Death March — Fixed

“Hello, Alex here. I want to talk to someone real, instead of constantly being forced to monologue!”

Since the dream didn’t seem to be ending, and there was no sign of the normal rapid changes, I decided to take the initiative and look for Human habitation.

Thankfully, at the edge of the map, there looks to be some kind of highway.

***

It’s been three days since I started my journey towards the highway--I have been walking day and night, yet I still have half of the distance to go.

While my stamina gradually decreases, it’s still abnormally high: 2800/3100; having decreased around 100 a day.

If this were a game, I should be okay for around twenty-eight more days, but I am already at my limit--I’m not sure if it is because of the Stat, or that I am dreaming, but I don’t feel tired. Well, I did get a little sleepy, but that was purely mental fatigue and habit, so I endured it.

Though I am only walking right now, even if I decided to run, my stamina wouldn’t decrease at a much greater rate.

So, why am I walking?

Because I just want to.

At the start, I began to sing while running--but with such a small repertoire, I almost immediately ran out of songs.

The surrounding scenery is magnificent, but unfortunately, it only rarely changes.

So I decided to read the, long, long log.

I normally don’t like reading logs in games but I have to do it all the time to find bugs in my coding, but it’s painfully boring to walk silently along an aimless road--so I begin from the very first entry.

Of course, it’s hard to read the text while running, so I decided to slow down and began to walk. I quickly got so absorbed into reading the log, I forgot my original purpose of getting onto the highway.

The log started with ‘Magic: All Map Exploration activated.’, then the ‘Defeated…’ messages for defeating an uncountable number of Lizardmen and Dragonewts--finishing with the Dragon God. After-which followed ‘All detected enemies defeated.’ and lastly: ‘Conquered: Source: Dragon God Valley!’.

Source?

What’s that?

Then the log continued with the listing of loot, and the record of Leveling up--the loot records occupy around 80% of the Log; common gold and equipment. Then there is various forms of Dragon materials, ranging from horns, to fangs, and even scales.

Up to this point, I can easily understand the quantity of the loot, and even guess at the quality, but what remains is; strange.

Lizardman and Dragonewt corpses are stored.

Is this for a Necromancer’s use?

The rest seem to be daily goods used by the Lizardmen, like food and fuel--I can’t really use such items though. Furthermore, they all have the prefix of ‘broken’--aren’t these just garbage?

As one would expect, reading through tens of thousands of random details would be troublesome.

Thankfully, the storage seems to work on principals similar to those of WW, which allows the user to search and classify items by type and tag--I designed it to work like this to decrease needed steps for when a long time player needed to find items rapidly.

There is also an optional ‘folder’ function--which allows loot types to have their own folders; however, this usually means that the sub-types are stored as well, without being seen. Of course, you can manually sort folders by type and sub-type, then drag the required item out, but I didn’t get the chance to code a better version of this; so it takes a lot of concentration and effort--less, though, than without any folders.

Certain items or classification of items can be registered into a custom tab.

Oops, I wandered off the story for a bit.

I can’t blabber on about the programming and background functions for too long.

I open two iterations of the storage window, to begin organizing items.

First, I create a simple folder for each general type--then I create sub-folders for differing sub-types in each folder. Luckily, the same type of items automatically stack--without this, the number of items would be much too overwhelming.

There is a lot of gold loot.

The most numerous is ‘Ancient Empire Gold Coin’: of which there is 1,001,200…wow--when I tried taking one out, it was quite large and heavy, around four times the size of a fifty cent coin and a fair bit heavier, at around 30 grams or so…if I were to make a guess, I would have around 303 Tons of gold.

In the real world, around 211 tons of gold is mined a year, where I come from--hoarding so much gold like this--is very Dragon-ish.

The next most numerous coinage is that belonging to the ‘Saga Empire’, of which there is around 40,000; when I took one out, it was much smaller, around the size of a twenty cent coin and only 10 or so grams.

Third is the ‘Crimson Treasure’ of which there is 30,000.

Ooh, a fantasy-looking money has appeared!

When I take it out, it has a Ruby-like appearance and sometimes lets out a flash of light, which comes from inside it; there doesn’t seem to be anything causing the light.

A bit mysterious.

The rest are 10,000 Ancient Empire silver and copper coins, Saga Empire and Shiga Kingdom Big Silver, Silver, Copper coins--these total around 7,000.

For now, I shall sort it by country.

Still, WW and FFW didn’t have differing sets of money in WW it was called War Bucks, and in FFW it’s Kaan--no other currencies exist, except for pay-to-win players who purchase from the Item Shop.

Hmm, these various currencies may come from a quiz show that I watch occasionally during breaks, impacting my dream.

There is also jewelry, ornaments and works of art, besides the money--simple rings, emeralds the size of fists, crowns and headdresses, a life-sized gold figure, a decorative shortsword, and many other valuable looking things numbered around 300,000.

Most are just expensive looking, normal, items--however, there seem to be Magic Items mixed in, around 5% of the total.

The detailed information for the Magic Items are much too long, so I skimped on reading it.

Skimming the information, I see that there are some things that catch my attention: Able to produce 100 liters of water a day - The Hell Water Bottle; Able to easily store 1,000 bills, the Magic Wallet; Able to stack 30 varied types of items, able to form stacks of 30 of the same item, 30 Holding Bag.

I put those three things on favourite.

Taking out the Hell Water Bottle, I drank some of the water; I also wanted to wash my face and hair, but gave up when I noticed that a lot of the dust from the Meteor Shower is still floating around.

Since I have infinite storage, there is no point in using a Magic Bag--but I really like seeing a long sword slide in and out of a small bag.

Thus ended the second day

***

Moving on, today is the third day; the clock has just passed midnight; well, I am not sure that it is only the third, since sometimes I turn off the clock--and it doesn’t have the date.

Since I don’t actually feel tired and it would hurt to sleep on the hard stone ground, I just keep walking. There’s a full moon tonight, so I have no problems seeing.

I sort the inventory to show materials and corpses, according to the log, there are only a few Lizardman and Dragonewt corpses. This is most likely because of the massive meteors--if someone received the full force of the blow, there wouldn’t be much in the way of remains.

However, there are a lot of Dragon corpses.

The log shows that I defeated two to three times the amount of Dragons as Lizardmen and Dragonewts combined--my inventory is very much like a Dragon version of an Elephant graveyard. Most of the materials are from body parts, but there are also iron ingots, medicinal plants, timber, and stone; they’re probably from things crushed by the meteors.

There are many random body parts and scales; regardless of type, there are 7,900,000,000 total items stuffed into an infinite storage.

Even an old Dragon skin mold, and husks, exist.

Losing to curiousity, I took out the scale of an Adult Dragon, which is around 50 centimeters in size.

“Wow, it’s huge. If the scale is this bit, I wonder how huge the body itself is?” I couldn’t keep the amazement out of my voice.

While I’m at it, I took out the scale of a Lesser Dragon to check the size--which is about equal to that of my palm.

All items that are tagged as Broken are put in a specific folder--I was thinking of throwing it away, but stopped because it would become a literal mountain of garbage.

I followed the principle of saving the best for last--it’s time to check on the weaponry and armour.

There are around 30,000 things in total.

The Lizardmen’s spears are especially abundant, things which begin with ‘Lizardmen’s …’ are around 20,000; they aren’t even Magic Items, just normal items made from copper and iron, but there are only a few strange armours.

I tried taking out one of the Lizardman spears--it has a two meter long wooden handle with a sharpened bone as the tip, it couldn’t really pierce the leather armour I took out to test it on.

Maybe it isn’t meant for combat?

There are Magic Items such as Dragon Skin Armour or Dragon Scale Armour; however, there are only around 100 or so. Of the remaining 10,000 half of which are Dragon based large swords, spears and bows. There is Magic jewelry with special effects, but I am not sure I completely understand their effects, so I put off playing with them for now.

There are several interesting things, like Holy Swords and Divine Swords.

Why are the Holy Swords named Excalibur, Durandal, and such?

There are also two legendary Japanese katanas named Muramasa and Kotetsu.

With building tension, I joyfully start swinging Excalibur around--it should be quite heavy, but I can swing it around as though it was a wooden stick. Beautiful traces of light emit from the blurring metallic blade.

Something which drew my attention, before I was distracted by the mythological blade, was that there was a Divine Sword which had no name.

I subconsciously expected to get the Sword Skill when a swung Excalibur around, but it didn’t appear--I felt a minor sense of disappointment, but the joy of the blade overcame that.

However, unusual things also exist: Cannons and Ballistae; things that are commonly used by large armies, or placed on forts to counter flying enemies. As I skim the descriptions, it pops out to me that they don’t use gunpowder, but Magic Power instead.

Ooh, a gun!

100 Handguns, 50 Rifles.

Just for the record, there are no guns in FFW, but there are cannons in WW though.

With a grin, I take out the smallest of the Magic Guns, which is a pistol-type with excessive ornaments; there is also a trigger guard attached.

While, in the real world, guns have safeties--but in my dream, there is a sliding bar with numbers ranging from 1-10, I set the scale to 1.

Aiming at a nearby rock with one hand, I pull the trigger.

A ‘Pssh’ sound rings out, yet I cannot see any trace of the shot.

When I walk over and look at the rock, a hole around the size of a ten cent coin is drilled through it--it’s a two meter thick, hard, rock. But only 1 MP is consumed, and there is no recoil, it’s like firing a laser--this seems totally Science Fictiony, instead of Fantasy.

Setting the scale to 10, I fired.

With a loud cracking noise, the rock shatters--tiny shards of stone and dust flies away, there is a smooth trench bored in the ground as well.

Wow, this is powerful--around 10 MP is consumed.

“Well, that is way too efficient!” I grin happily and cheer quietly.

This type of weapon would break the balance of most games--well, at the early level of the game.

After that, I started walking while aimlessly firing the gun, set to the first level so as to minimize damage to surroundings, for the next hour.

***

Finishing checking most of the items, I began to think about something that bugged me before.

“What is a Source anyway?” I mutter to myself.

I am trying to figure out what the ‘Conquered Source: Dragon God Valley’ from the log--but beside the log, there is no other mention of the Source: Dragon God Valley anywhere else.

Usually I would have said “It’s a dream anyway…”--but something is bugging me.

Well, I have been spending an unknown number of days without conversation with anyone…I’m not suited for that, and I was lost in some kind of fog for around a day, I think, before I looked noticed that I had finally almost reached the highway.

But according to the map, there is no Human habitation around, other than the highway which lead west…ish--there is no presences around, besides myself, displayed on the map.

It was then that they probably ran away in fear, because of the catastrophe; aka the Meteor Shower with thunderous roaring and earthquakes.

I stopped running, and began walking again, bored and wanting even that tiny change of pace.

“Urgh, I really want a shower.”

As expected, not having a shower, and having been covered in dust, for three days is just too much.

Thankfully the dust cloud has mostly disappeared and it is now possible to wash off the dirt that is caking me.

With a sigh, I store my clothes and shoes in my storage, find a suitable rock to sit on and pour water from the Hell Water Bottle down onto the top of my head.

“Brrr…it’s a bit cold--but I, Am, Alive!” I laugh, a feeling of relief flooding my body, before taking clean clothes out from storage and wipe off the excess water.

Even without getting dressed again, I take a canopied bed out of storage and place it on the ground; to take a well deserved, refreshing, nap. On this day, I slept for the first time in four or so days.

This bed had some kind of Magic that allowed it to stay cool during the heat of the day, and I stirred slightly as the sun dropped below the horizon and the temperature dropped, the bed warmed itself.

The next morning, I noticed that I could hang laundry on the canopy, so I took a bucket from storage and wash my clothes, hanging them up on the corners of the bed.

While waiting for them to dry, I lazed around on the bed and ate beef jerky for around two or three hours--I was expecting someone to pass on the highway, but the radar didn’t change, even as the time changed to afternoon.

“If this was a book, manga, or anime--I would have met a noble girl being attacked by bandits by now.” I do like that template, “The service in my dream is so bad.”

Of course I shall turn a blind eye to the fact that I easily got end-game treasures, and a significant number of levels.

A flag would occur if this was a normal dream…or tale.

But nothing happened.

After changing back into my dry clothes, I stored the bed and began walking towards the highway again.