Braden didn’t answer for a moment. “Yeah, whatever. So we go upstairs now?” Braden said, pointing at a nearby staircase.

“I don’t think so, actually,” said Kyle. “We tried to get through that battle without using spells, and it didn’t work. And this was the first battle. Either we’re underleveled, under equipped, or just bad. Either way, we aren’t going to be able to make this climb. There’s like eightstories here.”

“So we just give up?” Dvorak said. “That doesn’t sound much like you.”

“No,” said Kyle. “We just act smarter. Why bother going through ten trapped floors full of monsters and death when we can just skip it all?”

“How?” asked Mason.

Kyle pointed to the window. “We sneak in the back way,” he said. “Chop wood. Build some wooden walls and floors and stairs and stuff to act as scaffolding. Enter directly into the top floor.”

“What, and miss out on the loot we’d get on the way up?” asked Braden.

“We can come back for that later,” Kyle said.

Mason nodded. “The best stuff is going to be at the top anyway. Maybe even something good enough to make the rest of the floors easier.”

“Kyle,” Dvorak said, “You’re killing me. Or more specifically my viewers. Here’s this perfectly good tower here and you’re going to skip it all? By chopping wood?”

“Yep”, said Kyle.

“Good plan! It involves me not dying. Go get a sandwich, guys. The moderators of my stream chat will send out an all ping when we’re ready to sequence-break right to the boss room.”

“Skeletons, though,” said Braden.

Mason nodded. “Form up!”

It only took another minute or two before the cloud of embers dissipated, and the remaining skeletons were no match for Mason’s hammer. Within a few minutes, they were chopping wood. Avina helped too, grateful to be able to participate.

“Sure we can’t just take it one floor at a time?” asked Braden, huffing with exertion. “If we, like camp out and drink potions, we could do it. It’d just be slow.”

“Slower than chopping wood, definitely,” Dvorak said. “Unless we have some very entertaining arguments between battles, I vote we front-load the boring bits.”

“It’s not about taking more time,” Braden said. “It’s about how much I hate chopping wood. Just because Avina has woodcutting as a skill doesn’t mean we all enjoy it.”

Avina shook her head.

“Avina didn’t take woodcutting,” Kyle said on her behalf. “That’s the other elf girl you’re thinking of. Kyrie.” Kyle was getting better with names. “Avina took…” Kyle tried to think of what skills Avina had, but he wasn’t sure. “Avina, what did you take?”

“Prayermaster and… and cooking,” she said sheepishly.

“Cooking? A cleric girl in an MMO that takes cooking?” Braden said, lowering his axe. “That’s so… domestic. Shouldn’t you be fighting that stereotype?”

“Hey,” Avina said indignantly, chopping at a tree. “Women should be able to do what they like, and I like to cook. I nearly went to culinary school, but then I started a nutrition science bachelor’s program instead.”

“Cut the teasing, Braden,” Kyle said, dividing a fallen tree into chunks he could put in his inventory. “Somebody had to take cooking so we had all our skills covered, and it might as well be somebody who enjoys it. Cooking might come in handy. What does it do, Avina?”

“I can make food in the crafting menu. I mean… better tasting food,” Avina clarified. With one more axe blow, her tree started falling. “And I can make food that gives stat buffs too. They last a long time. It’s great because I can affect lots of people at once by just doubling or tripling the recipe. but it makes me play a minigame to do it, and it’s… kind of annoying.” As the tree hit the ground, she started chopping one of the sections off.

“Can’t be worse than the ‘research’ minigame,” Kyle said. “But we cheesed the research minigame. Maybe there’s a way to cheese cooking, too.”

“‘Cheese cooking?’ I see what you did there,” Dvorak said. Kyle rolled his eyes.

“I could.. show you, if you want,” Avina said, picking up an armful of wood and bringing it to Kyle. “Maybe we could find a way to make it easier.”

“Sure. It’d be nice to have on-demand buffs like that,” Kyle said. “We’ll look into it when we get back. Maybe we can pull Aubrey in, if she’d stop making spell diagrams long enough. She’s great at finding exploits.”

“Yeah. Maybe,” Avina said. She dropped her wood in front of Kyle and turned away to start on another tree.

Even without architecture, any player could make wooden walls and some other wooden items. Better yet, a wall could be made to be two inches tall and two inches thick. Even better, walls could intersect each other and any angle the builder wished.

So, using their wood, Kyle built a “building” made up of dozens of one foot wide, one yard long rectangular rooms all lined up in a row. It had two-inch high walls and no roof or floor.

Then, the group picked up one end and pushed it until it was tipped vertical, then let it fall against the wall of the tower.

Which functionally made it a ladder.

A really high ladder.

“So…” Kyle said as Avina recast her spells on the group. “Who’s going first?” Kyle looked at the others, who pointedly avoided eye contact with him. “Figures,” Kyle said, and started climbing the frighteningly tall ladder himself.

Kyle didn’t trust himself to look down without getting vertigo, so he just trusted that the grunts and creaks below him indicated that the others were following him. He suddenly worried that perhaps the wood would break, but he hadn’t seen any construction break that hadn’t taken HP damage first, so he tried to talk himself into believing he was perfectly safe.

Just in case, he Examined the ladder and kept an eye on its HP bar.

When he reached the top, he was a few inches away from a window on the top floor. It seemed to have the same sort of construction as the ones on the first floor, meaning it was latched from the inside.

“Guys? The windows locked.”

“Smash the glass and unlock it then,” shouted Mason.

“Oh. Yeah.” Kyle started to pull out his axe, navigating his windows with one hand while gripping tightly to the ladder with his other. Then he thought better of it. Instead, he leaned as far towards the window as he dared, and looked though to see if there was anything on the other side that breaking the window would announce his presence to.

Inside, in a dark room lit by the blue light of a transcendence crystal, he saw a skeletal figure in metal armor seated on a throne. The room was lit by flickering torches holding blue flames. A thick purple rug led from the throne to the far side of the room, where Kyle could barely see a staircase leading down. It’d be a fitting final room; walking up those stairs and being greeted by the armored figure would have been quite an experience.

He’d have almost felt bad about ruining it, had he not been in a death game.

“Some sort of armored skeleton on a throne in there. Smashing the window’s going to let him know we’re here,” Kyle said.

“I guess we’ll have to climb through the window fast, before he camps the entrance and we get stuck on the ladder,” Kyle heard Mason say.

“I think I’ll actually try and kite him away from the window so you all can sneak through,” Kyle said. “Hold up a sec.” Kyle pulled out his axe with his left hand, took a deep breath, and smashed the glass.

The skeleton’s gaze snapped to look at the window, and Kyle tossed his axe through the hole in the window rather than spend the time to stow it. He fumbled briefly with the latch before it came free, and he pulled open the window as the skeleton stood and walked towards him.