Realistically, crafting after scavenging...

“Crafting time!”

Their pell-mell running through the forest faster than a startled deer came to a stop in a hillside clearing. Sama stopped power-skating and glided to a stop over the rough ground as if her legs were shock absorbers, coming to a halt in a fairly sheltered alcove.

Briggs rose immediately, having no complaints. With his ki, his bones didn’t even creak from the long ride.

He’d spent his Naming Karma on Endure and Wut, the Name of his Armor, the first of a long process that would take many months, if not years, to come to fruition. After all, he didn’t have endless spawns in front of him to grind, and tough ones, at that.

This day’s reward was Auto-Equip, meaning his Armor could fly on and off with just a mental command. Normally this would take a word and harmonization… but with it being Soulbound to his Essence, that was already taken care of.

“What are we working on today?” he asked calmly. After all, there was an endless amount of Stuff that they needed, mostly bunches of minor crap for special situations.

“Well, I’m going to be working on Doc. You can assist, but I’d like you to be making Healing Potions. I’d like to have a good stash if others need them.”

He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “How about a Healing Trap instead, if it’s for others?”

She tilted her head to consider that, weighed the options, and nodded once. “Makes sense. Let me get the silver.”

“I seem to remember using Healing Traps in Nightmare, but not specifically…” murmured Tremble.

Briggs grunted as he began to unload Forge’s other Cabinets. “Know how you can make magical traps that, say, explode in fire when someone walks over them? Healing Trap turns that on its head, makes something that works healing magic instead.

“To keep the cost down, it works only once a day for any living person, per person. However, if you’re harmed by positive energy, it’ll work against you over and over. So, an anti-undead sort of thing.”

“Has to be made of silver, approved by the Good gods, and we’ll make it of the lowest power level to keep the goldweight cost down. Basically, you use it on a battlefield to save heavily-wounded men. Instant stability, healing of otherwise mortal injuries, and gives them time to get to a healer, sometimes under their own power. Combined with an Amanan Healer, you can restore a large number of men back to full Health very quickly,” Sama added on.

“Potions are more emergency use stuff than anything, not very efficient over the long term, but very necessary. It’s always better to have your own healing than rely on Potions, especially for protracted fighting.”

“Hence Vigor and Battle Vigor!” Tremble bobbed in the air excitedly. “We learned that lesson very, very well in Nightmare…” Sama grunted agreement as she put the Anvil of Silent Thunder in place, and started digging out her metals.

“That’s right. So, what’s this Doc about?” Briggs asked with interest.

“Doc is a +Soulbound Healing Edge Katar,” Sama replied.

“Oh? OH!” He blinked. “Barebones, straight Weapon, aye?”

“Yes. I would use him to last through some very, very, VERY extended fights in Nightmare. If we’re going to be involved in protracted fighting, I want a potentially unlimited way to get our Health back.”

“32k of work needed. Two days of QL tops, and then a k a day Investing.” Briggs drew a long face.

“Uh-uh,” Sama smiled. “Two days of QL, and then Tremble drops in her harvest from a +III Warp Knight’s Sword she ate, and we’re done.”

“Oh! Well, that’s much quicker. The bad guys are helping us already!” Briggs opened up the alchemy cabinet and began to lift out the stuff he needed. Sama had gone in detail through the set-up, and he was already thinking of improvements. Of course, said improvements would cost time and money, neither of which they had unlimited amounts of at the moment.

However, he couldn’t hide how impressed he was with the QL30 woodwork of the Cabinets. Ancients loved working with wood, and so her skill definitely resonated with the beloved weapons and items carved by his people growing up. His tribe had fawned over the cabinets, especially when she opened one up and demonstrated the Compressing magic that could store just an incredible amount of stuff within.

And given that they were basically carved from petrified wood, they were even more impressive. He hummed when he thought of the day he could pull off something like this easily. He could easily make Master’s Work stuff, and his spear hafts were much-loved by the hunters in his tribe.

Some higher QL woodworking, in between his Smithing, would be a great change of pace… when it was time.

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“Sama, crows…”

“Seen ‘em ten minutes ago, but the hill line is the fastest way to get close.” He wondered why she had deviated from the trail of the dwarven company, and now had his answer. The Mask of Clarity, if trained up, could both magnify vision and expand it into other spectra. Since it was one of the Tats she had bothered to etch on herself, naturally she had topped it out.

This wouldn’t be the dwarves, and hopefully not the elves. It could be a stray band of rangers who had the misfortune to run across a prepared bunch of marauders, or what not.

Sama zipped towards the crows on an arc, following a river cutting through the forest so Forge could float along behind easily. It was a few miles out, and she made it there in just minutes.

She halted at the tree line, and they studied the field before them for a couple long minutes, looking for signs of life, and finding none save scavengers… which were a big enough threat in and of themselves.

He watched her reach into the Masspack on her back, and pull out a long length of what looked like tempered glass. When he heard the clack of gears, and the sprits reversed off the stock, his eyes lit up.

“You made an autobow!” he murmured excitedly.

The sprits unwound to full length, and the cogs within the bow ratcheted the string tight, pulling them back as Runes began to play over them, making the crisscrossing lengths of black cord look like a web of light.

She pumped the action on it, just like a shotgun, and the bowstring racked back to the catch.

“+Soulbound Force Speed. Yours if you want it.” She passed it over to him, and he sighed despite himself as his hands settled on it.

QL 35. He took a deep breath, feeling the emptiness waiting in it to be filled, and injected Essence from his Vajra.

Lines of light lit up on it, starting at the pump where his hands were gripping it, flowing down it as Runes lit up and then faded back into the glass and bone, leaving only sharp edges of silver light behind here and there.

With a crackle and a surge of pressure against his feet, the string snapped back to the catch, and a dark quarrel made entirely out of force hissed into existence.

He looked at the wolves moving around the field, some of them pretty big, and obviously working at what looked to be the remains of a few horses.

It wasn’t Named yet. He naturally didn’t have a true ranged Weapon yet, he’d been throwing his Hammer for that purpose, but nothing beat an Autobow this side of gunpowder weapons when it came to such a thing.

He adjusted the stock for the length of his arms, snapped it up coolly as Endure waited between his legs as he settled into a shooting crouch. “No scope?”

“Didn’t need one.” He glanced at her Mask and mentally cuffed himself. “Ready?”

“Yeah… wait.” He lifted up the end of it, reached forward, and twisted the small tube underneath it. A narrow silver beam that would be invisible to anyone not able to see magic suddenly reached out in an arc representing the flight path of the bolt, and he swore to himself. “You even installed a leyser?”

“It was a prototype. After I got it to that stage, I realized I messed up with what I really wanted to do.”

A +Vier prototype. He shook his head despite himself. “What were you looking for?”

“My Autobow is Named Fall. I intend to build him as Morphable from Hand Crossbow to Siege Crossbow. However, I haven’t completed the final build yet, and it hasn’t been a priority to have long range combat yet. The mass offset in small size is a bitch to make, too.”

He grunted. She definitely had high expectations of proper Gear. He was more than happy just to have some truly ranged punch he could Name and grow. “I Name you Reach.” There was a hum at the spiritual level, a turning of a key and crystallization of identity washing across the Autobow. “Let’s go poke some things. Those look like warp wolves at the far end. Let’s baptize you in some fresh Naming Karma, shall we?”

Sama skated smoothly into motion. Tremble slid out into her hand so smoothly it looked like water, Runes dancing across the Bondsword and settling into Animal configuration.

Yeah, Warped Wolves. The spikes and horns were a dead giveaway. He didn’t bother to be polite, and the leyser settled on the leader. The Disk ghosted along, smooth as silk, and he pulled the trigger back.

And kept it there.

The string pulsed, its draw geared to his natural strength, which gave the medium crossbow an absolutely devastating pull strength. The force arrow arced out, crossing the hundred yards in less than a second, and plunged into the wolf leader like a small ballista bolt.

Pressure lashed against his thighs and calves as Speed activated, auto-cocking the string, using the strength of his legs to do so. Force activated as soon as the first quarrel hit, materializing a new one, and with his finger still back on the trigger, it launched the instant it was there.

Sama wasn’t moving very fast, the wolves had yipped and were looking around to see where the smashing impacts of the bolts were coming from, driving in at the rate of one a second with remarkable accuracy and lethal power.

As they got closer, the firing rate naturally sped up, a key feature of Autobows that made them extremely lethal at short range with this set of enhancements.

“Do you actually have magazines?” he asked, identifying the hollow area in the grip and holding slots in the stock for what they were with his Tremorsense.

“Only about a hundred bolts or so, and I didn’t make them magical yet. Again, low priority.”

Normal arrows could be enchanted, but he would have to rack the action to put them in place, although he wouldn’t have to draw the string. Still, the speed would shame any archer. Generally, an Autobow wasn’t considered mature until it was at least +Zeks, or even +Akt.

But when they were mature, wow, were they dangerous. In the mature game, Autobowmen were the elite of the ranged attack squads, much to the dismay of many archers. Needing a +Vier Weapon to really be useful did kind of slow things until that point, however…

Sama was in no hurry, and the pack of twenty or so mutated dire wolves weren’t what either of them considered a dangerous encounter. He could shoot kneeling on the Disk over her head without any problem, and he knew she was totally aware of what he was shooting at. Yeah, he could pick up Endure and go right to melee, but there was nothing like blooding a new Autobow to lighten up the mood.

Warped wolves were baying in pain as dark quarrels punched into them, sometimes right through them, and a couple went twisting down, including the leader, who’d been hit four times, including once in the throat.

At fifty paces, the first of her Banestars went out, moving faster than his own bolt, and he noted it didn’t get the power of her Sagedom, because the wolf didn’t die instantly. Still, it only required a flick of her wrist, and he finished that target off with two bolts in the chest as they closed in.

The remnant of the pack, jaws all bloody, started for them.

Once a second at a hundred yards was every half-second at fifty, the top rate of speed for the Speed Enhancement. Tremendous amounts of pressure were hammering against his legs as the equivalent of yanking back a +8 Strength bonus every half-second slammed against his legs, and he trembled despite himself.

Warped wolves yelped and spun away in the face of this fusillade, and then the fastest ones reached Sama.

Tremble took the middle and the left, he shifted directly behind her and dropped them on the right.

Multicolored fires swirled, called Wrathfire in the game. Lunging heads came off, sides were opened wide, one was gutted as she hammered the horse-sized bastard completely up and over them, crashed another one off to the left so hard she broke its ribs and tripped up two others, and then they were past the first rush, arcing hard as his own salvo didn’t stop.

He spun efficiently, keeping on target, crippling them with shots to their haunches, giving those still alive no chance to run.

Not that they could outrun her, but there was no need to chase them down.

There was an abortive attempt to turn back at her… aborted because he was literally shooting those who tried to in their drooling faces.

They decided to flee about five seconds and ten bolts too late, and no longer had the capability. Banestars chopped down two more of them before Sama even reached them, and his unceasing rain of bolts downed the rest before they could flee more than thirty yards.

“Only two misses. Not bad,” Sama told him, her arm crisscrossing in blurs, releasing vivic Shards quickly, and warped wolf carcasses exploded into unwhite fires, one after another.

“Leyser,” he grunted, knowing he wasn’t that good a shot.

“It’s why it’s there,” she agreed softly. Briggs heard the shift in her tone, and looked over.

The wolves had been feasting on a stack of bodies, corpses flung into a heap after being cut open and mangled badly, obvious even after the ripping jaws of the wolves tore them apart.

Vivic Stars drove into the mass repeatedly, turning it into an inferno of vivus that rapidly coated the blood and gore-strewn area in heavy white mist, slowly devouring all the remnant flesh and bone.

“Humans. Looked male,” he murmured under his breath. “Muscled, fighting men,” he said, getting to his feet atop the Disk and surveying the area with the advantage of height.

“They were stripped after death, and things cut off them for provisions before the rest was left behind,” Sama said grimly. She pointed. “That the final battle point?”

Briggs nodded slowly, and she started skating that way. “From the swathes of grass, it looks like a cavalry fight, but one side was greatly outnumbered, maybe fifty fighting at least five hundred.”

“They gave a good account of themselves. There’s at least two hundred fifty dead.” Her blue eyes were gleaming like razored sapphires. “Tremble, Human. Anything?”

The hue of the Banefire on Tremble shifted precisely to the color of blood, and Briggs’ skin crawled despite himself on seeing it. Detect Bane meant that Tremble was hunting for the blood of prey, not just sensing for a type of being.

“Nothing in range but you two, Sama,” Tremble said as they came up on the location of the final fight.

There were pieces of armor, padding, broken weapons, and severed limbs strewn everywhere. Dead horses were scattered around everywhere, and dozens of normal wolves were tearing at them, while flocks of crows, buzzards, and vultures were gathered around scattered human corpses.

There was a lot of them right in front of the two of them, all of them stripped naked, cut open, and parts of them chopped off like a butcher grabbing the best cuts of meat. Strips of skin might have been used to wrap the meat off, given how some of them had been flensed.

“Heart and liver removed from every one of them. Delicacies, I guess. Some had their skulls cracked, and their brains taken. I don’t think the crows actually got most of the eyes.”

Briggs took a deep breath. The stench of offal, waste, and blood was overpowering, but after experiencing the reek of ogre dens and giant caves, it had no effect on him.

“How long ago? Twelve hours?”

“Yeah, hit them last night, probably at evening.”

“They even cannibalized their own. No mercy at all for the weak.”

“That was probably the infantry force that came after.” She pointed to a wide, trampled swathe of grass. “All of them human, too. Booted feet and armored.”

“What’s the count of the infantry? Thousand? Two?”

She pushed off, skating that way calmly, expeditiously measuring numbers by gliding right over the mass. He bounced off the Disk, landing in the middle of the path, and his own tremorsense washed out to give him an impression of the feet that had mashed down the dirt and greenery here.

“Between eighteen hundred and two thousand?” he judged a minute later, after walking across the swathe.

She nodded agreement. “After them?”

“Hell, yes.” He didn’t think he could take on so many of them, but the gods alone knew what Sama might be capable of with Tremble in her hand. Tens were not laughing matters.

“I’m going to do a sweep of the perimeter, see if any of them got away, and then we’ll track them.”

Briggs swung back onto the Disk. Forge bearing her belongings faithfully behind her, they swept out to see if there were any random trails running away.