"How could you make a promise when you didn't know how to fulfill it? You're such a jackass!" not nice. Lethe hadn't even tried to be nice since I told her I had no idea how to train anyone. We'd been walking for two weeks since. I'd shown her the basic Assassin skills a hundred times, but she still couldn't do it. "And your instructions make no sense. How can I move forward when my feet are planted firmly on the ground? I lean forward and fall on my face every time. Your Assassin skills suck."
I'd thought of a more direct method, a spell that my Priest had. Mental link. It allowed the priest to channel a healing spell through the other person, using their mp instead of the Priest's. Maybe if I used an Assassin skill while mentally linked…that might work. "Let me try something real fast." I cast the spell and used her stamina to Silent Rush a tree. "So…did that work?" I turned to look at her and found that she was holding her head. I'd guess that meant it was working. Then I started doing the first move of all of her chosen classes. By the time I was done, she was whimpering. "It worked, right?"
"How do you stand it? Every time you level up…this pain!" apparently she'd never had her head bashed into a wall. It was significantly less painful than that. More to the point, pain was the same as exhaustion; a status effect. There was no brain being forcibly expanded, no skull for a brain to push against, no body whatsoever. There was a body that made pain intolerable before, now it was just a recognition of a potentially damaging event. Once you recognized it, you could ignore it. "Yeah, it worked." she obviously didn't have the same mindset. She was still whimpering like there were aftershocks to the initial pain. Maybe there would be, if she were weak enough not to control her pain response.
I turned to Hell. "So…which classes do you want? Or would you like to remain a pure Warlord?" that was unlikely. Nobody wanted to stay weak. I also hoped he was less of a pussy.
"I want all of the melee classes except Tracker. And the Shifter, Shadow, and Druid." He wanted a natural pet too. Natural enough. Tusks was plowing through boars with amazing strength. He was level twelve now, and as large as a horse while weighting at least five times as much as one. He was a car. What would he look like when he hit level two hundred? A mobile city? He hadn't grown a whole lot since he hit level ten, so maybe he was slowing down. Following that trajectory, he'd only be the size of a school bus by the time he hit level two hundred. I sniggered as I thought of a super-powered boar mowing down the armies of my foes. "So…how do we do this?"
I linked with him and shuffled through the abilities. He grunted before laughing. He was laughing at Lethe, still crouched holding her head in her hands. He grinned as he turned from our path. He grabbed a boar and lifted it so that it was level with his eyes. He glared at it until it averted its eyes. Green light connected them like it had me and Tusks. Apparently the personal touch was effective.
"Dozer, do what Tusks is doing." He hadn't realized that Tusks had been stronger than the average boar when he'd started hunting his own kind. Dozer was killed by the second boar he attacked. Not that it was any sort of loss. He'd spent ten seconds taming Dozer, and it died ten seconds later. No effort or price at all. "What's your secret, man?"
"Remember when I told you meat gives you a bit of strength. Tusks ate all of the corpses I made. Don't fall too far behind." I waved to him as I continued on my path. I heard Hell start killing boars, though. Dozer II was tamed and being trained into an excellent rat king within seconds of Dozer I's death. The overwhelmed boars squealed as they ran from him and his new buddy.
I watched Tusks as he walked ahead of us, eating boars alive. He really was a massive beast. Could I teach him a class? I tried to link to him, but he had no mp to use. I tried a melee ability, and it worked! There was no flash of anything, though. It was like I hadn't done anything. The stamina slowly charged back up again, so Tusks had a ton of it but it regenerated extra slow…good to know. What did it mean that he had stamina but no mp? Could he use my stamina-consuming abilities? "Do you want a boar pet?"
"I'm not a Druid." Lethe shook her head. She glanced at Tusks. "And the thing is so ugly. Who would want such an ugly pet?" I could almost smell her disdain. Whether it was aimed at Tusks or me as the one who wanted the ugly pet, who could say?
I chuckled. Tusks was indeed an ugly beast. His hair was coarse, and he was covered in scars. Apparently monsters got scarred every time they took significant damage. He was strong enough to vaporize his cousins, but he hadn't gotten tough until he leveled. The dog packs had attacked him a few times when he was smaller, leaving him looking like he'd tried to walk through a slaughter house now that he was massive. The scars had gotten bigger as he had. "I could get one of the dogs for you." she grimaced. Not that I could blame her. They were clearly dogs, and not the attractive ones that people bought on purpose. At least, I wouldn't have bought one of the squat things. Dogs should be lean, mean, killing machines, not derpy blobs. "Pets can be traded like any other weapon. I could give you one for free. And they're more useful than any old sword, you can leave them in an area to kill stuff and you'll still get a percentage of their exp gain. With enough of them working at the same time, the prospects are limitless."
She shook her head and laughed. "I'll get back to you when we meet a monster I want as a pet." Which shouldn't be too far. The beginner area was supposed to be only the immediate area around a city. We'd been walking for so long I couldn't even look back and see the Darkwood anymore.
I pulled out my map…and saw that we'd barely progressed at all. Two weeks of continuous walking had gotten us a fingernail closer to Melasia, and that was when I was zoomed in as far as I could while showing the two cities. The world getting bigger was really starting to set in. I'd never walked from one city to the next so I couldn't even tell if this world was bigger than the physical one used to be.
We needed a faster way to move. I glanced at Tusks. He wouldn't even notice our weight on his back. But he'd need to slow down for eating. What I needed was a battle line. Ten of them should do. I turned to the boars nearby and grabbed two of them. They squealed and I felt them enter my service. They didn't do the green light-trick. So that was only for the first pet? Or the first of a species? I did remember that having a pet present made them more willing to join the ranks. Or maybe it was the fact that I had one of their own kind as a pet. I wasn't sure. It was a strange feeling, almost like an inventory, except different. A mental inventory instead of what the imp on my shoulder could carry. I could…feel each of my pets.
I ended up making twenty boar servants and four dog ones. There was a similar pressure to leveling after the fifth, but that was just an illusion. Easily pushed through and ignored. It was almost starting to feel good. I'd realized that the pain was generated from the parameters of the game, so every time I felt that painful stretching I was overcoming the limitations I shouldn't have had in the first place.
As good as overcoming my limits was, magic was better. I'd never felt mana in the game, but I definitely could now. It was more than just efficiency now, it was addicting how good it felt to control something so completely. I'd been combining the poison and fireball spells for the whole two weeks we'd been walking, and I had one that I liked. An extremely explosive death cloud that lingered for twenty seven seconds. It was like a crowd control grenade of death. It cost as much mana as twenty fireballs, but that was worth it. With every level, my pool of mana was growing so much that none of my spells could make a dent in it. I killed a couple hundred boars for my new slaves to eat before I gave them the same orders as Tusks. I jumped onto Tusks' back. "You coming or what?" Lethe shook her head as she climbed onto the bristly monstrosity. "Forward march!"
"What are his stats? Just pure strength without constitution or anything else?" she sniggered at what she thought was a joke. It wasn't. I checked and found that was indeed the case. Strength was good, but he needed to be able to take a hit too. I nodded, though my expression probably wasn't a happy one. "Maybe you should feed him grains or something. I don't want him getting meat sweats while I'm on his back." Grains? I must have looked at her funny because she decided to explain her reasoning. "People are always saying you need to eat meat to become big and strong. No way such an imbalance diet would be good for you. So…grains. Maybe each type of food has a different effect. Maybe fruits make you smarter." Not a bad idea. Should have considered it myself, actually. Boars were herbivores, normally, so grazing should be a part of their upkeep. Grass counted as a grain, right?
"Tusks, eat some grass." He stopped to obey me. I watched as his constitution went up by a tiny margin. No wonder the natural boars weren't grazing. They'd be impossible to kill after a while. Way too imbalanced. "All of you, eat one bite of grass for every boar you eat." That would make sure they stayed stronger than they were tough. One bite of grass could not be of equal value to a boar, level one or not.
What was really unfortunate was that I didn't get a percentage of their stat boost. And I wasn't about to start grazing. Or was I? I didn't have to pick anything else up, why would grass be special?
"Imp, you can move around freely, right? And put stuff in my inventory without me needing to touch it?" the imp appeared in my peripheral vision, nodding. "Graze as fast as you can without removing a noticeable amount of grass from the surrounding area." And the presence of the imp was gone. Odd, how something I hadn't even noticed on my own could be something so familiar so fast.
I watched in wonder at the speed that my constitution went up. Almost one per second. Had Ryne designed the food system? We couldn't pick up meat products in the beta, but I'd assumed the full game would implement something. Selling, if nothing else. "Lethe, you need to get in on this." I turned to her, but noticed that she'd already commanded her imp as I had mine. "Maybe thousands of miles of grass isn't so bad a thing. Imagine if all of this grass was replaced with the best type of grain, we'd become invincible for nothing but sitting on our asses watching the grain grow." That was a lame way to play a game, but it seemed like a more reasonable way to live. Then I remembered that the imp wasn't part of the beta either. If I had to pick up and eat every blade of grass…that would not be worth it.
If it wasn't me, though, it was still pretty efficient. Whenever I didn't want any of my pets around, I'd just send them to this pasture. They'd kill boars and eat grass forever, becoming ridiculously powerful. I could make mage pets into tanks. I grinned as I realized the possibilities of this place. A pasture for pets to become powerful without player interaction. No wandering bosses or skills of any kind to worry about killing your fragile pet. Just players. I'd need to account for that when I eventually implemented my plan.
I turned to look at the sky and noticed for the first time that it was white instead of blue. No clouds. Just a white sky. It was pretty without being blinding. Like a giant blanket. And there was no sun, either. That was new. I looked around for a bit, wondering if it was somewhere, just out of my visible area. I remembered seeing the sun at one point, my sigil had blocked it over Zezhria. Maybe it was blocked by fog of war?
"So what do we do now? Sleep? Can we even sleep in this world?" Lethe was laying on Tusks' back just like I was. She wasn't relaxing, though. She was shifting and moving constantly, occasionally rolling over to punch at Tusks' back. "Not that I could sleep on this blanket of needles even if I wanted to. This is turning out to be less of an action game than advertised." Not true. I was currently killing hundreds of boars every minute. If that wasn't action, I wasn't sure what was.
"Give it time. I'm sure we'll figure out why this area is so easy soon enough." That was true. Ryne probably made the surrounding area so easy that the players would let their guards down. That way when the player entered the next area, they got slaughtered by the monsters just outside of this pasture. I wouldn't be surprised to find a dragon hiding in the next area. Or something more insidious.
I pulled out my map and zoomed in so I could see that we were actually making progress. The map was real-time. I could see Tusks progress across the grass. What had been explored was just a grassy line, but it was visible with a gray fog that wasn't real-time. I could watch Hell's progress as he carved their way through the boars after us with Dozer II's growing form at his side.
And…I had the line of sight of my pets too. If they could explore the map for me…that would be so much more convenient! I could even send them to look for port pads. Whether they could activate them was a different question, but at least I'd know where I was going. "Dogs number one through four, go in opposite directions, explore this entire plain for me, continue to kill and eat every boar and dog you come across, eating the bodies and grass, but don't come within one hundred paces of another player or npc. Avoid all monsters more powerful than yourselves. Go. Boars eleven through twenty, move forward in a fan until you reach the end of this area, and then double back, explore the whole pasture." Excellent. Now I wouldn't even have to look around for the port pads. My pets would find them for me. I leaned back against Tusks' shoulder and closed my eyes. I didn't know if I could sleep, but I was going to try.
"Looks like we maxed out our constitution for the level." Lethe muttered. I opened one eye to look at her. She had her imp in her lap. I could feel mine sitting just above my shoulder. That was good to know. There was a maximum stat for every level. I wouldn't have to worry about a player that decided to become a scavenger. A level one capable of defeating a level thirty. I shivered at the very idea. "I never would have thought our backpacks could gather stuff for us. Makes the bonuses of food too easy." so she'd noticed Ryne's little exploit as well?
"I'm guessing that the only thing you can gather without fighting it first is grass. Maybe upping to other stuff, if the imp gets stronger as we level." probably wouldn't happen. Maybe I could make it happen, though. If it was invincible as a non-combat object…even if it could only do a small amount of damage, that would still be really good. "Imp, can you fight, at all?" it shook its head. "Can you take damage?" another head shake. Potential, but it would probably take a long time to figure out how to weaponize it. "No matter. When we fight imps, I'll control an army of them. I'll train an army of everything."
That was my ultimate plan, at the moment. Who needed armies of npcs that maxed out a full fifty levels lower than monsters? And the monsters were more obedient, too. Zezhria had the Darkwood as a fortification, but if I could make a similar fortification around other cities made entirely of pets, I'd become invincible. Every city would be an unimaginable fortress. I had the perfect pasture here for any army of monsters I could ever want.
With the speed that the boars reproduced…I guessed that I could have anywhere from a few billion to a few trillion monster slaves leveling up in this area without driving the grass or the boars to extinction. If they could become extinct in the first place. Just thinking of the scale of army that would be required to make that happen was giving me tingles. While they were only killing level one monsters, it would take a very long time for them to reach level two hundred. That was good. If they ever became more powerful than me, I wasn't sure they'd stay my servant. I hadn't ever tried to level up my servants before, so I didn't know. The Conjurer, Warlord, Druid, and Saint were turning out to be the most powerful classes of all, for no better reason than they could make pets. If they pushed through the pain, anyway. Though, I could just be getting them too fast. Maybe a regular Saint could match me, given enough time.
"How high will you reach? Are you planning on taking over the whole world?" Lethe actually sounded like she didn't think I could do it. I was the most powerful character in the game. Literally. "Are you going to buy the crowns of every race and every city? Enslave every monster?"
"Every monster? No. Then I wouldn't have anything to use as leveling material for my pets. As for the cities, yes. I plan to take every single one. I will own this world. Including Heaven and Hell. While we're dreaming, why not dream for the absolute top?" And then I'd go back to the real world with the power from the game and destroy everyone I'd ever hated. Feed them to the game to make their very souls into batteries that powered my realm. I grinned at the thought. "I will own this world like no human could ever own the real one."
She sniggered at me. What was so funny? I was being serious. "When you own the world, can I have Zezhria? Don't expect me to wait around for it, though. Maybe I'll conquer the world first and then I'll give Zezhria back to you."
"It might take a hundred years, but who cares? We're immortal in games. What makes you think that changed? We will live until some monster, or whatever else is wanting to kill us in this game, decides we've lived too long and violently murders us. And we're the proud owners of Zezhria, so that won't even be the end. We'll live as long as Zezhria stands." Assuming npc assassins didn't kill us before we could overpower them. True immortality. Not just the everlasting life of a game while the players slowly rot away in the real world, but true immortality. Not even the limitations of the game would hold me forever. "Ryne made us into gods." accidentally while thinking she could take it back anytime she wanted. Hail Ryne. I wouldn't be her pet forever. Hail Ryne.
Lethe definitely didn't like the last sentence. What was there to disagree with? Ghosts would probably be a good descriptor too, but what were gods if not extremely powerful ghosts? "Gods can't be killed. Gods are invincible, not just immortal. The manual mentioned uber-monsters. Creatures capable of becoming level four hundred. One thing like that could level Zezhria by itself. That's a god. Not us." She growled at me. She definitely didn't like Ryne. Or maybe she was religious. "And Ryne is a murderer. She killed our real bodies. You told me that yourself."
"She set us free. Do you miss your old body so much? We're better in this world than we ever could have been in the 'real' one. Who were you before? Just some random high school kid waiting to get beat up? Or were you a rich high school kid waiting to laugh at the kid being beat up? Or were you the high school kid waiting to beat someone up?" girls were weird that way. I couldn't ever figure out who their bullies were, or why. The bullies were the same as the people they preyed on. Except for the few monoliths that joined the male bullies in pure brutality. "Any way you think about it, you're better now than you were. Even if you were a super-wealthy tycoon waiting to crush some other company, what's better than an elf assassin that can go invisible at will? In the real world, money is the only power. Now we have both money and physical, or mental, might enough to match it. This world is better." Definitely better. The real world was just a cesspool of hopelessness. Now we were on top. Eventually, the world itself would bow down before the players. Or we'd be exterminated. Either way, we'd have done something impossible in the "real" world.
She cocked her head as she watched me defend virtual reality over reality with a sardonic smile on her face. "What happens in ten years? Twenty years? How many Hardcore players did you know that never died? Anyone with one that lasted a decade? The players are going to run out. Then what will be so awesome about this world? What happens in a thousand years when you're the only one who had the money to buy a city? What happens when you're the only one left?" why was her voice trembling? Even in that case, there'd still be npcs. Were they that different from people? They had souls, just like people. Not as much, but how much of what made a person a person was a soul?
She thought Ryne was a moron. "Ryne thought of that. We can have kids that become players. I'm not sure how it works, it wasn't the focus of our conversation. She just mentioned it in passing, each player can have three kids." She reeled back. "That's not all that odd. Most games that have a system for sex have a system for kids. I even had a few in the beta." shit, shit, shit. Didn't mean to admit that. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. "They were npcs, but all sorts of things are weird about this world. Maybe they'll be just like us. Ryne made this place to last. It's a full world, not a game. Haven't you noticed that the graphics are as good as reality? How the corpses don't vanish? How the blood stays to stain the grass until one of the boars licks it up? This is as real a world as the one we came from."
"What about how flat the world is?" she replied hotly. Ryne really brought out the passion in her. I couldn't figure out how Lethe hated her so much. Hell had more of a reason, and he didn't seem to mind her at all. "Look around, can you see a single…crease in the terrain? Not a single hill. What about a river? Clouds? How long until all this grass dries up and dies?"
She had a point about the water. If we didn't have potions, would we have died of dehydration by now? I didn't see a stat about it…so maybe I didn't need to drink. If I didn't need to drink, why would grass? "That's Zezhria. The perfectly circular forest surrounded by a perfectly circular and flat plain. Artificially engineered by the founders of the city as the perfect system of defense. It's a hell of a lot bigger than before, but it's still the same basic principle. And, who knows? Maybe we're walking up a hill right now and we just can't tell because it's too gradual of a change. Have you noticed that we've progressed less than a millimeter on the world map for all of the running we did? We've gone well over a hundred miles, and you can barely tell on the world map. This game probably has exponentially more surface area than Earth. It would make sense for all of the natural formations to be exponentially larger in compensation." Not to mention the fact that it would make it so much easier to support massive beasts like dragons that needed ranges of thousands of miles to level up effectively. That in addition to the fact that if it was already a map designed by the humans, all Ryne would have to do is stretch it out in every dimension while keeping the character models the same. Presto, massively different ecological and geographical systems. How they would change given the physics of this world and possible entropy variables would be interesting to watch.
She sputtered for a few seconds. What was the point of defending the old world when we were in a better one? Was she hoping to go back to the "real" world? "What about the square map? Maps of Earth are never squares anymore, we know that the world isn't flat!"
"Why can't this world be flat?" she gaped at me. Had she never figured out that a game world didn't have to adhere to physics? "Who says the stars in the sky are planets and not souls of the dead, or lost kings, or whatever superstition the npcs have for them?" come to think of it…I'd never seen stars at night. It was a white sky during the day and a black one at night. The Sun and the Moon were the only light sources. And they were hardly constant. It didn't seem to be fog of war, as they were on the horizon when I did see them. "This is a game world. There are no laws of physics. You can become invisible at will. You can raise the dead and change into any animal or species you encounter. Dragons roam the air, maybe they fly all the way to the moon. Maybe they can fly higher. How deep do you think Hell goes? A thousand miles? A million miles? Is there a depth you can reach that just drops out into nothing or is there always deeper to go?"
"So why can't we see anything but grass, if the world isn't round? Shouldn't we be able to see mountains, or something?" she was still trying to use physics in a world created by a being. Not even the greatest of minds knew everything well enough to create a perfect replica of the real world. "We should have seen shadows of them on the ground as the sun goes up and down."
"Do you realize how big the shadow of a mountain would be? The horizon, that's how big it would be. Besides, put a ball on a table and a bigger ball on the other. Then put a stick on top of both balls. How long do you think the table would have to be before you couldn't tell that the stick was changing height? Maybe light is suppressed so as to have a maximum distance it can travel. Maybe it's fog of war. Maybe she just doesn't want us to be able to see that far away. I don't know. This world doesn't have to have rules. The only rules that exist are the ones she makes." She practically invented the world. In a world where magic was part of everyone's mind, why was Lethe arguing physics? There were ways to explain everything with our physics, but why was it an assumption that they'd be the same?
"False! There are rules, just not the ones that apply to physics, though most of them have been implemented anyway." Ryne? That was Ryne's voice. I turned to see her standing in a patch of gore. It took me a second to identify the pile of remains as boar. "It is indeed fog of war. If you could see the mountains, it would give you hope. Just like you won't be able to see the forest or any trees until they come within two miles of you. If you look back, you can see Zezhria, just a little bit. Only the temple spire and that's only if your eyes are amazing. If you were to explore the whole world, you'd be able to see most of it from the top of a tall mountain. If you had guild members or pets everywhere at once, you'd be able to see the whole thing real-time." She smiled at me, opening her lower jaw to widen it beyond human capabilities. I couldn't help a shiver. Though whether it was attractive or repulsive was another question. Hail Ryne. "And as for your unspoken question about the limits, the sky ends five miles up, and you can only dig ten miles down. Then you hit Heaven and Hell. Those each have fifteen miles of vertical area as well. It's a young realm. In time, the distance will grow. The true Hell is hundreds of billions of miles in every direction. But it also has a sky on the bottom surface as well, so that might help."
"Not that I don't enjoy the company, but why'd you show up?" she usually had a reason, no matter how odd. Curiosity, maybe. Or maybe the coin had flipped and she was here to kill me for fun. Hopefully not, Hail Ryne. "Aching for my company?"
She sniggered at me. Was the idea that laughable? I was beginning to see that I had a better personality for her kind than my own, so I didn't see the problem. "You aren't really worth it at the moment. You're weak. You still lack the true power that this world can give you. It isn't picky. It even gave power to me, a clear denizen of Hell. True Hell, that is. Hells below, it's annoying that I have to specify now. As for my reason for coming, I was curious to see if you'd figured out your cursor yet. It is quite an amazing system. I wish every realm had a similar system for showing potential and capability." I stared at her blankly. "The cursor. The thing that is constantly floating over your head. The thing that shows you what everything is when you concentrate on it. The one the shows your level and your class on top, in the color that best describes your current status, followed by your name, guild seal, and marital status, followed by your vitality, followed by your level of exhaustion, followed by your acuity. It's truly an amazing system."
What a benevolent goddess. She really was just showing up to offer me free information. Hail Ryne. Even if it was pretty standard information about the cursor in the beta, not that she made a mistake, Hail Ryne, I was probably just missing some hidden functionality. Maybe I was supposed to look at hers? I realized then that she didn't have one like a player. All she had was a black eye with a purple pupil as her class cursor. I sifted through my memory to see what that class cursor meant…the eye didn't mean anything. And the color should have only been one. Players changed from black to white as public opinion of their morality changed, and it changed to pink or orange when they'd recently killed another player or were operating in an area that had a bounty out on their head, but none had multiple colors at once. Black meant an evil player. And purple meant an uber-monster. Was that what she was? And evil uber-monster?
Had she shown up just to show me that she wan an evil uber-monster? A good heads up, I guess. Or maybe that was the way to hit level five hundred? Was she giving me a clue? "And to tell you about a little difference I put into play. The exclamation points and question marks were grating on my nerves, so I changed it so that an npc that is in need has a yellow cursor while any other npc has a regular one. You have to remember that they're just like people. Almost. They don't all have the balls to put their missions on the quest board. Or the money. It costs ten gold to put something on the board. Also, since this is a new system I instituted the normal hundred coppers to a silver and a hundred silvers to a gold. Your wealth just went up by a factor of ten thousand. Congratulations." She glanced around like she was trying to remember something. "I think that's all you need to know for now?"
"What about kids?" Lethe demanded. I'd forgotten she was on Tusks too. "You told Void that players could have kids. What's that all about?"
"Yes. Three kids. Each. If a player fucks another player, you'll always have twins. One of the father's and one of the mother's. Unless one already had their fill. It just wouldn't be fair to the game if players could have as many kids as npcs. You're so much more powerful." She giggled as if she'd made a joke. Maybe she had. I still didn't get any part of her psychology, let alone her sense of humor. "That's why it's even harder for uber-monsters to reproduce. But they're working on the monster breeding scale, not the character breeding scale." What was the difference? "Oh, yes! That's what I was going to explain to you as well. The characters are all about sexual breeding, but the monsters are just reproducing. There is a maximum value of any given type of monster in any given area. Of course, pets are excluded from these factors. Take dragons for instance, there can only be one for every mountain nest. And they don't need to breed, or it would get awkward for them to enter the territory of another dragon…the battles would be epic. Anyway, monsters can't run out. You can carve a way through them with an army, but they'll compensate by filling up the sidelines. And if you make them completely extinct, a new one will burst through the ground and start all over again. Monsters are eternal. As is plant life, for that matter. Cut down as many trees as you want. All you'll do is piss off the monsters that live there for the five minutes it takes for the trees to grow back. Though, there aren't any trees here. Shame. I like trees." She wandered for a few steps. The boars that came within the radius of her gore circle were instantly ripped to shreds. Was that something new? The circle moved with her, but she didn't seem to be doing anything. "Killing these things is fun, I do have to admit." She grinned at me. "Come! Pigs, come!" and the natural boars started charging her. She was really laughing now as they ran into that circle that met them like a giant meat processor. A billion whirling blades wouldn't have been as effective. They exploded upon contact with her ward.
"Stop it!" Lethe rushed forward. I lifted a hand and drew in a breath, but she'd hit the ward before I could form a single word. Damn. I was too involved in watching the blender. I was less enthused when she met the same fate as the boars, but it was still a fascinating bit of magic. She should have known that her power meant nothing to Ryne. Absolutely nothing. She exploded in a burst of gore, spreading her bones into the rising wall of shredded meat.
"Lethe!" Ryne turned to look at me, the joy gone from her face. Damn it, Lethe, why'd you have to ruin her fun! Now she was going to take it out on me! Hail Ryne! But it was still interesting. "Why couldn't you have let her live? She didn't need to die!" surely the mighty goddess had better control of her own magic than to shred innocent allies. Hail Ryne.
"Morons always die. You'll get over it. She'll catch up in a few weeks and you'll forget that she ever died. Unless you do something stupid and catch up to her." She grinned at me, the joy of a good massacre in her eyes. She lived for evisceration, this one. I'd seen the same frenzy in a few Berserkers, they were the ones that forgot the beta was a game and waded through the enemies with relish. Any second they weren't fighting they were pissed. Some of them focused on killing noobs and got banned. "Are you going to do something stupid?" I thought about it. I really, really, didn't want to run all this way again, but boars were barely even targets. I couldn't get any valuable practice from slaughtering chaff. But we'd been walking for so long. "Would you have a go at me if I gave you access to the nearest port pad? I really want to see how the second best set of gear in the game fares against my might." maybe how her favorite, champion, bestest buddy fought? Hail Ryne.
Second best? I nodded as I equipped my crown gear. It wasn't heavy at all. Probably due to one of the almost innumerable abilities each piece of gear had. I pulled a heavy sword out. I wished I could equip my shield as well. I had a feeling I'd need all the defense I could manage and a staff was just a boost to magic, which was severely lacking against this opponent. I would have used a shield with my heavy sword, but I'd forgotten that I'd need to meet a human before I could become one. Against her, I needed a heavy weapon to leave a scratch, and even that was pushing my luck. I bellowed and rushed forward. As soon as I entered the slaughter area I could feel her destructive force. My armor's durability was draining faster than I'd have thought possible. I could only survive in her immediate area for a minute, tops. For an aura buff or spell to be that effective…any active spell she cast would destroy a city. On the other hand, feeling the flow of mana was doing wonders for my imagination about how to use it. And that was while she wasn't actively doing anything.
As soon as I survived initial contact with her barrier, her face lit up. She rolled her neck and shrieked in ecstasy as a bolt of fire smashed into my chest, blowing me back out of her aura. I hadn't even noticed the spell she'd cast. "Care to see the spell?" she held up a hand and showed me a clear single ring. A common fireball? No, the spell was basic, but I could feel something else. Something more. Something enlightening.
My breast plate was totally shot. I could see my chest through the massive hole in the middle. I'd need to repair it from scratch, essentially. "Don't worry. All you need to do it beat on it with the hammer to make it all better. Self-healing is a really valuable trait for armor to have. No npc smith can work on crown gear unless it belongs to them, so you'll have to do it yourself or employ a hero. I won't completely destroy anything, though. You'll get to max out your repair skill!" she sighed in ecstasy again. She really liked to fight. "But this isn't good enough, Void. I need more. Become more powerful so we can fight for real next time!" She pointed one finger at me, a simple fireball again. I was blown a hundred yards back. A sound like shattering glass, and all of my crown gear got unequipped due to damage. Not even a scratch.
"Void!" it was Hell. He'd caught up. He should probably join in, as we'd have a teleporter unlocked in a minute. That wouldn't help unless we were in Zezhria. "What the fuck, man? I thought you two were best buds!" he was riding Dozer II, it wasn't as big as Tusks, but it was getting there.
"Watch Tusks for me." I got up and rushed at Ryne, closing my eyes so I wouldn't see it as I died. She giggled and blasted me with that overpowered fireball spell again. Not even a second cast. One simple fireball. So that's what it meant to be level five hundred. The second best armor in the game was completely useless against her.
I was expecting instant death. It didn't happen. She'd blasted one of my arms. Had she missed? Not possible. She'd done it on purpose. She giggled as I felt another explosion destroy a part of me. My leg. She was laughing now, as I screamed theatrically. The feedback from a limb being removed was nothing compared to overcoming my limitations. I felt lightning rip through me, and realized she wanted this to last. She'd used a Cultist spell I recognized. Red Lightning was the term most people used to describe it. It was a spell that could cause fatal levels of agony without doing any damage. Or you could use the level twenty variation that hurt someone to the last point of their vitality. A lot of the higher level spells Cultists used were modified to reduce the hp of the target to one and then stop. Annoying in combat, amazing for flavor. Less than awesome when you were on the other side of it, though.
"I love this system!" she screamed, and I could almost feel how much she was enjoying herself. "I could blast your arms off all day long and never kill you!" she giggled as I felt another wave of red lightning rip through me. I couldn't contain the agonized scream, this time. She was upping the power of the spell without changing the "limitation" at all. I glanced down at my body and saw that it was a charred crust. I couldn't move my head, but my eyes could see Hell's burnt corpse fall to the ground. At least he'd died quickly. Though…I probably looked like a corpse too. He wasn't screaming, though. "I love how the hp isn't just a stupid line. The vitality system is awesome! You have an hp gauge for your both arms, legs, lower torso, upper torso, and head. One of the torsos or head being reduced to zero kills you. Appendage damage doesn't kill you. It gives you a shield, just like in real life. If you sacrifice your arm, you might just save your own life when a bomb goes off. It's a very good system." She illustrated her point by destroying what remained of my limbs. Then she hit me with Red Lightning again, since my reaction was substandard. "You can even exhaust your arms and leave your legs fresh if you use your abilities wrong and draw from a single stamina source instead of using the overall exhaustion value. The mind doesn't really have facets, so much. Would you like to die now?"
"Please." She grinned at me as I saw a magic circle form in her palm. Red lightning. Then another formed. And another. Ten. A dozen. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. I felt my eyes widen as the number kept on rising. Watching the flow of mana was euphoric. To think her mind was so strong as to make such beauty possible. I was about to go crazy from pain, maybe permanently, but that didn't make the power on display any less impressive.