The Omnithaneum

by Matthew Powell

  Kill 1000 Guardsmen

  Area: WestDrift City

  Reward: 1,000,000 EXP and 500,000 gold

  Description: The WestDrift Guard has put out a bounty on themselves, both to aid in their training and to draw out the more stupid criminals. Guards killed while performing this quest will not increase the slayer's bounty, though Guard Captains will. The large number of guards that this particular quest requires means that encountering the same guardsman several times is almost guaranteed, and they will grow stronger each time.

  Joshua accepted the quest without another thought. A bit of quick math, along with a calculator be brought up in the in-game browser, showed that killing all those guardsmen plus the reward would be worth 10M EXP with his Blessing of Growth. The bit about now growing his bounty helped to put Joshua’s mind at ease about the constant fighting he would be going through. A quick search showed that the local currency, gold, converted to credits at a rate of 100:1. This meant that his current bounty of 100,000g was equal to 1000 credits, and there were already a lot of people who would hunt him just for that. Heck, he would hunt himself for that if it was an option.

  The massive EXP boost still wouldn’t be enough to reach tier 5. It would take a little over 14 million from his current amount, but this would get him most of the way there. There was just one thing he needed to do before heading back out into the city.

  If he was going to be fighting that many guards, Joshua figured, he needed a way to escape when they inevitably overran him. He already had an idea for how this would work and spent another 10,000 credits buying an intermediate skill book to make it happen. This wiped out the profit from selling the necromancer class set, but the ability proved well worth it.

  Skill Learned: Cellular Regeneration

  -The user can escape death by reforming their body using Pestilence. Enemies can destroy the Pestilence to halt the reforming process. Amount of Pestilence required to reform the user’s body is determined by how skillful the user it at controlling Pestilence. This skill does not have a cooldown but reforming the body can take a significant amount of time. User will not suffer a death penalty if successful, but items will still be dropped at the site of defeat.

  Current Pestilence Requirement: 25,000

  The skill basically allowed him to cheat death. A large amount of Pestilence had to escape from the fight in order to reform, more than half of his total reserve, but that problem would easily be solved once the killing started. Joshua wasn’t stupid; he knew that taking this quest amounted to declaring war on the guardsmen, and there was no way he would win. This skill was his ticket out when things got too hot. With his business in the guild finished, Joshua left out the way he had come. He had a war to start.

  Chapter 7

  Powers that allow users to escape death are incredibly useful but are normally time-gated or locked to higher tiers. They could take the form of a necklace that teleports you away when critically wounded, to switching bodies when injured, to straight-up making a new body somewhere else. The most powerful skills even let the user regenerate from a single cell, making them effectively immortal to anything but total annihilation. What do you mean that might screw up the late-game balance? We made total-annihilation skills just as common, so it should be fine. No one’s overpowered if everyone’s overpowered, right? – on Cheating Death, from The Chronicles of The Founder

  Starting a war with the guard turned out to be fairly easy. Now that Joshua had a bounty on his head, any guard that spotted him immediately attacked while calling for reinforcements. At first, it was just normal guardsmen: swordsmen, spearmen, a few heavily armored guys with shields, nothing special. Joshua surrounded himself with a spinning ring of floating swords and cut through them like butter.

  More powerful guardsmen started to appear shortly after the fighting started. Soldiers with magical equipment and using combat skills that forced Joshua to do more than cut them down where they stood. After a few minutes, he started to get a rough gauge of the guardsmen’s power.

  The regular guard was practically harmless. They couldn’t do anything to his floating swords, let alone get close enough to hurt him directly. Guardsmen with magical equipment or skills, noticeable because of their higher HP and level, were able to fight a floating sword one-on-one without losing but fell quickly versus two or more. Right when Joshua started falling into a rhythm of slaughter, things started to escalate.

  One of his floating swords was destroyed in a burst of flame, and another was trapped in a block of ice. 50 kills after starting, the guardsmen had broken out their first mages. The ice mage wouldn’t be too much of a problem, as the sword was breaking from its prison even while Joshua processed the situation, but the fire mage was a different story.

  Guardsmen (Fire Mage)

  Tier: 4

  Level: 16

  HP: 26,000/26,000

  The status screens for the city guard had all been very mundane, simply listing them as a guardsman along with their specialization. They didn’t have names or descriptions, which made learning more about them difficult.

  Joshua analyzed the situation quickly and acted out a plan. He created a large barrier of Pestilence to block the ice mage, who was unable to effectively destroy his Pestilence and turned to fight the fire mage. Using the floating swords against this enemy would be a waste of energy, as he would simply burn them all away, so Joshua pulled them back and put their power to better use.

  Virulence Aura flared up, covering the area between Joshua and the mage, but the guard was prepared. A dome of fire covered the mage, reminding Joshua of the barrier that the monk had erected back in the raid group. It burned away the aura, keeping the mage safe. Joshua made the aura denser, creating a thick black cloud that obscured the mages vision of the barrier’s surroundings, and closed the distance. The drain of his Pestilence was immense, but it would recover quickly enough.

  Joshua’s Obsidian Longsword, the real one, cut through the barrier with ease. The temporary constructs weren’t strong enough, but the real item they were based on was. The mage launched a stream of fire in his direction, and Joshua raised his shield to meet it. Joshua could see the strain on the mage’s face as he struggled to keep the barrier and fire stream up at the same time, leaving both spells weakened.

  Joshua forced his way forward, ignoring the heat and slight burning damage from the licks of fire that got around the shield. Once he was close enough, he activated the shield’s Envelope ability, and tentacles lashed out towards the fire mage. The first tentacles were burned away by the fire, but the shield drew on Joshua’s Pestilence to create more and more until one managed to get through. It wrapped around the extended arm that the mage had been using for the fire stream, interrupting both the spell and his concentration.

  All at once, the barrier went down, and the fire stopped. Virulence Aura rushed in even as Joshua’s sword fell on the mage, quickly him quickly and simply. The mage had neither the armor to survive a direct attack nor extra guardsmen nearby to activate their special ability. The moment Joshua had breached the barrier, the fight was over.

  Despite the added danger, the fire mage gave neither extra EXP or Pestilence. As far as Macrocosm was concerned, he was just another guard. The hard fight was entirely Joshua’s fault for being countered by a weaker opponent so easily. The fire was a problem he would have to work out eventually.

  As Joshua thought about his weakness, the ice mage finally got around the barrier he had created. The wall had been up for so long that he had almost forgotten there was a second mage behind it. This one proved much easier than the last, as the mage’s lack of destructive power meant that he only lasted a few seconds before newly-created floating swords impaled him.

  Earth and wind mages started showing themselves shortly afterward, but neither was an issue. The wind mage countered the floating swords by disrupting their ability to move properly, but a few Pestilence spikes from the ground brought her down quickly enough. The earth mage suffered a simila
r fate, as Joshua turned the stone dome he had hidden inside into an iron maiden-esque trap.

  This continued for a while longer, with Joshua effortlessly killing most of the guardsmen that came to fight him. They started to overrun the housing district that he had started the fight in. He was eventually forced to retreat to a safer place when the guard realized his weakness against fire mages and brought several of them in at once, but not before his total kill-count crossed 100.

  Joshua began to push towards the market-centric areas of the city closer towards the main gate. The number of guards both chasing him and lying in wait steadily increased as time passed, forcing him to stay on the move constantly. Even the weaker guardsmen could overpower him if they piled on by the dozen.

  After another half-hour of fighting and the death toll rising to 150, the guards stopped coming. Joshua didn’t notice this at first until he stopped in the middle of an empty street and found no one waiting for him. No guards were on his tail and none appeared to be lying in ambush, though even his armor’s 360-degree vision didn’t let him see through walls.

  “We meet again, monster.” A voice called out from a nearby rooftop. Joshua turned his head to see Sigmund standing above him. “I see you were telling the truth about not being sent here. The Necromancers wouldn’t have recruited you otherwise. Still, I cannot let my defeat be forgiven. Men, open fire!”

  From behind the arched rooftops and nearby alleyways, dozens of guardsmen sprang up. To Joshua misfortune, the guard had come better prepared than last time. Nearly half of the guardsmen were fire mages, and the other half had flame-enchanted weaponry. This wasn’t a fight he could win. At Sigmund’s word, he was bombarded by countless fire spells and flaming arrows.

  From the moment he saw Sigmund, Joshua knew he had walked right into a trap. He had sent most of his Pestilence supply through his foot and into the ground, where it spread out and scattered. He wasn’t nearly strong enough to kill these guards, so escaping alive was his top priority.

  The attacks hit and completely obliterated Joshua’s body. He had managed to push nearly 50,000 Pestilence into the ground, most of his new 60,000 total after fighting the guard for so long. Losing a body to control felt weird at first, but Joshua adjusted quickly enough. Most of his Pestilence broke through into a sewer system, where it started flowing away from the guard’s trap.

  Sigmund, as it turned out, had expected something like this to happen. He didn’t know about Joshua’s ability to escape and make a new body, but he had prepared for a potential sewer chase. There were a few guards with unenchanted weapons waiting for Joshua, likely only there to slow him down while the mages on the surface followed. They were terrified to see the mass of Pestilence, practically blanketing the entire sewer tunnel, roll towards them.

  Joshua formed several large swords from the Pestilence mass and used them to distract the guards. He couldn’t concentrate well enough without a body to form weapons strong enough to kill, so the swords were formed with just a few hundred Pestilence each and sent as a distraction while the main Pestilence scattered once again, dozens of different tendrils and masses fleeing through the tunnels.

  It took nearly an hour for the Pestilence to regather itself and form a new body deep in the cities underground. Joshua had considered attempting to reform at the Necromancer’s Guild, but there was a good chance they would see the Pestilence and destroy it just to be safe. Instead, he was forced to make a new body in an empty corridor and hope no one came by.

  The process finished almost exactly an hour after the ambush had taken place, leaving Joshua sitting in the empty tunnel to plot his next move. His equipment, thankfully, had reformed with him thanks to its Soul-Bound property. Losing the fight had ultimately cost him only time, but time wasn’t something he had in abundance. If he was going to reach the 1000 guard mark anytime soon, he would need to take drastic action.

  Joshua sent tiny tendrils of Pestilence through the tunnels and into the ground. Each tendril was incredibly thin, so weak that even a mouse could break them without a thought, but they served their purpose. With these tendrils, he was able to scout out several kilometers of the city at very little cost. Joshua had sent these tendrils out in search of one thing: the guardhouses.

  While the tendril’s searched, Joshua looked over his recent gains. The fighting had pushed him from level 8 to 13, the new level bringing a decent boost in HP and strength. While he could feel his body getting stronger, Joshua no longer felt the excitement that used to come with such powerups. Almost all his fighting recently had been done with Pestilence Manipulation, and only more Pestilence and better control could truly make him stronger.

  The city had guardhouses all throughout it, and it took the tendrils less than a minute to find one. They found several more while Joshua was moving towards the first, and most seemed to be built with similar designs in mind. There were barracks for the troops, a training hall, and an office for the officer.

  More importantly, each one was positioned either directly on top of, or right next to, the sewer tunnels. The sewer’s and the underground tunnels were connected at many points, so Joshua was able to quickly make his way beneath the nearest guardhouse and prepare to strike.

  Once he was in position under the building, Joshua spread his Pestilence tendrils through the dirt and stone to scout the place out. They squeezed through cracks and holes in the building’s stonework, forming eyes and ears to give him an idea of the building’s inhabitants. There were a few dozen normal guardsmen, but no mages or enchanted gear among them. It seemed like those were only deployed for extreme threats, and either had their own special location or were spawned only in specific situations.

  Once Joshua had a good idea of the guardhouse’s inhabitants, he used Pestilence Manipulation to dig a hole through the building’s foundation and floor, depositing the dirt and stone in the sewers. The guard reacted quickly, drawing their weapons and preparing for a fight, but they couldn’t have known to prepare for the Virulence Aura that flowed out, followed by flying swords.

  By the time that the local guard captain was able to make it down the hall towards the barracks, where Joshua had broken through, it was too late. He stormed through the door to find his men reduced to a pile of chopped up corpses being drained dry for Pestilence. Sigmund had proven to Joshua that the guard captains were not to be underestimated, but normal soldiers couldn’t hope to stand against the full force of Joshua’s Pestilence.

  The guard captain was met with ten flying swords, each one aiming to sever a limb or land a vital blow. Even with his experience, the captain fell in seconds.

  Aurelios, Captain of the Guard has died!

  Zandrius gains 10,000 (50,000) EXP

  All the guards in Aurelios’ Guardhouse have been killed!

  Bounty increased to 200,000g

  Guards will respawn in 20 minutes; other guardhouses have been alerted.

  Joshua retracted his swords and Virulence Aura when the notification appeared and started moving again. The guard would respawn soon, and they would warn the others about what had happened. It would probably take them a while to prepare a counter, but Joshua was sure they would.

  Joshua managed to clear out another two guardhouses before the first respawned, bringing his kill count up to 250, his Pestilence up to 70,000, and his level up to the brink of 16. He didn’t even know they had respawned until he scouted out the next guardhouse and found that several guards had been replaced by fire mages. Further scouting found this to be true for every guardhouse in the area. They were on to him, and they were being careful.

  Joshua was forced to take more extreme measures to deal with the fire mages. His tendrils had been digging through the building’s walls to scout them out, but now he gave them a new purpose. He used them to form Explosive Eye’s, a trick he hadn’t used since coming to this new world.

  Since the last time he had used the eyes, both Joshua’s control and supply of Pestilence had increased by an order of magnitude. He wa
s able to make and control seven eyes at once and formed them in the building’s outermost walls. He wouldn’t be able to beat more than two or three fire mages at once, and each guardhouse had at least five, so it was time for a more destructive solution.

  The eyes formed quickly, each loaded with nearly 2000 Pestilence, and violently exploded. The shock from the blasts was already enough to injure and cripple several guards, but it was the now-collapsing building that did the most damage. As a finishing touch, Joshua formed another eye and blew a hole in the ground, not caring to carefully dig through as he normally would.

  Out of the hole flew his swords, which darted among the building’s rubble to finish off the survivors. The guard captain was the only one who recovered in time to fight back, but he was overwhelmed just like the others. With the guardhouse cleared, Joshua retreated to the sewers once more.

  This process took longer than simply digging a hole, and Joshua was only able to destroy one more guardhouse before they devised a solution. He wasn’t sure what the solution was, but every time an eye or an ear sprouted from the walls it was met with either a blade or fire. They must have brought in some kind of sensor-mage. The moment he started forming the explosive eyes, they evacuated the building.

  Out of options and running out of patience, Joshua temporarily retreated to the Necromancer’s Guild. He was starting to regret taking such a lengthy quest. He had thought it would be a simple extermination, but they were countering his every move. Just when he was about to leave the sewers and enter the underground tunnels, he was met with a wall of fire.