Unbound Deathlord_Obliteration
Page 6
"Funny that, I also remember your girlfriend running from me, saying I was too big and she was used to tiny little things. It does feel like a recurring problem."
They looked at each other with fury in their faces... Then smiled and high-fived. Yep, they actually high-fived. In this day and age. In front of everyone. I tried not to look.
"Melkier, right?" I said quickly, before they could, I don't know, hang loose each other. I mean, Daggers was a girl, she shouldn't be forced to see certain things.
"That's me," he said. "We were talking about my money?"
"We'll get to that. I'm just wondering: how the hell did you manage to gather thirty people and save me? Bear told me you guys were all over the West Underworld."
"That was the plan: just adventure a little in Valia until you could pay us. But some of the guys, and I'm not confirming nor denying being one of them, felt that it would be better to be close to you, just in case you decided to run away with our money."
Fair enough. "Alright. Let's get to the meeting point before the White Tree comes back."
"What about my money?" Melkier asked again.
I was getting a little annoyed but the guy had just saved me and I decided to let him live for now. I'm not confirming nor denying that the thirty people he had with him had affected my decision.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'll definitely make it up to you. If I don't... Well, then there will be fifty of you and one of me." I exaggerated and winked at him.
We all started to walk but Bear and Melkier didn't stop chatting for a single second.
I eventually got tired of their voices — they refused to get in a party and use mind chat to talk — and after exchanging phone numbers with Daggers, Bear and Melkier, I put my character on auto-follow and logged off.
Like I had just told Melkier, he would be able to kill me at any time even with me online, so I wasn't overly worried about dying while offline. On the contrary, this show of 'trust' could help my relations with him and the other zombies.
Show of trust or not, I didn't even think about re-equipping my legendary items before leaving.
* * *
Back in the real world, I took a shower, ate something, smoked a cigarette, checked the news, and made sure my backup plan was still up.
After that I opened some Valia forums and began to learn everything I could about the skills in the game.
As it turned out, Garcia had probably paid someone to cast the high-tier Mass Invisibility spell on his group. At this stage of the game, paying for it would have been prohibitively expensive. If the White Tree clan could afford to do that, the Slums must have been way more lucrative than I had imagined.
The spell was made to allow multiple people to become invisible, so it explained how so many of them had appeared out of nowhere. Being a high-tier spell, it was powerful, so even my relatively high perception attribute, which could pierce through Daggers invisibility, hadn't been able to detect a thing. If it was really that spell which had been used, it also explained why I hadn't been instantly disintegrated by their mages: while invisible, they couldn't have any active morbs.
Although my immediate question had been answered, I didn't stop there and kept learning as much as I could.
A few hours later, Bear called me and I logged back in.
* * *
We were close to the corridor that was the meeting point. 'Close', not 'inside', being the key factor: it seemed the zombies had seen through my defensive plans and weren't keen on making things easier for me in case they needed to attack.
"Your people took their time," I told Melkier as I looked at the fifty zombies I had to pay. "Weren't you supposed to be nearby?"
"Some of my people have jobs or school to attend to," he explained. "Not everyone is as useless as you and can travel to Valia at any time of the day."
That was true, but I didn't have to like having truths thrown in my face. "You're a real ray of sunshine, aren't you?"
"Your mother sees stars with me every night and the sun is-" Melkier stopped talking mid-sentence and looked at Bear in a furtive way. Then, he faked a cough. "So, are we getting paid or what?"
Bear talked to him in my stead, huh? Good to know the big guy has my back. No, wait. No one has my back, and absolutely not 'the big guy.' I'm just grateful.
I focused on the business at hand. "Why did you insist that I had to pay everyone separately? I could have just given you the money."
Melkier smiled slightly. "That would work if all members of my clan trusted each other with our money. We don't. It's way too common for debts to never be payed between us."
That made me smile. "Don't you feel ashamed of it?"
He shrugged. "Don't tell me you never permanently 'forgot' to pay back the money a friend lent you. That's the way of life, dude."
Money had never been a problem for me, but that had happened more than once in my old gang, nevertheless. "Alright. Is this all of you?"
"All members of the Zombies 4 Life clan, yes."
I cringed at their clan name, but whatever. As I took a small bag of money from my enchanted purse, silence suddenly fell over all the zombies and they looked at me in earnest.
"Form a line, people. And don't even think about killing me; if the killing starts, do you really think your pals will just watch as you keep their money?"
They probably would, but it never hurts to sow dissent.
Great, now I'm thinking like mother.
Thinking of her made me remember her burnt corpse, which in turn made me remember the blonde woman dying in V-Soft. I shook my head and took four gold coins from inside the little bag.
They took mere seconds to form a line and I started parting with my money. To prevent people from joining the line twice, each time I paid someone I ordered him to go to the side and not come back until the payment was over. Everything went smoothly and I found myself two hundred gold coins poorer.
That wasn't a lot of money for me, who had a Profession which paid a hundred gold coins per month. However, I had learned that the average level twenty player, which was the average level of the zombies — I had asked — would make between fifty silver to a gold coin per day if they hunted hard all day long.
Granted, these zombies had died in the battle and it made them lose some attribute points, but they knew the chance of survival was slim when they agreed to go to the Slums. They weren't even wearing their best equipment to the occasion.
To hire a NPC in the game, the base price was one silver coin per level each day, with expenses like lodging and food included at the payment, and would change depending on multiple factors, from the NPC reliability to his personality.
At the time of the fight in the Slums, the zombies had been around level fifteen. And they had each received four gold coins just for a single fight. It was a great deal for them, especially in the Underworld, where players got less money than on the Surface, and everything was more expensive.
"So," I said while they were commemorating being 'rich,' "some of you helped me while I was in dire straits a few hours ago. To compensate you for that, I will give you all a unique opportunity."
"Opportunity?" Melkier asked with suspicion.
"Yeah!" I said excited. "Have you ever wanted to fight a war? Not a skirmish like the one in the Slums, but a real, large scale, exciting war?" From my interactions with them I could tell they were a bunch of battle hungry weirdos just like Bear, and I played that card.
"Why do you ask?" Melkier's voice was now even more suspicious, but also showed a hint of interest. It seemed that I had used the right bait.
"I'm the General of the Resistance's Army and if you follow me for the next two months, I'll give you a large-scale battle the likes of which you've never seen!"
"Two months? That's an awful lot, mate!" Someone said.
"I can't just follow a dude for two months, I have more interesting stuff to do," said another one.
They weren't thrilled. "Of course," I raised my voice, "I w
ouldn't expect you to do it for free!" That got their attention. "I will give each of you one gold coin per month just for the trouble. And when we do anything together, we'll split the loot in a fair way: whoever does more gets more!"
"We are fifty in total," Melkier said. "No amount of loot will be enough for us when split in so many ways."
I caressed my chin, pretending to think. "You're right. How about this: I'll pay five gold coins monthly to ten people who come with me. To the other ones I'll pay one gold coin and they just need to promise me they will come when the time for war comes. I guarantee that both the ten people who come with me and the other forty who come later will loot to their hearts content in the war."
This was a much better setup for me. Not only would I get their cooperation almost freely later, if the ten who were with me decided to betray me, I would still have a chance at escaping.
The reason I hadn't said it from the beginning was to make it look as if I was giving in to their demands in a negotiation. Not only that, I was even paying forty people for doing nothing, only out of goodwill. How could they be defensive towards me?
Obviously, it was entirely possible that they would simply take the money and not come when the war started — and I would make sure it started after I was done with Ter'nodril, unless I was dead or my plans for the prison failed —, but by then I would have gotten Manhart fifty players for his Army. If they didn't show up, it would be his problem, not mine.
"What the hell is the Resistance's Army?"
"The Resistance is a group of people led by a high-level lich who wants to stop slavery in the Underworld."
"Hey, that's cool!" One of the zombies said.
They talked among themselves and decided that while forty of them magnanimously accepted to be paid for doing nothing, the ten who would come with me wanted more than five gold per month.
Negotiations ensued and we agreed on five gold and at least twenty gold coins in loot per month. If they didn't get that much loot at any given month, they would start receiving ten gold coins from the next month onwards.
Negotiator trait increased to 2 (+1)
Successfully negotiating with Manhart, Bear, Daggers, and fifty other people, proves that you are skilled in the art of negotiation.
» +2 charisma in negotiations
Seeing that message, I thought about how good boosting charisma in a character could be. If I got a charismatic fella in my party and he used the Strategist trait to boost his charisma attribute, negotiations with NPCs would be a piece of cake!
It's a shame the last one I got, Eternal, had been lying through his teeth every second we stayed together, using his charisma based skills to manipulate me.
I sent them the invites and told them that being part of the Resistance's Army also had a hidden advantage: if they ever found Manhart, the leader of the Resistance, they could get exclusive Resistance-members-only quests from him.
"The recruitment window says you can lie to us," Melkier said. I remembered the message in my Profession window and understood why Daggers had taken her time before accepting my invitation.
"I swear by Logan that I did not lie to you regarding your association with the Resistance's Army," I said.
Divine Vow Made
You have made a vow in the name of Logan, the God of Blood.
If you break it, anyone can call Logan's judgment upon you.
"What?" Melkier and the others were confused. They obviously hadn't witnessed a Divine Vow before.
"Just check it out in the information boards back in our world and you'll understand."
Some of the main things I had researched about Valia after my talk with Manhart were Divine Vows and truthseers oaths. While their mechanics were different — truthseers couldn't lie if they swore something was true, while Divine Vows required someone to call you on your bluff — both were similar in what was considered the 'truth.'
If you didn't directly lie, you could hide things and say half-truths all day long. I had no option but to use a Divine Vow to try to show my sincerity. How well the Zombies 4 Life clan would accept my words depended on how much they wanted the extra money I was willing to give them.
Of course, I was also very interested in seeing what would happen if one of them wrongly called Logan's judgement upon me.
They kept silent for a long time and I guessed they were discussing the offer in their mind chat.
That was a weird system. I wondered why V-Soft would do things that way. Maybe they were thinking about how the NPCs in Valia would go about in wars? It certainly resembled a chain of command structure.
No matter how much I searched about Valia in the internet, there was still a lot to learn. That reminded me:
I said.
We traded a few more pleasantries before he accepted relaying questions from me to his Destiny Spirit. It confirmed everything Zenhit had told me.
"Okay," Melkier said a good twenty minutes later. "We accept."
They made a new line and I paid them again, concluding the recruitment process. Ninety gold changed hands and I found myself with only ten gold and a few silver coins in the purse.
I hired the ten who were coming with me as Lieutenants and the other forty as Privates. The rank gap was there because I already had plans of promoting some of the Privates to Sergeants when the time came.
The ten who would come with me asked that Melkier, who was also one of them, be promoted to Captain. I accepted, but didn't give him any more of my remaining ten gold coins.
Just like that, in less than half an hour. Easy come, easy go, as they say.
We all decided to log out for lunch and come back in one hour. I told them to think about the ambush we suffered and the mistakes we had made so we could discuss it when we came back.
From my experience with Valia and the Underworld, I was a hundred and ten percent sure that I would end up having to fight Robert, who Manhart had told me not to fight because he was too powerful. I needed everyone to be at the top of their game for that, hence the orders about thinking on what they did wrong.
* * *
Daggers began the debriefing as the thirteen of us walked to Margs Market.
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The other nine zombies voiced their agreements inside my head. I had asked Melkier to link our chats together so we could all improve our tactics.