Dark Souls: Pump-a-rum

After watching the Swordmaster fall to his death, Drake pulled his new weapon, the Uchigatana, out of his shield. Like when it was pierced by crossbow bolts, the crack in the wood plate started to fuse, and the wood knitted itself together, returning to its original form.

Drake inspected the Uchigatana.

The blade was around 70cm long with a notable curve not unlike a saber, it was forged in the style of a Japanese katana and patterned by rippling shades of silver-black steel, it looked deadly.

The hilt was wooden, 15cm long, and was wrapped in crisscrossing black fabric, allowing for a firmer hold, it came with an ornamental guard formed from a steel dragon twisting around a golden sun and was capped off with a simple black pommel.

Unfortunately, the Swordmaster had taken the scabbard with him, and it was now lost to the murky world below.

Drake waited patiently by the edge of the word, and soon enough, the soul of the Swordmaster rose up from the grey clouds and rushed towards the Dark sign ring.

The soul was small, tiny in comparison to champion Iudex's, but similar to Iudex's soul, the Swordmasters soul-hue was different from the pale white of a hollow. It was a shining silver-black mass of flame.

The soul's color was exactly like the steel that made up the blade of the Uchigatana Drake now possessed.

When it rushed into Drake's ring, he felt only a marginal increase in his strength, but that was not the real value of the Swordmasters soul.

Knowledge, unceasing, burst into Drake's mind.

The Swordmasters had lived a life dedicated to the sword, and after, even as an undead, he continued to practice and hone his mastery. He had long forgotten his name, his past, and all that remained was the sword.

The fruits of centuries of sole dedication to the art of the sword were now Drake's, locked away in his mind.

Drake gave the katana a few swings getting a feel for it, like with Iudex's knowledge of halberds he had not built the muscle memory to properly apply the skill instinctually.

"I will just have to practice a little... At least now I have a proper weapon. There's no point in keeping this crappy crafted spear." Drake said, kicking the spear he had dropped during the fight.

"There are just a few things left to do. I want to see if Andre can upgrade my new weapon with titanate, trade some stuff with the crows, and pick up the loot hidden above the shrine.

Drake decided to go for the loot and trade first. If he remembered right, there was an Estus shard that would unlock another use in his Estus flask, as long as he brought it to Andre, the firelink shrines smith.

Drake had noticed that like the game, the Estus was restored by the bonfire, but once he left the world of dark souls, he didn't know if there was any way to replenish it, so it was best he got the flask filled with the maximum possible amount of Estus before he left.

Drake walked down the stairs and passed by a tree, hanging from its dead branches was a shield. He chose to ignore it as it looked inferior to his current one.

He returned to the firelink shrine's entrance, this time taking the stairs up to the right instead of walking down to the firekeeper. At the top of the stairs, Stone archways opened up the shrine to the outside world.

Standing under an archway, something caught Drake's eye, a hulking mass of wood and stone that formed a sculpture similar to the upper body of a man, but the face was sunken in, missing, left in its place was an empty black hole.

"The tree giant," Drake murmured to himself before walking up to it.

Standing below its head, Drake tried to look into where its face should have been curious, and something small drops out from the tree giants head.

Drake catches the falling object on the inside of his shield and picks it up, holding it in his hands.

It was a seed that also sometimes dropped in the game.

Drake's brow furrows as he tries to remember what precisely the seed was supposed to do or mean, drawing a blank, he puts it in his bag and moved on up to a stone spired tower a separate building, part of the firelink shrine.

Drake found a corpse by the tower's gated entrance. It had a soul floating above it, which Drake quickly absorbed before pulling at the gate, trying to see if he could rip it out of its frame.

The gate held firm, so Drake moved onto his plan B, turning around there was a pale-white dead tree with branches hanging over the roof of the shrine.

"Just like I always did in the game, then... I'm not paying that old hag twenty thousand souls for a bloody key." Drake declared before running at the tree.

The tree was slanted having grown on uneven terrain, Drake ran up the tree's trunk before jumping to the side in a bid to land on the shrine's roof. He crashes is to the roof, dislodging and cracking its tiles as he falls on his side.

Drake stood up, dusting himself off, before making his way around the outside rim of the shrine's roof. He found a small entryway into the shrines rafters and walked in and across one of the two stone archways that supported the domed center of the shrine's roof. Where the two cross archways intersected, beams of light shone out from the between gaps of a man-sized bird nest, and out from this nest came feathers that cascaded down below.

A crow squawked out from the nest.

"You, you! Me, me, Pickle Pee! Me, me, Pump-a-rum!"