Unbound Deathlord: Challenge
Page 46
I sighed.
Ted said.
When we got to the cave, I summoned all the morbs I could, ending with five fire spheres and a death one.
Ted said.
We didn't have to wait long. Five minutes later, the first four people appeared.
It was a slaughter.
Ted opened with an arrow to a sorin's face. Bear raged – becoming slightly red – and used the Typhoon Swing to damage them all. My five fireballs flew and finished three of them, except for a dude who was wearing what looked like good scale armor.
Before the survivor could even react, Bear's huge bastard sword hit the guy on the side and Ted's second arrow hit him in the face. A second fireball in the man's face ended him.
It was all over in less than three seconds. Out of curiosity, I checked the damage logs.
[Ted] Critical damage for 2.0x damage!
[Ted] 153 damage dealt to Shorty
[Bear] 201 damage dealt to Shorty
[Bear] 189 damage dealt to Tall Guy
[Bear] 162 damage dealt to Good Armor Dude
[Bear] 205 damage dealt to Probably Mage
Critical damage for 2.0x damage!
222 damage dealt to Shorty
HP: 0 / 576 <?>
Critical damage for 2.0x damage!
222 damage dealt to Tall Guy
Critical damage for 2.0x damage!
222 damage dealt to Tall Guy
HP: 0 / 633 <?>
Critical damage for 2.0x damage!
222 damage dealt to Probably Mage
HP: 0 / 427 <?>
Critical damage for 2.0x damage!
222 damage dealt to Good Armor Dude
[Bear] 91 damage dealt to Good Armor Dude
[Ted] Critical damage for 2.0x damage!
[Ted] 102 damage dealt to Good Armor Dude
Critical damage for 2.0x damage!
222 damage dealt to Good Armor Dude
[Bear] 91 damage dealt to Good Armor Dude
HP: 0 / 890 <?>
I couldn't even read it all, because when Bear suddenly found himself out of targets, he turned to us.
Shit.
We were saved by a woman's scream behind him. A drow wearing the characteristic white robe of her people was there, and a second drow in Blackguard's cloak appeared right beside her.
Bear attacked.
His sword cut the woman almost in two, and she dropped on the floor, probably with an Open Wounds status effect. The Blackguard reacted fast and shadowed, striking Bear three times.
Something weird happened next. Bear's helmet opened by itself, revealing his now completely white eyes and sharp teeth. He dropped his sword and hugged the drow.
Then he bit the man's face.
A horrid scream followed. Four more people appeared, two other drow and two zombies. My fireballs flew, so did Ted's arrows. They counter-attacked.
They had a mage and a guy with a crossbow, who focused their attacks on Ted. Or at least tried to.
I didn't expect it from her, but she rolled to put me between the attacks and herself; she also somehow hit the mage's light spell mid-air with her arrow.
Meanwhile, the Blackguard had stopped screaming, probably having logged out after the shock of having his face bitten off. The other two players were a sword-and-shield guy, and one with two axes. Axes guy screamed in fury, and they attacked Bear.
I waited for five fire morbs before throwing them, guessing their crossbowman would do the same to them as Ted had done. I made the spells move erratically, but the guy still managed to destroy one with a bolt, and the mage destroyed another one with her spell.
Three of them were still enough to kill the mage, though.
Bear had dropped the drow on the ground and kicked the guy with the shield far enough to grab his own sword from the floor. Then he used the Typhoon Swing: he rotated with his arms extended, sword in hand. Right after that, he dealt a massive blow to axes guy, right in the face. Then to the man's arm.
Something fascinating was happening: he was recovering HP. Not only because of the drow he had bitten; with each blow he dealt, he shone slightly redder and recovered HP.
The crossbowman ignored us and started attacking Bear, too. Ted and I killed him after a short while. He rolled on the ground, trying to dodge our attacks, but it was to no avail.
Bear's HP hadn't even dropped to half. Between regeneration and his armor, it was very hard to kill him.
Without saying anything, both guys suddenly disengaged and ran.
Bear tried to run after them, but the guy with the shield bashed the zombie in the face, and he received a dazed status effect for thirty seconds.
She complied.
As we hid around a corner and heard Bear's rage screams, I felt burning anticipation inside me.
The zombie was a monster. How many more like him were there in the Underworld?
That war of mine would be even more amazing than I had expected.
Jack Thorn
Unbound Deathlord
Legendary Spotter, Hedge Wizard, Pioneer, Da
rk Archmage
Level 20
Hit Points:620 / 620
Mana Points:510 / 950
Stamina:305 / 305
Attributes:
Strength:19
Agility:17
Dexterity:19
Constitution:14
Intelligence:18 + 2 [Items]
Perception:16 + 10 [Items]
Willpower:18
Charisma:8
Traits:
© Adept Controller:22
© Adept Energizer:14
Adept Mage:12 + 10 [Items]
Scout:3
Athlete:2
Diviner:2
Gold Digger:2
Meditator:2
Scavenger:2
Shadow:2
Antimage:1
Crafter:1
Healer:1
Herbalist:1
Mind Seer:1
Negotiator:1
Nitpicker:1
Ranger:1
Strategist:1
Tactician:1
Warrior:1
26. My Life
'Ice-cream! Gimme the ice-cream! No, don't run! I just want a bite, I swear! Maybe two. C'mon, it won't be more than three!'
- Aunt
I shook the sword a little to loosen it from the corpse on the ground. People these days couldn't even die without being a pain in the ass to their murderers.
I cleaned the sword on the body's clothes.
Bear spoke with his mouth full of drow meat.
Bear and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Ted sighed out loud and began to loot the bodies with us.
There were sixteen corpses around us, killed in three distinct battles. We had started the first against a somewhat isolated group of five people. Another group of three people, more or less nearby, decided to help the first group and attacked.
They hadn't expected us to finish the first fight as quickly as we did, though, and soon found themselves fighting without backup. They tried to run and screamed for help and found eight paladins of justice willing to save them.
Such paladins, while confident in their numeric superiority, hadn't believed we would kill the second group so fast, and suddenly found themselves having an intimate physical conversation with our swords by themselves.
We explained to them, in very didactic terms, why you never help unknown people in MMORPGs. Especially when you don't have a way to be sure of the enemy's strength in comparison to yours.
We had decided on an ecological approach to after-battle scenes: we took everything the dead people had instead of leaving non-organic waste around.
With a perspective too tied to the games of old, Bear hadn't thought of putting leather equipment underneath his plate armor, and his total defenses were lower than mine.
Low-Quality Scale Armor
» +40 defense
Low-Quality Scale Pants
» +40 defense
My new scale armor was made of copper and ugly as hell, but gave me better defenses than my old chainmail set. Sadly, I couldn't fit one over the other, and ended up selling the chainmail to Bear. Even while complaining that it disturbed his movements a little, he was now using it under his plate armor for some extra defense.
After receiving a few hits in some battles, I had been enlightened to changes in the defense system that the lack of a Destiny Spirit hadn't made me aware of.
Since an update in the last week, if you wore a piece of armor above other ones, it halved the worse ones' defense.
Meaning that my leather armor, scale armor, and half chest plate didn't mitigate damage by a hundred and five – the sum of all defenses – as I thought.
After being halved twice and rounded up, my half breastplate – the piece with the worse defense in the breast area – had an effective defense factor of eight, instead of thirty.
The leather armor – the second best piece – was lowering the damage I received by half its total: eighteen.
Only the scale armor defenses were being kept intact.
Any damage I received in the breastplate would be lowered by sixty-six, way less than what I had expected. It seemed like V-Soft didn't want cheap people like me skipping the more expensive armors.
Such lower defenses were actually visible in the items descriptions after you equipped them, but I hadn't cared to check. I mean, who did?
He put his hands beside his mouth. "This is White Tree territory!" He yelled with all the power he could muster. "We obey Jack Thorn! We challenge the drow to a fight over this land tomorrow, thirty hours from now! Come to the Slums if you have the guts!"
I nodded to him.
A three-dimensional red 'C' letter the size of my head was rotating a few centimeters above me. We were on day twenty-nine, at midday, and had been killing people close to the drow cities for hours.
The most fragile point of my plan had been counting on the drow not attacking us immediately when we killed the first few players and yelled our summons. If they had, we would be dead, and it would've been the end of the Challenge for me.
Thankfully, I had read them well enough. Daggers had told me the drow considered players as distant cousins, but it was more like unwanted neighbors your parents – the gods – ordered you to treat well. The drow didn't care that we were killing the players, as long as it was outside their cities.
They should be downright pissed at the territorial claims, though.
Still, if you are a gang member in a neighborhood full of people you dislike, and a random dude starts to clean the streets of unwanted neighbors for you, you just let him do his job.
Even if he is yelling that the streets are now his, as long as he sets a place and date to decide that once and for all, and as long as such time is not too far in the future, you don't bother with him.
If you are going to confront a cleaning lady for stealing your stuff, you only do that after she finishes her job.
Unless she makes a point of yelling about the thievery every damn second of her workday, of course.
So, we had killed people for ten hours, and I had decided it was enough.
The drow and the White Tree weren't my only concerns. We had fought a few close calls, and I wasn't interested in dying by mistake in the middle of nowhere. Also, about one in every hundred people I saw walking around had the 'C' letter floating above their heads; Challengers were common in the areas around the Slums and looked my way with far too much interest.
Watching him eat people's bodies was one of the most disturbing things I had seen in my life. The fact that he didn't seem to care only made matters worse. In the cave where we had been the last few, he had at lea
st eaten giant ants.
It was a blessing that the meat lost its healing effectiveness and good taste after a half hour. I made a point of not looking his way after the fights.
Bear had already visited the cavern that Ted led us to: it was the rat's cave of their bet, the one that the specter had failed to clear using daggers, which forced the archer path upon her.
A series of narrow passages with turns every twenty paces made it excellent defensive terrain. Ted left us there and logged out immediately. She'd only come back when it was time for us to leave.
I laughed.
With some difficulty, I forced myself out of his hold.
Realization hit me, and I rolled my eyes. I couldn't believe the universe would make me act cupid.
He made a confused expression.
Ignoring him had become a habit by now.