Collide Gamer

An hour later and after realizing that it was pretty hard to find a hotdog stand at 9 PM on a Saturday, even in NYC, he returned to a slightly smaller camp. With a hotdog in his stomach. Just because it was pretty hard, didn’t mean it was impossible.

The decision reached evidently hadn’t satisfied everyone. “We accept the offer, Mister Newman,” Seth respectfully said. Now the man was smaller and weaker than him and thoroughly in the worse position, but John still felt incredibly weird being called a mister, especially by someone more than a decade older than him.

However, his response was distracted by a few windows.

Well, there went two more Guild Perks, which he immediately put down in the Wealth category.

Just one more and he would get his first Guild Hall Tier upgrade. Anyway, that was not the thing he should be concentrating on right now.

“Please, just John is fine,” he told them as he looked at that new Vassal menu he had gotten. Apparently, he could set tax rates and everything. When he tapped the slider once. Seth and those who seemed to hold some positions of power within the group gasped as they were surprised by a window. “Sorry, just experimenting with stuff. My powers are weird and I am still uncovering new stuff. For now, I will set the tax to zero, going to let you build without much interference…” John looked around. “Speaking of building, I think I can drastically improve your situation already.”

They began reorganizing this little slums from a spontaneously grown field to a properly laid out area of makeshift buildings made by Gnome. While somewhat artistically textured, Gnome still blushing whenever this was pointed out to her, they were a far-fetch from proper houses. Still, an upgrade from sheds and tents. John also planted the endpoint of the Transport Station at the centre of it all, right in front of the memorial. It looked exactly like the original over in his Guild Hall, a pavilion with bronze tiles on the roof and a blue floor, which now activated, glowing a bright blue where he stood.

John checked his watch, it was now almost midnight. “Okay, I will call it quits here for today,” he said and yawned. “Seems like only guild members can use this thing. Metra, would you do me the favour and guard this thing for the night?”

“Sure,” Metra rolled her head, “better than patrolling that empty corner of the island, something might actually happen here. You guys got booze? Alcoholised metals? I feel like getting drunk.”

John left her to it and went back to the yacht to sleep.

_______________________________________________________________________

“I guess this will at least somewhat break the monotony,” John said as he put down the new special building he had unlocked. The Transmutation Forge was special in that it didn’t cost John anything to build, not even Room Slots. ‘Guess that’s the case for the other Perk buildings as well then,’ he thought and looked at his new acquisition.

It reminded John of a big chimney: a metal tube, decorated with rings of sigil covered stone, sticking out of a square body on the floor. With the intent of testing it, a window opened while he was close to it.

He was presented with a list of different crafting materials, most of them either basic, real life stuff or some common Abyssal ones he could find in dungeons between level 5 and 25. In other words, it wasn’t that great right now. However, the materials were also cheap. A plank of wood three metres long was just five dollars, no matter what kind of wood either. “Mhm… okay, I can work with this,” John decided and bought a shorter one to experiment with. A confirmation window asked him if he was sure and if he wanted the materials transferred to his inventory, the Guild Bank or simply spewed out into reality. For the moment, he picked the last one of those option.

The money was withdrawn from his vast wealth of over 300 million. The Abyss Auction had been working quite well for him recently. He was still over two thirds off his goal of a billion, but he was getting there. In response, the Transmutation Forge, began to work, smoke rising from the chimney until the short board began materialising bit by bit from the square base, eventually falling into the grass in front of the apparatus.

John picked it up and tested it by bending it a little and such things. It was just a normal piece of wood, not enchanted with anything or special in any way. “Time for the next experiment,” John decided and walked over to the Transport Station with the board in his hand. He placed it on the floor before the teleportation was activated, then he found himself in front of the memorial. Looking at his feet, the board was still there. “Interesting,” John mumbled and placed the board in Aclysia’s hands. The weaponized maid was accompanying him for the moment, although she did say she wanted to buy groceries later.

“There you are again,” Metra was walking around with Qiada, swinging the halberd around like only a bored martial artist could. “I was wondering when you would show up; Jane and Eliza went out hours ago.”

“I took the time to sleep in, didn’t get that luxury recently,” John told her, being well aware that those two would check out New York at large. He trusted that they were strong enough to get out of whatever trouble they could find themselves in. Despite her hot-headed nature, Rave had survived this world longer than he had, so she must have been doing something right. “Could you do me a favour and point me to Seth really quickly?”

The man was indeed quickly found and then, much to his confusion, placed on the teleportation pad together with Aclysia. “What’s the idea here?” he asked, nervously looking at the blue radiation beneath his feet.

“Only Guild Members can use the teleporter, but I want to see what we can and cannot transport with us,” John told him, “and where the border lies. Aclysia will now attempt to teleport herself back to the Guild Hall without you, then she will come back and do the same but wanting you to come with her. This shouldn’t take too long.”

It indeed didn’t and the simple result was the expected one. When Aclysia wanted to take something on the platform with her, she could; if she didn’t, it would stay behind. Seth quickly scrambled from the platform when the experiment was done with.

“Okay then,” John looked at the guy in an obviously unwashed bakery outfit. “Time to give you people everything to fix yourself up.”

“Uhm, don’t you mean fix you people up?” Seth asked.

“No, I meant what I said. I am not here to play nanny; if you want to have a good life, you will have to build it yourself. I am happy with providing the environment and lifting you out of helplessness though.” John checked his clock, he wanted to have some time to run some more dungeons today. “I will spend the next two hours dumping some construction materials in this barrier. What you do with them is up to you, although I recommend you at the very least get a bathhouse going. Also, take this,” he handed Seth a hundred thousand bucks casually.

“That will go a long way in easing out creditors,” he said thankfully.

“What? No, that’s to pay the people that help in the whole building thing,” John was quick to clarify. “Give them money, tell them to go out and buy themselves some nice meals, some new clothes, that type of stuff. I am going to deal with your creditors in other ways. For the moment just concentrate on making this a successful community, leave all the worries about things that might threaten you from the outside to me.”

Seth looked at the stack of cash like he was suddenly shouldering a lot more responsibility than he had signed up for.

“Don’t go disappointing all your comrades now,” John pat the smaller man on the shoulder and then went back to his Guild Hall to fire up the Transmutation Forge again.

_______________________________________________________________________

In the end it didn’t even take two hours to dump more material on the Enclave than they could have possibly hoped to do anything with at the moment. To not clog up things needlessly, John then left them to it and started a run of the Tier 23 version of the Elves dungeon. It was the first Tier 23 he challenged.

“Master, may I inquire why we are not guiding their efforts in construction?” Aclysia asked as they spawned into the unfamiliar layout. John liked core floors. Sure, it was nice that the four Tiers prior always shared the same enemy and map type, making the grinding nice and predictable, but there was just something nice about the challenge the core floors represented. Not only were they unique, they also tended to have stronger than usual enemies and bosses.

“For one, I have no idea how to construct a community,” John told her. “So, I wouldn’t be a big help even if I stayed. All we could do is help carry some stones, I can’t help in getting a working mana generator or electricity or anything and I would much rather learn to delegate that to people who know how to do it than do it myself. Which is another reason: I really don’t feel like micromanaging what my ‘subjects’ do.” He couldn’t bring himself to genuinely describe them that way, just felt wrong. “I meant what I told Seth, as you very well know, you beautiful lady that partly lives in my brain.”

“If I went to look there, I wouldn’t be able to ask you questions and hear you talk, Master,” Aclysia reminded him of her slight obsession with his voice. “What is our plan then? Continuous levelling?”

“Basically, yes,” John answered her. “Although I will be going at it a bit more relaxed about it for the coming days. The efficiency will increase greatly once Magoi gets here, theoretically. Aside from that I want to wait for the loan sharks to make their first move on us. I am not in a hurry. Maybe we should relax this evening, how about I read you something?”

“Can’t you try to tell me another story? I liked that,” Aclysia asked, alluding to the time on the cruise he tried to make her dream.

“Mhm, first let’s try beating this dungeon before talking more about that, okay?”

“Understood.”

There was a thing about the Elves dungeon that made them especially random, which was that the name didn’t specify what kind of elves. With Orcs or Undead, John always knew what he had to expect. Between an orc clan and an orc warband, the only real difference was proficiency at warfare and the occasional special unit. Compared to the massive changes between dark elves, wood elves and high elves, to name the three widest known categories of the very intricate fantasy race, that was basically nothing.

It seemed that they had landed in a wood elf dungeon this time around, unsurprising as the four Tiers before this also had been filled with the brown-skinned knife ears. Still though, the large trees were covered in shimmering blue leaves, their dark bark illuminated by the sun shining through and blue crystals growing out of them.

‘I guess a forest floor is a kind of floor,’ John thought as he looked around. There were no pre-defined walkways like was usual with this kind of dungeon. There were very few points he could orient himself on, thankfully he didn’t want to draw this time around either. “I am halfway tempted to tell you to just burn it all, Salamander,” he joked.

“Ready when you are,” the endflame elemental raised a hand with a sizable flame already hovering over her open palm. When she realized he wasn’t serious, she squashed it in her fist and clicked her tongue in a disappointed fashion.

“I think Siena will be the MVP here,” John told everyone as an elf suddenly fell out of the trees above, throat slit, hitting the floor and turning into a cloud of quickly scattering particles. In the many shadows that the branches above cast, the nightmare elemental had a network of high-speed lanes only accessible to her that also reached up the high trees. The crystals did little in the way of stopping her, only making her route a bit more complicated.

“Like that is anything new,” Siena stated dismissively when she appeared back in John’s shadow. They made their way into the forest to the sound of some minor bickering between her and Salamander.

John was halfway unsure that this even qualified as a core floor as they made their way through. The occasional elf they encountered was the same as the one from the previous Tier, just levelled up. Did Gaia fuck this up again? Wouldn’t be the first time.

The answer came when he was suddenly showered in arrows and throwing spears, eliminating most of his pre-charged Mana Protection. He looked up to find a very interesting boss. It was a mixture of octopus, spider and tree hut, a slow-moving base that slung its tentacles around trees one at a time to get forwards. At the rim of it stood several dozen wood elves, along with a queen that was wearing nothing but leaves to hide her privates.

Not for the first time, John regretted that he didn’t have some sort of a taming skills to get beauties like that dragged out of their theoretical existence inside Illusion Barriers and add them to his very real harem. The sad reality was, they wanted to kill him, so he would have to return the favour.

John jumped behind a tree to save himself from the second wave of fire. He wouldn’t be of great use in this fight, but at least getting to safety was easy enough. That’s what he thought until the wood elf queen summoned a javelin of thorns that only missed John because Gnome reacted in time and dropped him into a hole. The construct of wood had penetrated straight through the tree he had been hiding behind.

Seeing the roots around him, John didn’t assume that this was a safe place either. ‘That boss is definitely new,’ he thought, crawling out of the hole and then scrambling to gain some distance. He didn’t need to be close for his elementals to do their thing. Gnome and Aclysia were quick on his tail.

In the meantime, Salamander and Sylph decided that this was a good time to put their heads together, literally, and combined. While Salamander despised doing so, the firepower thus obtained would probably be needed.

The result was a girl by the name of Sylfrena. She had light skin and pale red hair of average length. Her chest definitely took after Salamander, having shrunken only a bit to a D-cup, hidden underneath pale green fire that covered most of her torso under an ever-shifting leotard. Translucent flames of the same colour took the shape of insectoid wings behind her back that beat with such speed that they became just a blur of fire.

“Do I go? I think I will, yes, yes!” Sylfrena shouted out and became a streak of green that left only burning air in her wake. She circled the hut-spider at enormous speed, with the simple goal of dealing as much damage to the tentacles holding it as possible. Attempts to stop her came in the form of homing spells of nature magic, all of which failed to catch up to her.

One tentacle gave in, then a second and third one. The whole spider was dangerously slanted but still held on until Sylfrena sent a powerful strike at a fourth one, causing it to shrivel up and lose its grip. That was the last line, and the whole creature and the structure atop of it came falling down.

The sound of shattering wood and chitin were the signal for Aclysia and Siena to descend on the wood elves buried within. John supported them by sniping those he saw with Shardbound, Gnome protecting him in turn from whichever elves identified him as the biggest threat.

When they killed the queen, unluckily fallen and trapped under half the hut she had ruled over, they had officially beaten the dungeon. ‘That was a rather short one,’ John thought. ‘I guess this one is packed with optional content or something? Well, I can find that out another time.’