Strawberry's Descent

The catapult took shape faster than anything she'd built so far, mostly, Arista suspected, because launching something was fundamentally simpler than making something dig, cut, or fold. Wood, tension, a release mechanism. She'd had that part sketched out in an afternoon.

What took considerably longer was convincing herself the landing half of the equation wouldn't matter as much as it clearly did.

"Six meters tall, four meters wide," she announced to the small crowd that had, predictably, gathered the moment word got out she was building something new. "Reinforced frame, adamantium-strengthened tension arm, and before anyone asks, no, it's not for rocks."

A pause.

...What's it for, then?" asked a dwarven farmer, leaning on a hoe, watching the whole spectacle with the specific patience of someone whose fields bordered a construction zone that kept getting stranger by the week.

"People."

The silence that followed had a very particular quality to it.

"I need to figure out fast, long-distance travel between the surface kingdoms," Arista continued, entirely unbothered. "Each one's roughly the size of an actual country. Walking's too slow. Riding's better but still slow. Flying's a Celestial-only thing, no offense to Lyriel. So: catapult. Launch a person clean across a huge chunk of distance in seconds instead of days. Revolutionary, if it works."

"And if it doesn't work?"

"Then we learn valuable data about impact trauma. For science."

She recruited from the Easy-mode crowd first, deliberate, practical, and just slightly ethically dubious in the way most of her best ideas tended to be. Easy mode meant lower XP requirements, but it also meant significantly faster respawn timers, which mattered enormously more to Arista's actual research plan than anyone's long-term survival prospects.

"You'll respawn in under a minute," she told the first volunteer, a cheerful, thoroughly unbothered young human named Pim who'd apparently signed up purely for the novelty. "Worst case, this is just a very fast, very violent way to die and come right back. Best case, you're the answer to inter-kingdom travel. Either way, you're basically a hero."

"Cool," Pim said, climbing into the catapult's sling with the enthusiasm of someone about to go on a carnival ride. "Do I get paid?"

"You get a title. Test Subject: First Launch."

"...I'll take it."

[Launch Sequence Initiated]

The tension arm released with a violent, satisfying thwack, and Pim shot skyward in a long, screaming arc that carried him, by Arista's rough calculation, shouted after him as he vanished over the treeline, somewhere around four hundred meters.

The landing was not, by any measure, graceful.

[Player Pim has died.][Cause of Death: Fall Damage][Respawn in: 47 seconds]

Arista winced. "...Okay. Distance is good. Landing needs work."

Pim respawned back at the settlement's shrine a minute later, walked the whole way back to the catapult, and climbed in again without so much as being asked.

"Again?" Arista asked, genuinely a little touched.

"Again," Pim confirmed. "That was actually kind of fun, up until the ground part."

Attempt two used slightly less tension, hoping to trade distance for a gentler arc. Pim died anyway, this time from a bad landing angle that snapped both legs on impact before the fall damage even finished calculating. Attempt three tried a steeper launch angle, aiming for more altitude and a softer descent, Pim came down directly into a lake, which technically avoided fall damage but did not avoid drowning, since hitting water at catapult-launch speed turned out to knock the air clean out of someone's lungs just as effectively as hitting ground did.

[Player Pim has died.][Cause of Death: Drowning]

"Okay, no lakes," Arista muttered, scratching that variable off her notebook. "Noted."

By the fifth attempt, she'd recruited two more Easy-mode volunteers, partly to spread out the respawn cooldowns and partly because Pim, God bless him, had started looking faintly concussed even between deaths, which Arista privately suspected wasn't actually possible but felt weirdly plausible anyway.

Attempt six ended in more fall damage. Attempt seven ended when the volunteer, a soft-spoken dwarf named Toril who'd wandered over out of curiosity and gotten roped in before he fully understood what he'd agreed to: came down at an angle that clipped a rock formation on the way in, dying on impact before he even reached the ground properly.

[Player Toril has died.][Cause of Death: Blunt Impact — Pre-Landing]

"That one's on me," Arista admitted, wincing. "Trajectory math was off by a few degrees. My bad."

"It is fine," Toril said, remarkably calm for someone who'd just been launched into a rock at high velocity. "Respawn is fast. I will go again."

"You people are unreasonably good sports about this."

By attempt nine, the crowd watching had grown considerably, treating the whole affair with the morbid, cheerful fascination of people watching a fireworks show that occasionally injured the pyrotechnician. Nine launches. Nine deaths. Zero successful landings.

Arista stared at her notebook, covered in scratched-out angle calculations and increasingly frustrated annotations, and sighed.

"Okay. We need someone who can actually survive the landing itself, not just fly further or land softer. Someone built like a brick wall." She glanced up at the gathered crowd. "Anyone here stacked pure Vitality? Like, obscenely, unreasonably stacked?"

A long pause. Then, from the back of the crowd, a very large, very solid-looking human in full plate stepped forward, arms crossed, expression unreadable.

"...I might know a guy."

The "guy" turned out to be the very human currently standing in front of her, arms still crossed, plate armor creaking faintly as he rolled his shoulders like he was already limbering up.

"You're looking at him," he said, in the flat, unbothered tone of someone who had clearly heard stranger requests than "get launched out of a giant catapult."

"...You?"

"Bram. Tank build. Full Vitality investment since character creation. Normal mode, before you ask, I like my odds, but I'm not insane." He nodded toward the catapult. "Heard you needed someone who could survive hitting the ground hard. That's basically my entire class fantasy."

Arista looked him up and down, and for the first time all afternoon, felt something like genuine hope. "What's your HP pool looking like?"

"Enough that most things in this game bounce off me before they matter." He said it without a shred of arrogance, just flat, weary fact, the tone of a man who had spent a very long time optimizing for exactly one stat.

"Perfect. Get in the sling."

Bram climbed into the catapult's harness with the calm efficiency of someone who trusted his own build far more than he trusted her trajectory math, gripping a heavy tower shield against his chest like it was the only variable he actually controlled.

"Why the shield?" Arista called up.

"Instinct," Bram said simply. "Also, if I'm about to hit the ground at terminal velocity, I'd like something between my face and the dirt."

"Fair. Reasonable. Respect the shield."

[Launch Sequence Initiated]

The tension arm released, and Bram shot skyward in an arc even longer than Pim's had ever managed, sheer mass and momentum carrying him further, faster, the crowd craning their necks to track him as he became a distant speck against the sky before beginning his long, inevitable descent.

He hit the ground with a sound Arista felt in her own chest, a deep, bone-rattling WHUMP that kicked up a small crater of dirt and left him skidding several meters before finally, mercifully, coming to a stop.

Silence.

Then, from the crater, a groan.

[Player Bram — Status: Alive][HP: 20%]

The crowd erupted.

"HE SURVIVED—"

"HE ACTUALLY SURVIVED THE LANDING—"

Arista sprinted over, skidding to a stop at the crater's edge, staring down at Bram, sprawled on his back, shield cracked clean in half but still clutched in one hand, breathing hard but very much, undeniably, alive.

"...You're alive."

"Barely," Bram wheezed, staring up at the sky he'd just fallen out of. "Twenty percent. That was— " he coughed. "That was worse than the ogre raid boss. I want that on record."

Arista dropped to her knees beside him, half out of concern, half out of pure, electric excitement. "Twenty percent HP. From a full-distance launch. That means the distance isn't the problem anymore, it's purely landing trauma, and your build ate almost all of it."

"Glad my suffering is informative."

"Extremely informative." She grabbed the cracked remains of his shield, turning it over in her hands, mind already racing well ahead of the conversation. "This took most of the impact, didn't it. You angled it on landing."

"Pure reflex. Didn't want my face doing the job the shield was supposed to."

Arista stared at the shattered shield, steel, dented, split clean along one edge, and then, slowly, pulled up her inventory, staring at the stack of pale, springy cloud material she'd been hauling around since the mountain, still sitting there, unused, waiting for an idea worth using it on.

"...Oh." Her eyes went wide. "Oh. Bram, buddy, my guy, you just solved my entire problem."

"I threw myself off a giant slingshot and nearly died. I didn't solve anything."

"You solved everything." Arista was already crouched over her open inventory, pulling out chunks of the pale material right there at the crater's edge, calling back over her shoulder without ever actually standing up. 'Don't move! I need to test something and I think I finally know what the shield's supposed to be made of!"

im came jogging up to the crater's edge, having apparently sprinted over the moment word of Bram's survival spread, and peered down with open, delighted curiosity."

"...Is she always like this?" Bram asked, still lying flat, addressing the question to the sky in general."

"You get used to it," Pim said, entirely too cheerful for someone who'd personally drowned, snapped both legs, and been launched into a lake earlier that same afternoon. "Eventually. Maybe."

Right there at the crater's edge, cloud material spread across a flat rock instead of any proper workbench, Arista studied it with fresh eyes now that she had an actual application in mind instead of just vague theory.

"Okay. Bram's shield worked because it absorbed the impact instead of transferring it all straight into him. But it still cracked, because it was steel, and steel's rigid: it can only flex so much before it just breaks." She picked up a chunk of the pale, springy material, pressing her thumb into it and watching it slowly bounce back to shape. "This stuff doesn't break like that. It bounced my pickaxe back at me the first time I hit it. It doesn't fight force, it absorbs it and gives it back, over and over, without ever actually failing structurally."

She set the chunk down, already sketching. "So, no metal frame this time. No rigid core to crack under stress. Just the cloud material itself, shaped into a shield. Two iron handles bolted through the back so someone's actually got something solid to grip, but the shield face itself stays pure cloud, front to back."

The shaping process turned out to be nothing like forging metal, no heat required, no hammering, just careful, patient manipulation of a material that responded more like thick, resistant dough than any ore she'd worked with before. She pressed it into a rough round shape, working the edges smooth, testing the give at different thicknesses until she found something that held its form without going stiff.

[Freeform Craft Attempt: In Progress][Material: Cloud Essence — Unclassified][Component Compatibility: Iron Handles — Confirmed]

Two plain iron handles, leftover stock from an earlier batch she'd forged weeks ago and never found a use for, went in last, bolted through reinforced grommets on the shield's back face, giving her something solid to actually hold onto without compromising the pure, unbroken cloud material making up the front.

[Item Crafted: Cloud-Woven Impact Shield (Prototype)][Structural Integrity: Non-Rigid — Fully Elastic][Blacksmithing XP +60][Achievement Unlocked: Softer Than It Looks]

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Arista held it up, turning it in the light. It looked almost unremarkable, pale, faintly rippling, more like a stretched membrane than proper armor. She pressed her palm flat against the surface and pushed. It gave, deep and springy, absorbing the pressure entirely before slowly, steadily pushing back against her hand without any hint of resistance turning sharp or sudden.

"...Okay. That feels promising. Feels like hitting a very committed trampoline."

She glanced toward Bram, who had, with impressive resilience, already climbed out and was currently accepting a health potion from one of the onlookers.

"Bram!" she called, waving the shield overhead. "Round two! Same launch, this time with actual proper gear!"

From the crater's edge, Bram's groan was audible even at a distance.

"...I regret every choice that led me here."

"You're a hero of science! Get back in the sling!"

Bram climbed back into the sling with the weary resignation of a man who had, somewhere in the last hour, accepted that his fate was permanently tied to Arista's research. He took the cloud-woven shield from her hands, testing its give with a skeptical press of his thumb.

"...It's squishy."

"It's elastic. There's a difference. Squishy implies it doesn't work. This is going to work."

"That's what you said about the last three attempts too."

"Those where all different variables. This is a completely separate problem." Arista patted the shield encouragingly, as if it could hear her. "Just brace it against your chest on impact, same as last time. Let it take the hit instead of you."

Bram sighed, adjusted his grip on the shield's iron handles, and settled back into the sling. "If I die again, I want it noted that I did this entirely for the good of demon-kind."

"Noted! Very heroic! Everyone's watching, they'll remember!"

[Launch Sequence Initiated]

The tension arm released with the same violent thwack as before, and Bram sailed skyward in a long, familiar arc, the crowd, considerably larger now than it had been for attempt nine, tracking him with a mixture of anticipation and morbid curiosity as he arced over the treeline and began his descent.

"FLY BRAM FLY!" someone shouted from the crowd, which quickly turned into an actual chant, ragged and enthusiastic, echoing off the rocks.

"FLY BRAM FLY! FLY BRAM FLY!"

Arista watched, breath held, as the tiny distant shape of Bram angled the shield beneath himself in the final seconds of the fall, bracing exactly as instructed.

He hit the ground.

Instead of the bone-rattling WHUMP from before, the impact produced something closer to a deep, muffled whumpf, the cloud material compressing hard on contact, absorbing the fall's momentum, flexing almost to the ground before rebounding, once, gently, and settling.

Bram rolled off the shield, sat up, and stared at his own HP bar with open disbelief.

[Player Bram — Status: Alive][HP: 94%]

Silence. Then an eruption of cheering loud enough to startle birds from three separate trees.

Arista sprinted the distance without even remembering deciding to run, skidding to a stop in front of him. "Ninety-four percent! Bram! Ninety-four percent!"

"...Huh," Bram said, patting himself down like he didn't quite believe it either. "That felt like landing on a very aggressive mattress."

"That felt like landing on a very aggressive mattress because it basically was one." Arista snatched the shield up, inspecting it, not a single crack, not a single tear, fully intact and already slowly re-expanding to its original shape. "It's not just softening the landing. It's an airbag. A reusable, undamaged, fully recoverable airbag."

Bram climbed to his feet, testing his own limbs with visible surprise that all of them still worked. "So. Does this mean I'm done being launched into the ground?"

Arista looked at him. Looked at the shield. Looked back at him with an expression that answered the question long before she opened her mouth.

"...Absolutely not. We've got distance data to collect and an entire transportation network to design. But now you get to survive it comfortably."

Bram closed his eyes and let out a long, suffering sigh.

"Fly Bram fly," he muttered. "I hate that this is my legacy now."

[Achievement Unlocked: It's Not Stupid If It Works]"Successfully weaponized questionable engineering into a functional transportation method."

Arista stared at the notification with the particular pride of someone who'd just had their most chaotic instincts formally validated by the universe itself.

"Framing this one," she muttered. "Literally. On a wall. Somewhere prominent."

But the achievement barely had time to sink in before her brain was already several steps ahead, chewing on the next problem the way it always did. Distance. Bram had gone far, further than any of the Easy-mode volunteers, but "far" still meant a fraction of a kingdom's actual size. If she wanted this to genuinely replace cross-continent travel, launch distance alone wasn't going to cut it.

That night, tablet propped against her knees again, she found herself down a very different kind of research hole than usual, not blacksmithing forums this time, but grainy footage of real-world extreme sports, wingsuit flyers diving between mountain ridges at speeds that looked, frankly, unreasonable for a human body to survive.

"Wingsuits," she murmured, watching a flyer carve a long, impossible arc between two rock faces. "That's it. That's the missing piece. You don't just fall after launch: you glide. Turn all that momentum into actual controlled distance instead of just... arcing down like a really committed cannonball."

She sat up straighter, mind already racing. "Okay. New problem. I need someone who can actually sew, properly sew, garment-level precision, not 'weld metal plates together' precision, and I need fabric that can handle wind resistance at speed without tearing apart mid-flight."

The tailor question, she suspected, would take some searching. Blacksmiths she understood. Tailors were an entirely different skill tree, one she had zero experience navigating.

The fabric question, though, solved itself almost instantly. She thought back to the stockpile of cloud material still sitting in her inventory, the same springy, energy-absorbing stuff that had turned Bram's shield into a functional airbag.

"...Obviously that. It bounces force instead of tearing under it. If anything's going to survive high-speed wind shear, it's the stuff that already survived getting mined out of an actual sky."

She grabbed her notebook, sketching a rough humanoid outline with wide, membrane-like panels stretching between the arms and legs, and then stopped, stylus hovering, staring at her own sketch with a slowly dawning, deeply inconvenient realization.

"...Wait."

She flipped back a page, to the cloud shield sketch she'd drawn in this very notebook the night the prototype first worked, too proud of the thing not to commit it to paper a second time, in her own hand, outside the game entirely. Then forward again to the wingsuit outline.

"Wingsuits work because you maximize surface area, arms out, legs spread, whole body catching air like a glider. But Bram's shield needs both hands on it, braced against his chest, the entire time he's falling." She tapped the sketch, frowning now. "You can't spread your arms out to glide and hold a shield flush against your body at the same time. The two things directly fight each other."

She sat back, chewing the end of her stylus, staring at the conflict she'd just handed herself.

"Great. Fantastic. Solved the landing, solved the tool, and now the tool and the other tool don't want to coexist."

She logged back in the next morning, notebook's worth of sketches already fresh in her mind, and headed straight for the makeshift surface workshop she'd thrown together near the catapult site, the same stretch of Dwarven Republic territory where all of this had started.

Bram leaned against the frame of the doorway with the weary patience of a man who had learned to recognize this specific tone in her voice.

"...What now."

"Nothing! Just a small structural contradiction in the entire premise of the project. Nothing that can't be solved." Arista grinned up at him, already flipping to a fresh page. "You free for a few more test flights?"

Bram closed his eyes. "Why do I already know the answer is yes."

"Okay, baseline data first." Arista pulled out a fresh page, already sketching a simple timer notation at the top. "Before I even touch the wingsuit problem, I need actual numbers. How long is Bram in the air right now, shield-braced, no wingsuit? That's my control variable."

She pulled up the stopwatch function on her tablet, set to trigger on launch and stop on impact, then waved Bram back toward the sling.

"Same as before. Shield ready, brace on landing. I'm just watching the clock this time."

[Launch Sequence Initiated][Flight Timer: Started]

Bram arced skyward in the same long, familiar trajectory, and Arista watched the timer climb, murmuring numbers under her breath as he reached the peak of his arc and began the descent.

[Flight Timer: Stopped — 8.4 seconds]

The now-familiar muffled whumpf of the airbag-shield doing its job echoed across the field, followed by Bram sitting up, considerably less battered than his first two attempts.

"Eight point four seconds," Arista announced, jogging over. "That's the whole flight, launch to landing, no wingsuit."

"Feels longer when you're the one falling," Bram said, climbing to his feet and handing the shield back to her for inspection.

Arista turned that number over in her head, comparing it against the wingsuit-versus-shield conflict still sitting unsolved in her notebook. If a wingsuit meant arms spread wide for the entire flight, and the shield needed both hands braced against the chest only in the final moment before impact, then maybe she didn't need to solve for the whole flight. Maybe she only needed to solve for the last second or two.

"Okay, actual question." She looked up at him. "If the shield were clipped directly to your chest plate: like, physically attached there, not something you're holding the whole time, do you think you'd have enough time, mid-flight, to actually grab it and get it into braced position before you hit the ground?"

Bram considered this with the same flat, methodical seriousness he seemed to bring to every near-death experience she'd put him through. "Depends how long grabbing and bracing actually takes. If it's clipped at the chest already, I'm not reaching far, just unclipping and pulling it forward, maybe locking my arms against it right before impact."

"So, quick estimate. A second? Two?"

"If I'm not panicking, one second, easy. Two, if the wind's doing something unhelpful."

Arista's grin started creeping back in, the way it always did right before a plan clicked into place. "So if you're spending, say, six of your eight seconds gliding with your arms spread wide, wingsuit doing its job, covering actual distance, that still leaves two full seconds at the end to unclip, brace, and land. The wingsuit doesn't need to fight the shield the whole flight. It only needs to let go of the job right before the shield needs to start it."

"...Huh." Bram looked, for the first time all day, genuinely impressed instead of just resigned. "That's actually not a bad plan."

"I have those occasionally." Arista was already scribbling furiously, sketching a rough chest-mounted clip mechanism onto her wingsuit outline. "Okay. New requirement for the tailor, whoever they end up being, quick-release clip, chest-mounted, something Bram can pop open one-handed under stress without fumbling. And the shield needs a folding mechanism, so it's not just permanently sticking out flat from his chest during the glide phase."

Bram sighed, already anticipating exactly where this was headed. "So I'm doing more test flights."

"So many more test flights."

Finding a tailor turned out to be considerably harder than finding a dwarven pattern-welder, mostly because "someone who can sew wind-resistant fabric into a wingsuit shape" wasn't exactly a common request at any of the settlements Arista had access to. Blacksmiths she could find on every corner. Tailors capable of garment-level precision, working with a material nobody had ever handled before, were a different matter entirely.

She widened her search past the Demon Realm, past the surface kingdoms even, eventually landing on a name that kept surfacing in forum threads whenever anyone mentioned genuinely unconventional crafting work, a player known simply as Nettle, an Imp-subrace demon who'd apparently built an entire reputation designing elaborate trickster-themed gear for a small, rapidly growing guild.

[Guild Spotlight: Low-Key]"Founded three weeks ago in the wake of the Gates of the Underworld and the Second Heavenly-Demonic Accord. Membership growing steadily. Guild motto: 'Small tricks, big consequences.'"

Arista snorted the first time she read the name out loud. "Low-Key. Loki. Cute."

The guild's page made its inspiration fairly obvious before she even reached the About section: half the pinned posts referenced her by name, screenshots of the tunnel breakthrough, the diplomatic bluff, even the caltrop recipe credited prominently as "proof that clever beats strong."

"Founded in honor of Strawberry, whose refusal to accept the rules as written showed an entire server what was actually possible if you just... didn't stop asking why not."

"...Huh." Arista sat with that for a moment longer than she expected to, something warm and slightly overwhelming settling in her chest before she shook it off and got back to the actual task at hand. "Okay. Focus. Tailor. Nettle."

She found the Imp in question at the guild's modest hall, a small, wiry figure perched cross-legged atop a worktable surrounded by half-finished garments, pins held between sharp teeth, muttering to a bolt of shimmering fabric like it owed her money.

"You're Strawberry," Nettle said, before Arista had even opened her mouth, sharp eyes flicking up and down with obvious, unhidden delight. "The actual Strawberry. Founder of my entire guild's personality. This is, okay, this is genuinely a lot, give me a second."

"You founded a guild around me?"

"Around the principle of you," Nettle corrected, hopping down from the table. "Loopholes. Chaos with a purpose. Being smarter than the rules instead of stronger than the enemy. It's a whole philosophy now. There's a manifesto. I'll show you later, it's very good, I wrote most of it."

"...Okay, flattering, slightly concerning, we'll circle back to that." Arista held up the folded cloud material she'd brought along. "Actual reason I'm here. I need a wingsuit. Precision sewn, wind-resistant, made from this."

Nettle took the material, turning it over with the sharp, assessing focus of someone who clearly took garment work far more seriously than her guild's chaotic branding suggested. She pressed it between two fingers, testing the flex, holding it up to the light.

"...This isn't cloth." A pause. "This isn't anything I've worked with before."

"It's cloud. Mined it myself. Bounces force back instead of tearing under it."

Nettle's eyes lit up in a way that made Arista immediately, instinctively trust her. "Oh, I am absolutely doing this. Give me everything you know about how it behaves, every measurement you've got, and give me a week."

"I need it to survive high-speed wind shear without deforming the aerodynamic shape."

"I need silence and a proper workspace, but yes, obviously, that too." Nettle was already clearing space on her worktable, shoving half-finished projects aside with the brisk efficiency of someone whose priorities had just violently reordered themselves. "You just handed me the single most interesting material request I've had since I started this guild. I would frankly be offended if you asked anyone else."

Arista grinned, already feeling the particular, familiar thrill of watching someone else catch the same obsessive spark she'd been running on for months now. "Welcome to the project, then. Fair warning: it comes with test flights, a very patient tank named Bram, and at least one incident involving a lake."

"...I'm going to need that story in full detail before we start."

"Deal."

While Nettle disappeared into a week of focused, obsessive tailoring, Arista turned her attention to the clip mechanism, a problem that seemed, on paper, considerably simpler than folding adamantium or gluing gears into submission. A latch. A release. How hard could that actually be.

"Spring-loaded quick-release," she muttered, sketching a simple hinge design that would bolt onto Bram's chest plate, holding the shield flush against his armor until a firm tug popped it free. "Needs to hold secure during the glide phase, can't have it rattling loose mid-flight, but release instantly the second he actually needs it."

Her first prototype erred, understandably, on the side of secure.

"Okay," she said, clipping the shield into place against Bram's chest plate, giving the latch an experimental tug that didn't budge even slightly. "Feels solid. Very solid. Definitely not going anywhere."

"That's the concerning part of the sentence," Bram said, testing the clip himself with a firm yank that produced nothing but a faint metallic groan.

"It's supposed to be secure! We don't want it falling off mid-flight!"

"We also want it coming off when I actually need it, don't we?"

"...Obviously. It'll be fine. Get in the sling."

Bram, against what Arista would later admit was every reasonable instinct he clearly possessed, climbed back into the catapult with the shield clipped firmly to his chest plate.

[Launch Sequence Initiated]

He arced skyward in the same long, familiar trajectory, and Arista watched from the ground, counting down the seconds in her head, waiting for the moment he'd unclip and brace for landing.

She watched him reach for the release. Watched him yank once. Watched him yank again, harder, panic visibly entering his body language even from this distance as the ground rushed up considerably faster than the clip was cooperating.

"...Oh no."

Bram hit the ground shield-first, clip still very much attached, the full impact transferring straight through the rigid latch mechanism directly into his ribs instead of being absorbed properly by a freely-braced shield.

[Player Bram — Status: Alive][HP: 31%][Status Effect: Fractured Ribs]

The groan that followed was long, pained, and deeply, personally offended.

Arista sprinted over, wincing before she even reached him. "Okay. Okay, that's, that's very clearly a design flaw, and I am so sorry, and also we have excellent data now."

"The clip," Bram wheezed, still flat on his back, "did not. Release."

"Yeah. Yeah, I got that. Loud and clear. From here, even." She crouched down, inspecting the offending latch, which sat exactly as stubbornly locked as it had on the ground, completely unbothered by an actual emergency having just occurred. "Too much tension in the spring. It's built to survive wind resistance during the glide, which means it's basically overbuilt for a quick one-handed pop, especially under panic-adrenaline grip strength instead of calm testing-ground grip strength."

"Fascinating," Bram said, flat and pained. "Truly riveting engineering insight. Currently experiencing it through several cracked ribs."

"I'll get you a healing potion. And also," Arista added, already scribbling furious notes, "a much, much weaker spring."

Bram closed his eyes, lying in a fresh crater that was rapidly becoming as familiar to him as his own bed. "I would like it on record that I am beginning to regret my Vitality build specifically because it keeps making me the obvious choice for these experiments."

"Your Vitality build is a gift to the scientific community, Bram."

"My Vitality build is a curse."

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