It was time to put the dumbest idea in the history of dumb ideas to action. To make this absurd strategy to kill the King Jaeger work, he just needed three things.

A bigger sword? A huge physical powerup? Some cheat ability? Plot armor, as if he was the protagonist of some action movie where bullets bent around him? Haha, no. None of that was necessary.

Marcello’s mind raced at a hundred miles per hour as he reviewed his plan in his head. He felt mental clarity and a bit of drug-induced euphoria like he just got injected with a bit too much morphine, which was a strange side effect of using despair intuition. It felt very much like a light at the end of the tunnel ability, or thinking outside of the box out of pure desperation.

The three ingredients he needed to put this insane ploy into action were far more basic than one would think.

One, he needed wood. A lot of wood. A metric buttload of wood. So much wood that he might die of exhaustion chopping it all.

Two, he needed mana to bind the wood together. Marcello still had a dozen and a half or so mana potions that he could burn through, which would hopefully be enough. The -Wisdom hit unique to his enigmatic bulwark knight class was really shitty at this point though, since it cut into his base mana regeneration. Luckily the vital energies of the biome replenished mana at a higher rate than usual, because if not he would run out of mana potions a lot faster than he would like.

Three, he needed time. Construction was hard work, and you didn’t build something big in just one day. Currently he still had nine days left to work including today. It was going to be tough to make the deadline, but he had faith that he could make it.

Well, actually there was a fourth ingredient– location. This strategy only worked if there was a suitable location to execute it.

Marcello recovered for a bit longer, then set out to find the location that he sorely needed to put this plan into action. It was still mid day, so he had quite a few hours left until evening.

This entire biome was just a set of so-called pillars as the system called them, with trees growing from pillars of rock growing from trees and et cetera ad infinitum, with the King Jaeger standing at the pinnacle of this particular pillar.

So, naturally, there was an edge to the pillar. Currently the section he was residing on was like the cylindrical end of a rock pillar, like the top of an opened can of soda complete with the fizzling that was the waterfall and those strange upwards moving globs of water. Marcello had peered down from the edge a day or so ago, which was when he really found out how high up he was, at the same time he spotted the Yggdrasil or world tree in the far distance.

All of those facts together led him to conceive the dumbest idea in the history of dumb ideas. What he needed right now was a good edge of the pillar, preferably one with trees nearby so that this was not just a suicide mission. More explanation later.

Huff… huff...

Marcello spent an hour sneaking across the edge of the pillar while avoiding all the different dangerous animals of the biome. After quite a lot of arduous trekking back and forth, he finally found a nice area to put his scheme to work.

It was a large jagged cliff edge of the pillar that vaguely formed a crescent shape, which was perfect. He scoped out the measurements, mentally noting how much wood he would need and how many trees he’d have to cut to make it work. For this particular strategy that he was about to employ, the thinner the planks the better, so he’d use the nordic cutting method to generate more planks.

Just as he finished doing his mental calculations, a new notification appeared in his vision.

Quest: [Carpenter’s Insane Platform]

You have learned the basics of carpentry, and are now putting them to use for a strange and possibly suicidal plan to take down the King Jaeger. Appropriate application of carpentry skills will be vital to your survival, as you strive to build a wooden platform with a delicate balance between being deceptively sturdy enough to fool the King Jaeger, but also structurally unsound when the King Jaeger takes a step too far. You have embraced the fact your own life and death will be placed in the hands of your construction. This may become your greatest construction yet. Platform constructed [0/1]

Wow. Marcello didn't remember the system being so damn long winded before. But yeah, the quest description actually summed up his plan better than he could have summed it up himself.

Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop.

Marcello began hacking at a large tree, the trunk so thick that he’d probably need the entire afternoon to get through it.

So about the plan. His master plan was something even a toddler could think up. But was that a bad thing? On the contrary, that was quite possibly the highest compliment someone could pay to him. Toddlers could sometimes see the true reality of a matter that adults would miss, as adults already had their strategic thinking shackled down by the weight of should’s and supposed to’s in a dazzling display of narrow mindedness which blinded themselves from the truth of a matter.

His intuition’s specialty was piercing the veil of despair, of swiping away the cobwebs of human learned narrowmindedness and hysteria built from fear. His inheritance would see reality for what it truly was, naked and bare.

Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop.

One of the greatest ancient strategists from the east was once presented by his king with an impossible puzzle. A neighboring country was about to invade them and destroy them. Death was imminent, and the king and his countrymen were in a state of utter despair and hysteria. The king needed time to prepare for war, but of course he would not be given time. How could he buy time and subvert this country from invading?

After much consideration, the strategist decided on a plan. The strategist’s plan was insidious, nonsensical, and in every single way just not a plan that had any chance of working. He proposed slipping the neighboring country’s spies a scroll containing the highly valued blueprints to an advanced dam, a piece of technology that would severely enrich the neighboring country.

The king was furious. How could the strategist propose allowing the neighboring country’s spies to steal away their kingdom’s prized dam plans? What the strategist proposed was borderline treasonous!

But the king’s father had once advised him to have faith in the strategist. And so he begrudgingly took the strategist’s advice, allowing the neighboring country’s spies to steal blueprint technologies that were considered the treasures of their nation. At the strategist’s behest, the king allowed the spies to escape with just a few arrows to their backs, nearly mortally wounding them on their escape and making the illusion all the more potent.

The neighboring country’s high court was elated when they received the dam blueprints from their wounded spies, congratulating and rewarding the spies immensely when they realized that the stolen blueprints could improve their agricultural yield by threefold, which meant far more silver bullion in the pockets of the ruling elite as they collected taxes from the yield. They greedily decided to construct the dams at once using the stolen blueprints.

The construction took three years. By the time the construction was complete, the king had already fully barricaded his country and raised an army to match the neighboring country’s army.

Checkmate.

A victory like that was not as glamorous per se as, for example, the king finding a magic lamp and hailing the ghost of Achilles himself or someone of similar status as him to fight as his champion and bravely defeat the neighboring kingdom all by himself with his superhuman strength.

Honestly, part of Marcello kind of wished that he could do just that, pull a hulk and just smash the King Jaeger in one-on-one combat with some time slowing ultra instinct stupid bullshit or some moonlight bending swordsmanship nonsense bullshit like the overpowered main character from a web novel or something. But that was simply not possible for him at his current state, if ever. So at the end of the day, the less glamorous and less honorable trickery method was one that he would gladly embrace.

After all, a win is a win, right? Even if the audience didn’t find the victory particularly honorable or glorious. As a wise man once said, fuck the peanut gallery.

Because he couldn’t physically kill the King Jaeger by himself, all he needed to do was borrow some power from the laws of physics themselves.

What goes up must come down.

Uh. Now that he thought about those gravity defying water droplets, maybe not in this biome. He stopped chopping the tree for a moment to chuck a rock down the edge of the pillar, just to make sure that gravity worked as it did on earth in this strange terrestrial world.

Thankfully, the rock continued to fall until it disappeared out of sight through a cloud.

Marcello spent the next four hours chopping the massive tree. He needed a shit ton of wood for this platform to be convincing, so he had his work cut out for him in the next few days.

This was really tough work. His arms were already beginning to feel a bit numb.

Chop. Chop. Chop.

Phew. He took a breather to drink some water and wipe the sweat off his brow.

Chop. Chop. Chop.

His back was really hurting at this point every time his rusty hatchet hit the tree, but he bit down and endured the pain while thinking about all the rewards he would get if this plan worked.

Chop. Chop. Chop.

Marcello’s arms ached like hell from the constant motion, but the vital energies from the biome were just barely able to keep him going. He needed to cut down so many more trees for this plan to work that he was starting to feel apprehensive about this whole endeavor.

Chop. Chop.

Thud.

Finally, one giant tree down. Several more to go. Marcello decided to start again bright and early the next morning.

The second day, after a restful night of sleep. Despite the distinct lack of birds chirping in the morning, there were those same old cricket sounds that really eased in the night sky and helped him fall asleep. Thankfully the crickets were only a few inches larger than normal, and they didn’t seem particularly hostile to humans.

The third day, Marcello really did not sleep all too well the night before. There were nocturnal creatures in this biome, but thankfully they didn’t climb trees so they didn’t bother him all too much besides the weird gnawing sounds they made when they were passing by.

The fourth day, with Marcello’s sleep quality declining each day from the increasing back pain that even the vital energies of the biome could not completely soothe.

Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop.

Ding!

You have earned the title: [Tenacious Woodcutter]

The completely sweat drenched human opened up the description to his hard earned title. He wondered what kinds of goodies it would give him.

HereBeTreasure

Apologies for the tone shift. It will go back to normal next ch. I originally had something else planned for the previous chapter which got scrapped.