End Online: Volume 1 (12 page)

All of a sudden the
wolf becomes a little more wary, a snarl creeps onto its face that could either
be from anger or happiness of seeing me again, either way I have the
feeling revenge is the only thing on the wolf’s mind right now.

Being fully aware
of its speed and given that I was only able to win last time due to being
able to land two incredibly effective critical hits at the start,
hindering its movements speed. I doubt even with my current speed I could
beat it now that it’s more cautious of me and treating me quite seriously.

If I removed my hood my
speed that is already tremendously fast would double, and I should easily be at
least as fast as the wolf. But I have already decided to keep the hood on
and nothing will be changing that.

The wolf took off in a
flurry of white, directly towards me in front of the entrance. I had already
anticipated this, and the moment the wolf began to move so did I, sprinting off
to the left towards the closest bunch of apple trees.

The wolf with a single
powerful bound changes its trajectory to intercept me right before I reach the
trees. A race against time, it is a test to see if I can reach the trees
first, or if the wolf can reach me.

My adrenaline is
pumping. The wolf trying going to intercept me right before the trees, its jaws
opened to deliver the greeting of our reunion. It made a low lunge at me
to grip me in between its teeth. Deciding that this was all or nothing, I
ignored the distance and jump as hard as I can.

Narrowly escaping
the wolf’s jaws, I feel its hot breath passing across my feet. The trajectory
of my jump followed a parabola, fortunately I manage to get my hand on a lower
branch just after the height began to drop,
this
kind
of jump would have shamed most basketball players. Swinging myself around the
branch I climb up slightly higher in the tree, out of the reach of the great
white wolf and into safety.

For the next two hours
I travelled through the trees and collected apples, the amount I can carry
has exploded enormously since my strength is now a total of fifty three
points, along with the fact that my armour is rather light I can carry an
enormous amount of small items such as wolf pelts and apples.

The wolf followed
underneath me the entire time carefully, waiting for the moment I would drop
down. And I did, after slowly collecting a total of 160 apples, I
could not find any more so there was no more reason for me to be up here.
Falling down to the ground the wolf jumps back a few meters to put a little
distance between us, clearly remembering what happened last time.

Fortunately for me, the
exit was behind me. Turning and running I hear a pounding noise following me, I
don’t even need to turn around to know that the wolf was gaining ground on me.
Ten meters away from the exit the wolf proved its dominance as a sharp
pain overcame my back as a solid blow from behind caused me to
catapult into the ground in front on me, luckily bouncing and sliding
through the exit and out of range of the great white wolf.

Truly scary, that is my
thought when I look at my health that has dropped by a quarter. To think that I
beat a wolf that can do this to
a me
in one clean hit,
despite how much stronger I am now, terrifying.

The sun started to sink
over the horizon, the game entering the night stage. At night monsters became
about 1.5 times more powerful, the experience you got also increased a little,
but not really enough to make up for the increased difficulty of monsters.

Back in town all the
merchant shops are closed during the night, so I log out.

***************************************************

The trip to buy
groceries and come back was incredibly dull. It took me half an hour to get
there, and once I was there I was too embarrassed to ask other customers to get
things for me from the upper shelves. The
the
trip back took twice as long due to being held down by the extra weight of the
shopping. A two hour round trip to a nearby supermarket just to buy food
had completely worn me out, especially my arms.

After my lunch it is
time to go back to End Online. With the morning sun it was time to search the city
for the herbs I needed, but the bazaar was calling me first.

“Good morning,
Peachstar
.” I approach the small girl at her usual spot

“
Mooorning
!
how
can I help
youuu
today?!” Still as irritating as ever I see.

“I’m fine. Also I have more
apples for you to sell,” A couple of heads turned at my voice and
Peachstar
seemed to light up.

“Oh
reaalyyy
?
That’s great! The last ones sold the
saaame
day!”

“
Haah
,
well that’s really good to hear.” These apples were surprisingly popular!

“
Nowww
,
this time you don’t get any money until their sold though,
kayyy
?”

I was aware the normal
situation of when it comes to real money transactions, you generally leave the
goods with the merchant and don’t get any money until they are sold. But seeing
her shaking a finger back and forth across her nose, I can
feel unimaginably violent urges rising from my stomach.

“It’s
okay,
the money will automatically be deposited into my
wallet when you do finally sell them.”

I always try keeping my
conversations with
Peachstar
as short and on topic as
possible,
she is without a doubt an incredibly nice
person. But, talking to her always leaves me feeling angry for no particular
reason.

With our conversation
over I walk to another vendor that specializes in animal pelts, I had been to
this man a few times in the past.

“Hey, Mr Hood, how can
I help you today?” He was a very down to earth person, as a matter of fact he
was so normal that he could stand in the middle of a crowd and nobody would
notice he was there, not even the crowd themselves.

“Morning James, I have
a few animal pelts to sell today, 2 silver each as usual.” Pulling out a stack
of 74 wolf pelts, James was no longer surprised at the amounts I’ve been giving
him.

“No worries, I’m glad
to be able to buy it off you,” James had the ‘Sewing’ skill, and in End Online
you use that skill to create clothing and some light armours out of various
animal and monster hides.

I also learned from him
that I can sell just about anything directly to other players too. What Mouse
told me about only being able to trade with merchants who paid the higher
subscription fee only applied to real money
transactions.

Two
silver for a wolf pelt
is quite a cheap sale, I could potentially get three if I
haggled or five if I sold them directly to customers, but I wanted to sell them
quick and James always bought them all then and there.

Next on
my to
do list was to gather the herbs that the old lady from
the apothecary requested. Travelling around Iceridge I searched for parks and
relaxation areas, to be completely honest the guide I found with information on
the herbs was from
Grenton
, the starter city and
capital of the Kingdom of Foster, which wasn’t covered in snow.

It wasn’t exactly
recent news, but each starter city was the capital of its own kingdom. My
territory is the Kingdom of Glace, while
Swordbreak
is the capital of the
Dalbe
Kingdom. Each kingdom has
a specific symbol, which can be seen as your inventory icon at the bottom-right
of your vision and once you hit level fifty it will appear as a tattoo on the
back of your right hand, until then you are not allowed to leave your kingdom.

The symbol
for Glace is a wolf,
Dalbe
is two swords
crossing each other, and Forster is a tree. All these symbols are a simple
solid shape in a ring, creating three perfectly round symbols representing the
kingdoms.

Bringing my mind back
to topic, I enter a small park area which has a few benches and trees around
but probably the most important issue would be all the snow, it is about half a
foot deep and covering everything.

If my instincts are not
wrong then this city should be the same as the others and have
novice level herbs in its parks as well, one only need brush the snow out
of the way that is hiding the herbs. I try in between the trees and use my hand
to brush some of the snow aside, only to find soft dirt underneath.

My second location I
try however revealed two green medicine herbs, jackpot! A quick sweep of the
area revealed eleven more green medicinal herbs and nine antidote herbs.
The next issue that came to me was the harvesting of them. While I identified
them by memory off the picture that they look like on the internet, I do not
have “Herbalism” to harvest them.

Pulling them out of the
ground breaks them at the stem, which was especially difficult with the
antidote herbs considering I need the roots of them. Some diligent work and
practice allowed me to be able to quickly dig the dirt around them and remove
them. Only I still kept breaking them.

In half an hour I had
thirty six green medicinal herbs and twenty antidote herbs with the roots still
attached. Despite them all being withered and damaged, I had them.

Walking into the
apothecary the old lady behind the counter gave me a somewhat angry look and
spoke.

“About
time young’un!
Where are those herbs you were
s’posed
to bring me!?”

“I’m terribly sorry for
the delay! No matter how many times I tried to harvest the herbs I just
couldn’t do it right and kept damaging them, these were the best I could
manage!” A complete lie I know, but I will need to be good at fooling
people if I’m going to make a lot of money!

“They are absolutely
terrible!” She gawks at the herbs I placed in front of her, “You are also
incredibly lucky that my first grade skills with herbs ‘
ill
still allow me
t
’ use these however if you had any
less dexterity these herbs would have been completely ruined.”

Oh, so dexterity is
related to harvesting herbs huh, that is a useful piece of information that may
prove useful later. It was possibly also required to clear this quest
without the herbalism skill.

“Allow me to show you
the correct method for harvesting herbs such as these while you are here too,
t’ do something like this t’ nature tis a heinous crime.”

She made some hand
motions as if digging around
a
herb and
began forcing me to copy her movements. Five minutes of this old lady
grabbing my hands and forcing me to dig out the air before a notification
appeared in front of me.

Incredible, I may have been
short changed when I started this game but I have now gained two free skills,
even if ‘Herbalism’ probably won’t be very useful to me.

“Good, now you’ve got
the hang o’ it,” The old lady nods her head to herself a few times and
continues while squinting at me, “But someone like you ‘ill only forget if you
don’t practice it
prop’ly
. Go get me fifty more o’
each herb! An’ each one has t’ be in perfect condition!”