The Gods of the Second World (LitRPG The Weirdest Noob Book 3)

by Arthur Stone

  He had a pretty decent Agility stat, which allowed him to dodge arrows and melee weapons, and high Speed, which meant he could run fast; apart from that, his Vigor was leveled up well enough, which meant he wouldn't succumb to weariness too soon. And even if they managed to hit Ros, he had good Stamina, which gave him extra HP, and Defense, which lowered the damage received, amplified by his armor and the very same Stamina.

  On the other hand, high-level archers could also hit you with magic. Not all of them, though, and their success largely depended on their weapon. They had to put a special spell on their arrows before the shot. All of this must have affected the current situation, which let Ros notice the motion just before his body was about to be run through.

  Someone behind him started whooping gleefully. Those morons seemed to have a very vague idea of who they'd run into. They most likely thought that with levels like theirs, they could find any pesky noob in any forest. The plan must have been to catch up with him, surround him, and kill him without breaking a sweat. They were likely to mock him in a variety of ways before that.

  "Guess what," thought Ros. "You're no match for me, and you can suck it." They'd never manage to catch up with him. He'd run a while, get warmer, and then show them how fast he really could go.

  Then Ros stopped suddenly, looking at the vista that had just opened before him with chagrin. Now he understood why they'd been whooping.

  He had nowhere to run.

  Technically, every direction was open and no one was holding him down. But the terrain changed in a most unpleasant manner. What he faced was an enormous area of woodland that had been burned to the ground. Most trees had been felled, and the few that remained were charred stumps without any branches. The worst thing was the rocky massive running parallel to the river that he could see in the distance. It was a sheer face of solid rock some forty-five feet high. Ros was agile enough to climb it, but that would take time.

  Meanwhile, those whooping bastards would come out of the wood and make a pincushion out of his exposed body while he climbed the rock.

  That meant his first attempt to reach the capital could be written off as a failure. He might close his eyes and relax, or attack the swines that seemed to be having such fun at his expense with all guns blazing, but the result would be the same. Ros would very soon end up at his latest respawn point, facing a very displeased Agythric. The latter would call him brainless meat or something of that sort, and then he could start again.

  That sucked. So much time lost.

  "Hey, what the hell is that?" he heard a voice behind him cry out, frightened and indignant at the same time. "A-a-a-a-a-a-rgh!!! Guys! A-a-a-a-a-a-rgh!!!"

  The voice got cut off. Then another voice cried out,

  "They killed Butch! The bastards!"

  "Who could it be now?! How could this noob have offed Butch?! How is that even possible?"

  "No idea! There's some archer here! A-a-a-a-a-a-rgh!!! Damn!!!"

  "What’s the matter?" "What is it?!" Two voices cried out at once.

  Another voice answered,

  "Lemans has bought it, too!"

  "An archer again?!"

  "That's right! Two arrows! One in his eye, and another in his ear! What a bastard!"

  "Everyone, fall back toward me! Let's keep together! We should control all the approaches!"

  "This swine killed the mage and the healer! We cannot revive them now!"

  Well, now… It seemed as though Ros had unexpectedly run into an ally. Not too shabby an ally, either.

  An intelligent one, too—the player seemed to know what they were doing. Namely, they managed to stay unnoticed, study the disposition, and take out the most important characters—the healer and the mage. They were the only ones capable of casting resurrection spells, which cost a lot of mana. Therefore, these two would invariably head for their respawn points. The only chance they might have would be if one of the remaining players used a resurrection scroll in time, but those are very expensive and hard to come by, so very few players had such scrolls on them. And even the ones that did would normally only take them along on the most important campaigns when the loss of even a single player could mean defeat for the entire party.

  If Ros was right, and there were three opponents still left, he wasn't in that good a position. They had no support and couldn't see the killer, so they were perfectly aware that no one could revive them if an arrow gave them a fatal wound. On the other hand, the easiest classes for an archer to dispatch have been taken care of—the magical ones. Those were notoriously vulnerable to physical attacks. Dispatching the rest would be a little more difficult.

  Also, he had to be certain who was whose ally at that point. The unknown archer didn't introduce him- or herself to Ros, and definitely didn't make any friendly overtures. It might have easily been a completely nihilistic player killer aiming to kill everyone alive in the area. Someone like that could kill a weakling like Ros with a single arrow—the second one wouldn't be needed.

  What conclusions could he make? He should make no noises and try not to move. His only chance was to huddle up in the bushes and see how it all would play out. If he got lucky, they would forget about him, or he might find a way to escape successfully.

  Where was the invisible sniper hiding, anyway?

  Thud! Another player cried out,

  "He got me! It's my legs!

  Over there! That's where the arrow came from! Derek, fire in that direction! Fire at once!"

  "Will you stop shouting? I'm writing a message to Tsouras! He'll send some more boys over at once!"

  That didn't sound good. These five players (or maybe there were more of them) seemed to have company. They may have been the patrol group of a strong party keeping track of all the approach to the disposition of the main force, or a bunch of scouts. Therefore, there were other players nearby, and there was probably a lot more of them. The mysterious archer was just a single person, no matter how skilled. It was unlikely there would be two or three masters of disguise of this level around. Therefore, the archer wouldn't be able to take on a large group.

  Unless they were one of those legendary Asian players, that is. The popular opinion was that they never ate or slept, and had been leveling up since the very launch of the project. Their levels were so high they should soon be capable of competing with top ranking guards from the Imperial army.

  But what would such a high-level player do in a backwater like this?

  "Guys! Does anyone have any salve for fractures? I could really do with some! My legs can barely function!"

  "Why don't you shut up?! You'll let them know where we are!"

  Thud!

  "A-a-a-a-a-a-rgh!!!"

  "That's what you get for shouting, you moron! Now you don't need any salve at all!"

  Ros hid behind the bushes, pretending to be a pile of yesteryear's leaves or something even less appetizing, but he kept an eye out to observe the environs all the same. The rain had stopped—there were just the droplets falling from the leaves, so nothing was getting in the way of the rrokh's night vision.

  It turned out to be a really useful skill. And it had seemed perfectly useless to him initially. He was some noob for sure, failing to realize just how lucky he was.

  It wasn't that he had gone that far since then, though.

  And what was that sound?! Did a branch crack under someone's foot? Or did he just imagine it?

  Oh no, he didn't. A branch moved, sending forth a spray of water droplets. A hand emerged, only to disappear and reappear in another opening in the bushes. The owner of the limb came out in all his glory shortly afterwards—a tall thin man with incongruous triangular ears and a pointed hood. He had a fancy-looking bow in his hand with an arrow drawn, with tiny multicolor sparks falling in every direction.

  He obviously belonged to one of the Elvish races (and there were lots of those). Most of them favored bows. Could he be the invisible archer? If Ros was right, the pointy-eared players weren't all that adept at dis
guising themselves. Also, he would never have spotted someone that good—he'd have been spotted first, and much earlier. This one didn't even through a casual glance at the hiding noob—as though completely unaware of his presence.

  Another player appeared behind the archer—in a chain mail shirt and a full helmet, with a shield and a battle hammer. Such characters tend to be noisy, and would never be a natural choice for a fighter who preferred to stay unseen. Therefore, Ros was seeing the remnants of the very group that got him hiding at the edge of the charred woodland. They all looked worried and hurried, and kept looking about them. There were lots of noises in the forest after the rain—there were drops falling from the leaves, and the branches that had soaked up water would fall with a loud crack every now and then. Both players would startle in a most comical manner each time they would hear such a sound.

  Their names were displayed in reddish lettering. They may not have been the worst kind of killers, but they must have killed someone who could not provide resistance relatively recently.

  And these guys looked pretty scared… Well, they deserved it. They wanted to shoot themselves a noob without too much trouble, but things have turned out differently.

  Thud! The warrior fell down with an unpleasant hoarse sound; his neck was pierced by an arrow that must have come from somewhere behind him. The wound to such a vulnerable place must have caused a brief shock. This state may last for a second, or three, or even ten—no one can tell for sure, but the victim will be utterly helpless all this time.

  Or it might have been something else. The arrow could have been enchanted with a stun spell. The result was the same, at any rate.

  Had the warrior remained standing, he could have turned around and used his shield. Those players were hardly the most pleasant kind of an opponent for an archer, and both classes could get on each other's nerves—one had excellent protection, but could not deal any damage from a distance, while the other could, but their protection sucked. Archers were similar to mages in this respect. The only way in which they were superior was their high Agility, which meant a higher chance of dodging an attack.

  Thud! Thud! The warrior didn't so much as cry out. He fell down with two arrows in his back, and another in his neck. He looked like a porcupine with most of its quills plucked out now. He'd either be dead or in so deep a shock that it would take him a long time to recover.

  High-level archers who knew what they were doing could be regarded as pure evil.

  The elf took a potshot, and then started running without paying any attention to the road, just like Ros did recently. He chose a direction that was most unfortunate for Ros. It was obvious that he would run anywhere his feet would take him to escape deadly arrows from the dark, but it was extremely annoying that he chose the very direction where Ros had been hiding.

  In real world, he could have passed within two feet of Ros and fail to notice him in the darkness and the bushes. However, the game had laws of its own, and there was a range at which a player would discover you, no matter how good your disguise. It depended on one's Disguise and Perception skills, as well as class and race bonuses, and, to a lesser extent, a couple of other stats; the range itself could vary from a few dozen feet to mere inches.

  In Ros's case, those few inches weren't an option. He was a pathetic noob in comparison to a player of that level. The elf would doubtlessly grab his bow as soon as he'd find out there was someone in the way, and, at such a distance, it would be stupid to hope for him to miss.

  A single arrow would do for a noobster.

  He couldn't run away, but he couldn't stay, either. What options did that leave him? To fight? That would be ridiculous. Given the difference in their levels, only Ros's Chaos skills would reach the opponent, and those wouldn't do much damage. The Chaos School was great as far as debuffs were concerned, since the most important thing about those was the likelihood that a given spell will work. However, in terms of actual damage, even high-level skills were inferior to those of any other school of magic. However, other spells would most likely get dispelled or hit the opponent for a single token point, so it made no sense to use any of them in this situation.

  Debuffs had a whole range of interesting features he could rely on right now, though—namely, control skills. Those had little to do with damage—their main function was to make the opponent unable to attack. Or, at the very least, to make them immobile and thus incapable of running toward you. There were even specialist mages and warriors whose function was to keep the target motionless so that it wouldn't enter combat. Such players hardly dealt any damage by themselves—they merely helped others to win with impunity.

  Ros wasn't one of those. His main control skill was Sleep. It could be used to turn a player into a living statue of sorts—they could see and hear everything without being able to move so much as a finger. Once he dealt any damage to the opponent at all, the effect would be dispelled. Alternatively, it would wear off once the time specified by the game's mechanics would elapse.

  Unfortunately, Sleep, too, may fail to work. Ros often had it happen to him when he fought high-level monsters. It was all a matter of luck.

  Still, he was lucky, and his actual Luck stat was so high that not even the beefed-up Asian superman players had anything on him.

  What would be the point of casting a spell that would only hold his opponent immobile for a couple of measly seconds? The cooldown time for it was long, and he wouldn't get a chance to use it again. The effect would wear off, and the elf would dispatch the impertinent noob furiously. He wouldn't manage to run away in such a short time, and there was no shelter anywhere. The edge of this wood was one of the worst places to hide.

  On the other hand, the invisible archer hiding in the thicket would get an excellent chance to get the last high-level target without sweating much. They might be grateful enough to Ros for this gesture of goodwill to forgo wasting him along with the others.

  It gave him a glimmer of a chance to survive a rather sticky situation.

  Ros waved the short staff that he had crafted himself with the aid of the recently-received Transmogrification Cube—a miraculous artifact that had once belonged to the Craftsmen’s Guild Master from the Locked Lands. He made a number of attempts, some more successful than others, but this staff was his favorite, and it gave an extra chance of casting a successful spell or dealing magical damage. It was really useful if the target had a high resistance to your spells, which is usually the case when the level gap is too great. There was less of a chance to miss.

  The elf froze, as though thunderstruck. Now he could see Ros perfectly well, but there was nothing he could do anymore. The spell worked, and the target wasn't merely immobilized—it could not take any actions whatsoever.

  Ros just hoped no heavy branch would fall on his opponent's head. A single point of damage, and the bastard would unfreeze.

  So, what would happen next? Where was the invisible master archer? His favorite dish was served, and could be had at any moment.

  A second. Two seconds. Three. Nothing was happening.

  Thud!

  "A-a-a-a-a-a-rgh!" The elf gave a shrill cry as his right hand got nailed to the nearest tree.

  He made a desperate effort to free himself, but it wasn't enough, so he stayed a still target right where he had stood.

  Ros looked the archer in his eyes, half-mad with pain and fear, and chuckled sarcastically. Then he said, copying his earlier mocking intonation,

  "You should never try to dodge an archer, or you'll be real tired by the time you're killed!"

  The second arrow that came from the woods nailed the elf's head to the tree. So much for him.

  Ros sighed, turned around very slowly, and peered into the darkness. Even his vision didn't allow him to see much in the murk under the canopy. Everything was covered in a mist after the rain, and soggy pieces of rotten wood glowed here and there like the blue eyes of monsters. He couldn't make out the invisible archer, but he knew he or she was out there. T
hey might already have strung their bow, thinking of whether to hit him in the right eye or the left.

  The invisible archer was a crack shot without a doubt.

  One of the rotten wood lights flickered; then another; then, a third. Someone was walking through the forest, and the faint illumination provided by the phosphorescence got obscured for a moment every now and then.

  And this someone was approaching Ros.

  The shadows under the sprawling canopy got darker, and something changed in the way they fit together. At that very moment, the edge of a bright moon appeared from a gap in the clouds, as if doing so on request, and the moonlight illuminated a small silhouette of a woman holding a short bow in her left hand. She still looked like a blob of darkness come alive, even in moonlight. Only the incongruous lettering over her head testified to the fact that she was a player just like Ros.

  A few more steps, and he could finally see the archer in detail. The girl was petite, with short-cropped dark hair, and clad in a baggy black outfit. There wasn't so much as a hint of any armor. Her face looked detached, and she had a thousand-yard stare one would hardly expect from someone who had just dispatched five high-level opponents at a canter.