CWD: OE ~ Three

Since Nacho had upgraded his Ingredient Processing ability to Tier one, specifically level nineteen, they didn’t need to pull the Tier two Massive Millet Stalker into the forest. He could process the Putrid Mana out of the grains remotely. He bought bright yellow sacks from the Store with ‘It’s Juxta-bag’ written on the front in big red letters.

Brie was clearly still feeling concerned about their reactions to her reckless charge, so didn’t say a word against his request for her to keep watch. There was a good chance that they were going to be ambushed by other monsters, or by any of the Millet Stalkers that might’ve found a way through the roots covering the ground. The cook had to work quickly, because he only had a certain amount of time before the monstrous grain liquified—and he had no idea when that would happen.

To turn the ingredients into food, he needed to have at least three ingredients. Nacho knew that he planned to make donuts from the millet flour, but which recipe should he use? In his All Things Chicken and Breakfast Happiness chapters, there was a recipe for chicken donuts, but Nacho wasn’t feeling that adventurous. He turned to the section on Jimmy’s Fast Food for Everyone, and decided upon ‘Jimmy’s Belly Bombers’, a yeasty raised donut with a sugary glaze.

Nacho flopped his Aria onto a rock and started going over the ingredient list for the Belly Bombers. Wizards might have spell books, but he only had access to a cookbook. Thus far, he had three full cookbooks in his Aria: Colonel White Beard’s All Things Chicken and Breakfast Happiness, Jimmy Fast Food for Everyone, and Hiccup’s Cantina Cuisine. He had his eye on one more, Insect Eats: Delicious Bug Recipes, since they kept encountering bug monsters. He shook his head and grimaced. “Somehow I know if I get that, I'm not going to see another insect for weeks…”

Even though he was on a time limit, what he was doing at the moment was an important step. If he didn’t have a recipe that could actually make use of the millet flour like he hoped, then going out and harvesting it was going to be a waste. More than that, it was going to be a threat against his very life, thanks to the monsters. Nacho shook his head and muttered, “All of this… for a chance at an Epic donut. Is this reality insane, or what?”

His basic strategy was to process four cups of millet at a time, or at least enough to get four cups of the crushed millet. Thanks to his constant testing of his abilities, Nacho was almost certain he could get the Putrid Mana out, and then pound the grains into flour. To be fair, he wasn't absolutely certain, as sometimes the rules were funky when it came to things that the Patrons didn’t want players to be able to do. For some reason… they hated the fact that he was a Satiation Player, especially that he had maxed out the class line by becoming a Common Cook.

Nacho clanged his knives together—he didn’t need to do it to get the Juxtaposition’s attention, since the Patrons were always watching, but he liked the symbolism of it. It reminded him of his purpose.

“Here we go.” He could remove the Putrid Mana out of Ingredients at a maximum distance of fifteen feet. He crouched, waiting for the perfect moment to strike, watching for when the wind was in his favor, the monsters in the area were moving in a specific manner, and ju~ust the correct angle—there! His cleaver slashed seemingly lazily to his front, but nearly fifteen feet away, a millet grain was shaved off a monster they had slain.

Reuben held a bag open, and the monstrous grain Nacho had targeted split off the monster and bounced across the ground like a fumbled football. It took a little bit of finagling, but the Healer was able to catch it directly in the sack. Reuben gasped as he hefted the bag. “That was wild! Also, this is abyssally heavy. Tier two stuff gets heavy real quick, huh? Is it more dense, or is it the magic?”

“Couldn't tell you for sure.” Nacho felt like a real sorcerer as he processed out Putrid Mana and swept the millet seeds from one of the garishly colorful Juxtaposition sacks and into another. He managed to get nineteen rounds of the seeds processed before he was at the danger zone for Mana, yielding him eighty cups of whole millet.

Four cups of the millet weighed about six point two eight pounds, and so he ended up with a little over six hundred pounds of flour thanks to its strange weight. The System kindly let him store the twenty sacks in his Storage Slots—an extra-dimensional space—and the Patrons let players stuff them with the same basic items. Yet for some strange reason, Nacho wouldn’t have been able to wedge even one single stalk of wheat in with the millet. It was exclusive to a single item, or type of item.

“This is crazy, man. Last time you tried something wild like processing at a distance, all you did was get in the way.” Reuben laughed as millet seeds practically hopped into his garish bag. “What changed?”

“Practice makes better, my friend.” Nacho almost never stopped practicing at least some portion of his skills, or thinking of a way to use them in a better, more efficient manner. Nineteen rounds of Ingredient Processing level twenty-one ingredients at fifty credits per four cups gave Nacho a total of nine hundred and fifty credits.

When he told his team about the windfall, it was clear that Brie was trying not to be jealous over it. She had received a mere sixty credits for killing the Tier two monster, and Nacho perfectly understood her frustrations and what he needed to say, “I know that you’re upset about the credit scaling, but you need to remember that we’re wild outliers. The fact that we can hit above our Tier is already fairly unique. We aren't supposed to be fighting monsters this strong, not in a serious way. We should, if we are following the scripted plan, be currently working our way through hordes of Tier one creatures.”

“I'm not mad, I just think it's completely ridiculous that you are able to pull in so many credits from even a single kill like this.” Brie clearly wasn't getting it, and combined with her earlier recklessness, Nacho decided it was time to be blunt with her. “Just doesn’t seem fair.”

“Fair, is it, Brie?” The cook gave her a stone cold glare that made her freeze in her tracks for just an instant, a trick he had learned during his life of killing people for profit. “The Juxtaposition isn’t fair. End of story. I got a class that only one percent of the population had the option to get. How many of those people in the same position would have taken it? A fraction of a fraction. Add that on to the fact that I should be almost entirely a support class, unable to fight at all, as well as how quickly the ingredients go bad?”

Nacho tried to rein in his anger, so took a deep breath before continuing. “I would say most cooks get to process maybe—maybe—one kill a day. Our team is ahead of the curve in almost every single way. Get your head out of the clouds, and try not to get us killed because you are mad that we aren’t going ‘fast enough’.”

That was the end of any conversation for quite a while, he was sure. Even so, the situation made Nacho glad he’d chosen to be a Satiation Player. More than that, he was happy that he had been able to spend a few years as a fighter, and knew how best to utilize the choices he had been given.

“Should we be worried about those?” While Nacho and Brie worked in silence to package everything up, Reuben had kept an eye on the Stalkers. “Most of the time, they stay in the center of the meadow, but it looks like a few found a passage between the trees on the other side of the forest. If we want to keep the monsters bottled up, do you think we should dig out the space between the trees to block their escape? It’s already getting dark.”

“Better now than after they get somewhere else and make a mess.” Nacho agreed calmly as they purchased shovels from the Store. They went and started digging. Reuben had gone cheap, he had purchased a Common Tier zero shovel for twenty credits, and it showed. The red metal tip wasn’t connected very well to the yellow handle. When he drove it into the ground the very first time, the handle snapped.

“Cheap and useless?” Reuben wiped sweat off his head.

“The Patrons won’t remind you to buy Tier one stuff now that you’re Tier one. They’ll just mess with you.” Nacho raised up his own red and yellow spade. “I got a Very Uncommon Tier one shovel for only forty credits. It’s super dull, and the handle is splintery, but it should work.”

Brie nodded and decided to break her silence. “I went with Nacho’s recommendation.”

“Sure,” Reuben erupted good-naturedly, throwing his hands and busted shovel into the air. “Here’s the guy trying to save us some money, and all I get is ‘you should know better’. I see how it is. You’re conspiring against me.”

“Yes.” Nacho admitted freely, earning himself some side-eye as Reuben bought an upgraded tool. From there, they all worked quickly. Since they were all Tier one, they were far beyond the human limits of strength from old Earth. They didn’t stop digging until their trench had reached bedrock, which they hoped would stop the Stalkers from escaping just like roots seemed to do.

The sun had fully set by the time the work was done, and neither Nacho nor his friends wanted to stay in the forest near Murdering Millet Meadow. That meant a hard march back to a river to set up camp on the beach, and setting up watch rotations. There was no way to get a message to the Chips Guild that they were fine or that they needed to warn people to watch out for plant monsters.

Nacho knew that people would worry, as his team was supposed to have returned by now. Still, there was nothing to be done, since no one that wanted to see the morning would move through unfamiliar territory at night. The Dinner Party would just need to camp out and walk back the next morning, hopefully early enough to calm the masses.

The Guild Leader sat with his back against a dead tree, a pretty good seat that gave him an excellent view of his surroundings. He’d stowed his Sunday Brunch Armor for now, and was in his boots, jeans, and hoodie. He watched the area nearly unconsciously as he started thinking back to the Probability Vision. It felt good to be with his friends, just the three of them, like during their first weeks in the Juxtaposition. That had been what he’d wanted the three long years he’d been alone as the Shadow Killer.

“Why did I mess that all up by starting a guild?” He shook his head at his previous actions, trying to remember the logic that had gotten him from ‘I will keep us alive at all costs’ over to ‘I should take responsibility for a bunch of random people’. Most of the time, he wasn’t bothered; being allowed to test and experiment as much as he wanted. That meant that Nacho was in his kitchen cooking a dozen things at once, and had to pretend not to be annoyed by the interruptions here and there.

Assassinations had been a stupendous teacher of focus, but in the kitchen with pasta boiling, sauce reducing, and bread baking? He could have any number of things going all at once, and if he didn’t address them with a certain amount of aplomb and attention to minor detail, the food would be ruined. Then he would be out whatever amount of credits he had invested in the process, as well as the time he had invested.

Then there were ‘the Brittanys’, his new kitchen help that always pointed out his mistakes before he served the food. Even now, he wasn't entirely certain how those two teens had ended up as his kitchen staff, but Britt and Brittany loved to cook, and had dreamed of opening a restaurant. Who said dreams didn’t come true in the Juxtaposition? They had certainly been a lifesaver for him, a guy who had survived on earth only thanks to pre-packaged food.

Now the Brittanys organized the meals, took care of the logistics, and were in charge of hiring help as needed so that the huge number of guild members didn’t starve to death waiting for him to make meals or return from missions. They couldn’t make the food, but they could and did ration out the vast quantities of food that he left for their usage.

That reminded him that it had been weeks since he looked over his guild status, and should take a quick peek at his guild.

Chips Guild Stat Sheet

Total Guild Credits: 859,993 credits

Total Number of Members: 5,536

Guild Master: Eli Naches

Alternate Guild Master: Daniel Chronour

Third Alternate: Reuben Colby

Settlements controlled: Armor Mountain, Jalapeno Town, Tortilla Flats.

Reuben was sitting next to the fire on a Common Tier one camping chair, constantly having to adjust himself because it was so uncomfortable and rickety. At any moment it could snap and he’d go tumbling to the ground, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was drinking a root beer out of his white and yellow Yeti horn, and looked up when he heard Nacho let out a pained grunt. “Whatcha looking at, Nacho? Doing some shopping, or still waffling on that insect cookbook? If you want my two credits in warning… no one is going to want to eat bug gyros.”

“You know nothing!” Nacho shot back without thinking about it. “I’ve been adding bugs to your meals for days and you never said a word. Still, that's not the issue right now, I’m actually looking at the Chips Guild Stat Sheet.”

“I knew that was a cockroach.” Reuben mumbled as he spat a wad of phlegm into the fire. “Brie tried to convince me it was a date. I knew it.”

“When should I start taking benefits from the Guild?” Nacho desperately wanted to get a handle on this subject, and that manifested itself by having the words tumble out of his mouth in a rush. His friends looked at him with concern, and he coughed lightly to try and cover his embarrassment. “Sorry if that was a little... explosive, but it's been on my mind for a while. At some stage, we’re going to have to grab credits from the guild’s coffers and start leveling ourselves. We need to get to Tier two, even though that’ll make life harder, but we’re not getting there without outside financial support. That’s what the guild really needs to do, support us until we are essentially nuclear deterrents for other guilds.”

Just the idea of having so many Tiers of people to feed exhausted him. He’d have to prepare three different ranks of the same food—Tier zero, one, and two—to safely feed everyone. It wasn't like he could skip the weaker people; most people in this hostile world were still Tier zero, and the main source of their guild’s income.

“We could level ourselves now,” Reuben suggested eagerly, not wanting to put off power for even a moment when it was offered. “We have enough. For the three of us, at seventy-five thousand credits each, we could do it. If Old Bill, Kala, or Zack complains… we give them the bird.”

“Obscene finger gestures?” Nacho queried after Reuben paused leadingly, clearly hoping someone would bite.

“Au contraire!” Reuben tipped his bottle toward Nacho in thanks for taking the bait. “Not a rude gesture, a polite one! You cook up some fried chicken, Colonel’s original recipe. We literally give them the bird, deep-fried to perfection in a special blend of herbs and spices.”

“I… fail to see your point.” Nacho rubbed at the stubble that had grown in on his chin, an uneven mess that he wasn’t able to do anything about while they were in the field. “Because you failed to convince me, let’s see how you will present your case to the people holding the purse strings and pitchforks, so they don’t incite an angry mob. Let’s just talk to the council when we get back.”

“Boo~oo, my way is better.” Reuben clicked his tongue, though he gave up without another complaint. “On the plus side, we are getting the ambitious types, thanks to my Marketing ability. Not only did we win the Dragon Spear—excuse me—the Sewer Skewers, but we’re really starting to have an impressive city.”

“Three cities, or settlements, at least.” Nacho leaned back against the dead tree and scooped up some sand to let it fall between his fingers. “I’m not sure how much I like all of the… people. That is, the problems all the people bring.”

“So give up and leave them to fend for themselves.” Brie called in the darkness, knowing that he would never do something like that. “No? Didn't think so. In that case, you might as well worry about problems you can solve? On that note, should we have tried to use the Sewer Skewers in the Millet fight? Would that have helped?”

Reuben laughed at the thought of the cook trying to stab the wiggly monsters with a pointy object. “It might’ve helped Nacho stab himself. I’ve only ever seen him successfully fight with the skewers against rats.”

“I’m amazing with them in enclosed spaces where my enemies can’t get away very easily.” Nacho let conversation die off, knowing that he had nothing to explain. He was great with the weapon, compared to what anyone else could do with them.

He smirked at that thought, knowing that it wasn’t a fair comparison. Only Satiation players could use the Sewer Skewers, and he was the only S-classer that had survived until now. Nacho shook his head and grimaced, “Aw, man. Now I’m calling them that? This reeks of a marketing skill… Reuben, did you have something to do with people calling Satiation players S-classers?”

“Snore, snore.” Reuben stated aloud, attempting to avoid the conversation.

“You can’t just say ‘snore’ and actually expect me to think you’re asleep!” Nacho threw a moist pancake at his snickering friend, deciding that the conversation would just need to wait until another day.