Ornery landed onto his feet with a strange deep sound emanating fom the ice, another crack forming somewhere beneath - rather than the violent cracking from the glacial bovine's buckling, it was more like a quiet ping - like the sort of noise that some people would call "singing ice", when a lake would freeze over in winter in certain areas of the world. They didn't exactly do that in most of Japan - the winters were far too mild, most years. He couldn't remember the last time they got a freak cold snap in Kobe.
But he watched... well, watching was a strong word - rather, he'd listened to a lot of videos about random stuff while coding, or cooking, or doing virtually anything else that was fairly boring on its own, and sometimes autoplay would serve him the strangest stuff. He could go from a video about airplane malfunctions, to unsolved murder mystries, to solved natural mysteries (like those sailing stones? wild), to Weird Ice Sounds, Why Do They Happen...
Ornery had been trained by years and years of being half-asleep on his school desk, only waking up to answer questions and do some work before nodding off again, to retain way too much information even when he'd been listening at only quarter-capacity. Many teachers had tried to trip him up before. Shiroyama, they'd call out, and then they'd ask him something that someone who slept through class absolutely wasn't supposed to know.
He answered correctly every time.
(It probably helped that he was one of those obnoxious people that read every school book from end to end ahead of time, out of idle curiosity.)
"Oh, possibly. I think a lot of ice monsters in games just don't have mouths, though, do they? That's the first ice butthole monster I've ever seen," Ornery said, hurrying to Talebrook's side before slowing down to a much more manageable pace. His speed was still boosted from his relentless Gale Blading, so he'd have to consciously walk slower to make sure he didn't outpace them by accident.
If he was any other shitty overleveled Twinblade, perhaps he'd have sped ahead, destroying everything in his path, but he was Ornery, and he judged that he could do that just fine when playing on his own. When partying with other people, he didn't work like that.
He peered down beneath his feet, noticing much the same thing that Talebrook had - was it a fish? A serpent? Some sort of enormous prehistoric crustacean, or seaworm? A... dinosaur? Ornery gave it the most suspicious of looks. It would most likely come back to bite him in the rear, later.
"Don't like this one bit, but I guess there's a reason I'm here," Ornery said, scratching his head with one of his swords. He was usually holding onto them even when he hadn't needed to - he liked the drawn weapon running animation a lot more, and while he was usually a first-person player, he wanted to look cool for everyone else.
"You ever think that this game's, like---it's a lot less... game-like, in some aspects, than the previous installments? Like, the NPCs are way smarter, to the point that I don't think most of those responses are entirely preprogrammed. The fields are way cooler, and everything's way more interactable. I'm surprised their servers aren't frying as we speak. Maybe they are, who knows."
He took those few steps alongside Talebrook.
"... Maybe that's why CC Corp's servers burned down last time. 'Cause they way overdid it."
He knew that was most likely not the case, however. The fire was far too suspicious. Personally, he'd suspected arson, but who in their right mind would try to burn down a video game company?
(That was a rhetorical unvoiced question. Arsonists were never particularly sound of mind.)
