Chapter 4

Unintended usage

Now that Tsuna joined the ranks of players, well noob ones, he could finally explore the outdoors and not be cooped in a place with hotties. Maybe he wasn't suited for harems... Leaving that aside, he had no special moves except snapping a bow at some random monster. It was pretty much melee and he had one area of attack if you can call it that- throwing his last line of defense and offense- his bag, at his enemy... Yeah, people won't want him in teams, especially since he won't ever meet their eye. There was another reason he did not want to meet anyone's eye since now every eye meeting would follow up with herb distribution which was bad since he was kind of famous for melting an armor off after the supposed seductive lines. He was not catfishing. He is not catfishing!

But now those lines bring trauma to both him and his victim.

So he was wandering around in the forest, playing solo even though he died half the time against any non-melee attack until he anticipated it and chewed on the leaf. It is not bubblegum and it feels weird to chew on leaves, especially when there is a green glow when restoring HP and he is pretty much a firefly with that attracting more monsters to his location. He is currently a glorified glowstick.

Through his journey to the second village, he discovered that his title was no joke and that the game was forcing him to own up to it and even live up to its connotations when he saw something strange. There were flowers and herbs lying around in the forest as resources for potions, medicine, and strange concoctions. With his profession and his stupid achievement, he supposed he was desired to keep at it and probably collect those. Well, if that reasoning didn't apply, he wouldn't have to pause when another bunch of plants lay at his feet after harvesting itself. It even went so bad that when he turned back he saw that he was walking on a path of flowers giving him that look of a divine beauty who descended into the mortal world. He did not want to stand out anymore! Just because he was a villager didn't mean he had to pick all the herbs in the world. No, he did not want to catch 'em all!

Being peer pressured by flowers and not wanting to walk on a makeshift flower meadow, especially since it left an obvious trail to be sought out by monsters (no wonder he felt like there was a dartboard drawn on him!) he started picking up the herbs around the way. The worst part of this was that if he stopped and left some herbs out of the bag since he did not want to carry junk around, a violin would sprout of a nearby tree and the leaves would shift to create a spotlight on that bunch (Tyndall effect for those who are curious about this phenomenon). It would then begin to play sad ballads to guilt trip into taking them back. Worse, if he left the place and hardened his heart, they would trail behind him like ducklings... He did not remember becoming a parent and did not want a demotion from the label a certain prefect gave to the majority of the citizens of Namimori. For goodness sakes, he became the fodder and the last time he checked, villagers did not play any role as important as cannon fodder!

The next village was a haven for him. It was called clockwork town and had no semblance of anything green. He did not expect a game to turn him anti-environmentalist for sure. So he decided to stick around to build immunity and to went out frustrations he decided to head to the tavern where he could emulate the life of an adult and wallow his worries in beer. Hey, it was virtual, so it carried no harm.

To his surprise there was already someone who looked as miserable as he was, seeing that his head was smashed into the counter. Eager to commiserate together, the brunette joined him on the counter and inquired,

"Rough day?"

The blonde in baggy green clothes replied,

"Rather than that, I was simply lacking in sugar."

"I don't think the tavern has sweet stuff looking at the menu."

"I was hoping it did seeing that the medicine the NPCs give aren't sweet and I can carry only so much dango from the first village."

Since the first village became a center of amusement for a while, people with chef professions and hobbies stuck around a little bit to accompany the scene with good food for a great party. So this guy might have stocked up on that as much as someone without his unique circumstances could.

"Medicine has a reputation for being bitter and when you're in combat I doubt the taste comes into question since people did not complain so far about the fighting."

"In my case it's different. The character creation system found that I liked sweets so much that it made me a mechanic whose creations ran on sweets."

"So you had to taste them to determine if they could be applicable..."

"The bots we can summon are more primitive than what I can actually create so I didn't want to share the sweets with them."

So this guy was into the field as a professional. No wonder he would find the choices game developers could give him be insufficient. But wait...

"So you've been eating them instead?! Then how have you gotten here without your actual weapons?"

"In the beginning, I had fueled the turrets and mines they gave. I was so jealous that they could eat the sweets instead of mine back then. So I figured that if I modified them to become what I actually want, I wouldn't mind... that much... to share them."

"You can modify them?"

"Yeah. I stacked them up and dissembled some with the help of monsters. The final product was a mecha suit like Gundam-"

"So that robot in the beginners' town was real?!"

"Wow, people still call that town beginner's town? Anyway, yeah. The catch was that to become usable it needed a human cockpit."

"Why was that a problem. You can just be the pilot."

"The prototype needed a person with the knowledge to run the bot with its various controls, and I wasn't willing-"

"Why?!"

Even though it was Tsuna's dream to become a robot when he grew up~!

"I like inventing new things, but it's a pain to actually use it. It's fun when you can debug a system for its errors and see what it can do, but actually using these high-end devices require training and stuff like a fast reaction time along with fast dynamic movement.

I would rather use that time for developing new things"

"Then you can sell or rent the system to someone else, or even better, a teammate." Tsuna grumbled

"Yeah, the thing was when I got some people to try it out, they couldn't remember even a quarter of the instructions and when they tried to learn by experience, the bot flew off course into that floating mayor and fused with him."

"Wait! That angel turned mayor became a mecha?!"

"I guess so. Anyway, the first Gundam depleted all my resources, so I decided the second one could use the sugar in a person's body since I figured carbohydrates was pretty much sugar.

But the thing is, the amount of sugar needed to power up a bot about 40 times your height was quite a lot and ended up sending the next pilot to a church in the first second."

Tsuna looked at him horrified.

"So I decided to christen it Iron Maiden. Unfortunately, it was never used since I didn't get any more volunteers to pilot it..."

It was like listening to a train wreck because Tsuna felt that this was not even the beginning.

"Since the first transformer used more than 95% of my sugar supply, I was not happy with the share it left me. So I decided that a simpler navigable bot would need more resources and processing power to power that bot and seeing that since the power would have to be somewhere between the first and Iron Maiden-chan since it couldn't be totally powered by people or totally power itself, it needed another source of power.

So I decided to use the monsters that was lurking around in the forest to power the Iron maiden to see how much power I didn't have to supply from my side. Since the monsters respawned in the same location as it was killed I thought by repeatedly killing it, I could make an evolutionary model that could simultaneously emulate an AI while powering the system...

But I couldn't figure out why but they were very hostile to the pilots"

'No shit Sherlock! You create a battle royale system and hope that their generations don't curse you for their deaths! It's like that urban legend Kodoku'

(Kodoku(worm toxin) is an urban legend about a black magic technique where you trap poisonous insects in a jar where they have nothing to feed on except themselves. The final remaining insect is the winner that people use to bless the building it was buried under at the price of its residents' lives)

"At this point, I had shelved the Iron Maiden to create another with the help of some pals I've got acquainted with when building the bot."

"Pals?"

"Yeah, a bard, an alchemist, and another mechanic."

'A bard seems so out of place in a robot creating team'

"Yeah, I don't know why he's a bard either. His music is worse than a cat shrieking while scratching a blackboard. But anyway, the mechanic of the team is a strange one. I don't know if he's careless or his way of thinking is just that strange, but his inventions always have some or the other defect in them. But since they don't require sugar to be powered on, I asked him to mass manufacture parts to work with."

"Isn't that great! Now you don't have to worry about being without a weapon."

"The weapons I could create from the parts are as flawed as his. I think it's a joke the character creation system accidentally created."

"Come on, how bad can it be?"

"As bad as ending up with weapons as powerful as an atom bomb."

That isn't bad at all, just that you need to fire it from a long distance else... Oh.

"Or as bad as creating a knife fitted rifle, with the knife at the trigger."

Tsuna winced.

"Or maybe a gun that uses the user's life bar as ammo and disables the use of any HP recovery items or magic?"

"Why can't you design them without these flaws?"

"Like I said, the program isn't exactly a simulator program for robots or any type of an ROS-"

"What?"

"Robot Operating System. Those enable modular software programming into robots along with debugging and logging of their functionality, so it would be helpful. But since it's fixed here, I've got no choice but to reverse engineer the finished products while hacking it to make it work against its functionality. Not to mention for really interesting bots to work with, you'd have to grind your levels..."

"Ok ok. Enough of the jargon. Basically, you can't go against the traits of the original owner yeah?"

"Not to mention that I love my sweets more than the robots can ever appreciate them QAQ"

Tsuna remembered that a movie series used to have these really gross instruments that pretty much was torture porn with bad mechanisms that were a hack. It even had a mastermind who had a bad hobby of playing these 'games' with the 'players' as a literal puppet despite being the puppetmaster.

"Then how about you give the weapons created by these parts to the monsters?"

"Oh, I see. Since they have an auto-equip mechanism with weapons when unarmed, they can die using them."

"After all the captain sinks with his ship, yeah?"

The blondie's eyes glinted as he reached out for a handshake.

"My name's Spanner. What's yours?"

"Tsuna. Nice to meet you."

"The pleasure's all mine."

Then a notification pinged in his screen as the mechanic was added to his friend list.

"Now that I can see a way to combat without actually losing my items since they'd at the very least become monster drops when the battle ends... I wish there was a way to have sweets. Chefs don't really stop by here..."

"A clockwork town wouldn't have much appeal to a person who works with living ingredients."

"Say, aren't you a herb king? In that case, you might have a bunch of fruits. Some of them are bound to be sweet."

"Let me check."

Tsuna opened up his inventory and cycled through the plants he had gathered seeing clary sages, grass, dandelions, is that a cactus? What was a cactus doing at a forest?!

Oh! There were... oleanders -pink flowers with the description that they were sweet smelling and sweet tasting. And now there's greek mythology mentioning something about snakes and them. It was too long for him to spend reading, so he skipped it.

"I've got these... oleanders. It says they're flowers with a sweet taste. Is that fine?"

Spanner's eyes lit up in delight as he eagerly brought his hands forward to accept them. Tsuna emptied his entire supply since he did not fancy its color and wanted to get rid of his entire stock... but he'd take what he could get.

The mechanic impatiently took a bunch of flowers and started munching on them, then his frantic excitement morphed into the picture of calm. He looked like a goat this way, his vitality hidden as he seemed to carelessly sift through life. Or was it a cow and its cud?

Regardless, he was so in peace with the food that Tsuna did not even realize that the other had the poisoned status and his health bar was depleting rapidly with every bite. Only when he started sparkling, the brunette felt something was wrong and shrieked at the unpleasant surprise.

It was too late and the other was teleported to church and Tsuna rushed out of the tavern while sending a world message,

'Does anyone know what exactly is an oleander flower is?! My friend died out of poisoning from eating them!'

A reply came back from a person called S. as they said,

'It could be a case of Oleander poisoning which you get by eating the flowers or leaves or stems of the Oleander plant. People can get blurred vision, diarrhea, stomach pain, vomiting, headache, rashes to say the least from them. So you shouldn't be eating them. Not to mention, the snakes that eat its fruits may secrete poison through its scales or through its bites... Though it's a game so it won't be that severe. Doesn't the description of the plant before you pick it have an outline of blood red? The text was a matching red too. You should have heeded the advice and not picked it. Red is a color symbolizing danger, you know.'

It's not like he could help it given his profession you know?!

When he reached the church he spat out whatever the person in the world chat said and apologized profusely. The warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears though since Spanner did not show any indication of stopping his activity of chewing the flowers.

"Oh, they were poisonous? No wonder the screen was tinting red and everything was a bit hazy. Oh well, it's still sweet though."

"Spanner-san, stop eating them. I might have other non-poisonous plants that may be sweet."

"It's fine herb king. These are good enough."

These were the last words as the poisoned(again) mechanic got sent back to the same place. RIP Spanner. He did not die of diabetes at least. But his love for sweets did spell the end of him.

"Oh look. I got poison resistance as a passive skill."

That was the statement the sweet lover uttered after going through the cycle of rebirth 30 more times as any words of dissuasion fell on deaf ears. Tsuna, on the other hand, was not happy with the achievement he got from the ordeal.

'Mutiny'