Ice tilted his head and considered the situation. It was likely that there were many blacksmiths above a certain level that had the blueprint, or maybe even the finished product. Maybe each of them had a different amount of finished products, too.
Depending on the blacksmith’s character, it might be easier or harder to acquire what you needed. Maybe some of them would ask for money, others had to be convinced, and Heath… Heath wanted you to somehow sneak out eight gold bars from the mountain’s mine. There were many ways to approach that - steal it, bribe the guards, convince royalty.
There was no way to tell whether they had taken the most convenient blacksmith, but then again, convenience was in the eye of the beholder.
What he was sure about now was that it was the correct way to approach a blacksmith if you wanted them. If these blueprints were illegal, there was no way that you’d find them on the market or get someone to teach them to you. Worse, you might even get into trouble for asking around if you couldn’t manage to convince people that you were doing it for a mission.
Ice had a feeling that if they hadn’t chosen Heath - who cared more for his forge and new materials than anything else - they’d have had a much harder time proving they were trustworthy.
This was a bit dangerous.
“Off to the mountain we go, after all”, Little Droplet said cheerfully. “I’ll finally get to see what lives there!”
For some reason, Bloodless Sunset took a couple of steps away from them and sent someone a message. He looked quite happy with whatever response he got, his eyebrows up high. When he returned to them, there was a spring in his step.
The outskirts of the mountain were bustling with players who had reached level 70.
Everyone bundled themselves up in warm fur clothes as they approached the snow, looking around. There were enough players that there was a certain competition over every monster, most likely because the spawn rate was too low to handle the hunters.
The four tried to take in as many types as possible.
What they saw were mostly common animals running away, but here and there you’d still see a group engaging in a fight with a monster.
There were foxes that looked like they were made out of ice, blending in with the surroundings and freezing whatever area they touched, around level 70-75 depending on their size and speed.
There were also large golems made out of snow, slow but resilient and with high damage. Ice noted them down as elite monsters around level 75.
Further away, he spotted something like a long-legged porcupine that used its needles to shoot. Similar to the foxes, they were 70-75.
These were the three types of monsters he could see, at least. They came in variants, making it a good number for a beginner area. The higher up you’d go, the stronger and more diverse the monsters, so it was safe to say that there would be at most one or two more types here at the border.
Ice looked past everyone and into the sky. Shadows were moving around - ice wyverns. The same type he had once tamed, but his pet had been called a malnourished young wyvern, while the ones flying above were a lot bigger and probably healthy adults.
“Great. Right into the higher territory if we would want to fight at all. At least we can follow the guards to find the mine.” Bloodless Sunset shivered in the cold and took a step closer to Ice.
His words weren’t wrong - you’d find the mine if only you walked into the direction where the patrolling warriors increased. That didn’t mean it was a good idea to walk right over.
“I’ll contact White Light that we are here”, Blackstone suggested. “It’s only noon and we could still approach other blacksmiths. We can still use the rest of the day, or does one of you have to leave?”
“Nope. Haven is our job”, Bloody said with a toothy grin.
“I’m fine too”, Little Droplet joined in.
“Tomorrow is a weekday, so I won’t have too much time”, Blackstone complained. “I’ll have to come by in the evening and at night… I guess I can skip some things, but not everything.”
She conversed with White Light, who promised they’d come over as soon as possible. In the meantime they simply waited in a desolate corner, when suddenly a figure came running over.
“You! So rude! To send me running around everywhere!” The assassin pouted in a way that made him look a lot like Bloody.
“Your fault for being slow”, Bloody shrugged. Dead Rabbit glared at him, then turned to everyone else.
“Hey everyone. I’m Dead Rabbit, Bloody’s brother. I hope you won’t mind me joining in for a while?” The youth’s eyes wandered from Bloody, over to Ice, down to Blackstone and finally ended at Little Droplet. He looked stunned for a moment, then excitement appeared in his eyes. Ice had a bad feeling about it.
“I’m Blackstone, a smith, and that’s Little Droplet, who is our healer. It’s nice to meet you”, the dwarven girl greeted him with a smile. Little Droplet only tilted their head.
“What are you all doing right now?”
“Waiting for the rest of our party to come.” Bloody leaned against Ice’s shoulder in an overly familiar manner. Considering the emotionless pokerface that the mage had, it kind of looked as if Bloody was leaning against a statue.
Under normal circumstances, their group would have drawn attention, but not if everyone was rushing around to be the first to find a monster. Of course you could steal other people’s monsters, but no one liked seeing that and your reputation would suffer. First come, first serve meant that if you wanted to fight, you had to be quick.
Besides, they had taken up a spot in a really quiet corner. This was also so that no one would overhear them talking.
“I’m jealous that you got the quest”, Dead Rabbit lamented. “A world quest… That’s pretty amazing.”
“I don’t even know what I did to earn it”, Blackstone laughed awkwardly. “My teacher was suddenly quizzing us on all kinds of stuff and I won, so maybe that was a test? I’m not sure how everyone else was scouted by the prince.”
“I was working at a hospital. I don’t know why I got chosen”, Little Droplet told their story.
“Better than me”, Bloody laughed loudly. “The only reason why I got the quest is that the prince said that Ice could bring his party along.”
Betrayal was written all over Dead Rabbit’s face. Did that mean he’d have gotten the quest if only he had stuck around the Ice Emperor?! That was a world quest! The dream of every player!
“World quests are chain quests”, Blackstone tried to soothe Dead Rabbit. “This first part might be restricted to us, but there’s a good chance that there will be more players joining in on other parts. At least, the other three world quests were like that until now.”
Haven had gone through three major quests so far.
The first one involved Prince Altair.
There were three factions vying for the throne, all three led by three very different princes. They each got a task that they had to complete, and based on that, the king would decide on a crown prince.
Every player could join a faction they wanted to support. There were some who could directly join the ranks of the faction to decide on administrative plans, but a larger number of players were simply helpers that worked on the task.
When the crown prince was decided, the quest changed to keeping the crown prince safe from being assassinated or supporting his enemies.
Those that had actively tried to aid the assassination had gotten a strongly negative reputation after everything was over.
There were various smaller quests in the chain that you got depending on your status and who you supported, which meant that many players joined the world quest.
The second world quest was the appearance of a monster. A red wyvern, as huge as you’d imagine a dragon.
The beast had been woken up by a group of adventurers and the capital needed to steel itself to survive its attack. It was a huge war where you could help defend, actively go attack, or help inside the city walls. As an ice mage, Ice had been on the attack and had caused good damage.
The third and most recent quest had opened up the elven forest in the far east, where the marriage temple was placed. It was a diplomatic quest where, depending on how the players acted, the elves would become enemies or allies of the human kingdom. There were whole delegations formed by players.
Now this quest was the fourth one, and it started in hiding, with not even ten players being sent to explore a castle…
Not to mention, this whole quest chain might go haywire if other players managed to get there first and the information spread differently than planned.
Bloody snickered as he watched Blackstone try to calm down Dead Rabbit, who was busy lamenting his situation. Ice wasn’t too interested and looked around until he spotted White Light.
The knight hurried over, followed by Spiderlily and Knightrider. Absinth was nowhere in sight, but he had a feeling that she wasn’t ever going to be a true part of the group. Her personality didn’t match too well with the rest of them.
“Oh?” White Light looked surprised at seeing Dead Rabbit. “You’re here too?”
“He’s back to cause trouble”, Bloodless Sunset teased.
Dead Rabbit looked offended, but White Light’s expression turned funnily blank. He stared into nowhere and whispered something barely audible in a helpless tone: “I think he’s a very obedient sibling…”
Bloodless Sunset slowly lifted a hand and waved it in front of White Light’s face. The knight snapped out of it after a couple of seconds and resumed his smile.
“Anyway, I don’t think he will cause trouble. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t take him along for as long as possible, considering he already knows the situation anyway.”
Dead Rabbit lifted a hand. “Can I change brothers, please?”
White Light looked more than tempted. He patted the assassin’s shoulder in a supportive manner.
Maybe because they were the only two women right now, Spiderlily joined in on Blackstone’s side. Blackstone smiled up at her, a carefree grin, and Spiderlily’s face softened up.
Knightrider walked over to Ice, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. The mage found himself tense up - it was the same gesture that Knightrider had often done back when they were still students, but now it felt foreign.
Well, you could not expect him to still be used to a lot of physical contact after all these years.
Ice forced himself to relax.
“So? You found the blueprint already? That was quick. We only managed to gather info about the three monster types down here and a bit about what people saw up the mountain.”
“We have someone who will give us two sets, but we need to get gold from the mine in return”, Bloodless Sunset said with a neutral face.
“You mean the mine that was just found? The one where they just started mining and that is completely in the hands of royalty?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I do like a challenge”, Knightrider snorted at the ridiculousness of the situation. Royals turned into snarling beasts if you stretched even a finger into the direction of their ore veins. Not to mention every single guard here was a professional at level 80.
“Good and bad news from our side as well”, White Light sighed. “Which ones first?”
“The bad ones, please”, Bloodless Sunset responded, hiding his face behind his hands and peeking out between his fingers.
“The outer ring here is up until level 78, then there is a thinner ring with monsters up until 85, and after that it does a jump with monsters on level 100 wandering around. Oh, including a wild area boss at 110.”
Ice felt his lips twitch a bit. “And the good news?”
“We might not be able to survive that, but neither will other users. At least it’s unlikely someone will get to the castle right now.”
“I mean”, Blackstone mumbled sheepishly, “that’s something. And the Ice Emperor did manage to slip through with Bloodless Sunset, right? We… can do it somehow.”
“How did we bypass all that?” Bloody managed to catch himself before he screamed the words. He muffled them with his hands and took a couple of deep breaths. “What kind of nonsense is that!”
“The blizzard”, Ice said after some contemplation. “You have to run before and after the blizzard. That should be one part of what you have to do.”
“Right! That was something I had noticed, but it hasn’t happened again yet.” White Light exclaimed in surprise. “When the snowstorm started, the monsters went into hiding. Although this is a dangerous time, we can also use it as long as we are certain we can find cover quickly enough.”
“That won’t help all the way. We got killed at the end because we were ambushed by monsters. There’s gotta be some trick to it.”
“You have one month, right?” Dead Rabbit tilted his head and crossed his arms. He thoughtfully tapped a foot on the ground, where the snow crunched under his shoe. “It has to be possible to reach the target in this amount of time. It has to be something easy enough to find out. Not to mention the time you have to spend to get that equipment.”
“You’re talking like it’s certain we even need it”, Spiderlily interjected. Her voice was quiet but strong - Ice somehow thought that she was the real thing, not like Ice, who was constantly misinterpreted as being cold. “This is merely our assumption. We might be doing something that wastes time.”
The rankers agreed silently.
“We could go check out different blacksmiths, but Heath warned us that the equipment is illegal since the war. We might stir up a hornet’s nest if we ask around randomly.”
“So it’s better not to do it, right? If we end up in jail, we will waste time. Moreover, for something we might not need. I don’t want to waste this one month we have…”
“By the way, what happens when a world quest fails?” Little Droplet blinked their large eyes and tapped a finger against their plump lips.
“You can’t fail exactly. Not doing anything is also a valid way to continue this quest. Basically, we will not get the prince’s rewards, but the chain quest will still continue on in the direction that missing information will result in. A world quest doesn’t need players to do anything to actively advance it, but of course we all want to gain as much as possible out of it”, White Light explained. “Players are more likely to be involved in an integral part of the quest chain if they have done an important task in a previous part. Not to mention how useful it is to be on the prince’s good side.”
All at once, everyone stared at Ice, who was frozen under their united gazes. He was the perfect example of a lucky guy who had risen like a star due to the prince.
“One by one. We should decide on how to approach the matter with the mine first. We could stop trying to acquire equipment, could go to another smith, or continue as planned.” Spiderlily brushed a stray strand of hair out of her face. “I personally would not like to invest too much time before we have seen the walls you have spoken of. There might be another way down, and I do not think we will be able to snatch the royals’ gold.”
“And as you said, asking around might make others suspicious”, Blackstone agreed with a sad sigh. She’d have liked those blueprints. Crafting was fun.
Bloodless Sunset hummed. “Ice and I aren’t competitive players. We could go up the mountain again and see if we notice any hints on how to safely walk around. Even if we die, there’s no big problem. Not like we can drop a level and I don’t have that much experience over the last level-up anyway. How about it, Ice? We can use the weird times of the day to explore. The early morning hours, for example.”
“It would be good to not draw more attention, yes”, Ice agreed. If they used these hours, they wouldn’t bother the others who still had a somewhat normal day and night rhythm. He also preferred not having to explore with such a large group - all this talking was starting to exhaust him.
“I can also come along”, Dead Rabbit spoke up.
“No. You sleep.”
“I’m not a kid.”
“Mom and Dad will kill me otherwise.”
“You can’t-”
“I’m gonna tell them.”
The little brother shut up. White Light returned to having “look, he’s so obedient” written all over his face, which did make Ice a bit curious about his family.
He didn’t know White Light very well. They had met online during some advertisements, beta testing and a dungeon or two, but they weren’t exactly friends. Acquaintances, probably. They did greet each other.
... Is White Light streaming?
Thank you for the chapter.