Orc Craft Omnibus, page 83
part #1 of Orc Craft Series
“But we’re so high up, Tripp. We’ll never get down.”
Bo laughed now. “There’s a reason you have to climb up the tower you know. Even when I lose, I still win.”
Tripp shook his head. “You’re forgetting something.”
“That happens quite a lot. You can’t run a giant puzzle tower without having a few lapses in memory. Care to fill me in?”
“We’re players, Boxe. If we die, we come back.”
“Not in the tower. If you die in my tower, you lose.”
“Then I suppose we’ll just have to leave.”
Tripp quickly gathered some of the essence that he’d made from using his mallet on the tower heart and stuffed it in his inventory.
Items received: Tower of Windborne Heart Essence x6
“You’ll need to trust me just once more,” he told Etta.
A sudden shudder made her lose her balance, and she fell back into Gallo. The Dark Weaver held her steady.
“What do you need?” she said.
“Just copy what I do, even if it’s crazy.”
Bo shook his head now. “Idiots.”
As the tower fell apart around him, Tripp summoned up his courage and he focused on the bone plains outside, way, way down on the ground.
And then he ran at the opening and leaped from the tower.
CHAPTER 35
A series of explosions tore holes in the tower, the blasts coming from all along the structure. They started way up high, level with the gods, and worked their way down to its base. The force was powerful enough to rain stone, mortar, bone, and steel onto the onlookers below.
A figure catapulted out of it. It would normally have been hard to get a detailed look at someone who was plummeting out of a tower. Especially when they were screaming and flailing their arms as if they might learn to fly.
This, however, was unmistakable an orc. An orc with a hammer in his hands, with sunlight glinting off his steel armor.
He fell to the ground, shouting all the way down before a thud put an end to the noise. Three more figures followed him, and it was only when they hit the ground that people saw they were a minotaur, dark weaver, and a mage.
You have died!
You have died leaping from the Tower of Windborne
Penalty: For 2 days, you are vulnerable to height damage, even from the smallest of jumps.
That was the message awaiting Tripp when he respawned on the Bone Plains, a few hundred meters from the tower.
The structure was…well…it wasn’t there anymore. The individual bricks and stone blocks it was once made from still existed, but nobody would call them a tower now.
Instead, they were spread out all along the plains, the furthest of them having been catapulted four hundred meters away.
The players that had been crowding around the tower, trying to get in, trawled through its ruins now. Some of them looked for loot, while others picked up pieces of stone, storing them in their inventories as mementos of the Tower of Windborne.
Portals opened here, there, and everywhere as players fast traveled to the Bone Plains, having heard that the great tower had been toppled.
Questions were asked. Hundreds of them. As different as they were worded, they all boiled down to one.
Who did this?
And from that question came others. Did someone beat the tower? Or was it set to destruct if nobody conquered it?
Tripp brushed the dust from his steel armor and he ran his hand through his hair and shook the bits of stone out of it. Looking around, he saw Etta, Gallo, and Barnard not far away.
“Here he is,” said a voice, and then someone slapped him on the back.
It was Rolley. Rolley with two arms and two working hands, one of which he stuck out toward Tripp. Tripp offered his own.
“I’m guessing you did it, buddy?” said Rolley. “I'm assuming that’s why the tower collapsed.”
Tripp couldn’t help smiling. “I guess we did.”
“Tell me everything I missed.”
Tripp explained about destroying the heart using the deconstructor mallet, and how they only way to escape the tower was by jumping out of it. It seemed like the only way to win.
“I haven’t had a notification or anything yet,” he said. “I wonder if we got this wrong.”
Etta and the others joined them now. Gallo seemed a little uneasy, having been their enemy until recently, while the most tension was between Rolley and Barnard.
The rogue and the mage eyed each other. Rolley looked like he wanted to tear his head off.
“Listen,” began Barnard, “Let me explain why I-”
Rolley lunged at him.
When he reached him, he pulled him into a hug.
“It’s good to see you, you spineless assface. You’ve got a lot of making up to do, a lot of explaining to do, but it’s good to see you.”
Etta looked at Tripp. “Well done,” she told him. “Without you and your crafting…”
“Without me? Without you guys I wouldn’t have gotten into the tower. And if I had managed to get in on my own, I’d have died in the first room. We got as far as we did together.”
“What a lovely moment,” said Gallo.
Gallo was joking, but to Tripp, it really was. He saw players across the plains pointing at him now. No doubt that word had spread about him leaping from the tower. Maybe someone had watched him go into it days ago, and they’d pieced things together.
People would have questions. They’d want to know what he saw, and how he beat the tower. Just like with the stuff in Godden’s Reach, people would be talking about him for a while.
And yet, Tripp found himself enjoying the few minutes he had left before the other players reached him. He watched his friends laughing and talking, and he enjoyed the peace and calm before the crowd got any closer.
CHAPTER 36
“That’s the end of the show, thanks for watching, guys. A big thank you to Tripp Keaton, who kindly agreed to guest star and answer all of your questions. Don’t forget, Tripp has launched his own video channel. I’ll leave a link in the show notes if you want to check it out.”
Trent hit the button to end the stream and then gave Tripp a warm smile. After having watched Trent’s show for a while, despite declining requests to be on it after Godden’s Reach, Tripp was glad that Trent was as friendly in real life as he was on camera.
“Tripp and Trent,” said the streamer. “That’s got a ring to it. Tripp’s and Trent’s Soulboxe Spectacular. What do you think?”
Tripp laughed. “Let me get my channel going first. Then I’ll see about expanding. Thanks for mentioning it, by the way.”
“No problem. I’m not going to get you on the show and then not plug your stuff, am I? Besides, I watched your first few videos. I loved them.”
“You did?” said Tripp.
He’d been worried about the quality of his show. It was difficult to capture the in-game footage correctly, and then edit his voice-over onto it later. Added to that, his audio equipment was crummy.
“What’s not to love? A channel about crafting? It’s amazing the stuff you can make. Things I didn’t think of. Between you and me, I spoke to one of the devs. You know Julie Ward? We’re…uh…we have a thing going on. Anyway, she said the artificer class has gone through the roof. As soon as people found out all the stuff you did in the tower, they wanted some of it.”
Tripp shrugged. “There are people in Soulboxe much better at it than me, who’ve been doing it for much longer.”
“None of them play as orcs, though. That’s your USP, and trust me, I know how important those are.”
“I better head off, Trent. We’ll do the next cast remotely, yeah? I just wanted to drive down here and meet you this time.”
Trent shook his hand. “Pleasure, buddy. Take care. Oh, one last thing I wanted to ask you.”
Tripp paused at the doorway. “Yeah?”
“What did you get for beating the tower?”
That was a question Tripp had been asked on almost every video stream and podcast he’d appeared on in the last two weeks. It was something players asked him every time he logged into Soulboxe.
In fact, he’d become so popular that he’d had to leave Windborne, leave all the populated areas of Soulboxe, and he’d hiked way down south in the map. He’d found a little valley with reed houses and pale-faced, silent-but-friendly people. It was there that he recorded his in-game crafting shows.
“Here’s the thing,” he told Trent. “We got nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“You sure you completed it?”
“Oh yeah. I have a little medal on my character screen that proves it. But the devs gave us nothing. I guess there’s a lesson in there somewhere.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Me either, but it helps if I pretend there was something to learn.”
Trent laughed. “Well, at least I know.”
“There was one thing,” said Tripp. “You know about the whole tower heart thing, right?”
“Sure. You’ve told that story to a hundred different streamers and casters.”
“Well, here’s something I didn’t tell them. Before the tower collapsed, I took some of the tower's heart essence. I figured it was pretty rare. So, I artificed it into a bunch of weapons. One each for me and my friends. If you see any minotaurs or rogues or mages out there with tower heart weaponry, you’ll know they’re the real deal.”
“Interesting. I tried reaching out to the girl. Etta. She hasn’t gotten back to me.”
“She flew out to meet her bother. He’s in France, so she’s gone to meet him for a vacation. Maybe you could get Rolley or Barnard on the show. Rolley can talk for days.”
“Maybe I will. Where you headed off to now, Tripp?”
Tripp shrugged. “Where else? I have some crafting to do.”
The end of book 2
Thank you for reading! To find out when book 3 is released, you can join my mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/gjWw6j
Deck Davis, Orc Craft Omnibus
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Bo laughed now. “There’s a reason you have to climb up the tower you know. Even when I lose, I still win.”
Tripp shook his head. “You’re forgetting something.”
“That happens quite a lot. You can’t run a giant puzzle tower without having a few lapses in memory. Care to fill me in?”
“We’re players, Boxe. If we die, we come back.”
“Not in the tower. If you die in my tower, you lose.”
“Then I suppose we’ll just have to leave.”
Tripp quickly gathered some of the essence that he’d made from using his mallet on the tower heart and stuffed it in his inventory.
Items received: Tower of Windborne Heart Essence x6
“You’ll need to trust me just once more,” he told Etta.
A sudden shudder made her lose her balance, and she fell back into Gallo. The Dark Weaver held her steady.
“What do you need?” she said.
“Just copy what I do, even if it’s crazy.”
Bo shook his head now. “Idiots.”
As the tower fell apart around him, Tripp summoned up his courage and he focused on the bone plains outside, way, way down on the ground.
And then he ran at the opening and leaped from the tower.
CHAPTER 35
A series of explosions tore holes in the tower, the blasts coming from all along the structure. They started way up high, level with the gods, and worked their way down to its base. The force was powerful enough to rain stone, mortar, bone, and steel onto the onlookers below.
A figure catapulted out of it. It would normally have been hard to get a detailed look at someone who was plummeting out of a tower. Especially when they were screaming and flailing their arms as if they might learn to fly.
This, however, was unmistakable an orc. An orc with a hammer in his hands, with sunlight glinting off his steel armor.
He fell to the ground, shouting all the way down before a thud put an end to the noise. Three more figures followed him, and it was only when they hit the ground that people saw they were a minotaur, dark weaver, and a mage.
You have died!
You have died leaping from the Tower of Windborne
Penalty: For 2 days, you are vulnerable to height damage, even from the smallest of jumps.
That was the message awaiting Tripp when he respawned on the Bone Plains, a few hundred meters from the tower.
The structure was…well…it wasn’t there anymore. The individual bricks and stone blocks it was once made from still existed, but nobody would call them a tower now.
Instead, they were spread out all along the plains, the furthest of them having been catapulted four hundred meters away.
The players that had been crowding around the tower, trying to get in, trawled through its ruins now. Some of them looked for loot, while others picked up pieces of stone, storing them in their inventories as mementos of the Tower of Windborne.
Portals opened here, there, and everywhere as players fast traveled to the Bone Plains, having heard that the great tower had been toppled.
Questions were asked. Hundreds of them. As different as they were worded, they all boiled down to one.
Who did this?
And from that question came others. Did someone beat the tower? Or was it set to destruct if nobody conquered it?
Tripp brushed the dust from his steel armor and he ran his hand through his hair and shook the bits of stone out of it. Looking around, he saw Etta, Gallo, and Barnard not far away.
“Here he is,” said a voice, and then someone slapped him on the back.
It was Rolley. Rolley with two arms and two working hands, one of which he stuck out toward Tripp. Tripp offered his own.
“I’m guessing you did it, buddy?” said Rolley. “I'm assuming that’s why the tower collapsed.”
Tripp couldn’t help smiling. “I guess we did.”
“Tell me everything I missed.”
Tripp explained about destroying the heart using the deconstructor mallet, and how they only way to escape the tower was by jumping out of it. It seemed like the only way to win.
“I haven’t had a notification or anything yet,” he said. “I wonder if we got this wrong.”
Etta and the others joined them now. Gallo seemed a little uneasy, having been their enemy until recently, while the most tension was between Rolley and Barnard.
The rogue and the mage eyed each other. Rolley looked like he wanted to tear his head off.
“Listen,” began Barnard, “Let me explain why I-”
Rolley lunged at him.
When he reached him, he pulled him into a hug.
“It’s good to see you, you spineless assface. You’ve got a lot of making up to do, a lot of explaining to do, but it’s good to see you.”
Etta looked at Tripp. “Well done,” she told him. “Without you and your crafting…”
“Without me? Without you guys I wouldn’t have gotten into the tower. And if I had managed to get in on my own, I’d have died in the first room. We got as far as we did together.”
“What a lovely moment,” said Gallo.
Gallo was joking, but to Tripp, it really was. He saw players across the plains pointing at him now. No doubt that word had spread about him leaping from the tower. Maybe someone had watched him go into it days ago, and they’d pieced things together.
People would have questions. They’d want to know what he saw, and how he beat the tower. Just like with the stuff in Godden’s Reach, people would be talking about him for a while.
And yet, Tripp found himself enjoying the few minutes he had left before the other players reached him. He watched his friends laughing and talking, and he enjoyed the peace and calm before the crowd got any closer.
CHAPTER 36
“That’s the end of the show, thanks for watching, guys. A big thank you to Tripp Keaton, who kindly agreed to guest star and answer all of your questions. Don’t forget, Tripp has launched his own video channel. I’ll leave a link in the show notes if you want to check it out.”
Trent hit the button to end the stream and then gave Tripp a warm smile. After having watched Trent’s show for a while, despite declining requests to be on it after Godden’s Reach, Tripp was glad that Trent was as friendly in real life as he was on camera.
“Tripp and Trent,” said the streamer. “That’s got a ring to it. Tripp’s and Trent’s Soulboxe Spectacular. What do you think?”
Tripp laughed. “Let me get my channel going first. Then I’ll see about expanding. Thanks for mentioning it, by the way.”
“No problem. I’m not going to get you on the show and then not plug your stuff, am I? Besides, I watched your first few videos. I loved them.”
“You did?” said Tripp.
He’d been worried about the quality of his show. It was difficult to capture the in-game footage correctly, and then edit his voice-over onto it later. Added to that, his audio equipment was crummy.
“What’s not to love? A channel about crafting? It’s amazing the stuff you can make. Things I didn’t think of. Between you and me, I spoke to one of the devs. You know Julie Ward? We’re…uh…we have a thing going on. Anyway, she said the artificer class has gone through the roof. As soon as people found out all the stuff you did in the tower, they wanted some of it.”
Tripp shrugged. “There are people in Soulboxe much better at it than me, who’ve been doing it for much longer.”
“None of them play as orcs, though. That’s your USP, and trust me, I know how important those are.”
“I better head off, Trent. We’ll do the next cast remotely, yeah? I just wanted to drive down here and meet you this time.”
Trent shook his hand. “Pleasure, buddy. Take care. Oh, one last thing I wanted to ask you.”
Tripp paused at the doorway. “Yeah?”
“What did you get for beating the tower?”
That was a question Tripp had been asked on almost every video stream and podcast he’d appeared on in the last two weeks. It was something players asked him every time he logged into Soulboxe.
In fact, he’d become so popular that he’d had to leave Windborne, leave all the populated areas of Soulboxe, and he’d hiked way down south in the map. He’d found a little valley with reed houses and pale-faced, silent-but-friendly people. It was there that he recorded his in-game crafting shows.
“Here’s the thing,” he told Trent. “We got nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“You sure you completed it?”
“Oh yeah. I have a little medal on my character screen that proves it. But the devs gave us nothing. I guess there’s a lesson in there somewhere.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Me either, but it helps if I pretend there was something to learn.”
Trent laughed. “Well, at least I know.”
“There was one thing,” said Tripp. “You know about the whole tower heart thing, right?”
“Sure. You’ve told that story to a hundred different streamers and casters.”
“Well, here’s something I didn’t tell them. Before the tower collapsed, I took some of the tower's heart essence. I figured it was pretty rare. So, I artificed it into a bunch of weapons. One each for me and my friends. If you see any minotaurs or rogues or mages out there with tower heart weaponry, you’ll know they’re the real deal.”
“Interesting. I tried reaching out to the girl. Etta. She hasn’t gotten back to me.”
“She flew out to meet her bother. He’s in France, so she’s gone to meet him for a vacation. Maybe you could get Rolley or Barnard on the show. Rolley can talk for days.”
“Maybe I will. Where you headed off to now, Tripp?”
Tripp shrugged. “Where else? I have some crafting to do.”
The end of book 2
Thank you for reading! To find out when book 3 is released, you can join my mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/gjWw6j
Deck Davis, Orc Craft Omnibus
