77
1036 Words
Not knowing what else to do, they searched the forest. There were no dangerous monsters, merely the rabbits that scampered around. Aster only stopped a few times for a snack while they worked, but they never stopped trying to find an answer to this latest puzzle.
They were giving up hope when they finally dug up a box of nails. Thousands of steel nails, perfectly preserved.
That was telling, and Matt had Aster send a single message to Liz and Susanne informing them of their find.
Not an hour later, the two of them found both a hammer and a saw buried in the ground.
When they finished the island late that night, well after the sun had set, they looked over their haul.
Liz gestured at their collection, “Everything we need to build a boat. Saw, hammer, rope, nails, cloth for a sail. They even gave us an item that converts mana to a sealant that can also dry wood. I’d say Minkalla wants us to build a boat.”
Aster c****d her head and asked, “Sure, but what is this test? Are we just meant to escape, or something else? If we make it out a mile, will we find land or find ourselves teleported out? There isn’t a boss in our perception. I feel like there’s something more to this test. It almost seems like a challenge room.”
None of them had an answer to her question, so they started to plan out their escape vessel.
At first, their idea was to just make a better raft, but they discarded that after worrying that they might need to tackle more challenging waves, or possibly storms.
After making a rough draft, Matt bit the bullet and spent the Genesis Energy to simulate their design. Liz could technically do so with her AI that reserved rather than spending mana, and therefore Genesis Energy, but his had grown to do such testing much better than hers, so it fell on him.
They could always get more Genesis Energy, after all.
Sadly, their first design was a failure, as they had several stress points that they hadn’t accounted for.
After brainstorming some more, they ended up with a catamaran style for their boat. It was more stable in their testing, and Liz remembered that Duke Water’s family used a similar style of boat in their archipelago low Tier world.
With two connected canoes for greater stability, they would have a platform for a place to rest and weather the sun and any storms they might encounter.
It was also going to be a lot easier to make a catamaran with their limited shipbuilding skills, rather than a more typical single-hull ship.
After deciding on the style, they needed to decide on the size. The initial idea was to make it big enough to fit their house, but even without testing, the math didn’t work. The house was solidly built and heavy. To make the catamaran large enough to hold its weight, they would need larger trees than they had access to.
Discarding that idea, they decided to scale back their plans and reduce the size to something more manageable.
After testing their plan with Matt’s AI, they started construction.
Matt and Susanne worked together to take down and strip trees while Liz and Aster worked on the framing work.
By the end of the day, they had a half-decent pile of wood for them to work on tomorrow, and a half-finished frame laid out.
It was a nice evening as they spent the remaining daylight eating a nice spread of BBQ rabbit before turning in.
Matt was woken up from his sleep when Liz called out for them. “We’re under attack!”
That jolted him awake, and in less than thirty seconds, Matt threw on his set of physical armor and readied his sword. Liz was already outside the house, and he followed seconds later with Aster and Susanne on his heels.
From the shore, frogmen were exiting the water in the dozens.
Instead of attacking their house or them all, the monsters were heading directly at their boat.
Liz, who was the fastest to wake, lashed out at the nearest one and stabbed deep into its thick barrel chest. Blood flowed, but even as that single monster turned to her, the others kept attacking and tearing apart their boat.
Matt reached the monsters, and his sword took the first out in a sweeping attack that came up through its legs and then back down.
The monster died in that single attack, but the Genesis Energy Matt got for the kill was minuscule. He couldn’t even cast a single [Fireball] with the amount he got.
That didn’t make sense with the rules of Genesis Cultivation, as it normally increased the reward per kill massively. If they only gave this much Genesis Energy, it implied that they would give nothing if this was a different floor.
After Matt cut down another two frogmen, he slowed down and eventually stopped moving altogether. Like that, the monsters stopped targeting him altogether.
Pulling back, he called out. “Retreat. Let them have it. They’re trying to destroy the boat and only the boat. It’s half-wrecked already. Let ‘em have this one.”
After they pulled back, they had the pleasure of watching the frogmen pull their boat apart and drag the cut wood into the water, where they vanished.
Left on an empty beach, Liz cursed. “f**k this place. First, it drops us off in the middle of nowhere, then expects us to build a boat without any of our prepared information. Then it sends monsters to destroy our hard work.”
She turned and led the four of them back into the house, where they all went to sleep. They weren’t in danger here with these frogmen, so there was no reason to keep watch.
Aster was the only one not to fall asleep immediately, as she had eaten one of the fallen monster’s hearts and regretted that decision. She spent ten minutes washing her mouth out, bemoaning the fact that food would never taste good again before finally settling in for the night.
- Writer
