Juggernaut carried Logan low and steady on his back, iron legs eating up the ground without any wind-boosting skill to help him along. He didn’t need one. Even at a walk, something his size and speed of 20 covered ground at close to sixty miles an hour.
Five point three kilometers passed in a handful of minutes.
The cliff came up fast, a long gray wall of rock cutting through the forest like something had torn the land in half. Vex’s group hadn’t bothered climbing down the face of it. A wide ramp had been cut into the stone instead, sloping down from the cliff top into a passage mouth hidden behind a curtain of hanging vines.
They followed it down and in, and the passage opened into daylight again almost as fast as it had swallowed them.
A garden waited on the other side, walled in on every side by the cliff itself, sunlight falling clean through a gap in the rock far overhead. Vex sat under the shade of a tree near the center of it, tail curled around his feet, looking entirely unbothered.
"Master. Glad you made it."
"Good work holding this down alone." Logan looked around, and his eyes went wide.
A tree stood at the garden’s heart, heavy with fruit that glowed faint silver under its leaves.
```
[ Skyfruit Tree (Tier-1/Rare) ]
```
Three flowers grew in a ring around its roots, each one a different color, each one giving off a different kind of heat or cold or crackle in the air around it.
```
[ Flameroot Aster (Tier-1/Epic) ]
[ Stormveil Orchid (Tier-1/Epic) ]
[ Frostglass Lily (Tier-1/Epic) ]
```
Near the back wall, a thick vine wound up the cliff face. Two seed pods hung from it, each one pulsing slow and steady like something was still alive inside.
```
[ Heartwood Sap Crystal x2 (Tier-1/Legendary) ]
```
And tucked into a shaded crack at the base of the cliff, a cluster of pale mushrooms glowed soft blue in the dark.
```
[ Glowcap Mushroom Cluster (Tier-1/Uncommon) ]
```
Seven resources total. Logan had never seen this many good things sitting this close together in his life.
He worked fast. He picked the flowers by hand, cut the sap crystals free with careful strokes, and gathered the fruit and mushrooms into his storage ring.
When the ring was full, an idea struck him.
"Solveig. Take my storage ring back to base. Empty it out, then come straight back. Tell Tinkerbell to use them as she sees fit and create some good things."
"At once, Lord."
Solveig took the ring and was gone before Logan finished the sentence, a streak of gold-white light cutting up through the gap in the cliff overhead.
He was back in under two minutes, ring returned to Logan’s hand, empty and ready again.
’That’s a speed I could get used to.’
They left the garden through the same passage they’d come in by. Once they were back under open sky, Logan pulled a fresh Treasure Compass from his ring and let it go.
It spun once, then settled, pointing northeast.
They’d barely covered a few hundred meters when a notification opened in front of him.
```
[ Match Announcement: Player Uorop is the first player to kill a Field Boss. +500 Tower Points. ]
```
’Uorop? That’s not a name from Earth.’
Logan turned the thought over as they walked. Once humanity reached the Tower’s fifth floor, matchmaking had started pulling players in from other worlds too. Nobody fully understood why floor five was the line, only that it was.
Solveig split off ahead of the group not long after, flying wide loops through the canopy and coming back each time with nothing to report. On the fourth pass, he didn’t come back empty.
"Lord. I found something you’ll want to see."
"What is it?"
"A canopy shaped like an umbrella, bigger than anything else out there. And underneath it, a frog. A hundred meters tall, easily."
Logan’s stomach had butterflies. ’A Field Boss. But a hundred-meter-tall frog is crazy.’
"Lead the way."
The trees grew bigger the deeper they went, trunks wide enough to hide a house behind, leaves the size of Juggernaut’s own back. Somewhere ahead, two of those trees rose taller than the rest, their canopies merging into a single unbroken roof over the forest floor.
They never made it that far without company.
```
[ Four-Armed Aquabuster Primate (Tier-1/Rare) ]
```
Twelve of them dropped out of the branches at once, each one built like a gorilla that had been stretched and doubled. Four long arms ended in webbed claws, throats already swelling with the pressure of whatever they were about to spit.
"Annoying things," Stonewing muttered, dropping into a fighting stance. "Loud, too."
Logan didn’t bother reaching for a skill. "Go."
He didn’t need to say more than that.
Solveig moved first, a streak of gold cutting between two of the primates before either one finished raising its arms.
Dawnbreaker Slash opened both of them in a single pass, and the greatsword’s light lingered a second longer than the cut itself, cauterizing the wound shut before either body hit the ground.
Juggernaut didn’t bother with finesse. He planted all four legs, and the cannons on his shoulders opened up, Siege Cannon Barrage tearing through the trunk of a tree and the primate hiding behind it in the same shot. Three more went down just trying to get out of the way.
Vex was already gone from where he’d been standing, Shadow Stroll carrying him through the shade of the canopy and out right behind a primate before his claw ripped into it. Two Cinder Shadow Clones peeled off behind him and did the same to two more.
Stitchgrin didn’t chase anything. It just opened its mouth and strings shot out en-mass, wrapping around the last struggling primate, making it completely immobile and pulling. Devour swallowed it whole, zipper teeth closing over it in one motion, and the toy-shaped thing patted its own stomach with something that looked disturbingly like satisfaction.
Solveig got the last two as well, wings snapping him into a spin while his great sword tore through both skulls before the primates could even track where he’d gone.
Twelve of them. It hadn’t taken thirty seconds.
```
[ 12x level 10 Four-Armed Aquabuster Primate (Tier-1/Rare) killed. +1800 Tower Points ]
[ Solveig has reached level 5. ]
[ Stitchgrin has reached level 5. ]
[ Juggernaut has reached level 5. ]
```
Logan ran through their stat points fast, spreading them evenly across the board for now. There’d be time to specialize once he knew more about how each of them actually fought.
They kept walking.
The ground changed underfoot before long, softening into wet earth dotted with pond after small pond, each one shadowed by a single broad leaf standing over it on a thin stalk like a roof built for one.
Past the ponds, the twin canopy finally came into full view. The giant frog sat beneath it exactly where Solveig had said, still as a boulder, skin the mottled green-brown of old moss.
```
[ Orvanfield Stormlord Frog - Elite Field Boss ]
Level: —
Rank: Special
HP: 25,000/25,000
MP: 20,000/20,000
Attack: 50
Speed: 30
Constitution: 250
Arcane: 200
```
Logan’s stomach dropped. "That’s not just a Field Boss."
"No," Stonewing agreed. "That’s an Elite one."