Pinball

Pinball's head shot up. Mishiro calling for him had snagged his attention. Something about her voice. She thanked him -- she told him that he was good at fighting, and that she felt safe around him. Pinball's eyes lowered. "Of course," he replied. His voice was almost sullen, yet strangely resolute. Most days he wished that he wasn't, that she didn't. On others he caught a glimpse of her and remembered why he couldn't stop. Pinball watched as Zamek dropped to his knees, unearthing his most treasured possessions in the world. Letters, jewels, and other trinkets had been locked away

<<THREAD SUMMARY>> Acanthus Receives: Acanthus | [Word Count: 5193/10 = 519.3] * [True Tier: 3] * [Group Factor: 0.7] + 1,000 EXP (Quest Reward) = 2,091 * 2 [recruit drive] = 4182 EXP 8,316 + 2,000 Col (Quest Reward) = 10,316 Col 12 Mats Kumatetsu Key And also this stuff: Pinball Receives: Pinball | [Word Count: 5193/10 = 519.3] * [True Tier: 8] * [Group Factor: 0.7] + 1,000 EXP (Quest Reward) = 3908 * 2 [recruit drive] = 7816 EXP 2,000 (Quest Reward) + 436 (Laurel Wreath) = 2,436 Col x1 T4 Dungeon Map (Recorded using Blank) Kumate

He didn't believe her. But he also didn't push it. After waiting a moment to see if she had anything else to say, Pinball finally relented with a nod. "Okay." He wasn't sure how she would act in the quests going forward. She presented this strange, unpredictable variable that he wasn't entirely comfortable introducing into his life. But he also didn't want to leave her alone. Not after that display. As they walked, Pinball's eyes were drawn to a path through the bushes... a dungeon? He withdrew a blank dungeon map and recorded the location. He was of a mind to collect as many dunge

Pinball didn't dwell on it. He nodded and led the way. Behind them, Zamek recovered. Though he was pale as a sheet and looked completely bewildered, the old man was wise enough to keep any comments to himself. He coughed, wheezed, and followed. It wasn't like he had much of a choice, now. There was a storm coming. They fled across the desert. Pinball had swapped his cloak for one longer, tattered. It bore the insignia of a forgotten guild. His eyes shone gold from beneath his hood. "There," he said. Ahead of them, the desert flattened; the sand gave way to stone. There was a shallo

His knife hissed through the air and embedded itself in the soft spot between the bear cub's skull and neck. It almost unceremoniously exploded into crystalline fragments, leaving just the two of them in the forest clearing. Pinball stood, knives out -- a flash -- and Tyrfing was replaced with the sickly crimson-black blades he used to inflict his DoTs. They disappeared beneath his cloak. First on their way here, and now this. There had been signs before too, hadn't there? He just hadn't noticed. Or maybe he hadn't wanted to notice. Maybe he had always known. Now there's a thought.

Oz went whistling along. Pinball kept his eye out for the warden. He knew that he was close. In truth, he had no reason to believe that he was -- the Endless Maze was just that... an endless maze. There was no right direction here, and the distinction between things like close and far was hazy at best. But there was a weird intuition that came with years of experience doing things like this. His hunch was proven correct when he heard the rumbling. The walls beside them shifted and slid apart. The path directly ahead of them led not into another series of walls and dead ends, but a wide o

This time, Acanthus joined him. A far cry from herself just a matter of hours prior, she launched herself into the crowd of bears without a hint of hesitation. Pinball watched as she cut through the group of them, her Sword Art cleaving her a path through the bloodthirsty bear cubs (cubs? they were pretty big for cubs). Despite the vague interest he felt by Acanthus' display of competence, Pinball wasted no time in following up with his own attack. He'd been in this exact scenario countless times, and he wasn't the type to be slowed by emotion in the first place (not anymore, at least).

Oz switched up very quickly. It was enough to make Pinball squint -- he wasn't totally oblivious to the scraggly man's theatrics, and even less so to what type of person he was. He didn't like being touched though. He'd slide Oz's arm off from around his shoulder nearly as soon as it was wrapped around his neck, but let him continue otherwise uninterrupted. He was essentially asking Pinball for protection in exchange for his boss drop. Truth be told, he would have escorted him out for free if he'd asked him to. But Pinball wanted the boss drop, and Oz didn't seem like the type that would

Pinball was quiet as he walked. That is to say, nothing was different in that regard. His fingers raced across his menu interface, stopping only to start scrolling through an inventory that seemed almost endless. He finally found what it was he was looking for, and he equipped both items to help him. In a flash, Pinball wore both Tyrfing, his simple yet elegant looking set of knives, and an old, tattered cloak sporting the insignia of a guild that he figured had likely faded from all minds but his. "Same plan," Pinball began to ask, "hunt down a few mobs on the way back?" It was a

He began making his escape through the fluffy brown mass of hot, furry bodies. They paid him no mind, even when he shredded up their cousins and friends on his way out. He watched his energy level dip. Should he really be playing it so fast and loose, when death was a concern? He thought about it for a moment. He couldn't see himself dying to these bears, unless they all suddenly turned on him, and they'd not shown any signs of hostility since he'd started. He figured if he made it out of the bear ocean quick enough, he could recover and likely finish off the rest of them afterwards. He could

From beside Morningstar, Pinball whistled. His stealth dropped, and there he was, arms crossed. "Nice hit." Morningstar had sent Terra Firma's health plummeting below half. "Might be killing it too fast, though." If they were after the monster's extra skill, they needed to crit Terra Firma, activating its stance change. But not if they killed it before it had the chance to do that. Pinball tilted his head. He realized how he must have sounded, suddenly appearing like that -- he apologized. If he had been in Morningstar's position, he would have been pretty irritated. "Sorry. Not tr

A woman trapped in a gelatinous cube wasn't on this year's bingo card. He wished he could have said that he'd seen stranger things over the years, but he wasn't sure that he had. The woman in the slime had a green cursor above her head. She was a real player. More than that -- though he couldn't quite remember how, she seemed strangely familiar. Pinball stood there for a moment, debating his best course of action. He could always reach in to save her, but what if it was a trap? He could try to cut her out, but would she take damage? And what if (however unlikely it might have been) he de

Grit teeth and a frown. The bandit chief grinned maniacally. Sweat dotted the brows of both. Pinball ducked beneath sword strikes and the spear thrusts. He exhaled. Ahsan's scimitar was thrust towards his chest. Pinball twisted and avoided it narrowly. He buried two knives in his chest and kicked him away as the other bandits attacked. There were a lot of them. He knew on their own he could handle each of them handily. In a smaller group, too, the fight would have already been over. But there were many more than what he was used to fighting and their attacks took decent chunks out of his healt

The bear was as good as dead. For a moment he watched as the boss's health bar ticked away in chunks. Then his attention turned to Acanthus. She was not putting the bear out of its misery. Not that there was any need to. It was as good as dead anyway -- why get in close and risk taking a hit for no reason? In life or death scenarios -- and boss fights, regardless of what floor or tier or whatever should always be treated as such -- you should always take every precaution to mitigate risks. You only needed to make one bad mistake, and your life was forfeit. You would die, your avata

"Bored?" Was Pinball bored? He wasn't sure. He didn't often approach people. He'd come on pretty confident for someone who preferred his solitude though, and now he was floundering like a fish out of water. He didn't usually enjoy company. He usually didn't get bored, either. Pinball just sort of existed on a day-to-day basis, and that was usually enough for him. He struggled to find the right reply, but Shin wasted no time in continuing down the path, seemingly unbothered by his sudden appearance -- and not at all intrigued by the orange crystal above his head, as far as he could tell.

Pinball stared right back at him. Why the hostility? He hadn't taken Oz for the type to get hung up over an orange cursor -- but Pinball had been wrong before, and he had no right to complain if he was. Pinball was, after all, a rightfully branded murderer. There'd be no changing that. He wouldn't change it if he had the choice to (and he did).That being said, he was about to tell him exactly why he was here, when Oz began to chide and dismiss him entirely. "Stalkers...?" If Oz wanted to leave, he wouldn't try to stop him. But Pinball's normally stoic expression betrayed genuine confusi

His energy was low. It was lower than he think it had been in a very long time. But still, despite thirty odd bears being slain, there was still an ocean of enemies remaining. He felt the slightest twinge of worry in his chest. What was going to happen when he ran out of energy? Every time a group of bears had gotten close, he had put them through the blender. A flurry of knives was enough to keep them at bay. It's what made them look so passive, so unresponsive. When he ran out of energy, was that going to remain the same? Or were the bears going to finally take their opportunity to maul him?

It was slowly coming to his attention that there were only so many ways you could kill a bear. Put a knive through their forehead, bury a blade in their belly, carve 'em up, stick 'em full of daggers -- after a while of the same thing, over and over again, it began to lack creativity and imagination. Not that Pinball felt particularly uninspired when it came to killing things (as much as he'd hate to admit it). But especially when they were passive, stupid, and generally unresponsive, Pinball almost felt that it was too easy. He had to remind himself that however they had gotten to his doorste

Pinball didn't throw knives this time. He just put the big brown bears through the blender, slashing wildly in all directions and carving them up haphazardly. Every attack hit, of course. It was nearly impossible to, in an ocean of bears. There was a certain amount of finesse that was required to wield his knives effectively; or at least they did because he had the bad habit of flourishing them. That was all thrown out the window in a situation like this, though. The correct answer was to just swing your arms around wildly and move on to the next one. The bears, as they always were, were compl

He pushed through the ocean of bears, and killed another four. One, two, three, and four. They all fell with ease. The huffing, puffing, grunting mass of large brown furred bodies did not stop. It did not even lessen in intensity. Pinball resolved himself for a long day. He wouldn't be able to stop until he'd thinned the herd -- no, eradicated all of them. How could he sleep when there was a constant stampede outside? Pinball's knives found their marks and he swam through the ocean of bears again. Again, they didn't seem to pay him much mind. Pinball sighed. How much more of this was he going

More knives, more bears dead. He threw two, cut down another two with a fresh pair in his hands. Like all the others, they didn't offer up much of a fight in response. Maybe it was because there was just so many of them that they didn't notice Pinball mowing through them by the squadron of them, or maybe there just wasn't enough room for them to properly attack in the first place. Pinball himself was having difficulty with just that thing. He was crowded in, boxed in by giant walking tanks of fat and fur. They looked at him with stupid eyes, not recognizing or perhaps not caring that he was in

Another thing to note about the army of bears outside his home was the heat. The heat generated from a hundred something giant, heavily furred, hot-breathed beasts was overwhelming. Pinball would have started sweating if it was the real world, surely, but it didn't make the heat any less uncomfortable. He kept his hands on his knives and kept mowing through them. It did nothing to less the heat. Or the crowding. Whenever he cut down a group of bears, it felt like another group was already there to take their place. When would it end? He'd already cut througha dozen of them, and seemed to make

Big brown furred beasties stretched out across the forest like an ocean of fur. Tooth and claw, thick fat and fur -- it was lucky that Pinball was on a lower floor, and that they were simple trash mobs, or else Pinball might have had a much harder time working his way through that endless sea of mobs. Four had fallen to his blades, and another four quickly followed. He kept his back to the door of his home, Green Garden. At the end of the day, he was horribly outnumbered, and he couldn't afford to draw the aggro of more than a small group of bears at the time. It was lucky then that they showe

He was going to be rolling in col, materials, and loot by the time this was over. Pinball hurried across the stone floors of Green Garden. Outside, the cacophany of snorting and paws and shuffling was unceasing. Pinball made sure his stuff was equipped properly -- he was going to take full advantage of this opportunity, however annoying it might be. His cloak was equipped, and so was the right knife and his new trinket for looting mobs. Pinball nodded quietly to himself, sent a quiet prayer that he wouldn't have to deal with something like this on his doorstep again, and pushed outside. Immedi

He was surprised to find a shop out in the wilds. Usually they were in cities, behind the walls of safe zones, and thus a hassle to get into. He wasn't looking for anything in particular -- but they had such a good stock, it would feel bad if he let the opportunity slip through his fingers. Knowing that he was going to go on a grinding spree, Pinball selected one of the desserts that he had for sale. It had a Prosperity buff attached to it. Hopefully after he was done hunting, he wouldn't have to worry about Col again for a good long while. "Thank you." *** Purchasing: