling in the middle of the enemy infested forest.”
“I’ll do my best,” Kris said through gritted teeth as Keia healed her sliced arm again.
I shook my head and wondered if I looked this crazy to Keia and Kris when I was exploiting loopholes.
59
Explosive Rescue
We made our way through the forest with the only sounds being that forest and the occasional curse from Kris as she sliced her arm, followed by the sound of Keia’s healing. We were a merry band of misfits loaded down with a ridiculous amount of goblinsteel ore that’d be worth a fortune if anyone came across us, killed us, and put our stuff up on the Auction House.
“I’m going to stuff a gem infused with the wrong spell in your mouth if you keep making noise like that,” I growled at Kris.
“Oh yeah? Well then I’m going to stick the business end of my hammer where the sun don’t shine,” Kris snapped right back at me.
“Come on,” Keia said. “I know we’re all on edge, but that’s no reason to make the job easier for the Horizon Dawn patrols.”
“Her cursing every time she gets stuck is making the job easier for the Horizon Dawn patrols,” I muttered.
Kris opened her mouth, and from the furious look on her face she was about to lay into me
. I was ready for it. Unfortunately Keia stepped between the two of us, and in an instant she was back in her leather and had daggers out and pointed at both of us.
“Come on,” she said again, in the same light tone that was an odd counterpoint to the daggers she was using to threaten us. “There’s no need for our merry band of misfits to do Horizon Dawn’s job for them.”
I glared at Kris for the space of a breath before I started to laugh. A moment later she was laughing right along with me. She put a hand on Keia’s shoulder.
“What the hell is so funny?” Keia asked, looking between the two of us like we’d lost our minds.
“Kris and I griping at each other is nothing new,” I said. “Sorry if it freaked you out.”
“Freaked me out?” she said. “The two of you looked like you were gonna kill each other!”
“Wouldn’t be the first time an argument led to a little player killing,” I said with a shrug.
“It’s therapeutic,” Kris said.
Keia continued staring at us like we were nuts. Then she rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breath that sounded like something about us being crazy.
“If you could please refrain from trying to kill each other while we’re in enemy territory?” she said. “Again. No point in doing the enemy’s job for them and advertising to the world exactly where we are.”
She glared daggers at the two of us. A glare that was helped by the very real daggers she was holding up to either of us. Daggers I knew she could use for all sorts of unpleasantness if she had a mind to.
“Sorry,” we muttered at the same time.
And with that our merry band of misfits continued off towards the goblin mine. Kris hit me with a glance with her eyes going wide as she looked at Keia. I gave an imperceptible shrug.
“I saw that,” she said.
Both of us moved our eyes forward like we’d been caught by a teacher who knew a hell of a lot more about what was going on in the back of their classroom than they let on.
A motley group we made, at that. A leader whose only skills were in Gathering and Spellcrafting which wouldn't do a damn bit of good in a fight.
At least not a close quarters fight. At least not in a close quarters fight we’d survive.
I did have plenty of water gems on me that I could infuse with fire to create an unfriendly surprise for anyone who took us on at a distance. That hadn’t been an idle threat for Kris.
And an unprepared leader was the least of our craziness. The healer was more of a stealth archer since that’s what she'd been pushed into when she started the game. And Kris was… Well she was Kris. She played the same thing she did in every game. A tank who didn't have to do any of the thinking. No, she just waited for me to point her at something and then she did her best to make sure that whatever she was pointed at didn't live for very long.
There were times when I envied Kris her way of playing games. There was something simple and pure about it. Of course that play style would’ve bored me out of my mind if I ever took on a tanking role, and I was glad Kris had always been willing to fill that meat shield niche. For all that she looked like anything but a meat shield in her form fitting armor, but I’d never thought of her like that.
It would be like having the hots for my sister even if we did live in an alternate reality where she was into the gentlemen. Talk about gross.
With this group even being out here was a gamble, but I figured it was a worthwhile gamble. If I could turn that goblinsteel ore into goblinsteel weapons and goblinsteel armor then I’d be even richer.
Besides, I still had plenty of goblinsteel ore waiting in my vault back in town as insurance in case this expedition went pear shaped. I had high hopes that I might find even more ore to mine on this trip. Assuming the respawn timer was in my favor and Horizon Dawn hadn’t cleared out whatever mine we wound up in.
Keia held up a hand and snapped me out of my reverie and thoughts of all the stuff I was going to buy with my money if this worked. I looked around the forest and saw another one of those little red flowers with the yellow veins running through it. I reached out and picked the thing.
I needed to figure out what this thing could be turned into, alchemically speaking, but I’d been so busy creating and selling all the Nhewb’s Blessing potions and dealing with my sudden windfall that I hadn't had time to sit down and figure out what made this flower tick.
“Seriously?” Keia hissed. “I tell you to pay attention and you’re picking flowers?”
“I know, right?” Kris said.
“What?” I asked.
"I hear something," she said. "It sounds like fighting."
My eyes narrowed and my hands opened and closed a couple of times before closing into fists. Fists that became a white knuckled grip that was borderline painful until that pain wore off.
"We should probably move to go around whatever it is,” Keia said, ignorant to my fist situation. "If there's fighting then…"
"We need to go have a look," I said.
"That's actually the exact opposite of what I was about to say," Keia said. "If there are people fighting out here then why would we want to go near it? I can't heal all that well, Kris is still new for all that she's tricked out in your gear, and you…"
She let that hang. The meaning was clear enough. She said it with a smile that took away some of the sting, but I was well aware that I contributed mostly brains and gear to this group.
"Think about it," I said. "If we hear fighting out there that means it's a Horizon Dawn patrol fighting somebody."
"Which means they’re not fighting us," Keia said. “As long as the local patrol is attacking someone else they’re not our problem.”
"Except it is," I said. “Those assholes are either killing a bunch of goblins who don't deserve it, or killing a bunch of player characters they’re bullying. Either way, we can't let them do that!"
Keia sighed and rolled her eyes. "What part of “nasty fight up ahead” do you not understand? If it's one of their patrols then they could kill us just as easily as they could kill whoever we're going to try and fail to rescue. The only thing we’ll accomplish by trying to come to the rescue is adding more bodies to the ground and one hell of a windfall to their inventory.”
“We need to at least go and get a closer look,” I said. "The opposite is true, too. If they’re fighting someone then that means the fight could also potentially be turned against them and in our favor if we add our numbers to whoever’s getting ganked. You see a bunch of people they’re going to kill, but I see someone who could reinforce us in a fight against the bastards.”
"And then Horizon Dawn knows we're out here," Keia pointed out.
I sighed. "Fine. I'm going to go take a look on my own."
"Now wait just one damn minute…"
Kris shrugged and turned to follow me. She'd been on enough of these crazy adventures to know when it was best to go with the flow and see where the adventure took us.
I knew I was taking a risk here, maybe even a monumentally stupid and unnecessary risk, but then again this seemed like the kind of time to take risks. And that tingling feeling was back running along my scalp. I couldn't help but think that if Keia heard combat in the distance then it was the sound of an opportunity.
Keia sighed behind us, though it was really more of a growl than a sigh.
"You're going the wrong damn way," she said.
"What?" I asked.
"You're going the wrong way," she said. "You want to go off in that direction."
She nodded in a direction that was slightly to the side of where I’d been heading. I eyed her for a moment and she smiled and blew me a kiss. She knew exactly what I was thinking. I couldn’t hear the combat at this distance. For all I knew she could be pointing us in the wrong direction and sending us away from the combat she clearly wanted to avoid.
Only I didn’t think she’d do that. I was going to have to trust her. Just like I’d trusted her with my secret identity tha
t wasn’t so secret anymore and the fact that I was suddenly loaded. In-game, at least.
I sighed and shook my head.
“I’m going to trust you on this one," I said.
“Good man,” she said with a wink.
We moved through the forest as quietly as we could. Though honestly I wasn't all that worried about making too much noise. Not when the people we were sneaking up on were in the middle of a fight. I figured they were probably too busy dealing with the terror of close combat to worry overly much about whether or not someone was sneaking up on them, let alone hear someone sneaking up on them.
Soon enough we got close enough that even I could hear the combat going down. Keia hadn’t been lying. When we got close enough that I could see what was happening my blood boiled.
A group of Horizon Dawn people were gathered at one end of a clearing. A group of goblins were at the other end of the clearing with their backs up against a sheer rock wall that thrust out of the forest floor.
The way they were grouped up was odd, too. There were a couple of Horizon Dawn people wearing what looked like their noob gear facing down the goblins, while people in their more fancy armor were holding back and watching.
Almost like this was training, and they were letting the noobs get a chance at killing some goblins in a nice safe environment where they were never in any real danger.
The Horizon assholes jeered at the goblins who had swords out. The goblins looked terrified. As though they’d been fighting for their lives.
Seeing this fucked up training day laid out before us filled me with a fury that went above and beyond what I usually felt when I saw someone working for Horizon in the area, and that was saying something considering my baseline fury towards Horizon was already somewhere between “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” and “Hulk smash!”
Spellcraft Page 46