The wagon came to a sudden jolting stop, knocking me off of my bench inside the wagon and out of the wagon. I landed on the ground with an ‘oof’ on my back, knocking the wind out of me, my helmet clattering down next to me. I laid there attempting to wheeze some air back into my lungs. The next thing I noticed was the sounds of battle up in front of the wagon train. I rolled onto my belly, still trying to get air into my lungs to get up, and willed my new warhammer onto my back, still in its sheath. I picked up my helmet and slammed it onto my head as well. I had my hammer disappear for the wagon ride since it would have been annoying having it on my back for the whole ride. I got up immediately and unsheathed the hammer, its radiance immediately pushing the darkness back and lighting up the surrounding area around me. However, it was really dark still. I rushed toward the front of the caravan, seeing glinting steel off torchlight on the front wagon swinging wildly around toward what looked to be Fred.

I threw the hammer straight at the opponent, the head of the hammer striking true and smashing them in the head with the hammer and it landing next to them. The man stood there, dazed at what just happened. Fred took the opportunity and immediately stabbed his sword into the man. I ran up to Fred as the seemingly-a-bandit dropped to the ground.

“Damn bandits,” I heard him mutter. “Good timing, Setari, I thought I was done for.” We clasped arms again. I picked up my hammer afterwards.

“Nah, you were holding your own, dude. Don’t sell yourself short. Let’s go help everyone else.” We ran toward the next bunch of people fighting a few bandits. I came up from behind one and smashed him straight on the head with the hammer, my notifications blinking madly as soon as he collapsed, dead. I rotated the swing down and around into the side of another bandit’s head as I stepped toward another bandit. He watched me swing toward him, knowing what was coming. The third bandit here was immediately mobbed by the other few people there and went down easily. I ran around to the other side of the cart and found Antivitz and the Elf mage, whom I just realized I didn’t know his name, the mage blocking hits from the bandit heavily on the offensive and blocking blows from Antivitz, his warhammer trying to find an entrance to hit the bandit. This guy was good. I saw him notice my glowing hammer and he made an attempt to disengage with the Elf, which left his guard open. Antivitz swing his hammer at a low angle and completely broke the man’s shin in two, the leg flopping around like a piece of jelly hanging off of a stick. He bellowed out in pain and collapsed onto the ground. Antivitz stood over him, hammer held high.

“Why did you attack our caravan?!” He bellowed out. I put the head of my hammer on the ground flat and leaned on it with my arms, watching this play out.

“I dunno man, we’re just bandits!” the guy whimpered. “I said we shouldn’t! There were no guards though! We thought it was ripe for the picking!”

“Ye thought wrong, ye damn piece of goblin shite.” Antivitz brought his hammer down onto the man’s helmetless head.

“Aaaahh! N-” His head splat like a watermelon on the ground. Blood spattered my armor, hammer, and the side of the caravan. While this was happening, Fred came and stood next to me without me noticing.

“You’re cleaning that up, you sodding Dwarf! Look at my precious white caravan cover! Ruined!” I lifted my hammer up to illuminate the blood on the white canvas cover on the wagon. Fred sobbed. “Blood is so hard to get out of that material!”

“I’ve got it.” The elf mage said a few words and pointed at the caravan cover and it was white like new again. He pointed upwards and said a few words and well and a white dome came over all of us around the scene and our armor got cleaned up, good as new. I picked up my hammer and sheathed it back in its holder and hid it off of my back.

“Ugh, let me go back to sleep.” I said, the adrenaline wearing off. I started to walk to the back of the wagon to go back to sleep. Antivitz and the Elf followed and caught up to me. We climbed back into the back of the wagon and before we all dozed back off, I asked the Elf what his name was. He told me his name was Arun, and I fell back asleep, my helmet back on my head as a crappy pillow.

The next morning I woke to the wagons still rumbling along, and Arun and Antivitz chatting about something that I wasn’t awake enough to hear. I sat up on the bench. I felt like a homeless guy taking a nap on a bus, only instead of curved seats for sitting it was a flat bench, which I imagine was probably more comfortable than bus seats by any stretch of the imagination.

“Antivitz, what are you guys on about?” I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

“Look outside!” he said, giddily. I turned my head to look outside the wagon. Outside, the fields and forests of Gor were long behind us and we were now in The Wastes. I opened up my map to see how far we were into it. We were a few miles into the area now.

“Jesus.” Bones were literally strewn everywhere. We crunched over them as we rolled along, mixed with dirt and whatever else was mixed into this grey, dead soil. I poked my head outside of the wagon as well to take a look at outside of the general area of the wagon. There was absolutely no life at all in the dirt around us, only death and decay. Antivitz wasn’t joking. There were literally millions of casualties in this war and it was just never cleaned up.

“We have to be careful of some Orcs in this area where we’re going to be digging today,” Antivitz said to me. “I’ve also persuaded Arun here to come along as well since it’s pretty nearby where the caravan was going to begin with.” I turned to Arun.

“Pardon me for asking, but where were you headed anyway?”

“Gor’s capital city, Tares. I just have some business there is all.”

“Say no more.” I waved my hand at him as if to say ‘no need to tell me anything else’. “Antivitz-”

“At this point lad, just call me Vitz.” He shrugged.

“Alright, Vitz, are these Orcs going to attack us at any point or just shove us out of our dig or something?”

“Nah, they’ll just yell at us to get out or something. I deal with them a lot. I also know their clan’s chieftain personally, the clan of Orcs being the Warmongers.” I chuckled as he said the clan’s name. “Something funny, lad?”

“No, well, yes, that’s such a generic Orc clan name, geezus.” Vitz chuckled as well at the irony of their name.

“Well, I never thought about it,” he chuckled heartily more, “but, it is, isn’t it?” We had a good laugh as the caravan pulled to a stop. “Alright lads-”

“I’m probably older than you Antivitz,” Arun started to say, as Vitz glared at him, making him stop talking.

“We’re at the digsite. Hop on out!” Vitz declared. I waved goodbye to Arun as he stayed in the cart, headed for Gor’s capital.

I jumped out of the back of the wagon, my burlap shirt mildly sweaty from the heat of The Wastes. I took off my helmet and stowed it in my bag. I looked around. The area was strewn with bones and old pieces of wood, as well as shards of exploded trees sticking out of the ground. It seemed like, actually, as I looked around, that the entire circle of The Wastes was ringed with trees that had just split into smithereens, giant chunks of trees sticking out of the ground. I also saw some Giant bones sticking out of the ground as well. I hadn’t seen one yet since they were technically an active race, but it must be crap to play as, if I had to guess at the lack of Giant players. I feel like the battle might have taken place in what was once a forest or maybe a large clearing ringed by a forest and whatever it was that created The Wastes blew everything up. I’d probably never know, though, I was interested. Vitz moved to the side of the clearing we were nearest, heading towards the wooded part of the area. We stopped just short of the forest, where a bunch of shards of wood and bone were. There were a lot of smaller pieces of wood, looking like old tent poles, perhaps?

“Alright lad, get to diggin’!” He held out a shovel he produced from seemingly nowhere since he didn’t have a bag, just pouches ringed around his belt. I took the shovel and poked the shovel into the ground. The shovel was light, but cut through the light dirt like a sword through air. The dirt was extremely soft and easy to move as well, almost like sand. “If we’re digging huge mounds of dirt, how do we fin-” as I attempted to move a bunch of dirt, I heard a grating noise, like my shovel hit something metal. I dropped to my knees and dug around whatever the item on the ground was. As I shifted away more dirt, a blue glow started to come from inside the dirt. Vitz didn’t say anything, just watched. He hadn’t even started digging himself yet! After a few more minutes of digging with my hands, I uncovered a large blue orb, ringed with gold bands vertically and horizontally. I inspected the item.

[Mana Bomb]

Charge: 100,000/100,000

Detonates on contact.

Location found: The Wastes

Then I had a notification laid over the description of the item. I looked away from the item to close the description and read the notification.

You have discovered the profession:

[Archaeology]

Discover old treasures lost to time, if you know where to dig and what to look for!

LCK+1

And then another notification came up, showing I had leveled up to level ten immediately in Archaeology with this find. Apparently that was a really good find, and I was halfway to level eleven. It looked like I’d probably get +1 Luck every ten levels in the profession.

But it was still a bomb, I realized.

“Uh… Vit-”

“Yeah, I see it, lad.”

“What do we do with it?” He pulled out a large syringe with a large needle. Still handheld size but just large.

“Stick this in it and pull all the mana into this syringe. Then we blow it up.”

“W-what?” I was extremely surprised by this turn of events.

“You’re very lucky to have found a mana bomb your first day out. We extract the mana from these and sell the pure mana at the shop, or use it for other purposes as well. It goes for quite a pretty gold coin, if I do say so myself.”

“How much?”

“About a gold per 5 charges, more or less. We tend to sell it a little bit at a time since it’s typically bottled by every 3 drops via syringe.” My eyes widened. There was fifty thousand gold just sitting in this mana bomb, more or less. “I get one of these almost every dig. They were pretty shoddily made despite the looks of the bomb. And since normal people can’t condense their own mana into usage for crafting things, Liquid Mana sells for quite a lot, since you can create other materials from the mana, depending on how much of it you have. So it’s like a wild card material for crafting.” I continued to dig around the orb as he was speaking to me, completely unearthing it, but leaving it in the hole. I took the syringe he was now holding out and held it to the glass , the glass seemed to reach a little bit for the syringe. I pushed it through and with a small pop noise, the syringe was in. I drew back on the syringe handle and it was like a super-powered vacuum was sucking up all the mana into the syringe. It was mildly satisfying to watch it being pulled into the syringe, the syringe being filled with a deep blue liquid.

After a couple minutes of doing that, the syringe was completely full and I handed it back to Vitz. He stowed it in one of his pouches.

“Alright, stand back, lad.” I moved back a healthy distance from the area. Antivitz unsheathed his warhammer.

“Vitz, what the hell are you doing?”

“Exploding the bomb!” With that, in one swift motion, he made to slam the hammer into the bomb casing, and just as he was about to look like he was going to smash it into it, he stopped short of hitting it. Then he just barely touched it with the hammer. I heard a small tink noise as the hammer just barely touched the rim of one of the gold rings, and it seemed to disappear from reality, being erased, line by line. It was like watching a 3D printer in reverse, almost. The parts that were disappearing were just floating up into the air as small sparkly bits, floating away and disappearing into the air. It was, in a word, beautiful. After the show was done, I exclaimed,

“I thought it was supposed to explode?!”

“Lad, ye think I would get that close to something that would explode and kill me? Please. I love doing that to those things, it’s my favorite part of finding those.” We both shared a laugh as I walked back towards him, and we got back to work.

The day progressed with vigor as I found some select items that Vitz was interested in maybe once every hour. By the time we were done, it was dusk and Vitz brought out two small, single person tents, seemingly from nowhere, again. I thought about what we had discussed over the course of the day as I crawled into my tent, and laid down. Antivitz had seemed a bit touchy over the history of my personal race, and for some reason it seemed like it may have hurt him a bit to discuss history in general. Such a weird NPC personality for an archaeologist to have, but, I’m sure I’d get to the bottom of that sooner rather than later. I stared up at the tent’s roof, a couple feet from my face and my body barely fitting into the tent. I accessed my UI and took a look at the hammer that Vitz gave me, just for giggles. I already knew it was incredibly powerful.

[Hammer of Unyielding Light]

STR +50

CON +50

INT +50

PER +10

LCK +5

This hammer was created by a Master Smith of the Naz’catec, in conjunction with the Dwarf race for the king of the Naz’catec, King Brom. A twin was also created for the king’s brother, but it has been lost to time itself.

I’ll have to ask Antivitz where he found these, I thought to myself. However, just after reading the end of the description, a notification popped up.

Your elapsed time in the game in real world hours is: 37 hours, 2 minutes. Please leave your capsule now to eat and take a break!

I logged out immediately, surprised at the passage of time.