The True Enemy Revealed

by Jason Cheek

  Theric had similarly good news on the fortifications being constructed on the Plains of Atoll side of the pass. With the quarries now cleared of monsters, the miners were turning out stone blocks for the base of the fortified wall like there was no tomorrow. The week before, they’d managed to complete a defensive berm of earth that was twenty yards high, which would help to reinforce the base of the stone fortifications nicely. Lastly, with the mines cleared, there was plenty of iron to keep the blacksmiths and engineers in materials for crafting the anti-siege weapons that I’d left designs for.

  All in all, it was positive news. I just hoped we had enough time to get our fortifications built up before we were attack. It felt somewhat like the start of a strategy game like StarCraft or Civilization. You knew the attack was coming, the only question was when and where. Did you have an enemy bumped up against your borders or were they a little farther out? How many opponents were around you?

  In any of these strategy games, you couldn’t just stay in your starting area to weather the storm of incoming attacks. There were never enough resources close by for that and it left your troops gathering resources exposed to the enemy. No, the best long-term strategy for future growth was pushing out and grabbing as much land as you could at the beginning of the game. Usually, that was done by closing off an area like a valley or landmass by using mountain passes or oceans. Just by sealing off those bottlenecks you could hold large areas of land with just a few troops focused in one or two areas. It also created a relatively safe area for your gathering civilians to keep your troops supplied.

  While this was a superior strategy, it came with its own dangers. If you were attacked before you could close off the area and secure the chokepoints, it was usually a wipe. With your forces split up on opposite sides of your closed off area, you couldn’t concentrate your forces quickly enough in any one area to hold off a serious attack from an enemy.

  In one way, Fang Pass was a perfect location for this strategy. It had a wide valley that could be fully secured by blocking off the chokepoints at either end of the pass between the Kingdom of Larethien and the Plains of Atoll. Doing so gave me a relatively safe area for my civilians to gather resources and work the land.

  The bad side to Fang Pass was that it was one of two passages through the mountains that the northern tribes took to invade the Kingdom of Larethien. Also, as far as the northern tribes were concerned, it was currently the weakest link. BrokenFang Hold was either currently in Goblinoid’s hands or severely weakened from recently being overrun. If it had just been the monsters coming for us, I could have focused all of my efforts solely on the Plains of Atoll side of the pass and easily built up my defenses.

  Unfortunately with the nature of the players and PVP guilds I’d pissed off, that wasn’t an option, which was why I’d immediately grabbed both sides of the pass. It stopped a lot of headaches by keeping out other players from entering my lands and scoping out my defenses, besides the whole killing my people and stealing my resources thing.

  At the time, I figured It was better to plan it out from the get go. Better than waiting until the last moment, since I knew The Syndicate would be coming after me to get their revenge. That wasn’t even taking into consideration the rest of the Chaos Storm alliance, like the Dread Pack and The Pwnguins, which I’d pissed off so far on my quest to rescue Domenic. I’m sure by the time this was over, there’d be a lot more pissed off PKers out for my blood. No doubt, they’d all be hot on my heels for retribution.

  I asked Kyarina to pass on my praise of a job well done and included the slew of new NPCs that would be showing up today at noon. Best to warn people that there’d be nine hundred new people of the world showing up on their doorstep at noon today. Well, eight hundred and seventy-five since twenty-five would be going directly to the Sea Elves. The additional people would really give a shot in the arm to ramping up the defenses on the Plains of Atoll side of the pass.

  While all of my vassals sounded like an immensely overpowered force, it was nothing in comparison to the Hobgoblin invasion headed our way. If Fylreh’s people were correct, the initial attack supposedly was going to hit BrokenFang Hold’s incomplete defenses by the end of this week. If that happened, there was nothing my friends or vassals could do to hold out against such an overwhelming force.

  Even worse, now that the cat was out of the bag about people of the world being able to de-level players, I’d be lucky to get any more orders through with the general NPC Recruiter’s pool. I’d still get the option to purchase my specialty troops like the gnomes, centaurs, Gnomelings, Humans, and beastkin, but I doubt I’d be able to win any regular bids against the Chaos Storm alliances’ economic might. While I was putting my money into upgrading my lands, purchasing supplies, and ordering new people, they’d been raping and pillaging whole towns. Meaning, additional purchases from the general pool wouldn’t be an option for a while. At least, not until the economic situation balanced out.

  Luckily for me, The Valkyrie and Devil Dog players were willing to do whatever they could to help out, so their questions and ideas were a different beast altogether. Kyarina’s email had a list of all the suggestions everyone had come up with for ways of dealing with the force headed their way. Most of them were improvements to the defenses to make the siege harder to carry out. Some were ingenious, like creating a pit trap that gave away only after a certain amount of weight was atop the entire trap. Others were impractical or possibly dangerous to our own people but could have a large payout, like pre-staging man-made avalanches. Both would take a massive amount of work.

  Others were just good upgrades to the existing weapons and traps under construction, like enchanting crossbow bolts and such. I didn’t bother explaining that many of the ideas they’d suggested were already planned upgrades in the pipeline, but let them think that they’d come up with the concept themselves. I didn’t want to rain on anyone’s parade and discourage them from offering future ideas on stopping the Hobgoblins. Orion did have a great idea of incorporating the Fire Spitter design from the Wind Dancer into our defenses. This was something I’d already thought of, but hadn’t discussed with anyone at BrokenFang Hold due to our lack of specialty equipment, like mana batteries and the knowledge needed to lay out the runes for the enchantment.

  I went ahead and answered Orion honestly with my thoughts about using the Fire Spitters’ concept, promising him that I’d send the information I had on the runes needed for the design. It sounded like he was really interested in learning the engineering behind the concept, so I spent a little bit more time on answering his questions completely about the process. With the gnome and Gnomeling engineers that would be arriving at noon, maybe they could figure something out in regards to the mana stones.

  The last of Kyarina and Orion’s questions revolved around how best to slow down the invasion force headed their way. No one had any good ideas on what to do, except to possibly set up temporary fortifications and fight to the death. It’s not like we had any mounts for skirmishing actions. Even if we did, it’s not like an arrow through the head or chest was an instant death. You had to do some serious damage to take an enemy down in the game or get an Execute off while they were helpless.

  The temporary fortification idea I immediately nipped in the bud. Any volunteers who offered to fight in this way would simply be overrun. The Hobgoblins were level forty plus. Even if they managed to kill several monsters each, it wouldn’t be enough to gain a level and once dead they’d lose a level. Besides, that wasn’t even talking about what might happen to anyone who was captured alive. The possibility of being raped and tortured to death or even eaten alive was a very real possibility. I didn’t want to have any of my friends or vassals go through that if possible.

  Still, I had some ideas on how this might be done. If Orion could get some centaurs to volunteer to be skirmishers and a large enough force of players were willing to take the risk of ambushing the enemy, then I had some ideas on how this might be done somewhat safely
. Most of it revolved around concepts taken from the American Revolution, modern guerilla warfare tactics, ancient Mongolian tactics, and Hollywood films. None of it was particularly original, except maybe for how to adapt those strategies for use in The World. Spelling out all of the tactics I’d come up with during the last few days of travel, I finished up the email and sent it out mentally crossing my fingers that something would work.

  The rest of the emails from my friends were more informational. AJ, Krystal, Jill, Hefe, and some girl named Bonnie Smash that Hefe had befriended had headed out from Lodenburg on Sunday and were now camped just outside of Telrain. From the tone of everyone’s emails, there was something going on between Hefe and Bonnie. What it was had to be ridiculously funny, because everyone was tight lipped about it and Hefe was getting pissed off about the ribbing.

  It almost made me pull up their streams to see what the hell was going on, but honestly there was no time with everything I had to get through before I could log in. I sent them an email asking if they wanted to check out an issue for me in Telrain and hang out for a day in the area until we caught up with them. Shaking my head sourly, I typed out a quick rundown on everything that had happened with Princess Reeva and what I’d heard of Chaos Storm’s take-over of Telrain, asking them to see if they could get any recon on the situation.

  Yeah, I know the princess didn’t deserve my help after everything she’d done, but I didn’t particularly want to leave my enemy untouched in their seat of power either. Besides, even if we weren’t particularly friends, I did have a relationship with the uppity bitch. If I could ensure she achieved her birthright, she’d actively fight against the Chaos Storm alliance, especially after being enslaved to the Sea Orcs from the newfar’s duplicity. Depending on what was going on, this might be our only chance to knock the bastards down a notch or two and turn the human realm against them. If we could remove their economic powerbase, it might take out their ability to completely outbid me in the NPC Recruiter. A win-win situation if we could pull it off.

  Hopefully, they’d say yes. I’d missed hanging out and playing with my friends in-game. Well, everyone but Hefe of course. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Hefe. At the same time, I could only take so much of him at any one time. He didn’t mean to do boneheaded things, but common sense was never his friend. The only positive about hanging out with him, was watching the constant bickering between him and AJ. While annoying on one level, it was also something to behold. Shaking my head, I hit send on the message.

  My next email was from Mike. As always it was straight and to the point. He’d brought his entire Assassin Guild, at least those who were answering to him, along with Anders’ Norwegian Guild. They should reach Palnisdale by Monday evening and would be heading out to Domenic’s as soon as they resupplied. He expressed his concern about the heavy presence of Orc scouts in the area, especially since they were all level forty or higher. Not that they had any issues with their two hundred member raid.

  I gave him a quick run-down on what I knew about the situation and my suspicions of what was going on. Hopefully, we could get in and out without being caught up in whatever was going down. Asking him to keep me in the loop if he found out anything, I went to the next email chain.

  It was a quick update from Domenic and the rest of my close friends. John, his daughter, and her boyfriend had finally managed to reach the fortress with help from Anthony, Danielle, Glen, and Kitty who’d reached Domenic a few days earlier. They’d managed to take out several of the large siege engines on the way in. Even so, John was bitching up a storm about being slaughtered left and right on the way in, so it was business as usual.

  The last couple emails were updates from the rest of my LAN party friends. Everyone had reached the twenties. While that was good news, none of them were high enough to help out even if they’d been in the area. Still, I included them in the update about where we stood, before switching over to my browser and pulling up my twitch channel.

  Immediately upon seeing the raging posts, I wished I hadn’t bothered. Looking hadn’t been necessary to confirm if our channel was still up and running, but the explosion of hate under the comment section instantly pulled my eyes. Quickly, I scanned through the online comments.

  At first, the Podcast guy and his fans hammering me for torturing him in-game had all of the online support. People raged at my horrible behavior and called for my twitch account to be banned, but that ruckus was short lived. When the first pictures of the children of Darom’s corpses being discarded in a pile of garbage popped up, the tone had instantly changed. Within minutes memes with the Podcast guy in a Nazi uniform began popping up with links to his rant about the raping, pillaging and enslaving of the townspeople.

  At the same time, new screen shots began showing up of me saving the townspeople and their children. Some were of me helping the troopers that had been thrown in the dungeon, while others were of crying families hugging my neck in thanks. They all brought tears to my eyes. When I reached the most recent comments, I saw that the Podcast guy’s blog had been linked into the discussion.

  One click showed that his page had been disabled. A quick google search showed why. His video of hate had gone viral, but not in the way anyone would want to be known as being famous. In return, my videos had gone viral too as people searched for the full story. While more than one viewer had commented on my torture session with the asshole as being less than honorable, most had thought justice had been served and openly applauded my actions. Most importantly, no one was attacking me.

  Well, the Podcast guy and his friends had tried to say that I’d tortured him, before knowing what he’d done and that meant I was just as guilty as he was. No one had bought the argument. While it was true that I’d judged him before I’d known the full extent of his in-game crimes, it didn’t really concern me one way or another. I’d never said I was a hero. I was just a regular guy playing a game, while doing what I thought was best in a brutal world. People could enjoy watching my antics or not. I wasn’t about to play some shallow goody-two-shoe hero just to stroke somebody’s ego. This was who I was, plain and simple, and I had no problems dishing out punishment as I saw fit.

  While I wasn’t going to complain about the guy being hammered, since he’d attacked me first and was, quite honestly, an asshole. At the same time, I was of two minds about the whole rigmarole going on about his actions in-game. When it came right down to it, this was essentially a fantasy game. It was my choice to play the character that I did. It was my own morality that made me treat the AI personalities of The World as people. Some people tried to say I was a hero, while others claimed that I was a villain, like those labels meant something. Honestly though, what the fuck was it to them? What would have happened if I’d been purposely playing an evil character?

  People didn’t play these games to be judged by others who were just watching their streams. You could either watch the streams or not. It was your choice alone that determined who were paid for their streams and who weren’t. Beyond that, it shouldn’t really matter. It was like purchasing a medieval fantasy book and being pissed off that it didn’t have modern day sensibilities.

  Obviously, the heat on the Podcast guy had built up to the point where he’d felt the need to disable his entire channel and blog. While I felt justified to a point, that sort of hate being carried over into the real world was somewhat scary to me on one level. It seemed like nowadays everyone was being judged by a social medial magnifying glass that didn’t bother to take into consideration the actual context of an issue or fully research a situation before laying down the social justice hammer.

  To be honest, it had surprised me that the redirect from the Podcast guy’s initial post had actually worked. If anything, the cover-up of his own horrendous actions in Darom was what had made people truly pissed off. There was no stopping the smile that came to my lips. I guess gamers weren’t the sheeple that he thought they were.

  Closing my laptop, I pushed it away with a deep sig
h. Sometimes, being a guild leader took way too much time out from gaming. I silently thought as I took a last biobreak, before making my way into the computer room with my super-sized cup of water. The alarm to login had gone off over an hour ago, but I hadn’t been able tear myself away from the train wreck of our twitch channel. At least, not until I’d gotten a better handle on the situation. There was no doubt in my mind that I’d made an enemy for life with Mr. Bungholio, but sometimes karma was a bitch. Then again, I guess you could say that about all the PKers that I’d taken out so far in-game. Sitting back in the Egg, I geared up and triggered the login sequence as my vision went dark.

  Running Pod Diagnostic – Complete

  Synchronizing controller units - Complete

  Neuro Synchronization - Complete

  Initializing virtual environment …

  I knew something was up before I’d even opened my eyes, as I appeared in the game with a heavy weight pressing down on my chest. Keeping my eyes closed, I breathed in deeply and immediately gagged at the overwhelming stench of raw meat that filled my nostrils. Large paws shifted on my breast plate as something long and slimy dropped on my face, before it was lifted off again and repositioned on my chest. As a heavy grinding noise started up, I cracked my eyes open to study the massive Silver Dire Wolf laying across my chest.

  ‘Do you really need to do that here?’ I sourly thought at Neysa as she pointedly ignored me, while eating her breakfast on my chest. Looking to the side, I saw Helgath sitting next to a cooking fire preparing breakfast with a wide smile plastered to her face. Seeing my raised eyebrow, the Half-Orc hurriedly looked away as Neysa’s thoughts filtered through my mind.