"Did you know that madness is a function of the brain? The soul can't go mad. I could torture you forever. I would have to be careful, because a soul can break, but it can't go mad. A broken soul is essentially dead, like a battery that got stomped on by a giant robot. No more charge. A terrible waste of energy. If I released this, I'm sure you'd break. Just remember that when you eventually feel the need to betray me." that would, of course, never happen. Hail Ryne. I may not like being a pet, but I was sure that I'd get used to it. No harm no foul, after all. Hail Ryne. "And remember that I don't get all of my power from this realm. Everything you get while tethered to this place, I can take all of it and return it tenfold." She giggled as she vanished. Was that it? Would she let me live? Nope.
Excruciating pain hit me, more than the initial lightning but not as much as the advanced versions she used. Mercy from my goddess, Hail Ryne. It was also burning, as opposed to shocking. Uncomfortable, but not unmanageable. As the burning spread, I realized what must be happening. I was feeling it as my body came back together. So this was what being born felt like in this game. I waited it out, becoming used to the burn. Why couldn't resurrection happen instantly?
I thought about Ryne's…proclivities. She'd looked happy enough to slaughter every sentient being in the world when she'd hit me with the second fireball and ecstatic while she tortured me. That didn't bode well for my future prospects. I needed to become stronger, more capable of withstanding feedback. She'd just proven that immortal was good, invulnerable was better even if death was still possible. I guess I'd just have to find out if I could ever get to that point.
Then there was Hell and Lethe. This burn was pretty intense. I'd seen his burnt corpse fall to the ground and her get ground to a pulp. She was probably better off, with her instant death. As I considered whether they'd be screaming when they came back, the feedback ceased. More than that…it was like I was immaterial, it was so comfortable.
I tried to raise my head, but my butt sank. I was in a giant waterbed, but so much better. I opened my eyes to see that I was indeed in a massive bed. I rolled to my stomach and heaved, but my hands just sank into the bed. What was this? It wasn't water, that was for sure. Or…what was the mattress made of? I pushed harder, and my arms were into the not-water up to my shoulders. Nothing on Earth was so stretchy while remaining watertight. Or fluffy. It was like I was already underwater. Weightless. If anything could put me to sleep, it was definitely this bed.
I'd rolled to my stomach without any trouble. I rolled a few times and glanced around. I hadn't moved. I tried some more, and still made no progress. It was so stretchy it was rolling under me. Was it infinitely stretchy? I leaned down, and my entire lower body sank so my head was still level with the mattress. What was this stuff? I stood up and I was suddenly buried to the neck in silky smooth bed. Undeniably comfortable. I could sleep like this, but how could I get out? Maybe if I asked it. "Can I get out?" nothing changed. I tried swimming in it, but I still didn't make any progress. It was like being stuck in an ocean you couldn't drown in. One that you could still see the edge of. An ingenious prison. "Let me out!" it still didn't comply. I tried raising my hands above my head, but all that did was sink my head below the surface. It felt like dry water, and the feeling of being submerged entirely in it was…very weird.
The bed was deeper than I was tall, even with only my hands breaking the surface. And I could breathe. I dropped my hands to my sides and my head popped right back to the surface. Damn, this was a devious trap. I growled at the mystifying mattress. I added a death bomb to each finger and let loose the magic. Nothing happened. Then there was a bubble in the mattress in front of me. So it was a liquid. Blowing it up didn't seem very effective when my most powerful spell made a single bubble. I tried putting on my crown gear, but it was all too destroyed to equip. At least all of the pieces were still there.
"Fuck you, divine mattress." I growled. So what if it wasn't effective? I let loose all of the magic I had. The surface in front of me boiled for a few minutes before I ran out of mp. At least I knew the maximum output of my pool of mana. A small consolation. I let my mp recharge and did it again. And again. This was getting me nowhere. I tried swimming again. I could swim, but it was strange. Every time my hand rose above my head the rest of me sank to compensate. One hand could sink my whole body. A very strange contraption. Maybe it was a spell. I used a dispel on every direction I could point. Nothing changed. Damn. I dropped my hands to my sides again. "Funny, is it?" I saw Hell and Lethe watching me, chortling like morons.
"Hilarious. Not quite as funny as seeing the faces of the players when we came together again, that was absolutely priceless, but still pretty good." Hell chuckled, tears running from his eyes. He choked for a few seconds before he burst out laughing again. "The mighty Void bested by a bed!" he sniggered for a few seconds. "Also, we have good news. Our pets are revived too, but they come back in the Keep courtyard. Both Dozers are kicking up a storm down there. As well as Tusks and boars one through ten. I'm ready to go to that charnel field and start feasting on all of those corpses before someone else figures out that meat literally makes us stronger. Need a hand?"
"Rope would be appreciated. Lethe…stop…vanishing." She was appearing for a flash and then vanishing again. Since she was only visible for a fraction of a second, it was extremely annoying. "You're giving me a headache. Both of you."
Lethe stopped vanishing and burst out laughing. So that's why she was vanishing. She'd control herself and appear, and then lose control and vanish to make her laugher inaudible. It was a shame, her laugh was cute. Made Hell's guffaw a lot more bearable. He threw a rope and I reached to grab it. I was expecting to be shoved under again, and wasn't disappointed. On the one hand, I could no longer hear Hell's terrible laughter. On the other…I couldn't see the rope. I moved my hands in random search patterns and felt it. I gripped it and pulled. Nothing happened. I pulled the rope down to my side so my head could break the surface. Lethe was holding Hell by the tunic as he flailed over the mattress. The rope was nowhere to be seen. I wondered what would happen if he actually fell in. I decided to find out.
I grinned as I used a vortex skill that the Crusader had. Hell was wrenched forward, pulling him and Lethe into the mattress. They landed on it like it was made of stone. Damn. Would have been funnier if they got stuck the way I was. "That hurt, man. Seriously." They couldn't see it, but I shrugged. He growled and moved to my head. It was extremely odd to see him walking on a surface that felt like water to me. He grabbed my head and pulled. His feet sank into the surface.
Damn. "Stop!" Hell paused, his face one big question mark. "Check out your feet." He glanced down and gasped. Then he started flailing. The surface was stone again. Now that he wasn't touching me. Lethe dashed off of the bed. "Don't worry, it doesn't become liquid until you touch me. Go get one of the npcs that work here, they probably know how this whole thing works. A green cursor so they don't get you talking about a quest." Just in case. She vanished. I hoped it was so that she would move faster. "I thought all of our stats were supposed to be multiplied by a thousand while we were in our place of respawn." I grumbled. If I was as powerful as that, I should be able to get out of this damn bed.
"They are. You didn't see your dispels flying everywhere." Hell chuckled. If it really was a thousand times as effective as normal…would dispel look different? The effect didn't change from level ten to sixty. "Purple blasts of light hitting all sorts of stuff. Pissed Lethe off when you hit her with one and her stealth wouldn't turn on for ten seconds." So it added a cooldown as well as stopping the effect. And that was on a buff ability. Maybe dispel was a better weapon that I'd given it credit.
Lethe appeared with a maid running at her heels. "What's the emergency, my Liege?" couldn't she tell? I sank and pointed to Hell. I surfaced again to see her looking at me funny. What? "Don't you know that only the Liege can control the bed? It only recognizes the crown." So I needed to equip the crown gear. Great. It was all too damaged to equip. Except the weapons I hadn't used. I pulled out the staff. And I was standing on top of the surface, it was like stone. Hell was free as well. Freedom! I smashed the staff down in exultation, with maybe a bit of vengeance, and a blast of fire knocked Hell from his feet. And almost killed him. Whoops.
"Sorry about that." I jumped off of the bed before I put the staff back in my inventory. "Does the Keep have an anvil?" the maid nodded. "Lead me to it." I needed to repair my gear. I followed her, thinking. Ryne was so powerful that the strongest gear in the game was worthless. Second strongest. What would I have to do to go from level two hundred fifty to level five hundred if the monsters were all so powerful that armor was useless? I could hunt boars forever, but I could be killing them for centuries and never hit level eighty, let alone five hundred. Was her talk about the cursor a clue? Or monster reproduction? Babies? I tried to think of everything she'd mentioned, looking for a possible hint at ultimate power.
The Keep was an impressive building. I'd never been inside a real castle, and the only ones I'd even heard of were broken down ruins. This was the opposite of a ruin, but it was so much bigger inside than I'd thought it would be. The real castles I'd taken virtual tours of were barely as big as houses, with walls thicker than houses. The walls here weren't that thick. Thicker than normal, but hardly something that could survive a battering ram.
As we passed through hallway after hallway, it just seemed to get bigger and bigger. And we went deeper and deeper into the bowels of the place. As we walked, I started feeling a connection to the place. Like it was a pet. As that feeling grew and I started to remember the layout out of nowhere, I started to really understand the scope of how massive it really was. It had fifteen basement levels. Ten of which were dungeons. The stone wasn't all that interesting apart from how dark and shiny it was, but then I felt at it and realized that every wall was like the skin on a vein. The blood pumping through this monster was mana, but no less impressive for that fact. Once I opened myself to feel it, the walls thrummed with power. It was an impossibly powerful building. And it belonged to me.
I approached the anvil in the second basement. It had a smith's hammer next to it. Handy. I picked up the hammer and wondered how fast I could level up my blacksmithing skill by working on level two fifty gear. I pulled out the helm. Or the chin strap, at least. Activating the skill did absolutely nothing. No feedback or instructions whatsoever. The first hit had absolutely no effect except to level me up to level two. The second hit was the same. And the third. The fourth was a glancing blow that sent reverberations all the way to my shoulder and almost knocked me off my feet. It took fifty strikes to get the front of the faceplate to regenerate. I was still getting one-hit-levels when I finished with the helmet at level ninety eight. I pulled out my sword pommel and hit that three times before I noticed I'd stopped leveling at one hundred.
"Here. You guys level up too." Apparently skills ended at level one hundred. I turned inward as they took turns repairing the rest of my gear. I occasionally took out another piece and hit it a couple of times, but I never felt like there was any energy to redirect. If there was a way to break this limit, I couldn't figure it out by the time we got to the chest plate. It was already halfway repaired. Could it self-repair? I glanced through the list of abilities the armor had, and automatic repair was just a reduction of the resources required to repair it to zero. There was infinite durability as a possible enchant, but it wasn't there. That was good, I hated it when good gear got that ability, knocking some useful ability out of the way so it could puff out its chest and be useless. Repairing wasn't enough of a hassle to make it worth it and if you were in a battle that went from full repair to broken, you were punching above your weight anyway. Or using shit gear.
That didn't explain how it had repaired itself. I checked my status again and noticed a buff. Master Repair. I had a buff that actually repaired everything that came within a hundred paces of me. All allied equipment, anyway. I'd never need to visit another anvil! Did it work that way with every skill? Level up destruction magic to level one hundred and you get an aura of destruction for all enemy units? Was that what had happened to everything that came close to Ryne? What about skills like fishing? Would all the fish within a hundred yards be automatically caught? That meant an infinite amount of meat anytime the Master Fisher was swimming, assuming the fish worked the same way as monsters or grass. Was herbalism a skill in this game? Or gathering? I hadn't actually gone down the list of skills. I'd been too focused on making money and leveling up as fast as possible to bother with skills in the beta. They were like real estate, something that just wasn't worth the effort when the character would be deleted before the real game started. I felt through the mental menu, but there wasn't a list of possible skills. Not that I could find. There was a list of skills I'd already unlocked, but no list to tell me what could be unlocked.
While I was looking for the skills I went through my inventory. I noticed something I'd never thought possible. There was an exp gauge on the crown gear. I hadn't noticed before, but it was there. I could level up my gear. Maybe it was a quality of mythic gear? I'd never actually found a mythic piece of gear before, so I didn't know. Maybe Hell had. "Hell, did you get gear that leveled up in the beta?"
"Of course. All of the legendary gear gets experience as you use it. That's why legendary sets are so valuable, because if you have them all in your inventory, or equipped, at the same time they level up faster. Since it takes forever to level up the gear, most players don't notice." He seemed ecstatic that he knew something I didn't. I had to admit that it was a rare occasion. "In all of my time playing, I only got my legendary helmet, which I got at level ten, to level up once. Like I said, it takes forever. When it did level up, though," he shivered, a look of euphoria on his face. "It bounced from a level ten item to a level fifty item. I heard of a guy from Mars who got his gear to level up twice. According to the rumor, it was level two hundred." So I'd made the right choice. If it was that hard to level up the gear, there was very little use for it in the beta. But, if the gear started at level two fifty…could it level up once and become level five hundred? I doubted it. No developer would make it that easy. "It gets faster when you peak out your level. Then all of the experience goes to the gear. It's a very economic system. No experience is lost as long as you have legendary gear."
"What's so special about legendary gear?" Lethe snapped. Apparently she'd never gotten any. Jealousy was no reason to pretend not to know that rarity matters. "I only ever got rare gear, but that worked just fine for me."
Hell didn't think she was joking or purposefully being obtuse, though. He thought she was actually saying what she believed. "The difference is massive on each level. A level one broken sword, for instance, might have one to ten damage. A common level one sword could have from eleven to thirty. An uncommon level one sword might have damage from thirty one to seventy. A rare level one sword would have damage from seventy one to one hundred fifty. And so on and so forth. By the time you get to legendary, or better, the difference is monumental. A level five mythic weapon would be worth a level two hundred fifty broken weapon. Easily. Even then, a legendary item can't compare to a unique item. A unique item can't compare to a mythic item. Especially if they can level up. You could find a level one mythic weapon and make it into one of the most powerful destructive forces in the game by the time you hit level two fifty." It really was a colossal change. Mythic gear…it was priceless.
You could find legendary items from excessively powerful players that already had unique or mythic gear, but nobody ever sold a mythic item. I doubted anyone had ever sold a unique item either. They might have given it to a friend, but nobody in the beta would need money enough to sell one. Maybe some real money trades happened, though.
"That doesn't even touch on the fact that the better items have lists of bonuses. Don't you remember that massive flame-wave that hit when Void touched his crown staff to the ground? My guess was that it has a bonus that releases a level two fifty fireball every time it touches something. That was just the shockwave from the fireball exploding against that invincible bed. And he's not even level sixty." Hell grinned at her as he thought of the awesome power gear had in this world. It could change a mediocre player into a threat. He didn't quite understand how powerful that effect was, though. It wasn't the force of the spell used, a broken staff could have the same buff with the same amount of power, it was the number of bonuses you could fit into the gear. A mythic piece of gear had one hundred slots for magical augmentation. I could fine-tune the abilities with the enchanting skill, but that would take forever before I got up to the powerful bonuses like my gear already had.
That brought a memory to the fore of my mind. There was a reason staffs still existed in the world. They were terrible melee combat weapons, but they could be used as dampeners between the caster and the drain on their mp when they used multiple spells at once. I pulled out my staff and glanced through the bonuses. One of them was that it could completely block the amplified mp drain of casting multiple spells at once! That was…ridiculous. The main reason mages weren't walking around ruling this universe was because their spells took time to cast and because casting multiple spells at once, especially the more powerful spells, generated a debuff that drained mp faster depending on the power of the spell. This staff would let me drain all of my mp in one massive spell blast. You could hold a spell in reserve after casting it, so I could drain my mp multiple times for one massive blast of overpowering magic! It would take forever to charge up…but it was worth it. I wouldn't have to stick with weak spells added together. I could use my best spells in tandem. Mage classes, here I come! Maybe after charging a spell for a year I'd be able to do actual damage to Ryne. Not that I wanted to. Hail Ryne.
"Check your skill lists." Lethe grumbled. She seemed sullen that she was such a less experienced player than me or Hell. "Some of them don't make sense. Why should causing damage be a skill? Or taking it?" If that was the level of player she was…she had no business being mad about it.
"Skills are all about passive bonuses, so the more you do something the better you are at it. So everything you can do has an associated skill." Of course getting hurt was a skill. Just to make sure I wouldn't talk out of my ass, I flipped through the mental menu to check. I was level two at taking damage, meaning I had a permanent point two percent damage reduction buff. And level four at dealing, so a four percent increase. And level five at spell use meaning two point five percent reduction in mana spent. And so on and so forth. It was the mark of a good game that leveled you up in skills completely apart from the experience of leveling up a character. Much more fun than skill points to spend without doing anything. I'd already started on over twenty skills. That made me wonder how many there were. A hundred? More? I'd just have to find out.
One looked…different; pet control. It was like it was written in a different font. That was level twenty five. Did I get one more level for every pet I owned? Nice. I needed one hundred pets. It was the fastest way to see if every skill gave me a buff when I got it to level one hundred. The font being strange was dangerous, though. That could mean any number of things.
Then another idea came to me. Since I had the staff, I might be able to make some of the super-powered beasts around Zezhria my pets. The idea had me excited. "Come on! To the Darkwood" and without waiting for them I rushed as fast as I could for the city exit. I chose to ignore the grumbling about my lack of consideration and communication.