The Omnithaneum

by Matthew Powell

  “You’ve had your fun Mane, now it’s my turn.” Joshua had to stop himself from sounding too arrogant. The solution had been remarkably simple: all he had to do was take away Mane’s sword. The Buster Sword was an extremely powerful piece of equipment, likely stronger than Joshua’s own sword, and almost certainly Soul-Bound. Taking it away would render Mane helpless, as he couldn’t use his two main abilities without it.

  Mane reached the same realization quickly and started tugging his sword, trying to rip it free, but Joshua held strong. Pestilence tentacles and shackles broke through the ground and latched onto Mane’s arms and legs, restricting his movements, while another twenty flying swords surrounded the pair.

  “Heh, damn,” Mane said. “I guess you didn’t get first for nothing. Next time, I’ll be ready for all your tricks!”

  “And I’ll have some new tricks to show you. Good fight, Mane.” The swords struck, cutting Mane’s body to pieces and killing him instantly. Joshua was glad Mane seemed to take the defeat so well. Keeping a rivalry like that going would push both of them to greater heights. He was already thinking up plans to help him counter Mane’s powerful sword throw, and anything he could learn would help in other fights.

  Enemy soldier slain!

  Zandrius earns 50,000 (250,000) EXP

  Seeing the reinforcements growing closer, Joshua ran from the site of the battle. While he was confident he could handle himself against other tier 5 players, there was no telling whom the Saints might send as reinforcements. If an NPC like Jakobus showed up, Joshua would be destroyed again.

  Luckily, the fighting across the planet had kicked back up in the last few minutes. The drop pods had purposefully been launched when there was a lull in the fighting, in the hopes that they might land safely. Now that the fighting had resumed, all Joshua needed to do was follow the sound of screaming and explosions.

  Just as predicted, following the sounds of death brought him right to a battleground. Joshua took cover in a small crater just outside the battle’s outskirts to get a handle on the situation.

  Most of the fighting seemed to be taking place between a few hundred tier 5 NPCs, with a few players scattered among them. Most of them, including the players, were dressed in light-plated scouting armor, with the color matching their faction, and wielding some sort of laser rifle. Every now and then Joshua could see a tier 6 Demon soldier or Saint acolyte, but they were mostly serving to oversee the battle, rather than join the fighting. His sensor web told him mostly the same thing, plus a few people he couldn’t see that were either hiding or wounded.

  With nothing to lose and not spotting any major threats, Joshua charged onto the battlefield. A laser burst almost immediately hit him in the shoulder, but to his surprise, didn’t even make it through his barrier. Just as Joshua was getting his hopes up about the enemy having weak weapons, another dozen lasers smacked into his barrier, shattering it instantly. While each individual shot was weak, the weapon had a high rate of fire.

  Joshua brought his shield around, stopping any more of the beams from hitting him. Individual weak shots, while capable of overwhelming his barrier, couldn’t get through the physical shield so easily. Joshua was prepared to send in his flying swords towards his attacker when he heard something roll along the ground. Looking near his feet, Joshua saw a small silver ball rolling towards him.

  The ball turned out to be a plasma grenade, something that Joshua discovered painfully when it exploded. The blast tore the shield from his hands and sent him flying back into the crater he had charged out of. The Saint’s soldiers hadn’t come unprepared. He would need a better strategy than blindly charging forward to reach them.

  But did he really though? Joshua thought a little more about his recent powerups as he recalled his shield from wherever it had flown. The blast, while it knocked him back a fair distance, only took off a few thousand health that had already mostly recovered. Between his personal shield, his barrier that had already reformed, Pestilence Manipulation, and Pestilence Mastery: Weapons…maybe he was strong enough to break through with brute force.

  Joshua charged out of his crater once more, this time better prepared. The soldiers had locked onto his position and were waiting for him, but they became irrelevant before the wall of floating shields that he created. The soldiers didn’t just open fire and throw grenades, as Joshua had expected, but brought out some heavier firepower.

  A rocket slammed into one of the floating shields, obliterating it and blasting apart two others. Joshua barely slowed down. The charge reached the hills and trenches that the Saints had been using as cover before the shields dispersed, revealing Joshua. By then it was already too late as he dove into the trenches and started the real fight.

  Recruit of the Saints Who Cleanse

  Tier: 5

  Level: 18

  HP: 280,000/280,000

  Almost every Saint NPC on the battlefield had that same class, with similar levels and HP values. The sheer amount of HP they had was intimidating, especially considering how many of them there were, but Joshua didn’t slow down. The first recruit he reached, who had watched him dive into the trenches and had already brought his gun around to shoot, fell when Joshua’s sword pierced his stomach.

  Recruit of the Saints Who Cleanse has taken 32,000 damage

  Remaining HP: 248,000/280,000

  The attack was devastating and left the recruit stunned but didn’t do much in the way of actual damage. Joshua noted with concern that the recruit’s armor, despite appearing thin and weak, had actually negated a fair amount of damage, possibly even stopping the attack from critically striking.

  Joshua followed the stab up by kicking the recruit into the wall of the trench, almost stumbling backward as his armored boots struck. The recruit, while he appeared scrawny, had felt like a solid wall. If Mane had used this kind of armor, instead of going bare-chested, maybe their fight would have turned out differently.

  The recruit, while he had plenty of defenses, had little in the way of close-quarters weaponry. He had dropped his rifle when kicked and unsheathed what looked like a knife hilt from a utility belt. The recruit lunged at Joshua at the empty hilt, and Joshua instinctively brought his shield around to block it.

  When the hilt impacted the shield, a laser-dagger extended from it. The laser cut straight through the shield, and the recruit started dragging it, almost sawing the shield in half before Joshua retracted it. Maybe they were more capable in melee than he had thought.

  The recruit lashed out with his dagger once again, this time aiming for Joshua’s head, but Joshua was prepared this time. He jumped to the side, causing the recruit to lose his footing as the stab missed. With the recruit stumbling as his arm overextended, Joshua swung his own sword and cleaved off the appendage.

  Critical Hit! Arm Severed! Recruit of the Saints Who Cleanse has taken 60,000 damage

  Remaining HP: 188,000/280,000

  The recruit stared at his empty stump for a moment before crying out in pain. He tried to back away from Joshua out of fear but just backed into the same trench wall he had been kicked against. Missing both a limb and his only weapon, Joshua made short work of the helpless recruit.

  Level 18 Recruit of the Saints Who Cleanse has died!

  Zandrius gains 40,000 (200,000) EXP

  The fight had been harder than expected, but the reward was definitely worthwhile. Not only did the recruits give almost as much EXP per kill as opposing players did, but he even dropped his weapon!

  Standard Issue Laser Rifle

  Automatic Light Firearm

  Damage Potential: 1000 Blunt/3,000 Light

  The laser rifle was almost useless to Joshua, but it might fetch a few credits at the auction house. A nice long stay in the Plague Dimension might even give it a unique effect that would increase its value…or render it completely useless. It was an easy risk to take, especially considering how many more similar rifles he planned to loot in the very near future.

  The fight hadn’t go
ne unseen. None of the recruits was willing to cross the no-man’s-land between the trenches, but they started working their way through towards his position pretty quickly. Joshua’s sensor web told him that the situation wasn’t looking too good. The Saints were closing in on his location from every direction.

  He had a few options, but none of them were very good. He might be able to cross the space between trenches by throwing up a wall of shields, escaping to where the Demons were holding. That was his best chance at survival, but he probably wouldn’t be able to get back.

  Joshua considered staying where he was and trying to reinforce this one stretch of trench but quickly discarded that idea. While he could set up some temporary fortifications with Pestilence, it would just be a matter of time before he was overrun.

  Joshua was thinking that his best hope would be charging down one section of the approaching troops, breaking through before they could surround him when a new idea struck. Rather than fighting or fleeing, Joshua formed shovels and claws from Pestilence and started digging his way through the trench walls.

  He escaped into the wall and closed the hole just in time for the first recruits to turn the corner. They were met with nothing more than the corpse of their own comrade, along with a few piles of discarded dirt.

  Rather than form entire new tunnels that could be broken into and followed, Joshua used his Pestilence to shuffle the dirt around himself. His race nullified the need for air, and A Sickly Spider’s Web allowed him to move around while avoiding hotspots and targeting loners. The first scout he found had no idea what hit him when the wall exploded, releasing flying swords that impaled him.

  Joshua only managed to kill two more Saints like this before they started traveling in groups. Killing one recruit in an ambush was easy enough, but any more than that was too dangerous. Even if he was strong enough to kill everyone in the group, they could still hold out long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

  Rather than give up and retreat, Joshua simply changed his targets. If the NPCs were going to group up like that, then he would target the cocky players instead. He had already seen a few step out of the trenches, overconfident in their abilities, only to be cut down in a barrage of lasers. Joshua mentally sighed in relief that he didn’t try that when escaping; he would have been cut down before anyone even realized who he was.

  The other players were a much more dangerous target, but almost all of them were alone. Everyone on the battlefield was at least tier 5, and only a few thousand players had reached that point so far, so almost everyone here was alone. Joshua wasn’t able to determine their level or class through his sensor web without risking detection by forming an eye somewhere, a risk he wasn’t willing to take. It took all of a single fight for everything to go wrong.

  Joshua exploded out of the trench walls, flanked by flying swords, right behind the first isolated played he could find. He had expected the player to die instantly, chopped up or impaled like the two recruits, but that didn’t happen. Instead, as he left the wall, Joshua was met with the pointy end of a bayoneted rifle.

  Jonah the Spontaneous Rifleman of the Saints Who Cleanse

  Tier: 5

  Level: 2

  HP: 160,000/160,000

  The man, Jonah, was wearing the same armor as the NPC recruits but had a smooth white helmet covering his face. As Joshua was taking in the man’s status, the bayonet pierced his shoulder and Jonah pulled the trigger. The rifle he was using looked different than the others, as it made of dark metal and with a large green coil instead of the laser rifle’s sleek body. The gun wasn’t a laser rifle at all, Joshua quickly found out, as a bolt of plasma left the barrel and melted his left arm off at the shoulder. The bolt went clean through his barrier, armor, and his arm, into the hole he had come from, and continued on through several feet of dirt before finally coming to a stop.

  Jonah, despite having just blasted Joshua’s arm off, looked equally surprised at the event. He recovered quickly, however, and re-aimed the gun, this time aiming for Joshua’s head. Joshua quickly grabbed the gun with his remaining arm and jerked it to the side, calling on the flying swords to do their job. The swords made quick work of Jonah, finishing him off with just a few quick swipes.

  Joshua retreated back into the hole and sealed it behind him, leaving his arm to rot, before sitting down to take a short rest. It seemed obvious that Jonah possessed some sort of reactionary skill that automatically countered ambushes, and Joshua was mad at himself for not thinking of that. No one who had made it to tier 5 this quickly would have done so without a few tricks up their sleeve.

  That one rifle shot made it clear that players posed an entirely different threat than the recruits did. Where the NPCs had more levels and stats, ostensibly making them harder to kill, the players had better equipment and more skills. Had Jonah been slightly more aware of his surroundings, Joshua would be reforming a new body somewhere else right now, instead of licking his wounds.

  The plasma shot had done considerable damage, and Joshua regretted not grabbing it when he had the chance. The place was already swarming with recruits and even a single priest who had stepped in to check on the commotion. Thinking back, the weapon had probably been Soul-Bound. Nothing powerful enough to one-shot him, with his current defenses, would be available so easily. Joshua resolved to be more careful with his next few ambushes.

  Once his arm had regenerated, his armor repaired, and his barrier refilled, Joshua began carving his way through the dirt again. The noise that the short scuffle made had drawn recruits from other parts of the trenches towards it, and that meant other areas were now ripe for ambushes.

  Chapter 14

  Faction wars always break down in one of two ways. Most often, they are long and bloody affairs. While none have taken place at the time of this recording, we expect these wars to last an average of several weeks, occasionally even months. These wars take place between millions of NPCs and players. We expect the first few of these long wars to draw more players than the factions could reasonably make deals with, and we are prepared to limit travel to affected worlds in such a case. The other type of faction war is short and bloodless, often taking place over a few days in backrooms while soldiers hold mild skirmishes. These are much rarer and will likely break down into long wars if players find out and get involved. -on Faction Wars, from The Chronicles of The Founder

  Jonah turned out to be an exception rather than the rule. While almost every player in the battle had similar or even stronger armor, none that Joshua could find had a similar reaction skill or plasma weaponry. While most of them certainly had unique skills, none of them were prepared for trench walls to explode and tens of flying swords to shred them.

  Only one ambush went wrong from that moment forward. When Joshua broke through the wall and sent his swords forward, they pierced right through the target…who proceeded to completely ignore the lethal damage as he swung his massive warhammer towards his attacker. Joshua was forced to retreat back into the walls, immediately realizing he couldn’t fight the man head-on.

  A little more scouting revealed that the player had the Juggernaut class and was able to completely ignore damage below a certain threshold. While all of the flying swords combined likely exceeded that amount, individually the attacks were too weak. Joshua avoided that section of the trenches from that moment onward.

  The EXP came slowly, but Joshua managed to reach level 3 within an hour. The EXP requirement was increasing by a million per level, so he predicted a very long and slow grind to tier 6. He couldn’t even imagine how slow it would be for people without any blessings at all.

  His Pestilence hadn’t gone up by much since he had been mostly fighting other players, but the few NPCs that Joshua killed were enough to raise his cap to 120,000. All of the excess Pestilence generated was put into his two armor set’s storage, quickly filling them. With a whopping 750,000 Pestilence stored and ready to use, Joshua was confident he could kill any tier 5 player or NPC except that Juggernaut th
rough overwhelming force.

  Even if someone managed to get through his defenses, as Jonah had, the stored Pestilence meant that he could fully heal himself almost twice over. It would take over an hour to recharge should that happen, but it was a good option to have.

  By this point, the ambushes had become trivial and sparse. The fighting had started dying down half an hour in, causing most of the tier 6 NPCs, along with most of the players, to leave the battlefield. All that remained from both sides were the tier 5 recruits. Joshua was able to kill them even in small groups now, and unlike players, they didn’t try to escape.

  Once the fighting ended, Joshua started to follow after the remaining Demons when a thought struck him. Why? He had no aspiration to rise through the Demons ranks, only to get stronger and leave for a better planet. Allying with the Demons didn’t give him strong allies or training, it just decreased the amount of EXP he could get from any single battle.

  Even worse, all of the time he would spend talking to them was less time he could spend fighting. Centus would probably come looking to avenge the betrayal eventually, but that was a concern for later. His mind made up, Joshua turned away from the retreating Demon soldiers and sped back out into the wasteland with a new destination in mind. Just as he turned around, a notification appeared.