Unital Ring: The Mysterious New World

The Messenger

Minutes later, I sit around a campfire and stare at the ground. The positives of the battle are that we're all fine, and Silica managed to tame the thornspike bear with the frog meat and a butter-honey combination. The sole negative is that we could not keep one survivor of Schulz's group and question them. I admire them for fighting despite their leader's fall, a sign of discipline, if nothing else.

"Gotta beef up this wall, right?" Klein says while spreading his arms out. "And make it twice as tall."

"That last group scaled the wall without fear," Alice notes. "We'll need one tall enough to cause serious damage if they fall off. And we'll also want to flatten out all the divots and lumps on the outside surface."

"Like Central Cathedral," I subconsciously say. I turn to the swordsman in metal armor, wondering what's on his silent mind. "Kirito, I have an idea, but first, what do you think?"

"Well... I have no objection to strengthening our defenses, but I think there's going to be an eventual limit to what we can do in that regard. We can make the wall taller, but then they'll use ladders. And as players get to a higher level, they'll gain more kinds of ranged offense."

"So, how do you expect to defend this place, then?"

"Doesn't it seem to you that we keep getting attacked because we're just one little player house isolated in the wilderness?"

"Huh? You want to build more houses?"

"Yeah, but not one or two. We'll build a town here."

Thirteen pairs of eyes hone in on Kirito in stunned silence. The remaining five, me and the four women who are 'outsiders' to the group, just sit in silence.

Asuna speaks first. "Just constructing a lot of buildings doesn't make a town, Kirito. You need people to live in them."

"Well, the Patter should make it more town-like, right?"

"So you want to use them as a shield?" Sinon barks.

"No, no, we'll keep them safe, too. It just means we might be using them to help puff ourselves up and make this location harder for other players to attack..." He looks around desperately, seeing he's not convincing the others very well, so he turns to me. Feeling this might happen, I turn to the log cabin where the twenty Patter reside for now and stand up.

"I'm not going to mince words; we should use the Patter to our advantage while we have one. But furthermore, look at where we're at. We have near unlimited resources, and in a survival game, that's more vital than anything in the long run. If we make a formidable bearing here, we'll be near-invincible for a while."

"Iron ore was our biggest problem, but now that Silica's tamed the thornspike cave bear, that solves the major difficulty there."

"Wait…the bear's not going to respawn?" Leafa interjects.

"It will if we defeat it, but not if we tame it, I bet. Because then it would mean we could harvest an unlimited army of unstoppable monsters. We could have ten giant bears fighting for us."

"I don't want to try that one again," Silica protests, followed by an agreeable chirp from Pina.

"We can visit the cave again later to see if it's true about the respawning...but for now, I don't think it'll be too difficult for us to make more buildings. But the Patter alone won't be enough to fill out a whole town, so we'll need to scout out more NPCs."