Chapter 188. Climbing the Cliff
[The hardworking woodcutter climbed the huuudge cliff.]
The moment the trial began, the scenery around me changed.
An axe appeared in my hand.
And before me stood a towering cliff.
“You want me to climb with this?”
I tried using some of the skills I normally had.
Nothing reacted.
That made it pretty obvious.
The clear condition was probably to recreate the scene from the fairy tale and succeed.
Imitating some guy who survived long enough to become a fairy tale or legend, huh.
First, let’s look at the axe.
It looked less like a woodcutter’s axe and more like one of those absurd fantasy-game axes with a blade the size of a person’s torso.
And he swung two of these around at once?
Yeah.
He definitely wasn’t an ordinary woodcutter.
[Hayangi: What ability should we put into the thumb? Thinking about creating something new is making me excited! Let’s treat the index finger as a basic attack! Hahaha! We’re going to need a lot of practice!]
Hayangi was cackling to herself in excitement.
Fine.
I’d handle the climbing.
Thunk!
I buried one axe into the cliff and pulled myself upward.
Then drove in the other one.
Pulled myself up again.
I hadn’t even been doing it that long, yet I was already sick of it.
How many hours had I been climbing this damn cliff...?
[Hayangi: Let’s settle on concepts! The index finger is a neutral basic attack. The middle finger is the powerful one-shot skill you wanted! I really like that one too. Oh! What about making it feel like a forehead flick?]
“Not bad!”
Though if possible, I wanted the completed hand pose to resemble the sign language gesture for a mountain.
A gesture that was already irritating to look at, but now with a ridiculous amount of damage behind it.
Wouldn’t that make it even more infuriating?
What kind of effect should it have?
The ability would compress all the power I possessed through Spiral Power and detonate it....
Seriously.
What would look good?
[Hayangi: ‘The universe briefly went dark.’ How about something like that? Though if we do that, we could use it in a slightly different way too.]
Since this whole episode was about the thumb, shouldn’t we focus on an ability related to that first?
SCREEEEEECH!
A bird.
A gigantic bird!
A gigantic bird was flying toward me because it had spotted the shiny axe!
“Hup!”
I buried one of the massive axes beneath my feet like a foothold and stood on it.
Then I gripped the other axe tightly with both hands.
And...
I just swung it around wildly.
Apparently, the woodcutter in the fairy tale really was just an honest-to-goodness hardworking woodcutter.
There weren’t any special skills.
Normally, events like this were supposed to let you temporarily use abilities you’d never had before.
At least give me some kind of Firewood Splitting skill.
Thud-thud-thud!
“Huh!”
After struggling with the birds for a while, one of them kicked the axe I had been using as a foothold.
The axe came loose from the cliff.
Ah.
So this was how they were going to set up the scene.
I wanted to give them decent points for actually putting some effort into the sequence.
CRACK!
Well, that was that.
I still had no intention of obediently doing exactly what they wanted.
Who knew?
Chaos might have interfered with this trial too.
That bastard could meddle with the game system however he pleased.
I slammed my axe into the head of a bird that had been about to fly away after apparently completing its role.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
One bird.
Then another.
I leaped across them like stepping stones.
I didn’t have any skills, but apparently my stats were still absurdly high.
It wasn’t as if this would let me climb that enormous cliff.
Still...
Smashing their heads open made me feel better.
Once this trial ended, I’d split that spider’s head in half too.
And then I’d split the cliff itself in half.
How many pieces should I split Happy’s head into?
That felt like something worth thinking about carefully.
WHAM!
“Tsk!”
In the end, I couldn’t move freely in midair.
The birds hammered me from all directions.
One of my fingers luckily caught on the cliff, leaving my battered body hanging there.
So that was how the woodcutter, a guy who swung around axes that huge, ended up hanging from a cliff with a single finger.
The birds pecked him into that state.
[The hardworking woodcutter thought, ‘I must cross this cliff if I want to cut down the huge tree!’]
Why the hell was this guy so obsessed with trees?
And a huge tree....
A tree....
I don’t exactly have fond memories of trees.
It was also how Jayeon came to be born.
But looking at it another way, I once wasted an entire week just trying to kill one giant tree.
If I were put in that situation again right now....
Haha.
Well.
I don’t know what I’d do.
[Hayangi: ...So, about that. I think we should focus the thumb ability on the meaning of raising the thumb itself.]
“...Go on.”
[Hayangi: You know how raising your thumb means respect or approval toward someone? And lowering it means something negative.]
“Yeah... Ugh, this is harder than I thought.”
It wasn’t real physical sensation, but I had to stay focused the entire time to keep from falling.
That made it exhausting.
It felt like mixing a button-mashing event with a rhythm game.
Annoying.
[Hayangi: And we already have skills that fit. Choice and Freedom, and the imitation Lion’s Roar.]
[The Madness within the Adventurer begins creating a new skill!]
Haa....
This really wasn’t easy.
The fierce wind kept shaking my body.
Holding on grew harder and harder.
And my condition was already terrible.
My vision kept blurring.
All kinds of debuffs were stacking up.
[Hayangi: I’ve got plenty of time, so this lets me refine the details more carefully, but... how many hours has this been going on?]
Exactly.
I had been hanging in the same place for hours.
No matter how I looked at it, the quest design was bad.
There was such a thing as too much.
My other fingers had slowly begun twitching.
Maybe if I endured a little longer, I could finally climb up.
[Hayangi: Lower the thumb, and you place restrictions on most of the target’s actions. Like saying, ‘Booo~ That thing you’re doing sucks.’]
Then raising it would do the opposite?
Make someone more active?
Like—
Wow~! You’re amazing~!
I imagined gathering the kids in front of me and giving them a huge thumbs-up.
What a ridiculous image.
I liked it.
[Hayangi: See? We really do think alike, my friend! Great! Then it’s decided! Now let’s start climbing!]
