I woke up refreshed and ready for the challenges of a new day.
My schedule was totally packed. I planned to try and get the humans to do another dungeon run, and I wanted to research my new abilities. If this were a game, I doubted they would’ve dumped this many new things on me all at once, but since it was reality, I needed time to examine all of the things I could do.
The first item on the agenda hit a snag right away. When I got dressed and warped to the first floor, the humans were getting ready to leave.
I tried what I could to get them to stay, but I couldn’t communicate well enough to convince them. Realistically, I could have forced them, but I didn’t want that sort of relationship with them. So I saw them all off with a smile, and moved on to my next task. Instead of fretting over something I couldn’t control, I decided to check out my new skills. There was one that caught my attention right away.
My new title, “Ruler of Grimwood Forest,” gave me an amazing ability. It allowed me to alter plant life—which meant I could, for example, transform any tree I wanted into a hollow tree. I know, I couldn’t believe it either. This ability would have been pretty useless to most people, but for a dungeon master with my particular skills, this gave me an incredible amount of freedom to create new towers. There was no way I could pass this up. I had to try it out immediately.
First, I used my map to determine where the best places would be, and transformed four trees in strategic locations. Then I filled each of them with a Labyrinth Seed. This gave me a total of five dungeons, even though four of them were just single floor huts at the moment. I summoned a set of Sprigoblin Irregulars for each of the new dungeons, for a total of sixteen. I called over Team Apple and put each member in charge of one of the new squads. Then I used the Adjoin skill to connect all five dungeons together, and told the squads to go out and gather resources.
When dungeons were connected via Adjoin, they shared resources, and in many ways were treated as a single dungeon. Adjoin created a physical connection between two different dungeons. Generally this connection was a sort of corridor, but since they could be placed at different heights, they could be more like covered bridges—or even just a wall, depending on how close the dungeons were and the way the connection was made. Adjoining five towers together in this way essentially just made them all one big dungeon. In the game, you could actually adjoin your dungeon to another player’s, too, but the rules functioned a bit differently. There were also limits based on how far apart the dungeons were, so it was best to build dungeons you wanted to link as close together as possible.
With the dungeons connected together, I reorganized the first floor, added more rooms, and created a kitchen. There was a creature called a Sprigourmet, which served as a cook in the game. This was essentially just a Sprigoblin with a chef’s hat on. Their function was to process edible materials you collected into advanced foods, which could be used to summon more powerful minions. Luckily it seemed my costs to summon new creatures had decreased dramatically, so I created a Sprigourmet right away. Of course, a chef couldn’t do much without proper tools, so I needed to have a way to make those as well.
To that end, I summoned a pair of Sprigolems, one to serve as a blacksmith, and the other to mine useful ores. Now, you might be wondering just how much ore I’d be able to mine in a forest, but a Sprigolem miner didn’t just mine whatever was available right there. They used a special fairy mine that would never be depleted. The Sprigolems themselves were made of wood, but they had adorable little round bodies, and big spherical heads topped with little horns that almost looked like cat ears. They ate rocks they found while mining, and as they gained levels they slowly transformed from wood to stone. Once they became stone, they would eat ores until they transitioned into metal bodies. After they became metal they’d no longer need to eat regularly, they just needed a few dungeon points every once in a while to keep them going.
The mine and the smithy were located in the basement beneath the first floor, and eventually they’d be able to supply my Sprigoblins with new weapons, armor, and tools. For now, I was happy just to get the kitchen going. Unfortunately, it was going to take a lot of points and resources to get them all where I needed them to be, but I had a powerful shortcut at my disposal: I decided to give them names. Having names would theoretically boost all of their abilities and get everything up and running a lot faster.
I named the Sprigourmet chef “Bistro,” which worked out...too well. He transformed after he was named, gaining more Sprigian proportions. Instead of green skin, he had smooth, brown skin, glossy dark hair, and golden eyes. Not only that, but he could make delicious sweets. His smile was dangerous for a lonely young maiden to be around. Just one look from him was enough to set my heart racing. It was only a matter of time before he conquered my heart though my stomach. A true crisis. If he made any romantic advances toward me, I’d never be able to resist. I silently vowed to stay away from the kitchen.
I could always just say it was unbecoming of the sovereign to speak to kitchen staff directly, but the guilty truth would haunt me forever. Oh, Bistro, why did you have to end up so perfect?
This only proved that I was correct in not handing out names frivolously. If I named everyone, surely I would accidentally create even more irresistible cuties. With this important lesson fresh in my mind, I went ahead and named the two Sprigolems anyway.
There were two Sprigolems, a miner and a blacksmith. The miner toiled away tirelessly in search of metals and minerals, while the blacksmith used those to make weapons, armor, and tools. I was nervous about how they would change as they looked at me with their glowing green eyes. I named the miner “Herc,” as in Hercules, but I shortened it to make it cuter. In the same breath, I named the blacksmith “Hammer” since he would inevitably use one to forge metal items. They both transformed after receiving their names, and their round bodies became sleek and slender. Their formerly brown wooden bodies turned completely black, aside from their glowing green eyes. Their heads still had a pleasing round shape to them, complete with horns, but they were probably more cool than cute at this point.
“A-are you guys okay?” I asked. “Your bodies turned black.” They were still moving, but I wanted to make sure they weren’t burnt or anything.
“Ah, don’t you fret none, Yer Majesty, we be made o’ ironwood now,” Hammer assured me, flexing his nonexistent muscles. “Stronger ’n steel, but supple as wood. Best o’ both worlds.”
Meanwhile, Herc just silently bowed. I decided to take Hammer’s word for it.
With that out of the way, I was ready for the next phase of my plan: tail the humans, and find out where they came from. Okay, so it wasn’t really a plan, more like an agenda. I needed to be around more people to learn the local language, and these guys could lead me to them.
Luckily, when I officially became the Arbiter, my Fairy Wings skill had been replaced with Fairy Sovereign’s Luminous Wings, a massive upgrade. Fairy Wings was a skill exclusive to Sprigians that allowed the user to fly freely. The movement speed was only about twice as fast as we could run, but Sprigians naturally had a lower running speed anyway, since they had short legs. The biggest advantage of the skill was the ability to soar over obstacles. Envious players from the other factions had bombarded the developers with complaints until they added various equipment to the game that mimicked the effects of Fairy Wings. Of course, they also added some Sprigian exclusive items that could mimic various exclusive skills from the other factions as well, so the whiners kept complaining.
Anyway, the normal version of the skill manifested a set of transparent wings, not unlike those you might find on a dragonfly. Instead of being totally clear, fairy wings had a sort of iridescent quality to them, meaning they looked like they were different colors depending on the angle you looked at them from. The effect was nice, but not over-the-top. The wings also didn’t really move at all, even when the player was flying, which drew more complaints about the developers being lazy. Even though the developers explained that the magic that manifested the wings was what generated lift, and that’s why they didn’t move, people just wrote that off as a lame excuse and kept right on complaining.
The new and improved version was something else. When I deployed the Sovereign wings, I was shocked at how huge they were. Each of the four wings was longer than my body from head to toe, and flared out at the ends. The effect almost made it look like I had feathers. In addition, rather than just having a rainbow coating, these wings glowed in ever-changing colors of light. There was even a little tailcoat-like wing at the base of my lower back.
Wait, does that mean I have a fairy tail now?
Okay, bad jokes aside, these wings were way faster than the old ones. Instead of being able to move at twice my normal walking speed, it multiplied my speed by more than ten times. When I had the Fairy Sovereign’s Luminous Wings deployed, everything else looked like it moved in slow motion. With that type of mobility at my disposal, it didn’t take me long to find the humans from above.
After I located them, I didn’t approach them right away. Instead, I landed a bit away from them, and used my new Ruler of Grimwood Forest skill to change a random plant into a Way-Point Flower. Yeah, if people playing the game found out someone had a skill like this, they’d either be screaming to have it removed or begging to have it for themselves. It was super overpowered. I could essentially create my own points to teleport to whenever I wanted.