Chapter 486 – Flashlights

Sophia frowned at Notii. She wasn’t sure that they’d be better off together if they were planning to stick near a stronger group to kill anything they couldn’t. This was a treasure hunt, so it would probably be better to separate and search more area. She was certain that Ssssit and Dav would be able to sneak into some places with monsters, but she wasn’t sure if it was worth it or not compared to just covering more ground. “Shouldn’t we split up?”

“If your defenses are good enough, yes,” Rivexy told her. “But if you’re going to stay near a stronger team to get help, you need to be able to hold out until they get there or run fast enough to get away. Monsters aren’t always obvious in the forest. Your Shield will keep you from being instantly killed, but with your upgrade disadvantage that may be all it does.”

“That’s all Sophia needs,” Dav stated confidently. “She’s really, really hard to hurt if she’s prepared. One feather remaining is all she needs.”

“It’s not quite that good,” Sophia muttered. She felt her face heating up at the compliment, but it really wasn’t as useful as Dav was implying. “The feather has to be in my aura. It can be attached to someone’s armor or weapon but even though I can boost someone with a feather across the Lifeweb, that’s not enough to Plume Shift.”

“Or you can feather-jump,” Dav reminded Sophia. “I know you don’t like scattering the feathers but that’s what they’re for.”

Sophia scrunched her face to show him how she felt about it. “It’s not that, at least not mostly. It’s disorienting to jump that quickly. I have to find the new feather and shift repeatedly. You saw me get turned around a couple days ago.”

Dav chuckled. “By mistaking a feather left by a passing Archon for the one you were looking for, yeah. That’s probably not too much of a problem here, but even if it is … there won’t be many things that can travel that quickly. Once you’re far enough away, you can fly; there probably won’t be much that can outfly you.”

“Other than you,” Sophia countered. “So there will be some. Probably. But, uh, yeah, I can probably run for help if I have to.”

“Run to me, then,” Dav offered. “I can stay at the edge of your aura. That’s probably a good distance anyway, since it’s as far as you’ll be able to look for magic.”

That was a fair point. Sophia knew Dav could carry her, and he was faster than she was, whether she was feather-jumping with repeated uses of Plume Shift or flying. He couldn’t keep up the movement for as long, but he could easily get to a nearby team. “And Notii and his team can spread out past you to look for stuff. Ssssit can hide you if we find something we think you can sneak into and plunder, I do like that. Ah, Rivexy, were you sort of offering to have your team stick near us?”

Rivexy showed all of his teeth in a grin that very clearly made the point that bears weren’t herbivores. “That is why I suggested it. Yes, we’d be happy to take care of any monsters you need us to for some of the treasure. One quarter to the team that finds it, three to the people who deal with the monsters. If you kill some of the monsters, we’ll adjust accordingly. It should let you be a lot less careful. If you see something you don’t want to take on at all, call us over and we’ll handle it.”

“Covering more ground’s worth that much?” Sophia hadn’t expected to get even a quarter of a cache where all they did was find monsters and then call it in to Revexy’s team. That seemed like quite a bit for nothing more than telling the other team about something they’d otherwise just have to avoid. If she thought she could deal with the monsters, she could still kill them, after all. 

Sophia wasn’t sure if there would be any monsters she and Dav could handle. While it was true that the Flying Stars regularly killed third upgrade monsters at the second upgrade, there were five of them. By the time she was handling monsters on her own or with only one other person, she was near the top of the upgrade, and she wasn’t even quite to the halfway point of the third upgrade yet. 

Revexy nodded. “Early in the Event, there’s enough to keep us busy, but that’s not true later. If we weren’t there, you’d just skip them and we’d have to find them without knowing if you’d cleared the area or not; it’s much faster to simply kill the monsters than to search for hidden treasures. We’ll probably do that early on, but eventually there’s nothing left to do but search.”

“A quarter still seems a bit low when we’re telling you exactly where to go. We can cover a lot more area than your team can if you’re staying together to kill monsters,” Dav countered the original offer.

Revexy laughed. “But we’re also not covering that area if we’re coming to help you out. Fine, fine; a quarter if we have to come to you and abandon the area we’re searching, a third if you bring them to us, as long as we’re not fighting anything else. If we are, you need to delay them long enough that we aren’t or we get all of it for rescuing you. Or we can go back to a quarter standard for everything.”

“Sneaky,” Dav said with a grin. “You don’t get extra if you attack something after we tell you we’re coming, only if you were already in a fight, and if we help, it increases our share.”

“That’s already on the table,” Revexy answered. “Does that mean you accept?”

“Sophia and I do,” Dav agreed. “You’ll have to talk to Notii about his cut.”

There were many reasons Sophia preferred to have him negotiate; this was definitely one of them. He cared about the difference between a third and a quarter of a cache; Sophia didn’t. As long as they got the Cache Reward Chips to buy the Event completion, Sophia would be happy. That had to be the thing that allowed them to reach the next Branch in the Moonlit Branches and would let them talk to Issvako.

Sophia had even less interest in the discussion between Notii and Revexy, so she took a glance at the Event information. Fewer people were allowed in than were in the third Branch’s Meteor Pillars Event, and the Event was filling faster, but there was still space for several hundred more. Somehow, Sophia fully expected that there would be fewer people who chose to drop out of this one; a treasure hunt sounded less dangerous than a team flag defense. 

The fact that there were multiple ways to approach the treasure hunt also helped. There were almost certainly people with Spheres that weren’t useful for killing waves of monsters that would be wonderful here. Ssssit was a good example of that; he was only useful on one of the waves in Meteor Pillars. He was very useful there, but that didn’t change the fact that he needed a good group around him to make things work out.

A warm hand on Sophia’s shoulder pulled her attention to Dav. “Can you use the Lifeweb to track what other teams have explored? I can track where I’ve been, and probably where you’ve been, but not anyone else. That will help keep us on track so we don’t check the same spot twice, but it would be better if we know what others have cleared too.”

Sophia frowned. It seemed like there ought to be a way to do that, but there were obvious issues. She could try to gather together what everyone did in some sort of map, but the impressions she got from the Lifeweb didn’t exactly come with a GPS location. At best, there was a general idea of what direction they were in and maybe a rough idea of how far away they were, but that wasn’t even close to enough information to track which areas were cleared out and which weren’t.

The only person who knew which caches were cleared out and which weren’t was the World Tree itself.

Was that a possible answer? Sophia could share information from Cliff to others, and with Scion of the Towers, the World Tree’s information was also available. She’d mostly used it for information on monsters, but there was no real reason she couldn’t share information on the scenario they were in if the World Tree would let her. 

She reached out to the World Tree to ask for permission, the same way she would have asked Cliff. “Can you share which areas aren’t worth looking in? It doesn’t have to be very precise, in fact it’s probably better if it isn’t, and it definitely shouldn’t say where the caches are, but even if it’s just knowing that the central area is cleared out and we should move farther out would help.”

The World Tree didn’t answer immediately. Sophia was used to that; Cliff didn’t answer immediately most of the time, either.

The remainder of the time they had was spent planning. It was important work, fleshing out the simple principle of “stay close enough to be rescued while finding good things” into something that would actually work in different circumstances. 

Sophia had a number of things to offer, and to her surprise they weren’t simply her aural plumes; instead, her most important contribution to the planning turned out to be her ability to make magelights that were focused and would last for a couple of hours. The forest was dim and not everyone could see in the dark; even those who could wanted a focused beam of light because the caches sometimes had polished metal hinges that would catch the light. 

Sophia wasn’t sure how she felt about being demoted to “flashlight / laser pointer manufacturer,” but she wasn’t about to argue. If they wanted focused magelights attached to a stick, coin, necklace, or even their sword she was willing to make the magelights.

That turned into a discussion of all of the different forms a cache might take. Natural treasures were the easiest; while they varied immensely, they were probably out in the open instead of concealed in a container. If they were exposed to the air, they were almost always protected by monsters. The short version was that if something looked odd, it was probably the Natural Treasure. Touching it would add it to your Event Inventory as long as the monsters were dead, disabled, or sufficiently distracted. 

Cache Reward Chips were always in a container, but not all containers held Cache Reward Chips; some held only a Natural Treasure. They also varied wildly in size and shape, with the most valuable treasures often hidden inside the plainest containers, especially if there were no monsters. 

Revexy paused when she said that and added, “And now that I think of it, I should warn you: some things that look like containers aren’t. If you ever see two containers or something that looks elaborate where it should be subtle, be prepared for a fight.”

Sophia groaned. She knew exactly what Revexy was talking about. It should have been obvious; what monster belonged in a treasure hunt more than a mimic?