“You can’t run away forever, monster.”
Sigmund was waiting for him, along with enough guards to fill the tunnel.
“I must admit, it’s been a pain to track you down. We’ve learned a lot from these little conflicts, but I’m afraid it’s time for this little war to come to an end.” More guards started piling in from other sewer tunnels, with even more coming in from open grates on the surface. Joshua started pushing Pestilence into the floor, planning another escape, but a mage shot a bolt of fire at his feet.
“No no, none of that now. I spent a long time thinking of how you escaped last time, and I won’t let it happen again.” Sigmund spoke with a smug tone. He had finally beaten this strange Blackguard, and he wanted to rub it in before finishing the job.
Joshua started panicking. It seemed like every exit was filled with fire mages guards with enchanted gear. His best and most obvious hope was to escape out of the sewers and into the underground tunnels, where the guard wouldn’t follow him, but that was exactly where Sigmund had positioned the most guards. As he desperately searched the situation for an escape, a single fact floated into Joshua’s head. They hadn’t brought any earth mages, only fire.
Nearly 50,000 Pestilence fled Joshua’s body in an instant, forming a thick dome over him. The guardsmen almost immediately started burning through it, but the dome was just there to buy time. Joshua formed large floating Pestilence claws that started tearing up the stone, quickly forming a tunnel under the hastily erected barrier. Even as the claws started, he could feel the temperature rise as the fire started burning through the dome.
It took thirty seconds for the first hole in the dome to appear. At that time, all of the mages on that side focused their spells on the hole, filling the dome with flame and destroying it from the inside. When they looked at what remained, all they saw was a tunnel in the stone.
“What are you waiting for you fools?! Flood the tunnel with fire!” Sigmund called out, and the mages acted quickly. Unfortunately for them, just as the first one got close enough to cast a spell, Joshua burst out of the ground farther down the tunnel, past where the stone sewers ended and the underground caves began. He had made it into the underground. They couldn’t keep chasing him.
The mages attacked all the same, forcing Joshua to scramble away as flames jutted out of the tunnel he had just been in. A few others kept firing spells at him directly, forcing him to run away and occasionally throw up a hastily-made shield. In spite of their efforts, Joshua managed to make it around a corner farther down the tunnel. Sigmund seethed with rage at how close he had come but quickly gathered himself. The foolish Blackguard had taken on a quest to kill 1000 guardsmen. He would be back soon enough.
Chapter 8
The environment team was a little miffed when we told them that the environment had to be entirely and realistically destructible, but they didn’t complain too much. Certain structures like guardhouses and item shops will reform so long as the city they are in remains, but everything else has to actually be rebuilt. This not only lets players just have fun in the world, building their own cities with time, but also opens up countless battle tactics that crafty players can take advantage of. Later on, the players will be able to completely reshape the environment with their power, and even destroy planets entirely! Wait, you guys aren’t supposed to know that part yet. Damn it. – on Destructible Environments, from The Chronicles of The Founder
Joshua thought he would be safe in the underground tunnels, but that hope was quickly dashed. He tried to turn a corner, having escaped from the guardsmen several minutes ago, just to nearly impale himself on a waiting spear.
Irimun the Spear Guardian
Tier: 4
Level: 5
HP: 30,000/30,000
Dremun the Spear Guardian
Tier: 4
Level: 6
HP: 32,000/32,000
Two people had been lying in wait, and their status showed them both to be players. It was impossible to tell their appearance, as they were both wearing extremely heavy plate armor that covered their entire bodies, much thicker than the Scourge Blackguard set. Joshua had no clue why players would be attacking him and tried to back away, but the duo’s spears chased him.
“Oh no you don’t buddy, you’re our next paycheck!” Irimun, the one who had started the ambush, screamed while lashing out with his spear. Joshua had almost forgotten about his rapidly rising bounty. While killing the guardsmen wouldn’t raise his bounty due to the quest, killing the guard captains did, and each guardhouse he brought down had one. In total, Joshua’s bounty had risen to a whopping 600,000g, equal to 6000 credits after conversion.
Irimun’s spear chased Joshua as he retreated, parrying with his longsword. He had been foolish not to expect bounty hunters. That much money for a single fight was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Irimun chased Joshua down the tunnel, while Dremun stayed back. This proved to be a smart decision, as Joshua had spread Pestilence across the floors and had already formed multiple flying swords behind the advancing spearman. These two looked to specialize in heavy armor and spears, and that meant neither of them could effectively destroy his Pestilence.
Irimun didn’t even know what was going on, thinking he had Joshua on the ropes, right up until three swords stabbed into his back. To Joshua’s dismay, while they pierced over an inch into the thick armor, the swords weren’t strong enough to draw blood. Joshua tried activating Virulence Aura but quickly pulled it back when Irimun began radiating his own battle aura to repel it.
Joshua began to ready his Pestilence for another escape and reformation but stopped himself. These two players presented his first real opportunity to test his abilities against other people at his own level.
Instead of running, Joshua drew his own weaponry and started pushing his abilities to their limits. He used Airborne Pandemic to form launch pads and floating platforms, letting him dart around the wide tunnel and strike faster than Irimun could react. He flooded the area with Virulence Aura, believing that his own Pestilence reserve would outlast whatever energy Irimun used to protect himself.
The Pestilence on the ground grew to cover Irimun’s ankles, and spikes shot up from the ground to slow and injure him. Six floating swords, the most that Joshua could create while keeping up all these other effects, formed and began stabbing holes in Irimun’s thick armor. The spear guardian defended himself well enough, breaking the ground spikes with ease and spinning his spear to deflect the flying swords, but it wasn’t enough. What Joshua lacked in power, he made up for in quantity and variety.
Irimun’s armor, pristine at the start of the fight, eventually cracked and shattered from the countless holes and cracks filling it. With the armor gone, the spear guardian stood no chance against the constant barrage of stabs and cuts. When Irimun fell, Joshua was surprised to see a notification pop up. There hadn’t been one for any of the other players he killed.
Bounty Hunter slain!
Zandrius earns 10,000 (50,000) EXP
10 slain guards added to quest completion
Bounty raised to 700,000g
Joshua had wondered idly during the fight how Macrocosm planned to compensate players for quests like the one he had taken. It was clear that anyone undertaking such a massive quest would inevitably garner a large bounty from the guard captains, and the hunters would follow. The game had taken the extra steps to account for this, awarding EXP and quest completion equal to ten guards killed, presumably for each hunter slain. It was the perfect solution to his problem of countering the guard. He didn’t have to, he could just lure bounty hunting players to their death!
Joshua turned to the other hunter, Dremun, only to find the man standing there with his spear sheathed. Instead of preparing for a fight, he was standing there using his menu to record the fight.
“Hey!” Joshua called out, walking towards him. Dremun started backing away but stopped when Joshua put away his sword and shield. “Are you streaming
live?”
“Yeah,” the surviving spear guardian called out in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. “There aren’t many good streams or videos of high-level PVP, so we have a few million viewers right now.”
“A few million?!” Joshua had expected a few thousand at most. It made the next part all the sweeter. “That’s perfect! Everyone watching, listen up. Right now, I’ve got a bounty worth 7000 credits, and it's going up with every kill. If you want a shot at me, I’ll be waiting in the underground tunnels beneath the city of WestDrift, on the planet Grazurus. Don’t worry about finding me, just follow the people chasing me when they respawn.”
Joshua’s Pestilence, which had been slowly seeping through the dirt as he spoke, leaped out and latched onto Dremun’s limbs, trapping him. 15 swords formed in a circle, piercing the spear guardian’s armor from every direction, killing him instantly. He couldn’t maintain the swords for longer than an instant, but they did their job.
Bounty Hunter slain!
Zandrius earns 10,000 (50,000) EXP
10 slain guards added to quest completion
Bounty raised to 800,000g
Joshua hadn’t originally planned to kill Dremun, but he couldn’t think of a better way to end the message than a clear show of force. That little trick wouldn’t have worked had Dremun been prepared for it, but the people that would soon be hunting him didn’t know that.
While there was extreme danger in fighting other players, Joshua was confident in his abilities. Anyone with a higher level than his would be too busy climbing the ladder to waste their time hunting him, meaning the people he fought would be either his equal or weaker. If they kept giving rewards like this, he could finish the quest in a matter of hours by killing players and earn EXP doing it.
The only thing he couldn’t earn killing players was Pestilence, but that wasn’t an issue. As his supply grew, Joshua knew his limit must be approaching. It wasn’t marked in his status sheet or explained in a notification, but he had noticed patterns regarding the growth of Pestilence. Upgrades, from his total supply to his gear, were a multiple of the previous amount, but never too much. If his hunch was correct, the next limit would be at 100,000 Pestilence, at which point he would be stuck until tier 5, where it would likely rise to either 500,000 or 1,000,000. He already had 70,000, which was plenty for now. If he got close to the next tier and wasn’t finished, he could just go slaughter some more monsters in the Dire Forest.
Joshua quickly spread a wide web of Pestilence through the underground tunnels in preparation for the coming players. Dremun had claimed there were a few million people watching his stream, and that meant the forums, chat boards, and voice-chat servers would be blowing up right now with news of his challenge. It was the first real, high-stakes bounty hunt in Macrocosm, and he had seen other players in the city earlier. With any luck, they would be after him in no time.
Barely a minute after spreading the feeler web, Joshua found his first prey. A traditional adventuring party composed of the holy trinity. A knight, wielding a sword and shield to soak up the damage. An archer, who ran around and wounded their target. Finally, a cleric, to heal the tank and buff the archer. It was so classical that Joshua almost felt bad for what was about to happen.
He approached the hunting party, using his feeler web to stay out of their sight while trailing them. The makeup of their party was completely standard, made to hold up and overcome almost any challenge that a game could throw at them. This trinity of tank, healer, and damage had been around almost as long as online games. What this meant for Joshua, however, was that people had found ways to counter this exact grouping nearly 300 years ago. The team was incredibly powerful against traditional attacks, especially in a 3v1 fight, but there was one thing it was weak against.
Ambushes.
The party was walking along peacefully, most likely expecting to find Joshua and engage him in a fair fight, right up until Pestilence tentacles burst from the ground and wrapped around the knight’s legs and arms. He began to cut himself free almost immediately, but those few seconds were all Joshua needed.
Ten flying swords flew out of a corridor they had just walked past, unaware that Joshua was hiding around a corner at the other end of it. Two pierced the cleric, killing the girl instantly. Three started chasing the archer, who had started running away when she saw the tentacles. The other five began to whittle down the knight’s health and armor, which fell quickly without the cleric to heal him.
Joshua received the EXP, kills and bounty-raise for slaying the two hunters, but was forced to call back his swords as the archer outran them. He could still feel her presence through his sensor web, but she was fast enough to evade an ambush. She would probably regroup with her friends and either come back more prepared or give up and return to fighting monsters outside the city.
Either way, this fight sent a clear message to other bounty hunters. Joshua was planning to fight dirty, and he had gotten pretty good at it while fighting against the city guard. That thought sent Joshua’s mind down a different path. Had any other players fought against the intelligent NPCs as he had? Sure, the higher tier monsters were smarter, but not nearly at a human level.
Constantly coming up with plans to beat the city guards’ defenses had dramatically improved his ability to create plans and use his abilities properly in a very short period of time. It was likely that few, if any, other players had that same kind of experience in Macrocosm. They would get it soon enough, once PVP combat started getting more popular and people started pushing their limits, but right they didn’t have any of that.
That train of thought brought him to Foundation. The strange rank 1 player that had killed him effortlessly while evading an entire army of powerful sci-fi super soldiers. That freak was probably at tier 8 or something absurd by now. Joshua could have brought up the leaderboard to check but decided against it. Sometimes being reminded how far behind you are falling does more to hurt morale than to raise it.
While lost in his thoughts, Joshua’s sensor web picked up another three groups of players entering the underground. Two of the groups were normal and composed, though obviously more experienced than the first had been. The last group had someone dressed in a red robe with flame patterns on it. Joshua knew a fire mage when he saw one, and if the guardsmen’s fire mages were such a big threat, he didn’t even want to think about how dangerous a player would be. He chose to ignore that group and focus on the other two.
Joshua’s day continued like this, constantly fighting bounty hunters. The number increased as the day dragged on, and pretty soon there were over twenty parties hunting him through the underground. The constant wave of players, combined with their often-close proximity to other groups, meant that Joshua was forced to approach fights conservatively.
Joshua avoided any groups with a fire mage entirely, picked off loners and those who wandered from their groups, and generally hid in custom tunnels and caves dug out with Pestilence. The hit-and-run style of fighting meant that he often ran from fights with only a single kill or even none at all. Healers and ranged damage dealers made easy targets, provided they didn’t run away the moment he attacked.
As Joshua slowly pried kill after kill from hunting groups, they started to form plans to counter him. The players were significantly worse at organization and planning compared to the guardsmen, and many kept little secrets they had learned during their battles hidden in the hopes of stealing the final blow. None of them knew that Joshua could see and hear everything through his sensor web, and he was perfectly happy keeping it that way.
As the minutes dragged on, Joshua’s bounty began to climb as he racked up kills. Two million, three million, four million and higher. His bounty reached just short of five million as a floating sword decapitated an archer who hadn’t been paying attention, signaling the 40th player killed in less than three hours.
His level climbed all the way from 16 to 24 in that time, spurred forth by the 50,000 EXP he earned for every kill. He e
ven managed to earn a few powerful skills in the process.
Skill Learned: Beginner Pestilence Mastery: Weapons
-The user, through constant training and use in combat, has become proficient in creating temporary weapons out of Pestilence. Decreases the cost to create temporary Pestilence weapons by one third.
Unique Skill Created! A Sickly Spider’s Web
- The user can create a web of Pestilence threads, piercing through the ground. This web acts as a massive detection apparatus, giving the user the location and detailed information on any target that enters its radius. Cost to create and maintain web lowered, web length extended.
Congratulations, you have created your first unique skill!
Unique skills are things that Macrocosm’s overseer AI determines to be a useful application of one’s abilities, but that doesn’t have an official skill to match. A unique skill is created to compensate, giving the skill creator a powerful bonus to its effects as a reward for their ingenuity. Players that discover a similar ability may receive the same unique skill, but any attempt to teach the skill to others will result in them learning a weaker version that they must improve. As players begin to enter higher and higher tiers, most skills will wind up being unique.
The Omnithaneum Page 8
