Author’s Corner: This chapter marks the beginning of the third arc, or volume. If I had to give the volumes names, the first one would be Genesis, and the second Revelations. Now, what to call this one? I haven’t decided yet! Once more, unto the breach!

When the game presented real life consequences, life went on as normal. When the Seeds appeared and monsters began to spawn, the world adapted. But now… the night sky has been forever changed, the world itself is sending terrifying creatures after us. There is no more taking it easy, no more slow training. Everyone that is able must take up arms and fight for their right to survive. In a sense, Oakland has it easy, we’ve almost established our monster spawn shield. Other cities will have it much harder.

After hearing the news, I began thinking about things I could do. Going across the world was a bad idea when there was just the possibility of an ocean slime, but now there’s an almost guaranteed risk of giant monsters that would attack planes. So, getting to Sharon from this side wasn’t possible. No matter how confident I am against creatures my own level, I can be pretty sure that the Statue of fucking Liberty is not my level.

I put in a call with Sharon, and asked her if she’d be willing to come by Gallen 3 to meet up with me so I could pull her over in my grove. She seemed a bit confused, but did agree that sticking together would be a good idea. Like myself, most of her friends and family had been virtualized, so there wasn’t much to keep her there. I was honestly a bit surprised that she didn’t have a boyfriend or anything. Even more surprising was that I found out she used to, but her boyfriend dumped her when she became an elf and her chest became smaller….

I could only cough awkwardly as I remembered that change, and silently cursed anyone who would dump a girl because their breasts shrunk in these circumstances. Anyways, I had her head towards the Gallen system as soon as she could while I handled preparations. Next, I had my house AI alert my parents that I needed to speak with them, and told them of the situation. This would be possibly the most important thing, because I could either bring them out with my grove, let them leave with the rest of the virtualized people, or they could remain in the future.

There was the slim chance that I could discover the method of eternal youth as a druid, but that would still be an incredibly long wait. Unfortunately, neither of them were within traveling distance of wood elf territory. My mom wasn’t even sure where she was in relation to it, as she had not leveled up to the point where she could make a physical body and regularly speak with people.

I made the same call and offer to Jacobs, but he actually refused me, saying that if he was given these choices he would rather remain in the future. He was virtualized because he didn’t care for what the present life had to offer, and now he could live in a world that offered so much more. So it looked like it was just going to be me, Sharon, and our respective grove inhabitants. Why did I suddenly feel like I signed up to captain a harem ship?

“Alright, now we just need the plans for the S.S. Seraglio!” Celeste spoke up happily from next to me, causing me to raise my eyebrow curiously. “S.S. for Spaceship. We aren’t directly related to any country, so there’s no point trying to put that in. And since you’re both wood elves, or close approximations, it wouldn’t make sense to say that it represents Earth.”

“And Seraglio?”

“Ahh..” Celeste smiled innocently to me. “It’s a type of palace. I figured that, if you are going to have a ship to yourselves, and sail the vastness of space, you should at least have one with a fancy name.”

I sighed, nodding my head. Her logic did make sense, at least. “Well, at least you’re not calling it the S.S. Lovenest or something like that.”

The AI took on a mock shocked expression. “Why, I would never do something like that. What kind of program do you take me for?”

I simply gave her a long look at that, after which she nodded. “Fair enough, I see your point. Anyways, we should get back to the game, or the future, whatever you want to call it soon. I’ll need two or three days in order to let my aura fully match up with my knowledge, and then we can get the plans for a ship, and the other essential information we need. Even if we work around the clock, we won’t be done by the time Sharon gets to the Gallen system.”

“Yeah… and while you’re doing that, I can do some long overdue cultivation. If we’re going out by ourselves, without the protection of the game, then I really need to get my affinities higher.”

Celeste nodded at that. “Try to train your Metal Affinity as much as you can first, because we’ll need a lot of metal to build a ship. Even if it’s just one for you, Sharon, Yin, and Yang, the ship itself will at least take up the size of a city block. If you can go to a junkyard and get a lot of scrap metal for me to work with, that will move the process along much faster.”

“Alright, I’ll see what I can do.” I pulled up the adventurer’s guild website to make sure that there weren’t any local monsters being spawned in large numbers. After that, I put in a call to Monte to see how he was coming with the wiring, and he said that they were a little over halfway done. Just another day or two and it’d be time for me to raise the shield.

Finally, with everything taken care of, I logged back into the game and began cultivating my Metal Affinity. I even spread out my wings and activated the Aspect of the Mana Leech to ensure I took in the mana as fast as possible. If I could fill my grove with metal deposits, then I could possibly get enough mana to build the ship, possibly. Meanwhile, Celeste had gone quiet in order to focus on slowly feeding information to her Deus Ex body. Every now and then, she’d complain about finally knowing what a headache felt like, but was determined to get it fully synchronized.

Like this, the next few days quickly passed. Sharon was over a week out from the Gallen system, so Celeste had started working long before she arrived. Apparently, Celeste’s class became Drone Ranger, an advanced hunter class that focuses on using drones and turrets instead of basic pets and has a greater focus on technology. With her mana pool, she was able to summon four small drones, two medium ones, or one big drone.

We decided to use her medium and big drones as the combat ones, and set her smaller drones up as construction bots. She was able to buy upgrades for them the same way that she could for her own body, but at a higher cost since they were only pets. Alternatively, she could assign an archetype to the pets, and they would progress along a set development path at cheaper prices, but she would not be able to control what upgrades they got. For the construction drones, she went with this option, but chose to customize her other bots.

Summoning each bot required a set amount of her mana, which was unable to be recovered until the bot was returned. If she increased her mana reserves enough, it would be possible to have an army of minions. However, doing so would mean that she wasn’t able to get the other upgrades she wanted, so she was saving that for later.

Our first plan was to build a small shuttle, and use that to mine the ore needed from various asteroids to build a bigger ship. However, doing so would take a lot of time, and the asteroids around Earth were likely infested with monsters. So instead of going up, we decided to go down. On Gallen 3, there were no great subterranean creatures that would swallow me up if I decided to dig like the land wyrm on Hascion, and this planet was rich in a peculiar mineral, allowing the planet to give off a faint metal mana. Furthermore, there were many abundant mineral veins that would naturally regrow after a few weeks, so it wasn’t a problem finding metal.

The day after Celeste had finished synchronizing her body and mind, we went out about ten kilometers south of the city, and I sat on the ground while Yin and Celeste stood watch. This was a method I had never really tried before, but I was interested to see if it was possible. Spreading out my wings, I attuned them equally to earth and metal mana, and began absorbing as much as I could. This wasn’t like my normal methods, where I would cycle mana to replace what was lost, I was simply taking, allowing my body to be a vacuum of mana.

Within two meters of me, the ground slowly began receding, withering away as if it were eroded with acid. Meanwhile, orange and grey lights shot up from the ground and surged into my chest, the mana being funneled into my grove. This was a strange feeling for me, as if I could devour the entire world. However, I knew that logically such a thing was impractical. If I only have a two meter radius, it would take me decades of constant work to completely consume a single planet. It’d be far easier to blow it up if I was intent on destroying it.

Slowly, my body lowered down into a growing hole, that two meter radius remaining as I sank deeper and deeper. I could feel my grove expanding slightly from the intake of mana, but since I was not cycling the mana back out, my affinities would not improve. Considering that, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in a while, and used my Autopilot program to dig down for five hours using this method.

When I ‘woke up’ after the program was done, I found myself in a pit so deep that the top looked like a speck. However, looking at my grove, it had expanded by merely an inch or so in radius. Celeste told me that the pit I had dug was roughly seventy five meters deep. Taking another look at my grove, I found that there were a considerable amount of extra mineral deposits, even if the grove had only barely expanded. Though, it was not enough to build an entire ship.

After I flew up, Celeste offered a quicker solution. “Once Sharon gets here, you should have her cultivate the Metal Affinity, too. Then she can take the metal out of her grove, and you can put it in yours for me to build.” I nodded my head as I thought about it. According to my friends list, Sharon was still a few levels higher than me. Her cultivation speed should be pretty good.

In the meantime, however, we repeated this process of digging two holes a day. As a random experiment, after three days of digging I went back to the first hole to measure if it had begun filling itself back in. It actually had, and was now only a meter wide, and thirty meters deep. According to Celeste, this was a common phenomena on many worlds, where dug earth would be replaced by the ambient mana if there was not anything like a support structure stopping it.

After the third day of digging, Sharon finally arrived on Gallen 3, and I was able to take her into my grove. According to Celeste, I had almost all of the raw material needed to build the ship. All that was left was copious amounts of rubber. Everything else could be handled with our various abilities, or required materials that would need to be found after we got to space. For instance, the FTL drive of the old model she is basing the designs on requires a metal typically found in asteroids. So, we’ll construct the ship and fly it out to the asteroid, mine what we need and be on our way.

Unfortunately, even with the help of Celeste and her worker drones, it’ll take several weeks to turn the mineral veins into a workable spaceship. Thankfully, they run on mana, and don’t require rest. When I asked Celeste what the ship itself would run on, she told me that it largely ran on a plasma fission reactor, which I would need to help fuel when the time came. At least we wouldn’t have to worry about running out of gas, or having to dive into a sun to recharge.

Sharon was more than happy to cultivate the Metal Affinity after knowing that it would help us create the ship faster. She was also extremely interested in seeing my companions, as well as Celeste, since they had all evolved in some way or another. Except Yo… she seemed a bit creeped out by the slime staff I often kept strapped to my back, saying it was gross.

While leaving her to cultivate the new affinity, I went ahead and logged out of the game so that I could go provide the enchantment for the city. And they really know how to show it off as an easy target, I’d say. They had the glass ball for the shield placed at the top of the tower above Oakland City Hall, in plain view for everyone to see. Apparently it was a public relations stunt to show that they were doing everything they could to protect the people, but to me it was just asking a monster to attack it and unleash hell on the city.

Either way, I used the combined seeds I had previously created to enchant the glass ball with the cultivation technique to cycle mana, then linked it with the wire that led to the city’s protective circle. By the time I got home after that, there was already a noticeable drop in monster activity, and the adventurer’s guild website was only reporting monsters roaming into the city rather than spawning inside.

“Now, so long as a dragon doesn’t show up, we should be fine. And no, I am not jinxing this, please don’t let a dragon show up. I really do not want to have to deal with that…”