I joined back into the main gameworld and timestream with the roar of an oil fire doused with water. Rackids lay dead all around the clearing, while even more spilled out of the undergrowth to attack my party, who'd fallen into a loose defensive circle.

Mum pounded away with her punch daggers, muscles rippling as she drove them into virtual monster flesh. Beside her, Noah was throwing his weirdly flirtatious taunts out at any enemy that came within his sphere of influence. The air hummed with the sound of his radiant shields taking damage. When one snapped and broke, the smell of ozone and burning glass rushed out in a wave.

Elena took a hit a half second after I reappeared. A nasty slice down her arm from a hulking Rackid, which clicked its oddly shaped and vaguely insectoid mouth in triumph. Poor girl wasn't meant for holding lines like that. Thankfully, Ethan was there, and he muttered a quick prayer that pulsed over her body, bathing the battlefield in golden light for a second.

I was thrown into that chaos like a silent grenade into a mosh pit. My friends needed a reprieve, and I had a new ability to abuse. I wasn't entirely sure the devs had thought through the implications of an instant cast, mentally targeted, and imaginatively activated damage ability would have in a game like this. Especially when I had barely anything else to spend my mana on.

I had enough mana in my bar to cast Psychosomatic Sunder six times before I was drained. In my mind, I visualised six versions of myself, each one slashing, cutting, or stabbing at an equal number of the most urgent targets. I fixed those targets in my mind, imagining the six strikes with a mental clarity that I'd possessed since I was a tiny child playing adventure in the scrapyards. When I was certain I had them all in my head, I launched the mental commands and drew my sword in the same motion, careful not to actually physically touch the hilt in the process.

The Tobubana Katana sang through the air like it was the chain smoking lead singer of a death metal band. Out from the arc I cut through the air, a wave of pink and silver energy rushed, trailing sakura petals in its wake. Even before it hit, rackids were screaming in pain as conjured phantoms inflicted real damage.

Then my Larkspur Strike washed over them, blazing a trail of yellow critical hit damage numbers. That wasn't all, though, because the lengthy cooldown and telekinesis requirement on that attack weren't unjustified. Three translucent lavender illusions of me rushed past with swords drawn and very much gripped in their hands. Each one lasted barely a second or two, but in that time, they hacked and slashed their way through the massed enemy forces.

The end result of my combo was a sudden and violent explosion of damage number gore, followed by limbs, bodies, and weapons dropping useless to the forest floor.

Silence reigned over the clearing for several long seconds, and all I could hear was my own laboured breathing. Heart still hammering in my chest, I plucked my sword out of the air and carefully sheathed it.

Many of the rackids still stood, but this wasn't some old game with mindless AI that had no concept of fear or retreat. They wavered, as if waiting for one of their number to take charge and give them direction.

Into that silence, Paisley yelled, “Heck yeah! Death to gross buggy boys!”

Then she brought her pan flute to her lips and blew, emitting a high pitched screeching sound that summoned an undulating ball of grey and black magic above her head. It began to shoot little wisping darts that flew out to stab the Rackids.

“You had that in your pocket the whole time?” Noah asked incredulously.

Paisley laughed into the flute, causing it to make an odd warbling sound before she pulled it from her lips. “Yeah. I’ve been trying to focus on low damage and buffing spells because if I’m the one who gets the killing blow, then all you lowbies only get like one fifth of the experience.”

"Typical," Mum grumbled, walking over to casually punch a wounded Rackid in the face. Pretty sure that wasn't good form. Face bones are stronger than hand bones. Normally. Of course, then the dead enemy made a gross slurping sucking sound as it fell backwards, and I remembered the punch daggers. Did the devs really have to leave the foul sound effects in?

Regardless of gross sound effects, we finished the fight in relatively short order. The experience proved to be enough to bump several of our lower levels up a few, and Elena actually took a few daggers from the loot.

So much had happened during the fight that it took me a minute or two to remember what I'd even been doing beforehand. Something about smithing? Oh, yeah!

"I guess I'll see if I can turn all these weapons into metal stock for us to use later," I announced, staring down at the pile of Rackid weaponry.

You know how sometimes you look at a task, you think you understand it, and then you declare in your head that it'll be easy? Then you find out the harsh reality, and that easy thing is actually super hard?

Well, so was the steel that the Rackids' weapons were made of. No matter how hot I tried to get my little forge, it just wouldn't soften the metal up enough for me to work it effectively. Maybe I'd have been able to do what I wanted if I'd had a bunch more strength, and a race that didn't penalise me, but no. The task was seemingly impossible. Until, that is, Paisley very gently suggested that I google the problem.

That was the day I learned about the molecular structure of steel, and how a huge portion of blacksmithing was basically just abusing a piece of metal until that structure was what you needed it to be. Fascinating stuff.

To my relief, the process that I needed to follow to make the metal usable was very simple. I had to slowly heat the steel up, keep it at that temperature, and then slowly lower it again. It was very time consuming, however, and so that afternoon turned into three days.

Meanwhile, everyone else got busy with the various other tasks that would lead to our treehouse becoming reality. We had three main issues to address before we could get to building.

The first issue was that we needed the tree to reach maturity. That meant feeding it more and more enemies, along with more of those strange unseelie stones. Wait, what had Aite called them? Elsyian?

Anyway, the stones were imbuing the tree with some powerful magic, which the undead heart of the tree was using to fuel its growth at a staggering rate. Five days after the rackids attacked, it began to show signs of maturity.

It was that speed that had Paisley scrambling to complete her preparations to combat the second issue. Basically, we needed a much more permanent and robust method of control over the massive creature. That control came in the form of an elaborate set of intertwining enchantments that would later be linked to a control room of some kind.

The last major challenge that we faced was much more mundane than the other two. We needed a design. Luckily, mum was there to solve that one in no time at all. How did she solve it? Well, she hired an architect, of course!

Granted, she went for a freelance student of architecture rather than someone who’d gotten a full degree. It’s not like they’d actually kill someone if their building didn’t work out, so it was a nice way to give them some experience and money.

The design they came up with had a cylindrical bottom two floors built on the flat area at the top of the main trunk. From there, towers and additional rooms could be built on top like some sort of mediaeval jenga tower. Normally such a design wouldn’t have worked, what with gravity being a thing and all, but with the help of Paisley’s enchantments, we could get away with a lot of shit.

We had the stone for the bottom floors, and we were well on the way to getting all the wood we needed from the surrounding forest. I was finished with the nails after a few days, hopefully, and I moved on to other mundane metal items, like hinges and door handles. My mundane smithing skill was coming along nicely too, and before long I had more than enough experience to really get stuck into the crafting skill.

When I opened the menu, I was greeted with a large perk and recipe tree. Okay, okay… let’s see. Oh wow, I’d levelled my nail-forging up to journeyman tier already.

Crafting skill system in Rellithesh had an overall skill level, but with individual items having tiers of proficiency that would govern the quality of each individual recipe you knew. So with my blacksmithing, it was at level eight, but I was at journeyman levels with making nails. If I were to start making like, axe heads, I would begin at novice tier and I would have to go up to apprentice, then journeyman to get to the same level of skill as my nails. Beyond journeyman was adept, then expert, then master, and finally, for a select few people who really committed, sage.

Thankfully, if I were to make those axe heads, I wouldn’t be starting from scratch. My general blacksmithing level along with my expertise in the craft would allow me to create better axe heads, which would in turn level my tier with the recipe much faster than base.

Still, I had to actually know how to make things like door handles and shit, so that was where my recipe points came into play. Every level of a crafting skill, you’re awarded two points to spend on a recipe that would teach you how to make the item you picked in the same way that the game taught you how to do sword forms or whatever.

So that was what I spent one of my points on. Door handles. How bloody exciting. God, this house couldn’t be finished fast enough.

QuietValerie

So I'm not sure if I actually addressed how normal crafting professions work in a previous chapter. Sooooo if I did, and this contradicts that, I guess I'll have to do some retconaroonies. Goodness but I need to learn to take proper notes. Dx