“So are you going to help out here at all?” Kris asked through gritted teeth.

It was understandable that she’d be gritting her teeth. After all, she had her hands on either side of the haft to her massive hammer looking for all the world like she was in the middle of one hellacious bench press.

Though it was my understanding that typically when someone was doing a bench press the weight was coming from metal plates on either side of the weight bar, and not from a very rabid looking wolf trying its best to chew its way through the bar to get at the soft and squishy human on the other side.

Then again it’s not like I had much experience with the weight room in the real world to begin with. We had one at our school, but it was a place where Trent and his friends usually hung out so I tended to avoid it like it was the epicenter of a testosterone and steroids fueled zombie bro plague.

“It looks like you’ve got everything well in hand,” I said.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she asked. “Is this seriously your idea of having things well in hand?”

She used her rage to shove the wolf off. Unfortunately the thing took her hammer along with. She hopped to her feet and stood there staring incredulously at the wolf using her hammer as a chew toy with a look that was somewhere between confused and bemused.

“Here,” I said, pulling my sword out of my inventory again. “This might help.”

I tossed it to her. She watched the thing arc through the air but didn’t catch it. It landed point down in the forest floor, wobbling back and and looking utterly useless.

“Was that supposed to help me or something?” she asked.

“Well yeah. You said you needed a weapon and I tossed you a weapon,” I said. “Usually that’s the point where you take the weapon I’m offering you and use it to kill the nasty monster threatening you.”

“I don’t do swords,” Kris said.

She walked over to the wolf and straight up punched the thing. It let out a yelp of surprise and pulled away from the hammer, staring up at Kris like it was trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with a human that would engage it in hand to hand combat.

Not that it was hand to hand combat for long. No, Kris stomped on the hammer haft and it twirled in the air. She grabbed it deftly, looking for all the world like a slightly less imposing lady Thor from those ancient Marvel movies that’d been so popular once upon a time.

“So I’m killing shit while you gather?” she said. “That’s how it’s gonna be?”

“That’s how always is,” I said with a wink. “Good luck!”

Kris rolled her eyes, then turned and faced down the wolf with her hammer held at the ready. I knew she was loving this, for all that she was acting annoyed.

Satisfied that Kris was having her own brand of fun, I went back to gathering as many of the little yellow flowers as I could find. Which was easy because there were a lot of the fuckers all around us.

I made sure to keep a wary eye out for any additional wolves that might be lurking in the shadows. The last thing I wanted was to have a wolf come up and “take a bite out of my ass while I was presenting it picking flowers,” as Kris had so eloquently put it.

Kris swung her massive two-handed hammer at the wolf. The thing yelped and let out little cries of pain every time the hammer made contact. Yeah, it looked like Kris had things well in hand.

Though I did wince as I watched Kris beating the shit out of the unfortunate digital wolf. I wondered if the AI monsters were advanced enough that they could feel pain, then dismissed that thought as ridiculous. It would be needlessly cruel to do something like that to the poor AI creatures inhabiting this world whose only purpose was to die.

“This! Is! What! You! Get! For! Sneaking! Up! On! Me! You! Furry! Bitch!” Kris shouted, punctuating every word with another hit.

I smiled and shook my head. It really was nice of that wolf to come along and take some of the heat off me by giving Kris something to do.

There was a final yelp and then silence. I looked up to see Kris looking every inch the mighty warrior. She sucked in deep lungfuls of air as she leaned on her hammer and stared at me with a mixture of annoyance and bemusement. It didn’t help that she was covered in blood, though she wasn’t cursing up a blue storm so I assumed none of that blood was hers.

“You really weren’t going to help out, were you?” she said, sounding scandalized.

“I feel like I was pretty up front with you about that from the beginning,” I said.

“So what, you like the idea of me becoming wolf kibble?” she asked.

“You handled it,” I said, reaching down and tapping another cluster of yellow flowers.

Kris grinned. “You bet your ass I did! That was fucking awesome!”

She turned to the dark forest around us. “You hear that, wolf bitches? Any more of you want to play, Kris has what you want!”

She whirled her hammer around so it landed in her hand with a meaty smack and then twirled it by the haft a couple of times. Her look as she stared out into the woods challenging any roving wolves to bring it was downright unhinged.

It was one of those moments when I was really glad Kris was on my side.

“Come on,” Kris said, looking at the path of arboreal destruction I’d left behind us while she was leaving her own path of lupine destruction. “You grabbed all the flowers here. Let’s move on to the next bunch.”

“Seriously?” I asked. “You’re not going to gripe about me gathering shit?”

“Why fight it? You get to pick your fucking flowers and I get to do real gaming instead of standing here watching you pick a bunch of fucking flowers,” Kris said. “Seems like a win for both of us!”

I hit Kris with a one fingered gesture that meant the same thing in the modern cyberpunk reality I found myself in as it had since time immemorial. Kris rolled her eyes and went back to swinging her hammer and glaring at the trees as though she was daring them to release more wolves at us. And the forest obliged now that she was making enough noise to draw every wolf in the forest.

I just hoped it didn’t draw those damned griefers down on us. I was still pretty confident they weren’t coming at us for whatever reason, but that didn’t stop me from looking over my shoulder every couple of flowers.

Not that an early warning would’ve done much more than let me know the end was coming.

We settled into a comfortable rhythm. A rhythm that didn’t involve nearly as much bitching from Kris, which I was thankful for. Kris was plenty good at drawing the wolves in with her hammer whirling and shouting.

I happily walked along behind my murderous friend tapping flower after flower as I went on my own plant-based murder spree, though eventually the flowers and the roving wolves started to thin out as the forest got more sparse around us and things started to look a bit more civilized. Soon enough the forest ended and cultivated fields began with a quaint but decent sized fantasy hamlet off in the distance.

Smoke curled from chimneys rising above the houses. The place looked like a matte painting from an old 1980s movie when they still had to rely on practical effects instead of cutting and pasting from a CG library to set the mood.

I couldn’t want to check it out.

“Those assholes will probably be there,” Kris said. “At least they didn’t come after us in the forest.”

Suddenly I wasn’t as excited about checking the place out. If assholes like Gregor and Kravos were running the show there then the local in-game politics here were well and truly fucked. That brief respite killing wolves and gathering flowers and just playing the game had allowed me to forget those troubles for a little while.

“Yeah, I’m surprised they didn’t find us with the way you were swinging that hammer around and daring anything within shouting distance to attack us,” I said.

“Hey, if they came at me while I was in the zone they would’ve regretted it,” Kris said, reaching over her shoulder to tap her hammer. That love tap soon became an affectionate caress.

“I seriously doubt that,” I said. “But it’s nice you have dreams. Also, if you and your hammer need some time alone in the woods I can go look for some more flowers.”

Kris hit me with the old one-fingered salute. I ignored it as I always did when we were flipping that salute back and forth. We tended to do that a lot.

“So are we heading for the town that’s being run by a bunch of asshole gold buyers with superiority complexes?” Kris said.

“Well when you put it like that I can’t wait,” I growled.

“Just trying to keep things in perspective,” Kris said with a shrug.

“Hold on just a second,” I said. “Now that we have a moment to rest I want to have a look at what I’ve been gathering before we head into town to sell it.”

Kris rolled his eyes. “You’re seriously telling me you’ve been gathering that stuff and you don’t even know what it does? What if it’s worthless?”

I shrugged. “I was in the gather zone. Besides, it probably is worthless. We found it in a zone that featured wolves you could kill that helpfully threw themselves at you one at a time so you were never overwhelmed.”

I hit her with a significant look. A significant look, I might add, that was completely lost on her.

“You have that look like you’re trying to get one over on me and I don’t understand it,” Kris said.

“Let’s just say something tells me those player assholes wouldn’t have been as accommodating as some of those single file wolves if they happened upon us.”

“I resent that,” Kris said.

“As you should, O mighty warrior,” I said.

“Right. So you’re saying all that time you spent picking flowers was worthless,” Kris said. “That’s the takeaway I’m getting from this, and no amount of you insulting my combat ability is going to distract me from that.”

“No more wasted than all the skill gains you got with that big honking hammer you love two-handing was wasted,” I replied. “Now go polish your hammer some more while I do important work here. This shit might be worthless, but the stuff I find later in the game won’t be so I need to get skill points while the getting is good.”

I turned back to my inventory, which was way bigger than I would’ve figured based on the tiny little bag hanging at my side. No doubt another nod to gameplay mechanics taking precedence over verisimilitude, but my storage space wasn’t limitless. The petals created stacks of thirty which meant even more carrying capacity.

In a crafting sense, at least.

I had about a hundred petals. I turned and looked at the path of gardening destruction I’d cut, though I couldn’t see too deep into the dark and semi-scary forest.

“Damn,” I breathed. “I guess I did get a little carried away with the whole gathering thing.”

“You think?” Kris asked. “You’re about to get an achievement for the longest walk from the starting area to the starting town.”

“I am?” I asked. “This game has achievements?”

“No idea,” Kris said. “But if you haven’t gotten one by now for “Lamest Obsession” then there probably aren’t.”

“You keep insulting me,” I said. “But you know you’re always singing a different tune when one of my plans comes together and we’re kicking ass thanks to me investing time in “lame obsessions” like picking flowers.”

“Says you,” Kris said, turning to stare into the forest. “If you’re gonna be awhile I’m gonna go look for some more wolf heads to bash. You have fun smelling your flowers.”

“Whatever,” I muttered.

Kris wandered off shouting at the top of her lungs to try and attract some four legged furry friends to play with. Meanwhile I sat down and leaned against a tree.

It was time to look through the loot I’d grabbed. Sure it might not be shiny weapons, but with a little luck I’d be able to turn these skill points into shiny weapons with which to kick Horizon ass in the near future!