The shrine wasn’t much of anything, just a small fountain in an old church that had been overtaken by nature. Vine trellises hung across every exit, obscuring the outside world from sight. There was no sign of the player who’d helped them defeat the war golem.

“Let me think for a second,” Spiral said. “We could do a few jobs around here to snag an extra level or two and then start the trip to Aldur, the closest city.”

“What kind of jobs?” Kana asked. “I already have a job, and it’s not exactly something I do for fun.”

“Well, there’s the swamp rat infestation line that starts in town, or we could work on the Thulnar the Repentant quests. I guess if you wanted to pick up some crafting skills, we could start the forge smith missions.”

“What are those?”

“It’s where you—”

Before Spiral could explain, a woman dressed in a long skirt, knee high boots, and a blouse trimmed with silver runes popped into existence. Her hair fell to her waist in stripes of pink and purple beneath a pointed wizard's hat. The name above her health bar read Valit. She scowled and stamped her foot. “Stupid orcen pig marauders!”

Kana flinched away with a startled oath. The woman jumped in surprise, and Spiral snickered. “Sorry,” both Kana and the woman said at the same time.

“The shrine is a respawn point,” Spiral explained to Kana. “If you die anywhere near here, this is where your character will show up at.”

“Oh, I get it.” Kana looked over at Valit. “So... orcen pig marauders?”

The woman groaned. “Fourth time today they’ve gotten me. I’m never going to finish this quest.”

Spiral noted Kana’s confused expression. “She’s doing the forge smith quest line. The story is a smith who lives by the coast is losing his ingots to thieves, who you help track down, which reveals a bunch of orcen raiders from the fortress island out to sea. There’s some quests later on after you get a water capable mount to go out to the fortress.”

“Yeah, if I can ever get past the marauders around the boat,” Valit said. She eyed up the two of them. “I don’t suppose you’re doing anything right now? Want to team up with me?”

“Uh...” Kana glanced over at Spiral, who shrugged back.

“We haven’t started that line yet,” Spiral said. “Do you mind redoing the first few steps until we catch up to you?”

“Sure,” Valit said. “I’ve probably only made an hour’s progress on this once you subtract all the time I’ve wasted fighting those marauders. I could use the extra XP to replace what I lost dying anyway.”

“With three of us working on it, it probably won’t take us long to catch up,” Spiral said.

They set off together on a generally west course, following a dirt road that meandered through a forest. Valit chattered the entire way about how difficult it had been trying to solo the mission, how she’d been working on it all day, but that a sorcerer just didn’t have the durability to stand up to multiple enemies at once. When she was done talking about that, she started right in on how her first character had been ranger, but she’d decided she wanted to focus on crafting skills instead, so she’d started a new one.

Around the time they reached the halfway point, a message window popped up from Spiral. Kana skimmed the message, which read She sure can talk, can’t she? I don’t know if I can listen to this for another two or three hours. He raised an eyebrow at Spiral, who shrugged in return. Valit, who was walking in front of them and commentating about how realistic the trees looked, didn’t notice the exchange.

Finally though, they reached a seaside cottage with a smithy set up next to it. The place had been ransacked, and a tall, heavily muscled NPC stood glaring at it with a hammer dangling loosely from his fingers. He glanced up as they got close enough to trigger the script that started him.

“Sea bandits,” he growled. “Haven’t had a problem with them in decades, and just last week, they’re all over the coast.”

Valit hung back while Kana and Spiral approached the NPC. “Don’t suppose a pair of strapping young lads like yourselves would be interested in some spending money to impress the pretty lady over there?” the smith asked. “You get back my iron stock for me, I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Where is it?” Kana asked.

“Well, my guess is they hauled it off back to their ship, but it’s heavy work and they’ve only got an hour’s lead. You could catch up to them before they get there. Once you’ve got it back, you come get me and we’ll get a cart out there to load it up.”

The smith pointed them off into the woods, but Spiral was already walking away. “Come on,” he said. “I know where it’s at. It’ll only take a few minutes to get there.”

Kana hurried after him. It seemed almost rude to just rush off, but the NPC was just a snippet of code that dispensed their objective, after all. He didn’t seem to care that they’d walked away in the middle of the conversation. In fact, he’d turned back to the mess that was his smithy and resumed scowling at it as if they’d never been there at all.

“Ok, so this first part is pretty easy,” Valit said when they got to the tree line. “When we get to a spot on the trail, two orcen bandits will spawn to attack us. After we beat them, the rest will spawn deeper in the trees with the iron bars. We just have to run them down to make them drop the quest item and flee into the woods.”

“How tough is an orcen bandit?” Kana asked.

“Easy kill,” Spiral said. “This quest was designed to be done by a solo player. We’ll wipe them out with three people no problem.”

Valit shot a look at him. “This step, yes. It gets harder later on.”

A few minutes later, the porcine grunts of the orcen bandits gave a second’s warning before they erupted out of the trees. They were dressed in leathers with bristly patches of short, coarse fur poking out and blood thirsty grins on their piggy faces. Instead of the predicted two, there was a whole pack of five, each one wielding a rusted sword or dagger.

“Whoah! Where did they come from?” Spiral yelled.

He leaped in to meet the charge, but only managed to block two of them. The other three streamed past him to attack Kana and Valit. He whipped his spear out around him in an arc that caught one and dropped a third of its health bar off. Before it could respond, he activated his clipping sweep combo and tripped it up, and chained his new arc lance ability off that to strike the next nearest orcen bandit.

Instead of the normal three to six damage his attacks did, arc lance went off with a flash of brilliant blue electricity and blasted both pig-faced monsters for sixteen. That was more than enough to obliterate the one he’d tripped and bring his new target’s hp bar down into the red.

Valit pointed a finger at the third orcen and launched a thin beam of icy blue light. When it struck the creature, a layer of frost covered its chest and it squealed as more than half of its health bar disappeared. Kana finished it off with a two-hit combo, but the distraction let the last bandit get inside his range and pummel him.

The monsters quickly took his health from green to yellow, but once Valit hit it with another frost ray, he was able to chain together enough attacks on the other to finish it. Together, they joined Spiral in carving up the remaining two.

“What the hell was that?” Spiral demanded after their XP notifications disappeared. “There’s only supposed to be two bandits, not five.”

“Maybe because there are three of us, the game upped the difficulty,” Kana said.

“That makes sense,” Valit said. “I wonder if that means the marauders will be harder to beat later on too.”

“Wait, weren’t we supposed to chase after some other ones?”

“Oh, crap. Right.” Spiral scanned the trees. “There. We should just have to catch up to get them to drop the objective item.”

The trio took off through the trees after the rest of the orcen, who were hustling away under the weight of several iron bars each. When the group caught up to them, they abandoned the stolen iron and dashed off into the forest.

“Come back, ye cowardly piggies!” the largest of them yelled out as he waved around a battered and chipped cutlass. When the orcen didn’t pause, he gave the group of blood-shot stare that promised murder and raced after them.

“Oooh, hey, that’s Captain Swineblade,” Valit said. “He’s a rare spawn. If we can catch him, he’ll drop some nice loot.”

“Nice! After him then,” Spiral said.

The pair darted off, leaving Kana standing by himself with the iron bars. “But... what about the mission objective?”

“Leave it,” Spiral called after him. “We’ll redo it later if we have to.”

Shrugging to himself, Kana ran after the other two. He fell farther and farther behind as the chase progressed and he got tripped up in the woods. Eventually though, he broke through the tree line and found Spiral in combat with Captain Swineblade. Nearby, Valit was blasting the orcen captain with repeated ice spells, but the captain’s health bar was still over half full.

“About time you caught up,” she told Kana. “I’m almost out of magic. We need you to help finish him off before Spiral dies.”

The captain’s cutlass waved wildly as he hacked at Spiral, whose health bar had emptied half way. He caught most of the attacks on his shield, but every now and then, one slipped through. When he saw Kana, he grinned and said, “Get ready to lay into him. I’m going to stun him.”

Kana got behind the captain and started his attack combo just as Spiral bashed the orcen with his shield. For a few seconds, every strike took chunks off the monster’s life bar. Kana managed to unleash the entire combo sequence before Captain Swineblade recovered, though the clipping sweep attack did nothing but deflect one of the orcen’s attacks on Spiral.

Between the three of them, they brought the monster’s life down to a bare fraction. Just before he they could finish him off, his sword started glowing with yellow and brown light and he slammed it into the ground. Fissures ran through the dirt and hurled both Kana and Spiral off their feet.

The stun debuff popped up with a timer counting down from five. When it hit three, Captain Swineblade reached Spiral and hit him with a two-handed swing that took fully a third of the knight’s health bar away. At one, the second swing started coming down, one that would surely kill him.

Valit’s ice ray hit the monster a fraction of a second before the blow connected. The last fragment of the orcen captain’s life bar disappeared and he collapsed into the dirt. Spiral stood up and grimaced. “Jeez, I’ve only got eight hit points left.”

“Don’t be a baby,” Valit told him. “What loot did the rare spawn drop for you?”

“Belt with a strength bonus,” Spiral said. “Not terrible, but nothing special. You?”

“A fetish for conjurers that adds water damage to their spirit’s physical attacks.”

“Nice! I bet you get at least a thousand drols for it.”

They both turned expectantly to Kana. “Uh... well...”

He held up a large pirate’s hat with a thick, curling, white feather sticking out of it. “It doesn’t have any stats,” Kana said. “I’m not really sure what to do with it.”

“Oh, sick,” Valit said. “I’m so jealous.”

Kana’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Isn’t this kind of worthless?”

“Sell it to a costume shop when we get to Aldur,” Spiral said. “Some player working on a pirate outfit will pay through the nose for it. If you take anything less than five thousand drols, you’re getting robbed.”

Valit snorted. “I wouldn’t let it go for less than seven, and I bet I could still sell it in under an hour.”

“It’s that valuable?” Kana asked as he turned the hat over in his hands.

“It’s a collectable,” Spiral explained. “Its value is whatever you can convince someone to give you for it, but yeah, somebody will want it. There’s always someone who wants it, and it’s a rare drop off a rare spawn, so that means big money. Soon as you pawn it, we’ll pick up half a solid set of gear for you, really get you off on the right foot.”

“Huh. Neat.”

“Let’s go back and finish that objective first,” Valit said. “You guys can sell your hat later.”