by Arthur Stone
A green item! Just one tier below legendary! And if one gathered all six items from the set, that would net some sweet auxiliary properties. A perusal of the forum showed no such items were available for sale, but a search yielded a few mentions of them. Items from this set may have been dropped or found, but must have ended up in the vaults of top clans, bypassing the market.
Ros never did learn how much he could sell such boots for, but he was sure it would be a considerable sum.
It would do him good to discover around a dozen new dungeons and find some trophies with substantial bonuses to stats—that would probably net him at least a million. It wouldn’t solve all his problems, to be sure, but it would do as seed capital for further advancement.
Ros also found a teleportation scroll inside the cache. Inasmuch as he understood, he could use it to travel instantly to any place he’d already visited. That might come in handy—should he need to reach the city quickly, he wouldn’t have to walk.
He decided to start with the top level of the dungeon. That was where the cheapest resources could be found: high-quality amethysts, and frequent tin ore veins with an extra chance of getting two lumps of ore or an unexpected resource.
Speaking of unexpected resources, he came across the very first one less than an hour into mining, and the second in the early afternoon: a lump of high-quality silver ore and a flawed emerald, respectively. Nothing of the sort had ever happened before—the Chaos dungeon turned out to be more bountiful than the best of the mines. His unnaturally high Luck, as well as some other beefed-up stats, should make rare events more likely going forward.
There were no amethysts on the second level—citrines of lemon yellow replaced them, requiring Mining & Quarrying level 5 or higher. His level ten presented no problems, and his harvesting speed did not fall by much, which was not surprising, considering his Strength and Attack.
He finished the level the next day, after a night’s rest, finding a secret cache underneath a mine cart with a couple of interesting items for low-level players.
The dungeon was done by the evening of the third day, earlier than expected (he had assumed it would take a week). The seventh and final level proved to be the hardest. His Mining & Quarrying had grown to thirteen by then, but the aquamarines present on the level had the minimum level requirement of sixteen. Even with his Luck, he would often find nothing, and he only got an unexpected resource once—a lump of auritium ore, which was his first.
That was it—nothing else to do here.
* * *
Ros spent a whole day on the seventh level, reading the game forum—primarily the topics about his good self.
Over the days that had passed since the demise of the viceroy, eight strong clans joined the fray battling for the mine, previously considered worthless and of interest to no one. The only party with a direct interest in the proceedings that nonetheless took no part in the conflict was the Swords. The former owner had apparently decided to suck it up and keep mum, as though they never existed.
That much was no mystery—when elephants fight, the grass under their feet is expected to suffer in silence.
A particularly powerful tectonic spell had been used carelessly during the skirmish, causing numerous rockfalls that buried a large number of fighters underneath piles of rubble. They managed to respawn outside later; however, all the equipped items they had lost remained buried. Considering their value, the goal of the fighting was now to retain control over the area until the rubble was cleared up.
As far as Ros could see, the search yielded nothing, despite hundreds of players with high levels of Perception and equipment boosting the same stat participating. Everyone agreed that the noob they’d been looking for must have left the mine long ago, which was why no trace of him was ever found.
And yet, the search parties would not give up. Ros was particularly alarmed by the outraged story of one of the noobs who’d come to Arbenne intending to sign a lucrative contract for a month, but could barely walk five paces without bumping into high-level players from various guilds demanding that he join their party—in the mode that revealed his full stats. He wouldn’t be left alone until he agreed, and they threatened to blacklist him if he declined. The last thing a simple worker wanted was the reputation of a troublemaker, especially since it was virtually impossible to prove you were simply a victim of bullying and didn’t steal ore from any mine. Serious employers always checked the forums for names, and if they found a thread where a given player was accused of having cheated someone at some point, they didn’t waste their time investigating the matter and simply disqualified the applicant.
Ros realized someone must suspect something about his new abilities—someone who knew more than others. For instance, though the name of his race wasn’t mentioned in any of the threads, there were a bunch of posts by various players “casually” wondering about the rrokh race, its characteristics and whether anyone had ever seen any of its representatives. It was in the official database, after all, and there was even an illustration of a male rrokh, but no one had actually seen any of them in the game, and no player was able to select this race even with a full account.
There were a few replies, some of them rather noteworthy. Many had tried to select the race for its uniqueness, and those players claimed that the rrokhs had some very “yummy” bonuses.
Unfortunately, no one had managed to try them out. The instant they’d start playing, they would receive a system message about an error in the description of the racial abilities, and offering to replace said valuable abilities with something totally useless, or a free character swap with compensation—an expanded bag instead of the beginner’s variety, a set of noob elixirs, noob weapons or equipment.
Everyone opted for a new character.
But Ros had received no such offers. And his racial abilities worked perfectly well—the ones he could test, at least.
Why was he the exception?
Could the system have thought that with such skewed distribution of stats he would choose a new character of his own free will, without coercion? Then why would it keep offering rrokh to players as a viable option?
It was a mystery.
* * *
Ros saw the thread accidentally. It wasn’t particularly popular—it was the rather flamboyant topic that caught his eye:
“THE ACCURSED SUPERNOOB IS CALLING UPON THE GREAT EMPEROR OF NOOBS!!!”
Ros still remembered his first day: Arbenne, his introduction to the game world, his newcomer’s bewilderment, the bitter realization of his mistake, and the strange freak—a beta-tester with an illegible digit-only nickname, forgotten by the developers.
Ros hadn’t forgotten what Digits said about the inevitability of him cursing his new acquaintance.
The post was short:
“Your deeds have left me flabbergasted! Verily, you are the emperor of noobs! May heavens bless our great ruler! You haven’t forgotten the unequal duel between the mage and the silly buffer, have you? I think you remember. Stay away from there. We’re short of frogs as it is, and we don’t need you. Good luck. Oh, one last thing: stop cursing me already.”
There were a few replies that weren’t worth reading—primarily to the effect of everyone being sick of noobs flooding the forum with incomprehensible inanities.
Ros would have thought the same thing if the topic didn’t address him directly.
Digits remembered his name. He must have seen it at the forum, or in the red worldwide system messages—or, most likely, he was questioned about Ros repeatedly by various search parties that had found out it was none else but him who had brought the strange noob to the Sword Power recruitment office. That seemed the most plausible scenario.
So, Digits may have told them all he knew, but he also tried to warn Ros. He wondered how the man had accessed the forum—his severely limited account was unlikely to have that option, so he must have done it offline, which was no easy feat for a quadriplegic.
He wished he co
uld thank him. Ros couldn’t risk registering at the forum, not even under his new name, and anonymous messages weren’t an option. He also didn’t want to reveal his data to everyone.
Ros had never cursed Digits once, despite what the latter may have thought, but he wouldn’t be too hasty about trusting him, either. The whole situation didn’t particularly inspire trust. Although he didn’t intend to forget him, having been moved by the sad story of the helpless beta tester, and he intuitively felt Digits was a good person, regardless of his oddities.
That aside, the situation he was in really stank.
Even before Digits’ warnings, Ros had already realized he had absolutely nothing to do in Arbenne. Any player joining his party would see his stats boosted by his heroic feats, which would lead to unnecessary questions. And anyone who gave him a closer look would come up with more questions still.
Someone who was dangerously clever or in possession of too much information believed Ros had changed, or could change, everything about himself, including his appearance, race, and name. But no one could control the whole region completely. It was also very likely that the noob they were looking for could have left via a city teleport—those didn’t require the knowledge of a bind point, connecting nearby cities and making it possible to only reach nearby stationary portals. Some of the posts voiced cautious assumptions that the character could have been deleted or locked in a dungeon, seeing as he couldn’t be located by any methods. The same posts contained musings that he would be a far cry from a level zero player by now. Indeed, his many heroic deeds must have resulted in the removal of all his locks, so his level would be around twenty or thirty by now—that was the likely reward—or perhaps even higher. Thus, everyone should be searching for a player with a level between twenty and one hundred instead of a total noob.
Ros could only shake his head at the alarming accuracy of such theories, having guessed nearly everything right. It looked like a deliberate or accidental leak from some parties that excelled at counting. The former was more likely, since the presentation was neat and intelligent. He wondered if the purpose was to confuse him, or to warn him so that he wouldn’t get caught.
That was something Ros couldn’t understand yet.
His supply of meat wouldn’t last him more than two more days. He would need to leave the dungeon tomorrow, or face starvation.
Chapter 31
In the morning, Ros perused the forum, as was becoming a habit, and found that the general interest in his identity seemed to be waning. The most popular topics were along the lines of “The Russians are coming!” Someone suddenly remembered that whenever a player from one of the Western sectors made a famous achievement, gamers from the easternmost Slavic parts would raid the territory where the achievement had been registered in strength and slaughter everyone, preferably leaving nothing behind but tears and charred ruins. Said players felt particularly motivated if the perpetrator resided in the North American sector. There was even a special catchphrase for such occasions—“Mochi pindosov,” which translated roughly as “Squash the Yanks.”
There were many replies in such threads, replete with expletives along with observations a la “Russians are wackos, what else would you expect of them?” Everyone concurred that the formerly sleepy province of Rallia would soon become the center of frenetic activity, dwarfing the deeds of the mysterious noob glorified in red lettering.
Some well-informed and subtle troll had put forth a theory that this time the Russians would act in league with the Chinese—after all, there must have been a reason why the former never reacted to the recent heroic deed of the Oriental player who leveled up to three hundred. The author of the topic assured the public that he was initiated in the mysteries of the Russian language, and had found a phrase that could be open to a most menacing interpretation at the forum of the Eastern European cluster: “Russians and Chinese—brothers forever.”[10]
Overall, the subject of Russians and their behavior online was quite complex and nuanced. If there was a Russian community on a gaming server, it often gained game-wide notoriety. Non-Russian game projects usually had a mixed or an outright negative attitude to such players—though this was not an exclusive prerogative of the Russians—so there was always plenty of “fodder” for trolls specializing on this topic.
That surely had far-reaching implications.
There were more insults and profanity in this thread than in any of the others. The hypothetical alliance between the Russian and the Chinese made many participants of the discussion extremely agitated, calling people noobs left and right, and recollecting that the “Orientals” had lots of high-level characters, while in Russia there were many oligarchs ready to buy legendary and set items for any price, who must have amassed them in such numbers that they could outfit a military force to make the Red Army seem like a unit of boy scouts. Therefore, it was best to avoid Rallia altogether, unless you enjoyed watching yourself respawn in your long johns time and again.
Ros found the news encouraging. If his fellow countryfolk decided to start a war here, the hype around the heroic noob should subside, as well as the diligence of the searchers.
The more unrelated noise, the better for him.
His appearance was different, his username was different, and his race looked completely different—there was nothing about him to resemble the unseemly worker he had once been.
There was just one thing that remained—his level. Eighty-nine. That met the search criteria range defined by unknown smart alecks.
The map in his memory was rather modest—there was nothing left but notebook drawings. His wanderings through the city and the mine did not get reflected at all—apparently, while his Cartography level was zero, no records were made.
However, there were maps on the forum. Even though he couldn’t load them into his memory, it was possible to get a general impression of the area nonetheless.
Which Ros did.
Rallia was considered an exceptionally boring place for good reason. There were virtually no locations of any interest, and the only hubs of activity were ubiquitous mines with low-level resources. A land of miners, quiet and uneventful.
Players with expanded accounts would normally have nothing to do here. No generous bosses that could be farmed by whole clans were ever encountered here; mobs were few, and their levels were low. Rallia was also located on the border of the Locked Lands, which, as the name suggested, could not be accessed. It was more or less the edge of the world—even getting here via teleportation was costly. And why would anyone want to, anyway? To behold swarms of miners gathering in search of employment every Friday?
It would take Ros around three or four days of walking across forests and hills to get away. Even if he kept his level from being displayed to the public, high-level players with non-zero Perception would realize something was weird about him at first sight. And they’d be able to see other things besides his level.
They wouldn’t even have to invite him to join their party. Moreover, even a player bearing no relation to the search might be surprised enough at the encounter to remember it.
Ros might be paranoid, but he decided to be consistent in his paranoia.
* * *
There was no welcoming committee at the cave entrance, so the voice of paranoia urging Ros to keep hiding in the thylbit camp until he’d expire of hunger had been wrong. He made his way through the cleft and cautiously peeked into the cave, finding nothing suspicious there, either. No rockfalls left after battles, and no signs of anyone’s presence in general. Either no one had ever made it here, or they had been really careful about it.
Ros hoped for the former. It took him no less than three days to get away after Greedie got killed. He must have covered around thirty miles at least, as the crow flies, which meant he was a long way away from the mine. There were also dozens of large side tunnels en route—a lot of them much bigger than the cave with the river. These mountains had more holes in them than a wheel of old chee
se. The pursuit had plenty of space to wander about, and they may never have reached the waterfall in the first place. Also, the parts where the river narrowed could not be crossed without fighting packs of omruses. Ros had dispatched them, but it had been a while since then, and a new generation may have replaced the ones that he had killed. The pursuit may have run into them and reasonably decided that a noob would find it hard to pass through, and that going any farther in that direction would be futile.
He sincerely hoped he was right. Especially given that the main version of his escape on the forum was that he had given the slip to the unwatchful guards and reached Arbenne on foot subsequently. When the fight for the mine was just brewing up, no one had thought of blocking that route. There even seemed to be eyewitnesses claiming they saw a noob fitting the description near the stationary city teleport.
Ros raised a mental thanks to these “eyewitnesses” as he crawled up the rocks to reach a prominent crag looming high above the path he had noticed earlier. Upon getting there, he squared his shoulders, peering at the distant horizon where the dark green of the forest canopy merged with the cerulean blue sky.
It was incredibly beautiful.
He stuck a heavy halberd he’d taken along into a crack in the rock, looked at the pole, and said:
“I want to make this place my new bind spot.”
A system message popped up:
“Are you sure you want to make this place your new bind spot?”
“Yes.”
“Your current bind spot: Rallia Province, Devil’s Fingers Ridge, eastern slope of Mount Aqueton. Current owner: none. Attention: this is a dangerous zone. There is high likelihood of aggressive actions from monsters and players. It is not recommended to place your bind spots in dangerous zones. Attention! Wilderness! You cannot create long-term bind spots in the wilderness. You will no longer be bound to this spot after twenty-four hours.”
