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The Gamer Chapter 1336 – Oh no, the farm is in danger!
🕑 Added 2022-11-28 08:16:57 +0000 UTC“Howdy, young man!” the farmer greeted with a wave. He was standing with a pitchfork in the middle of the pumpkin field, shovelling dirt. John was somewhat certain that pumpkins were not the kind of plant that appreciated tilling. He was definitely certain that very few plants liked tilling after they were big enough to grow fruit. He was beyond certain that a pitchfork was not a digging instrument. “Howdy, young man!” The farmer repeated his animation.
John was thoroughly tempted to let the animation repeat several times. There was a steady, bratty giggling in his mind and he really did not need any other reason to do anything.
‘You’re such an awful person!’ Delicia called him out. ‘These look like real people.’
‘But they’re obviously not,’ the Gamer responded.
“Howdy, young man!”
‘I make fun of Gaia for it, but I am pretty sure their goofiness is entirely deliberate. Otherwise, I couldn’t see them as NPCs. Anyway, permission to finish the Quest?’
‘Permission granted – I am just that generous. Come on, praise me, praise me.’
‘You are just that generous,’ the Gamer played along. It couldn’t be playfighting all the time.
‘Yes, yes, you understand my glory. Now do the rest of this Adventure while walking on your hands!’
‘Don’t take it too far.’
‘Booo, you said you would be my PC.’
‘We are sorry to inform you that John Newman does not come with the handstand functionality.’
‘Lies! Lies and slander! You’re just being lazy.’
“Here,” John handed over the message, while ignoring the torrent of playful verbal abuse coming his way.
“Oh… oh no! I must run to escape the foul pumpkins about to attack! Please protect my fields!” The farmer immediately bee-lined for the chapel, leaving John and Delicia by the edge of the singular field. Just a few seconds later, a dozen of the pumpkins around the field were suddenly animated. With faces of a jack o’lantern and vine tendrils, they slowly patrolled around the field.
‘Great, now I am getting pumpkin juice all over my hands,’ the Gamer thought. ‘Unless…?’
‘Nope, go get messy for me. Come on, you love getting sticky for women, what’s wrong with this?’
‘Well, I can just avoid it,’ the Gamer reminded her and pointed a finger at one of the pumpkins. The blast ray turned the monster into a shower of orange goo and plant fluids. He blew at the digit like there was smoke rising from a gun.
‘Wooow, so cooooool.’ Delicia’s drawn out, dry sarcasm eliminated any level of confidence he had about that gesture. Now he genuinely felt cringy. ‘Look at this guy over here, shooting at tin cans with nukes. Look at how cool he is. Hehehe…’ She cackled at his expense, slowly growing louder. ‘Nerd so lazy, can’t even be bothered to kill beginner area enemies with auto hits!’
‘Oh, shut it!’ John kicked up a pebble from the floor, caught it mid-air, and then tossed it with so much might that it splattered a second pumpkin in the same way as the first. ‘How about that?’
‘You think you’re cool because you can throw rocks?’
‘Why do I even try?’ John grumbled and swiftly executed the remaining ten pumpkins in a series of blasts. The earth started rumbling after the last of the monsters had been executed.
“Oh, I am sorry, adventurer!” the voice of the farmer reached him from behind. It was one of the few times that John jumped at someone unexpectedly addressing him. It was difficult to surprise someone who felt all six elements in a large radius around them. Unless one was an NPC spawning back in, then it must have been exceedingly easy. “I should have told you, I have had the biggest harvest ever this year!”
‘Oh no,’ John thought.
‘Are you actually afraid.’
‘Only of the pun.’
A giant pumpkin broke out of the earth, scattering half the field out as it rose up on a stalk of interwoven vines. Atop its head was a crown of golden wood.
‘And there it is,’ John groaned.
‘How did you know that was happening?’
‘Spend enough time reading messages from Gaia and you learn that she is all about sass and puns.’ John raised one hand and aimed at the Pumpking. It was not moving. Apparently, he had not entered its threat-range yet. A ball of silver formed in front of his palm.
Delicia did not miss a beat to continue in her smug tone, ‘Are you going to complain about the supreme deity keeping you in check and entertaining you, hm?’
‘I’m going to complain about you twisting everything I say into an insult.’
‘It is just too bad that you have no one else to hang out with. All of your harem, and still, here with tiny spherical me.’ He could practically see her shaking her head, with a huge grin on her round face. ‘Whatever will I do with you, John?’
‘Move in with me,’ he replied seriously.
‘Wawawawa-what?’ she stammered. As a connoisseur of cute girl sounds, that got a 9/10 Gnomes from him. ‘What… how… already?’
‘So you were going to agree eventually?’ John teased her and released the Arc Lance. It blasted apart the Pumpking as easily as the smaller pumpkins, instantly finishing the Quest. Gaia might as well have been handing him free GP for this Adventure. That was the less interesting thing to think about at the moment.
The original plan had been to give Delicia her own apartment somewhere in the Guild Hall, likely even inside the Alchemy Lab. Propriety suggested such distance. Neither of them were people that cared much around propriety. John paid attention to it, but he was willing to fully ignore it if he thought he knew better. Delicia did not strike him as the kind of person to even think about that. An apartment in the Palace was not that big of a jump though.
‘C-can I have at least have my own bed at least?!’ she stammered out a terribly constructed sentence.
The misunderstanding clicked with him immediately. To tease her about where her mind went or to exploit it mercilessly to get her in his bedroom? A terrible question and he really wanted to go with the latter. Alas, he was an honest man – and a bit of a dick. ‘I meant in my Palace. The giant Building. Not my own apartment.’
‘Oh… ooooohhhh…’ Delicia was too embarrassed to give a further response.
‘However, I like this idea more. And no, only my bed.’
‘I… you… haha… very funny joke, John!’ The nervousness was written all over her thoughts. ‘Surely you wouldn’t use me as your pillow or something, right? That would be dehumanizing and I would never want that.’
‘I, for one, think that being a pillow for a loved one is the opposite of dehumanizing,’ the Gamer disagreed vehemently.
‘That is an interesting question actually.’ John walked up to the hole in the ground and peeked over the edge. There was a storeroom down there. The smell of rotting fruit hit his nostrils and he took half a step back.
“Thank you for your help, brave adventurer!” the farmer addressed him again. “I got things from here. You may leave now.”
‘…Okay, Gaia might not be the greatest intrigue writer,’ Delicia commented. ‘That guy is obviously trying to keep us out of his basement. There’s something going on here.’
‘Yup. Want me to ignore him like you’re trying to ignore your desire to move into my apartment?’
‘Yes. I mean no! I mean… hey, I’m the one supposed to be the teasing around here. Jump into that hole, right now.’ The Gamer obliged the self-conscious shortstack and powered his way through the horridly sweet stench. His feet hit the cobblestone floor below and stuck to it. The good news about this rot was that it was pretty clean, no maggots or mould in sight. The film of juices on the floor gave it such a sticky texture that John felt like he was walking on glue.
“This will not be necessary, adventurer!” the farmer shouted from above. “Please, just go home.”
‘Jokes on him, you’re too much of a contrarian to do anything you are told. If he had a nice pair of tits, he might listen, but nope. Braindead male NPC.’ Impressively she managed to convey the sound of her hand hitting her forehead through their mental connection. ‘Oh, I am sorry, you’re an ass man. Maybe you should have asked him to bend over, check him out?’
‘Look, the gay jokes are bad enough when my girlfriend tries to imply I want to sleep with my best friend, so can we not go there?’ he pleaded. There were a few moments of silence. A nice sign in and of itself, showing that she was giving his boundaries earnest thought.
‘Alright, fine. By the way, how many of the Celexiums can I take from you?’ He started a response. ‘All? Did I hear all? Fantastic, we never need to talk about this again.’
‘As if I would give you access to any of them,’ John gave his actual answer, while they advanced through the basement. ‘First off, they are a fantastically limited resource. Second off, I need them for different projects that you are not privy to because, third off, I’m not giving the world’s most valuable metals to a temporary stay in my life. Especially not for alchemy.’
‘The fuck is that supposed to mean?’ Delicia asked, outraged.
‘That alchemy is not a particularly accomplished art in our world. 90% of what you can do, enchantments can do better and permanently.’
‘Oh, oh, oh! Is that how it is? You think alchemy is some second rate art, huh? Think just because something is underdeveloped and underfunded is not worth your time, huh?! Oh, sorry, I did not realize you were so stupid – I thought I was talking to a genius here, but nope. You like talking about things you don’t understand?’
John smirked. ‘You’ll have your chance soon enough to prove me wrong.’
‘I will!’
Their conversation hit a stop there. Instead, they focused on looking around. Much like all previous structures, the underground complex had the typical starting area simplicity to it. It was a cobblestone cellar with wooden support beams. Wooden crates filled with rotting fruit made for the sole decoration.
On closer inspection, there was something off about these fruits. The way they wasted away was odd. John found everything between a fully fine pumpkin and a dried-out mound of fruit flesh. Odd were the in-between stages. The fruit liquified, before hitting some gooey state, after which it looked like life was getting sucked out of it and into the floor. Even weirder was that there was an empty space underneath them. ‘Who makes a cobblestone floor above a hollow body? That’s just asking for a cave in.’
Following that hunch, John did what video games usually did not allow and kicked the floor with superhuman strength. The cobblestone shook, the mortar cracked. A second kick sent John falling several metres. He hit his knee on one of the loose rocks, in a way that would have had him rolling around for five minutes if he did not have Gamer’s Body.
He found himself in a circular chamber. The walls were made from a writhing mixture of metal and flesh, covered in a copious amount of details to the sinews, muscles, and stitches. The floor was a bouncy membrane, covered in scar tissue that took the shape of various runes and such. ‘Straight into the endgame area,’ John thought, immediately more on guard.
It was the law of most video games that the more intricately an area’s texture design, the stronger the enemies around.
‘This place is yucky,’ Delicia remarked.
‘Not the worst I have ever been in, honestly,’ he responded. ‘Beats the Death Zone.’
‘You always mention the Death Zone when it comes to the worst areas you’ve been in. I mean, okay, with that name I can believe you, but really?’
‘Want some memory sharing?’ the Gamer offered.
‘I mean sure why – OH MY GAIA WHAT IN TARNATION?!’ He had just sent her a collection of memories of the state he had found Jeremiah’s corpse in. ‘Why are half his insides on the outside?!’
‘Izha needed them there.’
‘The what… what is an Izha?’
‘A central mind in the Lorylim hive. Don’t worry about it too much.’
‘I worry about that… I… urgh, I’m so happy I don’t have a stomach right now…’ Delicia retched. ‘And you deal with that often?’
‘Often enough,’ the Gamer responded honestly, just as he found a way deeper into the structure. One of the walls was a clenched muscle. Pulling on some of the metal bits made it relax suddenly. It was a bit like stepping through a sphincter, visually speaking. Thankfully, there was none of the smell involved. ‘Anyway, I take weird metal-flesh fusion over hyper-mutating rot every day.’
Quiet respect radiated off Delicia’s mind.
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