Chapter 2: Real World: Part 2
The real world wasn't worth my time. It was time to enter the world that was worth it. The best part about those damn drinks was that I never had to prepare food, or eat three times per day. More time could be spent playing. I slid into the Virtual Reality Interface. The bit of machinery that changed my life for the better in the best way possible. Even the routine shutting off of the power or internet that the landlord did every month to remind mom to pay the bills had stopped, apparently it was illegal to force a shutdown of the console so he needed to give mom two weeks notice. It was set up like a bed, so I didn't wake up with random aches. I grabbed one of my sleep stimulants and injected it into my thigh before I powered up the VRI. I slipped my head into the middle of the set, which was just three heavy spokes. "Welcome player; Voidslayer58008" At least her voice was soft.
"War World Online." I gave it a second for the system to locate the server data. "Enter!" a tiny prick at the base of my neck and the boring closet was gone. Replaced with a world of white fog. I didn't wait for the omnipresent voice to tell me my options. "New Game." The white fog was suddenly occupied. I was looking at a muscular man in armor. "Race Dark Elf." The flesh changed to pitch black. The muscles became leaner and he shrunk a good two feet. Being tall in real life may be good, but it just made you a bigger target in game. "Four feet tall. Greater muscular definition. Ff0000 tattooed three-claw scar bisecting forehead, left eye, left cheek from hairline to jaw. Long mohawk, color ff0000. Remove facial hair. Add two black dual-loop earrings in lobe of right ear. Single black loop in scapha of right ear. Eye color ff0000. Skin color 000000." Some people liked going through the colors with words, but crimson wasn't the same color as ff0000. And black had so many meanings, 000000 was just a simple way of making it as dark as it could go. I spun around the short dark little punk elf as I made sure I hadn't missed anything. "Shift scar bisect point to mouth. Rotate to 10 degrees. Deepen scar. Deepen scar." Now the first claw scar warped my nose and split my lips so my canines were always showing without going so deep that it destroyed the eye. I liked my crimson eyes to stay crimson. I didn't bother with all of the fine face alterations that some liked, I just used the base face. It was somewhere between my own and the racial default, so it actually looked like a fantasy version of my brother, if I had one. And if he was cool. I'd tried every race and sub-race the game had to offer. This one was my favorite. "Finish."
My perspective changed to that of the Dark Elf I'd just created. I dropped through the mist until I landed on a cushion of more cloud. "Do you walk the path of righteousness and self-sacrifice or blood-lust and greed?" The mist cleared to show me in the middle of a circle of class archetypes. Thirty six options, divided into six groups of six, all showed wearing their level sixty common gear. I turned on my heel, looking for the Assassin. They were arranged so the dark ones were on one side and the light ones were on the other. There were three sets of six dark classes. The morality didn't really change, these classes just had less lawful skills and they could be forgotten by the police of a city. Good guys committing crimes made waves and took forever to be forgotten. There was a morality side to the fame system as well, and you could only get some of the higher profile guard jobs if you were a good guy and everybody knew it. That wasn't limited to the good classes, though. You also needed a really evil reputation to get the best black market jobs. On top of the fact that bad deeds were only reported if someone saw it. Raising your reputation may be more difficult as a dark class, but lowering your reputation was also more difficult as a light class.
Assassin was part of the arcane dark sect of classes. There he was, standing right between the Warlord and the Shadow. They were all wearing the same level armor, but it looked different based on class. That was the only bone players had to pick with the developers that I could really understand. They liked having armor drops of different types and I wanted to look like a wizard as a warrior if that's how my enchants were set up. The developers did have different armor sets, it was just the rarity that changed the look instead of the name. It still had different stats depending on who it dropped for. You could also have a blacksmith reroll it and the stats would change to suit your class for an extremely high price. Personally, I could see both positives and negatives to the system.
Where the Warlord was covered in spiked plate-mail the Assassin was wearing leather with a facemask. On his other side was the Shadow, wearing tattered shadows that moved like they were alive on top of the ragged leather that kept his outfit from being too revealing. The Warlord was obvious and attention grabbing, whereas the Assassin and Rogue were both kind of subtle with their leather. Their look matched the class fantasy. The Shadow was pretty awesome, now that I was looking at him without knowing I couldn't choose him. I always found myself looking at him, regardless, but this time it was a real temptation. It was rare to see one of them walking around. They could stealth forever, so most Shadows just left it on, like a buff instead of a skill. I approached the Assassin anyway. "Will you walk the darkness with the silence of death? Will you kill without regard for prestige or recognition? Take my hand." The Assassin lifted his hand. I took it. The white fog enveloped me and I dropped again.
This was the part where I decided where to fall. The clouds below me cleared up and I saw a map. It could have been any continent in the world, the detail was so awesome. There were three mountain ranges, and one lone peak at the very center of the continent. It was all surrounded by an ocean.
"The orc tribes cover the southern part of the world. The fae fill the forests on the orc territory. The goblins control the orc land below the surface." This was the best part, now I could truly understand the political power of the game. "The humans control the north. The elves inhabit every forest. The dwarves have dug under the entire human empire. Two dimensional gates exist. One is at the top of the central mountain, called the Pinnacle. It leads to the Heavenly realm, where angels and other fearsome monsters roam. The other gate is in the deepest hole the dwarves ever dug. The Pit leads to the realm of Hell, where demons spew forth like the spawn they are. Both angels and demons have built a fortress around the entrance to their realm. You, being a Dark Elf, are only freely welcomed into a single city; Zezhria. Your kind travel the world, and have some citizens in every city, but only in Zezhria are you a welcome visitor." Of course. The anti races only got one city. Each race was filled with npcs that tended toward good or evil, the Dark Elves were the criminals of the elf world. Finding a High Elf bandit was truly rare while almost every Dark Elf that left home had a bounty on them somewhere. A lot of their racial quests involved doing criminal work of one sort or another. Assassinations were among my favorite bounties. Killing an adult always got you a huge bounty on your head as well as pictures of you scattered across the city so guards and players would recognize you. I knew the map better than a new character should. I knew that the elves had seven major cities. All of them were inside a forest, and the tone of the city was apparent throughout the surrounding forest. Dark Elves made a horrific forest. The capital, Allstaria, was surrounded by a beautiful forest full of gentle creatures and extremely protective predators. A high elf could walk through the whole forest and not get attacked. But, then again, a Dark Elf could walk through the twisted forests surrounding Zezhria without being bothered as well. It was one of the reasons I liked Dark Elves so much. Their forest was one of the most dangerous places in the game, being able to go through it freely was awesome. "Your game begins in Zezhria, at the center of the Darkwood."
I whooped as I dropped through the fog again. This time, I was going faster. I loved this entrance scene. I dropped like a rock until the cloud cover dissipated.
Screw the tutorial back-story bullshit. I dropped through the air, coated in flames like I was dropping through the atmosphere. "Born of fire, conquer those that dwell in darkness and light with equal fervor." That line was the same whether you were a good guy or a bad one. I laughed as my fireball smashed into the ground, leaving a small crater. Apparently, I was the only new character today. Tomorrow, it would rain fireballs like the apocalypse as millions of players started their new characters in Zezhria. "The world is yours for the taking." Thank you. I would take it.
I walked calmly through the forest, watching as beasts passed me. I didn't have the level to see how powerful they were, but I knew. There a panther was sleeping on a tree. It was actually a demonic cat, but the horns and wings didn't come out unless you woke it up. If it was one of the more powerful ones. Simple panthers were deadly enough, but when you stumbled across a demonic one…that was absolutely lethal. Either would rip a level forty five tank to shreds without chipping its claws. My first tank had been an orc, I'd been slaughtered trying to get to this city at level fifty eight. It was then that I realized that some of the creatures were the level they'd be in the full game. And some cities were meant to be impossible to conquer, the entire reason that a race that was universally despised managed to continue to exist. Maybe a huge army of level two fifty characters could lead an army strong enough to take down Zezhria, but not for a very long time.
Finally clearing the twisted black trees and oppressive mist, the black walls of Zezhria rose ahead of me. It was a gorgeous city. All of it was made of black rock, glass, and metal. Beauty in texture and reflection rather than color. Alien in the best possible way. The gates were open, giving me a view of the spires within. The whole city was like the mouth of some great stone creature. All of the buildings were teeth. Gorgeous teeth with no harsh corners, but every curve ended in a wicked spike. Stone and metal spires speared the sky like they were trying to eat the sun itself, twisting and curling like they were both alive and mean. The temple was the tallest spike of all. It was the respawn point for everyone that called Zezhria home. The mighty crown on top of the beast's head.
The bank was the throat. The only cube building in all of Zezhria. Every city had an identical bank in an identical location within the city; the middle. Even capitals followed this logic, choosing an organic way to make the most impressive part of the city somewhere apart from the middle. In Zezhria, it was the north end that was the important and impressive district. As such, the bank being a block of utilitarian ugliness was just in the peasant district. The banks were all linked so you could access your money from any city. Not strictly realistic, but neither was the ability to make magical symbols appear from my hands. I didn't chase realism so much that I wanted to order my stash transported from one city to the next via convoy.
I walked in and accessed my account. I didn't need to visit the vault. I just needed to equip my character with top-shelf gear. I pulled out a million, and felt my weight limit hit ninety percent. It actually felt heavy. That was the best part. It felt like I was carrying a pack that weighed as much as a person. I shifted my attention inward and verified that I was carrying ninety percent of my weight limit, or I could just feel that if I walked with this much weight for long I'd fall over. Knowing it was precisely ninety percent allowed me to know exactly how far I could go before collapsing, though.
I'd gotten good at multitasking during my experience in the beta. I could look at the world around me and internally verify everything I assumed about my stats and different menus shuffled through my mind at my whim. At this point I'd completely stopped using the interface entirely. The last stage have been having the menus as a transparent layer between me and the real world, but I hadn't needed that in over a week. I thought through my inventory so I could look at the gold, counting each piece absentmindedly. Coins were a nice, visceral sort of money. Feeling it with the inventory wasn't as satisfying as seeing it in the vault or touching it, but it did give me a tiny thrill to touch all of those coins and know they were a puny amount of gold compared to what I had access to. It felt so much more real than paper with a number on it.
I even pulled up the visual interface for a second just to look at it, and glory at the sight. The inventory being a window to a giant safe instead of the grid with filled slots was another awesome improvement. The safe was as big as you wanted it to be, but it was sitting on your shoulders, so filling it too much would have you crawling on the ground trying to move it. Limiting weight rather than inventory size was a choice I agreed with. I knew that some people didn't like the fact that fighting while weighted down had downsides but I liked that aspect. Maybe because I started as a mage who didn't need to move around a lot and later I was a fighter so I had all the strength I could want.
I walked out and, staying within the no-combat zone of the bank, put out a request for a level masking potion and a merchant access potion for half a million each, five times as much as their market value. I didn't have time to haggle. It only took five seconds for someone to respond. A Conjurer, level forty. "How's a level one got a million gold?"
"Gold is linked across all characters on an account. Starting a new one. You got both potions?" he nodded. I held out my hand and equipped the gold, a purse appeared in my hand. It was the best way I'd found of letting people see that I did indeed have a million gold. The game automatically calculated all the gold a player saw, so he didn't need to count each of the million gold pieces that, miraculously, fit in a purse the size of my fist. My arm trembled under the weight, but I could hold it for a few more seconds before I fell over. He pulled out the potions and I grabbed the potions as he took the money.
I'd only been ripped off once, and I'd hunted that player for months before he finally got sick of me and gave the million back. No drop-downs or pop-ups, all in the "real" world. I could command my gold to go into his inventory if I had his name, but this was an easy way to trade with someone I didn't know. Suddenly I had two potions where a million gold had been. I drank both of them and sauntered into the first armor merchant on the left. It was the only one in town that carried level sixty gear. I walked up to the stand carrying armor and touched the stand. It showed that the full set cost ten million. No problem. That's why I used a shop instead of one of the stands that other players set up, or wandering merchants. They had better items, but they cost more than a million, and I couldn't have the merchants directly charge my bank. Shops could. They were all linked with the bank so players didn't need to go back and forth to buy items.
I equipped the armor and was suddenly a mirror image of the Assassin I'd just shook hands with. No skin showed, but the hair of my mohawk was too long and trailed down my back. I grinned as I sprinted for the weapon shop across the street. My speed was on an entirely different level than it had been before I'd equipped the armor. Honestly, it was the fastest I'd ever been. The potions didn't last all that long. I'd barely bought two swords and a dagger at fifty million apiece before the shopkeeper threw me out.
Rushing to the teleport pad, I couldn't contain my elation. Some people looked at me strangely, but it was time for my favorite part of the game. It was time to level up for every kill! I ported to a staging point two miles north of Pinnacle. There were always strong bandit groups so close to the monster city. I couldn't survive inside the city, not until I was level twenty at least, but the outskirts should be fine.
I glanced around and noticed a pack of angels sitting around a fire. I accessed my sneak ability by crouching and thinking of being invisible. Some players had to go to the menu and manually activate their skills, either verbally or actually having to treat it like a touchscreen, but I'd been at it long enough that I could assign hotkeys to thoughts or gestures or even set it up with trigger activation or a timer without even needing to use the interface at all. The triggers didn't always work if I was hit with a condition, but that was a small price to pay.
I turned into a wispy shadow. I slipped forward as fast as I could while their attention meters kept low. Some Shadows didn't even bother watching the attention meters, but I didn't like the idea of angels swinging their weapons all over the place because they heard me moving around. Or casting a spell of revealing and removing my backstab bonus.
I wouldn't be able to one-hit-kill these angels due to the assassin's natural ability, but backstab damage was a bitch and my gear was at the base of top notch. I'd been backstabbed by Assassins too many times not to respect the sneak-attack. I shoved the dagger into the first angel and had the satisfaction of seeing it start to glow. It exploded in a burst of light, and I reclaimed my knife. It was a very powerful weapon, especially with the "double damage from backstab" bonus that all knives received. My cover was blown, though. I sheathed the knife and pulled out the swords. They felt awkward and heavy. It was fine. I swung them like baseball bats. Each hit made the angels burst, even when I only grazed them. These angels were weak. I finished them off without anything flashy. Their exploding bodies had destroyed their armor, but their weapons were on the ground. I picked them up and tossed them over my head into my inventory. Then I turned my attention inward.
Something like an internal alarm was going off, it smelled kinda orange, notifying me that my cursor color had changed due to killing holy creatures. Angels were annoying in that killing them was never secret. Self-righteous as they were, their invasion was justified and killing them was evil. Of course. Demons also reported back, always providing alignment alterations for killing them. Unless you had the ability to trap souls before they could report, which was a much higher level skill than I had access to. My cursor would become red and then black as I became more evil. The cursor color changed based on your acts, but a completely evil character could have a pearly white record if they really wanted to as the actual alignment was bottomless but the cursor stopped after it became black. All you needed was to be four times as evil as it took to be black, then be good for a half of that and you'd have a shining cursor. Assuming no class interference, anyway. With class interference it was half again as much because progressing past neutral was twice as hard. The color would go from blue to yellow before ending at white if I decided to be the rarest of Assassins; the light kind.
Leveling time. The first one was just a basic stat boost, I wasn't going for anything fancy or tricky so it was really easy to allocate. The second was where I got to pick a skill to become more proficient at. I amped up my dual-wield skill which was barely past zero. Killing bigger enemies didn't level your skills more unless you were just better at it. I got slightly more than a regular noob because I'd had other characters that used two weapons, but nowhere near as fast as I could level magic skills. Level three let me choose an ability. I picked silent rush. Then I sat by the campfire and waited for my sneak skill to remember the fight. I definitely needed to level my dual-wielding more, but otherwise I did quite well. I didn't usually sneak attack, but the burst damage definitely was valuable. Five kills to three levels. They really had been weak. Probably around level twelve, or so.
That was when I was sent flying. I flew through two trees before I rolled to a stop. I felt great, my armor was still intact. And that blow had been worth my time! I stood up and immediately became a wisp of smoke again as I closed the distance to the campfire. It was a higher ranked angel. It looked like a gold suit of armor with light coming from the cracks. And those wings made of pure white feathers edged in golden metal were a nice touch. The gold marked it as a very powerful one of its breed. Gold meant power. Silver or bronze were both weaker, though gold was among the most malleable of metals. Made no sense, but that was a bonus of a game. It didn't need to make sense.
The angels I'd killed had had gray and brown mottled wings and looked more like winged mercs than real angels. This was another class of monster. Damn, I wasn't sure if I could win. If he beat me, I'd need all new gear because I couldn't lift enough money to repair it and shops didn't repair gear. Oh, well. No pain, no gain.
I drew a dagger in one hand and a sword in the other. The dagger would be my stealth weapon, and I'd use the sword because I didn't have a shield. I used my new ability to cover the ground instantly and silently. My dagger dug into his side, and his sword smashed into mine. I flew the other direction, across the open plains. I rolled for a good hundred meters. I climbed back to my feet and pulled out my other sword. He'd cost me my dagger. Jerk.
Rushing him again, this time going for his legs to make myself a smaller target. Barely a difference, but one that I could exploit. His first retaliation was high enough that I could roll under it. In all, I got him six times before he blasted me with a beam of heavenly power. I flew into a tree again. His health was low enough that I'd kill him with three strikes or a critical. My chest armor could only take one more blow. He knew I was slippery, so I probably wouldn't be able to get him as much as last time. He was also paying attention to me now, so I couldn't stealth. Since I couldn't stealth I couldn't silent rush. I needed a critical. That meant a headshot. A downside of having a smaller hitbox, it was harder to crit in melee. I ran and jumped as high as I could, praying he thought it was a feint or something and I was about to use some sneaky skill. With both of my swords committed to hitting his helmet, that was my only real way to survive. Hitting the helmet wasn't even a guaranteed critical, but it was my best shot. Critical chance increased when you aimed. The more committed you were to aiming, the better the chance. I'd gotten my critical rate to almost ninety percent with my Paladin by purposefully using suicidal moves like this one. "Die, mortal!" it screamed. It was charging up another heavenly blast, glancing around for shadows. It was falling for it! This was actually going to work!
My blades struck first. His helmet exploded in a burst of white light. I dropped to my knees, temporarily blinded, as I felt my backpack suddenly get really heavy. That was definitely a good sign. Feeling it out, I was carrying one point two million gold. You couldn't pick up a glorious weapon that the carrier ignored, but everyone carried gold on their person. Even monsters had gold on them. The manual explained it as the pelt, or clothing, of the foe was automatically sold, giving you the gold value of the item if you didn't have the skill to use the resource. When you did, you got less gold but way more value out of the monsters you could farm for resources. That was why low level-enemies got you the same amount of gold regardless of your level. Similar, anyway. Selling was a strange concept in this world. You intimidated the npcs just by existing, so the more powerful you were the better deal they'd be willing to give you. So even if I killed the weakest characters in the game at level sixty, I'd gain more gold than a couple level ones selling the same item at the same time. Similarly, me with my high level gear would get better prices than someone with level-appropriate gear. It was never enough of a difference to make it worth it to farm weak monsters, though. Occasionally bandits would have a valuable stash, but monsters were absolutely not worth it. Higher level monsters were just that much more valuable.
Weekly Power Status
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Ranking 
-- Power
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