As Leo gazed down at the ten lifeless spiritual bodies lined up in one neat row on the craggy ground, annoyance washed over him. How the hell could this have happened?
"Didn't we give them all separate quests? Why the f**k are they all lined up like this here?" he asked to no one in particular as he knew the answer already. "And what kind of sick joke is this… they're all missing their heads."
"The report from McCloud suggests that these players all had quests around this area of the map, near the banks of the River Styx," Morgana explained. "He thinks they were hunted by something that's new to this region as we don't usually see decapitations in the Abyssal plains this time of year."
Leo looked over to his partner, Morgana, whose face had changed into one of intense concentration. Her eyes were glazed and unfocused.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Sensing for a presence that could have done this… now shush," she chided.
Seconds passed into minutes before the soft glow returned to Morgana's violet eyes, and with it, came the furrowing of a frustrated brow.
"There's a familiar spiritual residue in the air but it's gone now," Morgana reported.
"Familiar?" Leo's eyebrow rose a notch. "You know what did this?"
"I once faced a lesser that served one of my rivals here in the Abyssal Plains who had a penchant for decapitating the heads of other lessers and shadow beasts alike..." Morgana frowned as the memory of her enemies washed over her face. "We called him the Decapitator… but Leo, he doesn't roam this area… they know this region belongs to me."
"But if it was him…" Leo prompted.
"Then his master has either gotten wind of our plans and has taken steps to foil it, or, more likely, the greedy bastard is planning to invade my territory soon and has sent one of his top lieutenants to harass me and mine," Morgana hissed, her face growing darker and darker by the second. "I'll have to hunt him down myself before he can decapitate more of our players."
"No... don't worry your pretty little head over this... decapitator," Leo said as reassuringly as he could. He even patted her on the shoulder for emphasis. "The players will hunt him down for us soon enough. We'll turn it into a special event with big prizes. That'll rile them up good."
"You think a bunch of nobodies can take on a lesser even I would have trouble with?" Morgana bent her elbows and placed her hands on her hips. Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Are you looking down on me, Leo?"
"Calm down, partner… I don't mean it like that," Leo raised his hands in surrender. "Imagine players like Ath3na banding together to take on this special event hunt… it'll definitely create some good buzz for the Abyss and it'll allow us to work on our party system too."
Morgana thought about it, and after a few seconds, she'd changed stance to one that was less combative. "They'll have to be at least as good as Ath3na, otherwise, they'll just die like this lot."
She waved her hand dismissively toward the dead bodies lying before them, bringing Leo's focus back to the problem at hand.
Leo frowned. "Morgana… we have to resurrect them."
This declaration was followed by an argument as neither Leo nor Morgana would budge.
"This would be a sh*tty game if you only got one round to play it… no one but really hardcore gamers like those kinds of sudden death games… It'll ruin our long-term goals," he insisted.
"It takes a great amount of soul energy to recall a soul back from the dead... A minimum of thirty lesser soul stones, Leo," Morgana warned. "That's thirty life-draining wraiths per resurrection, and that price only gets larger as the soul evolves… It would eat away at our soul stone reserves."
That really was a dilemma, one Leo wasn't sure they could earn back if players kept dying which was usually the norm for online multiplayer games.
"We made the Easter egg hard enough that only experienced players could get through it," Leo reminded Morgana. "They won't die so easily…"
"Wouldn't these people be some of your elite gamers?" Morgana pointed down at the row of headless bodies to prove her point. "Well, they're dead, Leo… and who's to say that your Easter egg can only be completed by elites? Didn't Ath3na already spill the secret to her followers?"
Leo knew Morgana was right. The method of finding the Easter egg didn't remain secret for long. Whether for money or fame or just to be nice, Ath3na had already revealed it to her selected friends and followers.
Feeling frustrated, Leo's gaze fell to the floor, and suddenly, he saw something that turned the switch in his brain on.
"Wait... we can make dying taboo for the players," Leo realized.
Morgana raised an eyebrow at him, but it was more of a curious look than an angry one. "How would we achieve that?"
"Penalties," Leo said, facing forward while a smile dared to appear on his face. "We make the penalty of dying so undesirable that players will work extra hard to stay alive!"
"Interesting…" Morgana tapped a finger to her lips. "What sort of penalties?"
Leo picked up one of the objects on the ground and raised it to Morgana's eye-level. It was a rusted iron sword, one of the beginner-grade weapons players were given in Adventour.
"I once told you how much fun it is earning powerful equipment right?" he reminded her. "Imagine losing your hard-earned weapon or armor as a penalty for dying… that'll sting like nobody's business."
Morgana glanced down at her bat which she'd recently revealed to Leo was actually her reaper's scythe dolled up to look pretty. She thought about losing it and felt that annoying gut-wrenching feeling in the pit of her stomach which almost made her agree with Leo.
"But it's not enough for us to regain our investment of soul stones," Morgana said with a shake of her head.
Leo wagged a finger at her. He was genuinely smiling now, which he would later realize, considering there were dead bodies around them, was quite insensitive of him.
"There's a second penalty… players pay for their own resurrection with soul energy or stones they've collected," Leo answered.
Morgana gazed skeptically back at him. "What if they don't have enough for a resurrection?"
"Then we'll pay that difference automatically but the SRS will register the difference as a debt that players must payback. They'll be locked out from absorbing soul energy until they do," Leo answered right before he realized the flaw in his idea. "You can do that, right? Seeing as you control their souls with the reaper's contract we made."
Finally, that perky smile Leo was now used to seeing on Morgana's pretty face appeared.
"I can certainly place a limiter in their soul cores that the system will unlock only after they've paid their debt," Morgana admitted.
"Would you need to do that for every player individually?" Leo asked while thinking that would be impossible to sustain long-term.
Morgana shook her head. "I'll cast the spell and have McCloud update the Substitute Reaper System we created and include this feature during players' transition from the mortal plane to the Abyss."
Leo laughed. "You're really sounding more and more like a game developer, you know. I didn't even know we could use the SRS that way."
And just like that, their argument ended and their problem was solved. Of course, Leo was unaware that the soul stone penalty would cause problems down the line but that was a problem for another time.
Morgana instructed Leo to line the bodies up in a circle with their necks facing inward. So Leo dragged the bodies one by one and moved them into formation. After he finished with this task, he noticed Morgana examining him.
"What?" he asked.
"Your clothes reek of mundaneness. And switching to Maestro simply won't do," she said right before snapping her fingers.
Leo was enveloped in a white puff of smoke which seconds later transformed into a thick crimson coat that covered him from shoulder to foot. A deep hood was pulled over his head, hiding his face in shadow.
Morgana nodded approvingly at Leo's new getup. "The players need to feel like they really messed up when they died, and nothing says 'you suck' more than getting reprimanded by the Game Master himself."
Leo raised his arms to the side and inspected his new clothes. "You couldn't make me look any less of a cliché?"
Ignoring Leo's complaint, Morgana knelt in the center of the circle of dead bodies. Then, with bolts of lightning streaking out of her hands in the style of Emperor Palpatine, the reaper flicked her finger over each of their chests, shocking their bodies into violent convulsions while Morgana's energies washed over them.
"Human souls carry so much potential that a simple and yet costly spell is all we need to revive it," Morgana explained as she rose to her feet. Then she spared a smile toward Leo. "It's time for the show to begin."
Both game designers waited while their players slowly came back to life, their heads materializing out of nowhere as if they'd never been decapitated.
The first of these players, the red-headed Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike Leo had met earlier, opened his green eyes and gazed up at the two people looking over him. Then the player screamed a very unmanly scream.
Leo and Morgana jumped back in surprise, both of them realizing too late that these players might not be mentally stable immediately after experiencing an excruciatingly painful death.
Arnold's look-alike quickly rose to his feet, and after a glance down at his recently dead companions who were just now beginning to stir, he backed away from their circle with eyes that were as wide as a cornered deer's.
Morgana leaned in to whisper into Leo's ear, "Calm him down quick or I'll smack him to sleep with my bat."
Leo mouthed the word, no, at Morgana. Then he turned to face the player who was moving further and further away from them. Above his head, the gamer tag [Thorminator Lv1] appeared.
"Calm down, fool… You've just been resurrected… you're safe," Leo assured him, raising both his hands up in a gesture of surrender.
Thorminator stopped moving away although his bulky arms wrapped around himself like he was frightened of falling into pieces.
"Yeah, take your time… resurrection can be a bit jarring, like waking up from an extreme case of hangover," Leo lied.
Thorminator glanced down at his hands and pressed them over each other. "But… I died… it felt… it felt so real…"
Then he touched his face and pressed his fingers against his forehead.
"That thing cut my head off… but now… I'm alive again…" he realized as a single tear dropped down to his cheek.
It was then that Leo realized another reason players wouldn't want to die. It would be an extremely painful and traumatizing experience.
Leo glanced over at Morgana who was urging him onward with a nod of her head.
"Tell me more about this shadow that bested you, substitute reaper," Leo said getting into character.
"A giant with a shaggy lion's mane… and a single red eye…" he said, shivering slightly.
While Thorminator seemed lost in his own thoughts, Morgana strolled to Leo's side and whispered in his ear, "Yup… it's him alright. Only one Cyclops I know with an ugly red eye…"
"That's our first event," Leo whispered back. "The hunt for the red-eyed Decapitator."
"Oo~~oh, catchy. I like it," Morgana agreed.
While Leo and Morgana chuckled among themselves like bad schemers in a play, a second gamer woke from her brush with death. It was a pale-faced girl who looked no older than Morgana with silky smooth black hair that trailed down to her waist.
She raised slanted eyes at Leo and asked a question in Japanese that was quickly translated by the SRS into, "Who are you?"
Leo leaned toward the girl, and in the most pompous voice he could create, he answered, "Know me. Know the creator of the world you play in. Exalt the one and only Game Master of Souls... "