Man Made God 001
Page 19
Ding!
[You have defeated the 1-star monster [storm wolf]! Items dropped: [storm pelt] and 500 gold coins. +2,000 experience points! +100 AP!]
Ding!
[Titania has leveled up! She is now at level 2. +20 HP! +1,000 MP! +10 SP!]
Ding!
[Titania has leveled up! She is now at level 3! +20 HP! +1,000 MP! +10 SP!]
Ding!
[Titania has leveled up! She is now at level 4! +20 HP! +1,000 MP! +10 SP!]
Ding!
[Titania has leveled up! She is now at level 5! +20 HP! +1,000 MP! +10 SP!]
Adam felt the satisfied smile appear on his face as he received the experience and ability points from killing the [storm wolf]. He was also surprised to see that Titania had leveled up so much, but then he remembered she was only at level 1, and if her level up system was the same as his, then the experience points required to level up would be double that of whatever you needed to reach the previous level. She could level up so many times in a row right now because her level was low and didn’t require many experience points. It would become harder as time went on.
Still, the fact that she had leveled up so much after a single kill made him pretty happy.
Of course, the people around him could not see the smirk he wore thanks to his mask, but they must have sensed the smug satisfaction he felt. The remaining nine players bristled and shouted at him.
“Who the hell do you think you are?!”
“You think you can kill our guild members and get away with it?!”
“Let’s kill this motherfucker!!”
The four Warriors remaining surrounded Adam as the Priest used some kind of buff magic on them, the Archers knocked back their arrows, and the Mages got ready to cast a spell.
Adam glared at the people surrounding him and was just about to attack the nearest Warrior to break the encirclement, but mere seconds before he could, a flash of light flew down from above and began floating next to him.
This flash was, of course, Titania.
The fairy’s sudden appearance caused everyone getting ready to attack to pause. Uncertain expressions crossed the faces of the players surrounding Adam. They looked at each other, then at the fairy, then at each other again.
“W-what is that? An enemy?”
“She’s so beautiful…”
“Is she a fairy?! She looks like a fairy!”
“What?! No way! What would a fairy be doing in the Village of Beginnings?!”
Titania eyed the people surrounding Adam as they talked up a storm, then looked at him with a bold smile.
“It seems you are in trouble. Now may I help you?” she asked.
“Please do,” Adam said.
The first thing Titania did was use [scan] on the nine people surrounding him. All of them were at level 6. The Warriors had health ranging between +110-160, with a Physical Attack stat of +40-60 because their overall stats were more balanced than his own and they didn’t have any good equipment. The Archers also had +110-160 health, but their Physical Attack was even lower. The Priest and Mages had the lowest health, but they also had the highest MP, and their Magical Attack was nothing to scoff at.
Even so, Adam was not worried.
Immediately after casting [scan] several times, Titania clasped her hands in prayer and began to sing [Song of Valor], which increased his Physical Defense and Magic Defense by 200%. This meant his +95 Defense was now +190 and his +15 Magic Defense was +30. That might not seem like a large defensive increase, but if a person’s Physical Attack was only +70, then they would not be able to damage him.
Adam did not bother activating [Blood Sacrifice] since it wasn’t necessary to deal with these people. Before they even had time to recover from their shock at seeing a fairy, he attacked them, using [slash] to insta-kill the Warrior nearest him. His attack went from that person’s left shoulder to their right hip. After the Warrior screamed and died, Adam spun around and used [thrust] on a Warrior about two feet from him.
“What the fuck?!” That Warrior shouted seconds before Adam’s spear impaled him through the chest. Once again, there was no gore, no blood. Even so, the man released a shrill scream of pain before his HP was reduced to zero and he died. Adam yanked his spear from the Warrior’s chest and went on to attack the next one.
There were only two left.
“Fuck! This little shit just killed three of our people!”
“Kill this bastard!”
“Mages! Fire your magic! Priest! We could use some magic buffs here!”
The Mages were startled, but it seemed they had experience with VR gaming because they recovered from their shock quickly and opened fire. The magic they cast was a basic [energy bolt] spell. It was non-elemental magic that fired a bolt of pure energy and had an attack power of +120. Had anyone else been struck by these attacks, they would have been killed instantly.
-90; MISS!
“What?! What is going on?! Why did our attacks do so little damage?!”
“What the hell?! Fuck! I just used [scan]! Check out this guy’s stats! He’s at level 9!”
“WHAT?!”
The knowledge that Adam was at level 9 sent a shockwave rippling through the remaining members. Adam used that momentary distraction to take a [health potion], then kill the last two Warriors. He sliced one of them through the throat with [slash], then impaled the other one with [thrust]. His actions of taking out the last two Warriors sent fear racing through the two Mages, the Archers, and the Priest.
“Dammit! Fire! Hit him with your arrows!” the Priest shrieked.
The archers were shaking as they knocked back their arrows and fired them at Adam, but he dodged to the side, avoiding the arrows with incredible ease. Compared to bullets, these arrows were moving in slow motion.
“Shit! How is he dodging us?!”
“He must have real life combat experience! God damn it! Why did we have to run into this fucker?! Why couldn’t Daniel be the one who ran into him?!”
Adam didn’t know who Daniel was, but he didn’t care. He raced toward the Archers, who screamed and tried to flee, cutting them down before they could move too far.
-384; -384!
The Archers were both killed, their bodies dropping. During the time Adam was slaughtering them, the Mages and the Priest managed to run away. He noticed them in the distance and thought about chasing them. After a moment, he decided it was not worth the effort and turned toward the battlefield.
It was a bit odd seeing a battlefield with no blood. Adam was no stranger to violence. His hands were stained in so much blood that he could no longer see what color his skin was.
Of course, he had not killed in years, not since meeting Aris, but that did not change the facts. And the fact was that seeing a bunch of corpses that weren’t bleeding was just odd.
Corpses in Age of Gods didn’t remain there forever. Even as he stared at them, the players’ bodies disappeared into particles of light. The players would revive at the cathedral. He knew the moment they were revived, they would tell their boss about him, which could invite some trouble, but that just meant he needed to reach level 10 quickly.
“Those people were pretty weak,” Titania said as she fluttered down to him.
“That’s what happens when you join a party like that. You have to split the experience points, so of course their levels are going to rise slowly, and they won’t gain as much. Their equipment was also the same equipment they had when they first began playing,” Adam said.
Titania tilted her head when he said “first began playing” like she couldn’t understand what he meant, but then she nodded. “So those people are otherworlders like you. I should have realized that’s what they were.”
“You know about otherworlders?” asked Adam.
“But of course. This is not the first time otherworlders have come to our lands. Long ago, when the world was in chaos, a kingdom that existed long ago used a forbidden summoning ritual to summon a hero from another world to
slay an ancient evil. The ritual has since been forgotten. However, it seems many otherworlders are appearing in our world now. Oh! I should mention the ancient hero was someone who wielded this spear previously. According to legend, he was a very righteous man. This happened about two thousand years before my time.”
So there was an in-game lore about hero summoning. He’d heard the “summoning a hero to another world” theme was really popular near the beginning of the twenty-first century. The genre had gone out of style after awhile, but maybe the creator for Age of Gods was a fan of it and decided to incorporate it into his game’s lore.
Well, it wasn’t like that mattered. It was just in-game lore.
“It looks like you leveled up quite a bit,” Adam said to change the subject.
“It’s just five levels,” Titania said as though gaining three levels after killing a single enemy wasn’t anything special, though Adam could see the way she puffed out her chest. “It isn’t that big of a deal.”
“Where’d you allocate your status points?” he asked.
“Into my Intelligence obviously,” Titania said as if it was a matter of course. “We fairies gain the largest benefits from having a high Intelligence. Of course, having more health and a higher defense would also be useful, but we won’t gain many benefits from increasing our Strength or Constitution. I also used sixty of the ability points I gained to level up all my current songs. Now they are all level 2.”
Adam nodded. He was tempted to look at her stats, but he didn’t think now was the time.
“Let’s keep moving,” he said. “I would like to reach level 10 before I log off tonight.”
“Log off?”
“Er… before I go back to my own world for the day. I can’t stay here all the time.”
“Oh? I did not know it was possible to so easily return to your original world.”
Since he wanted to level up fast, Adam did not hesitate to leave this area and travel deeper into the forest. Those +12,000 experience points he needed to level up were not going to earn themselves.
Daniel Frost was a mage and the leader of the Rising Phoenix Alliance. While he understood that he was not the most powerful person in the virtual world, he also knew that he was not a small fry either. Very few people would go out of their way to anger him. Those few who did often suffered incredibly harsh consequences.
That was why, when several of his people came to him with stories about how one man killed more than half their party, he could not help but feel like he was being lied to.
“Did you really get wiped out by one player?” he asked.
They were in the middle of the forest. Daniel was with his party of five, which was a standard party for players. He was the Mage, but they also had a Warrior, an Assassin, an Archer, and a Priest. This standard party lineup was used the most in online multiplayer games because it offered the most stability.
He was a level 7 Mage. Level 7 was the current highest level anyone in the game had outside of Lin Akamine, the current number 1 player in the entire world.
“We don’t have any reason to lie to you, Guild Master,” the Priest said. This man and two Mages had run all the way over here after escaping from that madman who had killed their party. “We were just minding our own business and fighting against an 1-star [storm wolf] when this guy named Adam came along. Not only did he steal our kill, but he began attacking us!”
The two Mages by the Priest’s side nodded.
Daniel felt like gravity was tugging his mouth into a frown. He crossed his arms and ignored the battle going on a little ways off. His party members were currently attacking a level 7 [wolf], but they were doing an excellent job without him. The Warrior was acting as their tank by drawing the [wolf’s] agro, while the Assassin dealt incredible damage with [throat slit]. Meanwhile, the Archer was taking potshots using [dead eye] and the Priest was healing them. It wouldn’t be long before the enemy was killed.
He didn’t see a reason to intervene.
“It’s possible this person didn’t realize who he was messing with,” Daniel said at last. “None of the guilds have been officially established in-game. He was probably just an opportunist looking to steal your kill without knowing you belonged to my guild. Even so, we cannot let someone get away with killing our members. Our guild has a reputation to uphold. We’ll let every member know to keep an eye out for this guy. If we see him, don’t attack. Just report on his whereabouts to me.”
“Yes, Guild Master!”
The Priest and two Mages saluted him before heading off. They also needed to grind their own levels. As he watched them go, Daniel turned his back on the battle that had just finished and thought about this Adam player who had killed several members of his guild. He certainly would not let this go unpunished. If he ever found that man, he would definitely make him wish he was dead.
The deeper into the forest Adam went, the higher each monster’s level became, and the more experience points he earned for each kill. Of course, regular monsters did not grant him much in the way of experience anymore. There was also a level cap on the monsters here. After reaching a large mountain that he guessed acted as the border for the Village of Beginnings, the highest level monster was 10.
The level 10 [brown bear].
Name: Brown bear
Description: A bear that roams the forest. Brown bears are very aggressive and will attack anything that comes near it.
Class: Regular
Lvl: 10
Health: 2,000/2,000
MP: 100/100
Strength: +500
Constitution: +50
Dexterity: +10
Intelligence: +10
Speed: +20
Skill Name: Slash
Description: With just one powerful swing, the brown bear can rend the flesh from his enemy’s bones.
Ability: Deals +1,000 damage
MP consumption: 5
Cooldown time: 0 seconds
Skill Name: Roar
Description: The brown bear can unleash a ferocious roar that stuns the enemy!
Ability: 10% chance of causing stun
MP Consumption: 5
Cooldown time: 10 seconds
Its stats weren’t bad, but they were nothing compared to the monsters he’d fought down in that dungeon. This wasn’t even talking about the [necromancer] and the [skeleton dragon]. Even the regular skeletons had been stronger than this guy.
-528; MISS; MISS; MISS!
Titania was already chanting [Song of Vigor] to increase his physical attack power, which caused the damage he did to increase from +240 to +528. Unfortunately, his Hit-Rate still wasn’t very good. Three of his first four attacks missed. To make matters worse, one of his missed attacks had been [thrust], which would have dealt even more damage than [slash].
Meanwhile, the [brown bear] tried to use [roar], but it only had a 10% chance of stunning him and it didn’t work. When [roar] did nothing, the [brown bear] attacked with [slash]. Adam, however, merely hopped from side to side like a rabbit as he backed away, allowing the claws to miss him.
[Blood Sacrifice]!
Because he wanted to finish this quickly, Adam activated his unique skill and attacked the [brown bear] with even more vigor than before.
-1,440; MISS; MISS; -1,440!
He only needed to land two attacks before the [brown bear] was killed. The creature unleashed a pained roar that sounded more pathetic than frightening as it fell backwards, hitting the ground so hard the earth shook.
Ding!
[You defeated a [brown bear]! Items dropped: [bear fur] and 100 gold coins! +100 experience gained!]
Adam sighed as he looked at his stats. He’d killed fifteen enemies in the past three hours, but all that amounted to was a measly +1,500 experience points. The amount of experience points he needed was still over 10,000. He really wanted to know who the frack designed this game. The leveling up system was seriously messed up.
At least Titania had leveled up again. Her c
urrent stats were fairly decent.
Name: Titania
Class: Guardian of the Spear
Lvl: 6
SP: 0
AP: 0
Experience: 800/1,600
Strength: +10
Constitution: +10
Dexterity: +10
Intelligence: +145
Speed: +50
Physical Attack: +20
Health: 180/180
Hit-rate: 20%
MP: 4,300/4,300
Movement: +250
Physical Defense: +20
Magic Defense: +30
Dodge-Rate: 20%
Magic Attack: +290
Skill Name: Song of Refreshing Rain
Description: A song that can only be sung by Titania. This song is refreshing and lovely, like light spring rain. It has an incredible healing affect.
Current lvl: 2
AP needed to reach next lvl: 40
Ability: Indefinitely heals +15 HP every 5 seconds for as long as Titania is singing.
MP consumption: 50 MP per second
Cooldown time: 30 seconds
Skill Name: Song of Vigor
Description: A song that Titania sings to increase the strength of her companions. When sung, this song will increase the Physical Attack and Magic Attack of every companion in her party.
Current lvl: 2
AP needed to reach next lvl: 40
Ability: Raises the Physical Attack and Magic Attack of all allies by 220% for as long as she is singing.
MP Consumption: 50 MP per second
Cooldown time: 30 second
Skill Name: Song of Valor
Description: A song that Titania sings to increase the defensive abilities of allies. Defense and Magical Defense will increase for as long as this song is being sung.
Current lvl: 2
AP Needed to reach next lvl: 40
Ability: 220% for Defense and Magical Defense stat of all Titania’s party members. Increase lasts for as long as Titania is singing.
MP consumption: 50 MP per second