Chapter 17: What Could Be More Powerful Than A Deer?

Harmony’s turn came up first. She got her chakrams ready to attack the enemies around her, but stopped when Eunice called out to her. “<Hold on. You might be able to damage more than one creature at a time by making the deer run wild.>”

Harmony nodded and put the chakrams away. She kicked the sides of the deer like it was a horse in order to rile it up. The deer let out a shriek before flailing around again just like before.

Normally the system only allows the person who's turn it is to move. Apparently these were special circumstances that sort of bypassed it. There are times in turn based games where one character will be in a different state like being captured or frenzied. This was sort of similar to both, but in this case she was turning her enemies against themselves.

The deer bashed into all the other deer around it. All of them took more damage, especially the one that she bumped into to start the battle. It was now Vault’s turn. “Not going to lie, I thought this was a weird idea to begin with.”

He took out his ax. “Now I see this somehow gave us the advantage, so I'm not complaining.”

He lunged into action and swung at the same deer that had the most amount of damage. He took it out in one hit. It was now the mounted deer's turn. it flailed around a lot trying to throw Harmony off of it again.

It bashed into all the other deer once more, and this was the last hit they all needed before being taken out.

All their HP meters now dropped to zero. They received system notifications saying that they had now gotten deer pelts, antlers, venison, and some experience points.

Harmony had fallen off of the deer from the impact and rolled over to the water. She started glowing upon entering.

Vault stared at her surprised. “Hey, you're glowing!”

She stood up and examined her body all over. She gave him a thumbs up. “It’s cool, It doesn't hurt!”

Vault let out a sigh of relief, but his expression quickly changed to a more curious one. “Water that makes you glow? I wonder…”

He checked his status menu while sticking his hand in the water and saw that there was a passive healing effect taking place. “I was right! This must be a healing spring!”

Harmony jumped out of the water in excitement. “We finally found a way to heal ourselves?! Awesome! Dude we did it!”

She offered him a high five and he gave her one to celebrate their discovery. They had finally found a method of healing themselves. They could now check off the first task from Altem’s list.

Vault took out a cup and filled the spring water with it. He studied the system notification details about it.

“A cup of spring water. It will give a passive healing effect to whoever is exposed to its liquid for a few minutes. Within about 1 hour this spring water will become normal water once it is removed from its source.”

Those last words quickly killed the mood almost immediately. The spring water…Becomes normal water…After only one hour…There is no way they're going to be able to make use of it. Unless they could somehow move the dungeon there or teleport with the water, it was going to be useless.

Harmony and Vault both fell to their knees with defeated looks on their faces. Harmony punched the ground. “Darn it! We're right back at square one.”

Harmony stood up and Eunice switched out with Felicia. “Something I learned from my days as a scavenger, is that where there is a healing spring pond, there is also an impact on the wildlife around it.”

She wandered over to the bushes and found some herbs. She brought them over to Vault and they checked the system notifications.

“Salud. A medicinal herb that grows around healing spring ponds. It can be used to make potions with healing effects.”

Harmony gave the herbs to Vault. “I believe this is what your patron was referring to when he said you needed to work on your crafting. Using these herbs we can make potions to recover. Unlike the spring water, these will not have such a small limited time frame for their use.”

Vault smiled at her. “Just when I thought our efforts were in vain, you somehow managed to turn things around. The two of you are really amazing, you know that?”

She turned away from him. “I do not need to hear that from you… But… Thank you…For your kind words.”

He patted her on the shoulder once, before walking towards the bushes with the medicinal herbs. “Come on. Time to go pick some flowers.”

Felicia switched out with Eunice and ran over to join him. Under normal circumstances, it would have been really annoying to constantly have to pick the flowers, and throw them in bags or something.

This was one of the times where they were extremely grateful for the use of the inventory system. They just had to casually rip the plants from the bushes, and just teleport them into their spatial storage.

They repeated the process for about a half hour, all the while Harmony was complaining about not being able to make the deer her pet. Vault finished clearing all the herbs out of one of the bushes and moved on to another. “Look, if we're going to get a pet then it should be something more powerful than a deer.”

Harmony teleported another herb into her storage. “That deer wasn't exactly weak. I had to use all my strength to avoid getting thrown off.”

Vault teleported another herb. “I'm just saying, maybe something like a dragon. We could ride that thing into battle or just use it to fly around.”

Harmony suddenly paused. “Wait, does that mean we have to fight a dragon eventually?”

He also paused and they both exchanged a very uneasy look. They hesitated before asking the question. “Eunice, do you have dragons in this world?”

“<Yes, dragons are very real in this world.>”

Felicia let out a swear from Harmony's lips. Vault also responded with the same word.