As Yoko, Miguel and Jones disappeared into the thick of the forest one by one, Sung and Rin meanwhile continued to slowly row their chainsaws back and forth

  "It feels weird." Rin said all of a sudden. "That nanites exist, but we don't use them more often outside of here. Like it's a versatile material, anyone could materialize anything with this goop."

  "It's a lot harder than you think." Sung replied. The cloning machines use nanites, and there's no word in Sung's vocabulary that can even begin to describe how much of a pain it was to create the scaffoldings and sub-recipes for each type of cell a human body has.

  "How hard could it be?" Rin dismissed Sung, it truly is bliss to be ignorant.

  One by one the trees fell, several almost on top of them had they not gotten out of the way in time. From the fallen trees, however, a new problem grew. A problem that Sung and Rin should've seen coming ages ago.

  Entire trees, as it turns out, are quite heavy. Even with the combined strength of both Sung and Rin, none of the trees they fell would budge. They thought about rolling them on the ground, but all the branches they didn't bother to trim beforehand meant that the logs were firmly anchored into the snowy dirt ground.

  Log by log, they had to trim out the branches, cut the bark into more manageable pieces, and move them one by one into a neat pile. To add insult to injury, by the time they were done with all that, the total amount of wood they now have isn't even enough to make a warm coat, let alone 5 of them.

  Disgruntled, they went back to sawing trees down. Sung did try to turn upright trees into nanites directly, but the interface doesn't seem to allow for that. Materials do have to be "harvested" in order to be converted, how the system defines "harvested" materials though remains to be found via trial and error.

  Fortunately for them, though, simply sawing the trees was enough to count as being harvested. Entire logs convert into less nanites than it otherwise would've had they neatly divided them into chunks, but at this point they agreed that it wasn't worth the extra effort.

  With their morale improved and their workflow established, it did not take very long for the nanites to start piling up in their inventory. They've originally set an arbitrary goal of 3 thousand nanites, but by the end they've managed to accumulate a grand total of 20 thousand.

  By the time they were done, the sun's already slowly starting to set. With the forest thinned out, the two could see the giant icy tree over yonder, its majestic dazzle temporarily blinding both of them. They got two pieces of logs they just collected and used them like stools, letting out a long fatigued sigh while dropping themselves onto these makeshift chairs.

  "They should be coming back by now," Sung checked the clock on the interface, "should we prepare some food?" "Can't we just materialize them with the nanites?" Rin scrolled through the menus trying to find a recipe for food, but after listings of furniture, plates, and whatnot, food was the only thing absent from the extensive collection of crafting recipes.

  "God, we'll have to hunt then... In the dark, even." Rin complained. It was another oversight they should've considered, before spending the entire afternoon turning trees into nanites. "How will we even find animals, when we can barely see?"

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  "I think I saw a frozen lake nearby, we could catch some fish there I suppose? We'd need fishing rods though." Sung suggested. "I guess that's better than chasing animals around." They crafted two basic rods and headed off to the lake.

  Sung smashed out a hole in the icy surface with his brass knuckles, before they sat on the log pieces they cut up earlier as stools and waited. Neither of them had fished before, but they tried their best to imitate how people fished in wildlife survival documentaries.

  They sat until their butts were sore, yet no fish came to bite. Rin was visibly agitated, "Where are they?!" Rin exploded in anger. Ah, to be an angsty young teenager, Sung reminisced shortly of his school days. He would always be baited into a fight when the delinquents at his school taunted him about his redundant skills.

  Bait... Wait... Oh... Right, they forgot about the bait. With soil this cold they'd be hard pressed to find worms for bait, and of course they aren't on the crafting menu. Their efforts were futile, their asses sore for nothing.

  Desperate, Sung shoved his hands into the icy water. There are definitely a good amount of fishes in there, not all hope was lost. Shortly after, Sung felt something slimy brush past the back of his hand. He quickly grabbed hold of it and yanked it out of the water before it could escape, it flew out of his hands, landed on the snow, and flopped around for a bit, before Rin whacked it dead with his crowbars.

  Seeing their success, they quickly caught and whacked a few more before heading back, fish basketed with their shirts. They skewered the fish from the mouth with branches from the trees earlier, lit up a fire with flint they picked along the lake, and patiently waited for the three of them to return.

  By this point, the sun's fully set. The fish, now roasted to a golden, crispy texture, looked ready to eat. Yet, Yoko and co. were nowhere to be found. Rin took the opportunity to snatch one from the fireplace and gnawed on it, before quickly spitting it out - They forgot to remove the scales off the fish's skin.

  Sung, meanwhile, crafted a coat hanger and 5 coats for each of them. When he tried one on, he was immediately basked in a warm embrace. The coat blocked the brisk gusts while keeping him well ventilated still, as if spring came early.

  He threw one to Rin. The both of them now sat cozily around the fireplace, steamy hot roasted fish in hand, freshly skewered fish hung on top of the fire. The fish's a bit dry, unseasoned and quite fishy, but it's not entirely inedible.

  "They really are taking their sweet time, I wonder where they've gone?" Sung glanced at the digital clock again, it's nearing 9pm, and they're still not back. From a distance they can hear violent rustlings, some cries and thuds, before the commotion ended.

  Both Sung and Rin equipped their weapons, ready to battle to the death with whoever's behind that ruckus. Out of the forest came 3 figures, all three of them somewhat battered and bruised. It looks to be an easy fight, their opponents being rather fatigued.

  "Relax, it's us." Miguel reassured them while he walked over to the fireplace. "These ready? I'm starvin'." Sung put away his knuckles back into his inventory and instead pulled out a few coats for the rest of them.

  Miguel and Yoko recounted their encounters with Sung and Rin while Jones took a chance at the fish - and immediately spat it right back out, he never really liked fish to begin with.

  Miguel handed the blueprint fragments to Sung. "We found this in a can, see if you can make head or tails out of this, will ya?" Sung took a look at them individually, they seem to be different parts for a larger thing. "Plasma Amplifier... Magnetic Field Stabilizer... Ferro-ceramic alloys..." Parts for what seemed to be a plasma-based weapon.

  "Might as well keep a lookout on it." Sung concluded. Miguel then handed both Sung and Rin a Noxiblock each, to which Rin got excited over its appearance ("Cool, a heroin jab!" He said. "Kids these days..." Miguel shook his head.) while Sung instantly recognized it as just some watered down clone pod tranquilizers with biofluorescent dye.