Return To Winter Wood

The rest of my party were already gathered together when I got back into the game, organizing the only wagon we currently had at our disposal.

Most of a day had already passed while I was hanging out with my family, turning from the late evening I signed out from to a bright afternoon. The other clans had taken over the central area of the crater while thousands of bodies were bustling about hard at work.

Most of the workers were actually demons who were handling the manual labor and mana supply while only a couple hundred people from the different clans were putting that mana to use.

While the middle ground was cleanly melted and cooled into a smooth marble pavement about five feet deeper than its surrounding broken ground the surrounding broken ground only stretched for a thousand feet before. Outside of this small hundred-yard circle of a crater and its surrounding wall of broken ground were broad swaths of either cooled or molten ground.

The spaces between these work areas were all glowing a bright red from the heat of its neighbors so that even the marble pavement would be impossible to walk on for normal people or low leveled characters. For most of us, though, there were buffs and resistances and equipment which could easily compensate for such an issue.

As well, the region itself was a winter wonderland so most paved areas were only glowing or shimmering hot along their borders with the recent lava fields. To the north, south, east, and west from the camp crater in the middle were carefully paved roads with towering ramps lightly inclining out of the current outer walls.

Eyeing those ramps that stretched out for more than a hundred yards apiece on their way up, I remember the ramps that we had originally tried to make before finding out that this was a raid territory. Our ramp would have ended up being MUCH steeper than these, which would have put a lot of pressure on our rented land dragons. These ramps inclined gently.

"It's about that time," a friendly voice says softly from just behind and to the side of me.

Nodding my head in agreement, I say, "This place was crazy as hell and I had lots of fun, but it's time to go back to Sierra and finish things up. Afterward, Go, we're going to have to make some trips."

"You still need to go to the capital, we should probably set up a clan property or something in the area as well," he points out as I turn to head toward the wagon. "The rest of us are all packed up and ready to go whenever you are."

"Load up!" I call out loudly to the rest of the party and our familiars. The others were only slightly surprised by the sudden order but were only part of a second slower to respond than their familiars who were mounting up around the demons and getting ready to go.

Since there was only one wagon only Agnes, Lil, Oleander, and Merch were going to ride for now while everybody else mounted up on whatever was available. By the time I took my seat on Imperial to lead the wagon and its encirclement of defensive bodies, everybody was more than happy to head out.

For the first few moments of casual traveling through the central camp area, I simply appreciated the view while letting my mind wander back through my previous travels in the Winter Wood. We had found insane amounts of medicinal and general alchemy goods as well as literal tones of mob materials thanks to the constant confrontations.

After having spent about two weeks in the area, it was very likely that the road we carved on our way in was half eroded. Luckily, we still had half of our original ice scorpion mounts and it would be time saving to simply let Cweeper and Hermes handle the vanguard paving party.

Once we got outside of the camp crater, though, a familiar opportunity was soon presented to me and probably also presented to the rest of my party.

[Fast Travel YES/NO]

In the top left corner of the notification were the number of party members to vote and nobody had yet voted. So, I decided to pave the way and vote yes. Everybody else in the party made the same choice within the following second and the world suddenly brightened into the bluish gray of Fast Travel.

When we came out of Fast Travel it was once again late in the evening around the same times that I had signed out and we had already made it to the edge of the broken plateau itself. Just a few dozen yards ahead of my point position was the half-baked ramp leading up to the plateau from the ground below.

Just looking at it in the dim moonlight filtering through the clouds from more than one direction in the sky was giving me a headache. However, most of the groundwork was already laid and I was at least a hundred times more magically capable than I had been. Ten thousand MP and a couple of minutes later, we made our way down the new sleek blacken polished marble ramp that stretched forward as far as any road ramps back in the crater.

Making camp at the bottom of the ramp, I sent out our few remaining trolls, Cweeper and Hermes, and a couple of the smaller demons out into the frozen forestry. Even though we ourselves were going to sleep we had still spent nearly all of our stockpiled assets of food and ingredients during the different phases of the raid. Our overpowered familiars were more than capable of loot- foraging the landscape.

Waking up early the next morning, Cweeper and Hermes quickly walk me through the gathered foods, monster materials, and general bounties from the forestry. All of this was soon stored away in either the clan store or my own inventory if I could fit it.

Ever since the update, the players had their Player Inventories restricted. They were not shrunk down or anything since most players had spent their in-game gold on expanding it, but the expansion function was simply no longer there. If a player only had the initial hundred slots before the update then they were stuck with just those. New players, though, still had the option to spend the new gold coins at the same relative values for as much as one hundred more slots.

I, luckily, had spent a few thousand of the old gold to expand my Player Inventory and was still satisfied with the results.

Once the night's loot was put away, I spent a few minutes flying up to survey the area and our roadway leading out of the Winter Wood. Thankfully, much of it for the closest few miles was still in perfect conditions but as the road took certain turns while growing closer to the village outside the forest the road gradually decayed.

Only the first half of our crude road would cause us any real trouble by eating up our time and, as I suspected, we received another Fast Travel option not long after we set out from camp. After coming out of Fast Travel to see that it was still not long after proper noon, I put up a short vote on whether or not to rest the dragons whose levels were now in the eighties after all of their experiences.

Since the dragons were now working in tandem and much stronger than before, nobody felt that they really needed to rest and we once again set out. When we came out of Fast Travel again, though, it was to find our familiars just entering a conflict with dozens of several different animal types all led by trolls. Only seconds after we were under attack, though, we received a large amount of loot and a couple thousand experience from killing and capturing everything.

Cweeper and Hermes were the oldest and smartest familiars as far as our group was concerned and thus they knew our methods well. They had made sure to ensnare and capture at least half of the trolls and exactly ten of each beast type present. The rest were all slaughtered for three or four silver coins apiece and around a hundred experience points.

Despite the fact that we now had a couple thousand unbound demon familiars in our clan store, most of them were restricted and for obvious reasons and thus we would always need bulk amounts of everything that we could get. We now had a little more than three hundred Clan Fodder who could really only save up to acquire Taurian mounts. Those people would need the strength and support of these elemental based creatures while saving up the contribution for those mounts.

For just that reason, even the trolls were only listed for one thousand points apiece. Even before we had set up an early camp, all the familiars we posted in the clan store had been bought out. It was not a surprise, though, familiars were literally a part of our clan whether concerning our original party tactics or the buffs provided from joining the clan itself.

After camp was set up, the familiars were all left behind as guards while my team and I set out as soloists in every possible direction. It was time to restock our personal supplies and materials with everything we could get our hands on. As well, it was to evaluate our new abilities against weaker opponents since we were returning to an actual noob region.

Just moving at my full speed and poking someone would land as much as two hundred damage to a low leveled and lowly armored player thanks to my Agility perks and general buffs. Before the update, that could have killed people. Now, though, everybody gained more HP just by leveling so only low leveled magic characters might die on contact.

Surprisingly, it took over half an hour of wandering through the snowy forestry before a point of interest even popped up on my compass bar. I had not even come across a confrontation. Sure, there were plenty of birds and other small game animals scattered throughout the forest that contracted against the bright and pale woodland but I had no use for hunting them.

Ten minutes after finding a direction to travel in, though, I can across my first confrontation. Since I was over leveled for the area my enemies were both numerous and of mixed species. Trolls, being the overall strongest mobs in the region, were present and mounted on the second place all-rounders. Wolves.

The wolves all looked like regular alphas which stood very tall but several feet shorter than my own Alpha. Their shoulders were level with my biceps and they could raise their heads to look me in the eye. The trolls themselves were lightly armored in leather and animal bone weaving vastly different front the ice and troll bone defenses of the raid's trolls.

For a brief moment I had an almost PTSD style flashback to one of the times our full caravan was under attack from both trolls and wolves and I had taken one particularly nasty hit during the fight. Something that would have killed a person with no questions asked in reality.

Smiling as I rolled my shoulders to loosen them while being surrounded, I do not even bother drawing my Hauntings but instead lunge forward for almost fifteen yards and seven feet off the ground with one fist drawn back. Blurring up to and passed a stopped troll and wolf, I simply let my drawn fist plant itself in the troll's face with my movement speed's damage before following through with a proper punch.

Around ten percent of HP was all that drained from the trolls suddenly appearing health bar, but that meager amount as just from making contact. When I threw my full weight, momentum, and Strength into the actual throwing of my fist, the troll was sent flying straight back through the air with their arms flailing forward like a rag doll. They were out cold and in critical condition even before crashing into an icy tree and some shrubbery.

Landing only a few yards behind the startled stiff wolf the troll had only just been riding, I casually wave my hand while casting five hundred MP of Splash and equal amounts Frostbite over the wolf. The wolf soon became a six-foot tall plume of ice that stretched out to one side toward or from me. Despite being an ice regional creature, its health steadily dropped several percent every other second.

While the others were recovering from the shock or finding new positions in the incomplete circle I had hopped through, I simply hopped forward once again. This time covering the twenty yards of open, I land behind a troll while they were turned around to seek a new position and cast the same combination of Splash and Frostbite. Thankfully, the environment assisted the freezing process.

After a few more hops and half as many punches, half of the enemies had either been frozen or knocked out in critical condition with a single punch. If I used an open hand, most of them would have probably died. As it was, the remaining half were left with no choice but to converge on my position and try to unleash their skills and the skills of the wolves from whatever position available.

They had been smart to isolate the risk of friendly fire with range as sub-sentient species, but it was still a mistake.

Despite being under fire from combination of ice related skills, by affinities, resistances, and overall defenses had soared above the levels I had been before. Even with combination of sonic and ice attacks bearing down on me, I only lost about one percent of HP per second. My armor alone was at a level to strip most of the damage from these attacks sourced from my racial weakness.

Risking their numbers, I simply slap an open hand out and spin around while unleashing a Spirit Wave. Not only the mounted trolls and their wolves were sent sailing into the air but so was the snow and forest biomass covering the ground for several feet of depth. When the attack ended, I stood on a three-foot frosty dais of earth amid thirty yards bared frozen soil.

The damage itself was nothing like the knockback of this unarmed spiritual skill but the trolls and wolves were still left dazed and impaired strewn about the ground with much less than half of their HP.

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