Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Turris Sepulcrorum

Only ringing in the ears is heard. No, not even that. It was as if the very bones of her ear were shattered by the noise. Those shatters were causing her ears to feel wet and painful. They were bleeding.

Her brain couldn't process the sound that came from that wooden stick. It made her see colors of all kinds in her vision. As the colors danced in her eyes, she could barely see what really was in front of her.

Was she still awake? The world was wobbling all over, and she couldn't make sense of it all.

But then a voice in her head said to her "He really did a number on you all. Didn't expect something that was considered mostly useless by the real ones to be this effective."

The woman thought, "Someone considered this an useless ability? How can something this devastating be considered useless? Actually, how can I hear someone talking? I can feel that my ears are destroyed, so how is it possible? How am I even conscious?"

The foreign voice in her head said "Oh, you seem more confused by the minute. I oughta fix this sooner rather than later. Though I can use "Resurrection" fairly easily, I don't want to resort to someone dying on my watch."

The woman thought "Ah, now it makes sense. It is a god that is talking to me in my head." The voice said "God? Me? Well, if my brethren were here to hear you say that, they would be demanding I let you wither away. But I can't do that. If Elysium is to be prosperous in this world, we need to make some connections in order for us to prosper."

Woman thought "Elysium? You were one of the people who visited our village a short while ago? I heard Renald saying something about them being unaware of how the world works."

The voice says "While we are ignorant at the moment, we don't intend to stay like that for long. But never mind that. Let me heal all the wounded in one go so we don't waste any more time."

Then a comfortable feeling is felt by the woman. There was no pain. Only peace. Like a warm embrace of someone caring for you. A feeling the woman had forgotten long ago.

Then Michaela woke up and raised from the ground slowly. Then a familiar voice says to her "Need a hand Ms. Lien?" That hand belonged to a being that echoed the aura of a gem of highest quality. It was like a god was asking for her well being. She grabbed the hand and said "Thanks. I feel fine. And you…"

The man says "Li Last. The guardian of Turris Sepulcrorum and the last member of the rell race. But now, my title as the Special officer of Elysium will suffice. Or if you want, an advisor will do as well."

Then Michaela asks "What- what happened? After that elf put the stick in front of me, I…" Then Lych answers from behind Li "It's called "Decoy bullet". It is a projectile that isn't supposed to physically do anything by itself. However, when it explodes, it creates a sound that can be deafening if you are too close. In normal cases, it is supposed to be shot to a spot away from the target and once it makes the sound, it should distract the opponent for a brief moment, giving your allies and yourself a chance to make a move."

Then Michaela says "But Mr. Last said that it was considered useless by some people. How can something that can destroy one's hearing be considered useless?"

Lych explains "The purpose of "Decoy bullet" is to distract your opponent, but if your opponent knows that you can do that, it can be just ignored if there is a sound of that level. Plus, if you immediately cast a spell that cures all abnormal effects, the disorienting part of "Decoy bullet" shouldn't affect you that much. Sure, it gives a hassle for the opponent for a brief moment if they don't want to ignore it, but the majority of the real ones chose to just ignore it."

Michaela then says "Real ones? What are… you know what, forget it. I need some time to process all of this." Lych says "Do as you wish, our objective has been achieved anyways."

Michaela asks "What was your objective?" To which Lych said "The first objective that his majesty gave us was to survey the surrounding area. The secondary objective that the three battalion leaders, plus Li, came up with was to evaluate the general strength of the people in this world. On that note, do you think that you are above average in terms of combat?"

Michaela says "I'm certainly considered to be one of the most elite fighters in Lutah."

Lych says "I see. Well, we'll be off now. Oh, and also…" With amazing speed Lych comes near Michaela and says while leaning near her ear "As I said, they were just my friends having a debacle" and then he leaves like a wind. Li bowed before he left and soon even he was on his way. Then Michaela mumbled "Elysium. What really are you?"

Soon after, Lud asks the heads of the survey team to get to the throne room. This included Li.

There, Lud asked "So what can you tell me about the area?" Brutus rises up and says "Yes, there are three settlements around the area. Town of Lostwood, Lecta and Gendarville. All of them are the general western area from our current location and east of our location is mostly sea."

Lud then says "Good job Brutus. You may leave if you feel like it." To which Brutus says "Thank you for your praise boss, but since everything is uncertain for us at the moment, I'd like to hear more about what the others have to say." Lud nods and says "I see."

Then Lud looks at Lych and Marchosias and says "What about you two?" To which Marchosias answers "Yes, we have taken a closer look at Gendarville and found that humans aren't welcome in this world." Lych adds "Also, we found out that one of the elite fighters of this world is unable to beat me in close quarters combat."

Lud says "I see. And what are your thoughts on this Li?" Li then says "Yes, as stated previously, I'm quite positive that we live in a completely different world than the world of Odysseium. To recap, I don't feel Turris Sepulcrorum anywhere and neither do I feel any mytherell in the area."

Lud says "So the Tower of Mythril is absent and there isn't an ounce of mythril as we know it. Couldn't it be possible that we simply are in a pocket dimension that didn't have any rell influence?" Li states "While it is possible in theory, but even if I was on the farthest reach of Odysseium, I should be able to feel even a slight hint of Turris Sepulcrorum's energy, as it is part of my being."

Lud asks "But if you can't feel it, how can you exist without it?" To which Li states "I think that I'm currently just connected by an unobservable tether and that is my only connection to it."

Lud asks "Then shouldn't you be able to trace us back to it?" To which Li says "I'm afraid that Turris Sepulcrorum doesn't have the capacity to travel across worlds on its own. It is like trying to actually grab air with your bare hands and trying to move it as a whole to another place. It's just not possible."

Lud thinks for a moment, and then says "What about we use one of the tickets used to fight you on the 500 level?" Li thinks for a moment, and then says "It is worth a try. Though there is a slight chance that we end up in an empty void."

Marco says "Absolutely not! We can't lose our lord in his time of need!" Lych also says "I agree. If there is a chance that we lose our lord forever, then we shouldn't risk it. How about someone else uses it?"

Li thinks for a moment and then says "While it was only possible for a player… a real one to use that ticket in Odysseium, I don't know if it holds true in this world as well." Then Sarah raises her hand and says "I want to be the test subject!" To which Lud says "Why would you want to risk your life on something like this?"

Then Sarah has a huge grin on her face and says "Why of course, if everything goes well, I will have Li fight me in a serious duel." Everyone pauses for a moment.

Eventually Brutus says "As expected of lil miss. You never cease to amaze me. Give it to her boss. I think it's for the best." Lud is still a little skeptical, but then Li says "I think it is a fine choice."

Lud asks "What do you mean?" Then Li says "If everything goes well, then we will have a grand bout between the hardest single player boss and the hardest raid boss. Worst case scenario, you will lose both, but given that it seems the power level at least looks low in this world, you shouldn't have a problem. But no need to worry, I have a back up plan to return Ms. Livendig to this world in one piece. Though I might perish, it'll be of minimal consequence to you."

Lud says "Don't say that. You are a valuable person in our little group. No one could replace you." Li smiles gently and says "Thank you for your kind words, your grace. Should the situation rise, I'll try to save both me and ms. Livendig." Lud says "Good."

There is a small pause until Sarah shouts "What are you waiting for?! Let's get this thing going!" Lud then rises from his throne and says "Just in case the tower appears, let's go somewhere away from the city." To which Li responded "My thoughts exactly."

For some reason, all of the battalion commanders plus some other people from the city came to the place to see what's going on. Brutus says "Oh boy, now we better get something interesting started." Lych says "If the ticket just disappears to the thin air without making anything happen, it'll be a downer for all the people in the city."

Lud then opens his item box and takes the "ticket of rell's champion" out. Then he hands it to Sarah, who is also getting a bit nervous now that it has come to it. Sarah takes it and then asks "What do I do now?" To which Li answers "Usually this ticket is offered to the front of the Turris Sepulcrorum with the words "I offer you this ticket to challenge the last one." Then you should be teleported on top of the tower."

Sarah then says "But there is no tower here. How are we supposed to enter it if it's not here?" To which Li answers "Though it wasn't commonly used, the same process could be done if the player… the real one, is talking to me and picks that option on the dialogue menu."

Sarah says "So…?" Then Li says "So try saying those words to me." Sarah then properly goes to face Li and says "Um, I offer you this ticket to… to… um, to challenge the least… last one."

Nothing happens at first and soon Sarah says "I suppose I screwed this up. Ahem! I offer this…" and then an earthquake appears. Random lights appear to be flickering in the surrounding area and then Li and Sarah disappear. The lights won't stop flickering, until one huge pillar of light appears near Lud. Lud realizes that that light isn't good news and shouts "Run!" Then people flee from the area until a loud heavy warp sound echoes around the forest for a brief moment. Couple of seconds later, the sound stops and the lights have disappeared. All that was left was a huge smoke cloud.

Lud said via telepathic link to Brutus "If you are alive, then could you please do something to this smoke." After which Lud hears a groan followed by "On it boss." and then a gust of wind blows away the smoke completely.

When the smoke disappeared, everyone could see what had happened. IT appeared on the sea not far from Elysium. The Tower of Mythril and the island it standed in. This meant that the starting island of GFOO was summoned to this world. A surface area around 60 km² wide. A little bigger than the surface area of Manhattan.

Lud said "Brutus, give me a ride to the island. Elisia and Liz, make sure everyone is fine and when you are done, come to the starting island." Elisia and Liz said in unison "As you wish." and went on their way. Brutus changed into his dragon form and flew Lud to the Tower of Mythril.

There, as Lud had expected, the starting mechanical constructs were roaming as usual. And something that Lud also expected, the screen to view the ongoing combat between the challenger and the guardian. Blast echoed from the top of the tower, and you could even see that Sarah had changed into her true form on top of the tower.

Sarah's true form, "The herald of doom, the harbinger of destruction, Maledictus Fragmentum Dei" is a giant flying legless monster that has two hands flying near the main body. The head isn't connected to the body via the neck and is instead floating near the top of the torso. She is surrounded by blue and green flames that also cover her body. She has two horns protruding from the back of her head and one horn coming from the top of her forehead. Where the horns join, there is a ball that flickers in a blue and green flame.

There are three similar balls hidden among the body and those are her weak points. In the game, you are supposed to damage each hand and torso to get her to reveal one of those balls. Once the three small balls were dealt with, the head would fall in a manner that allowed you to attack the main ball on top of her head.

Attacking the main weakpoint without getting rid of the three other ones causes the damage to be transmitted to the whole party without delay and heals the hands and the torso with the same amount of damage caused. This made some attacks be taken out of the ability pool since even with a healer on board, the damage couldn't be mitigated enough.

Once you take out the main ball on the top of her head, you are sent to a phase two where the body changed forms and became a thorny flaming primal demon. In this form, she looks at what's generally taken as attractive, meaning she has more womanly features in this form than she does with her NPC look. Though she still has that demonic look, meaning horns, tail and flames surrounding her.

In this state, the arena is covered in spots that deal damage over time. The battle itself wouldn't be hard from this point onwards if it weren't for a little trick that the raid boss had. During the second phase, she had an attack called "Death door's call", Which Sets the number of health points you have to 1 if you are hit by it. It is also an areal attack which means multiple targets can be hit by it at once. It covers 20% of the area at max. This debuff makes you unable to be healed, unless the debuff is lifted by a spell, potion or scroll.

Needless to say, as the arena is surrounded by spots that do damage over time, if you are hit by "Death door's call", which wasn't a rare occurrence and you were affected by one of the spots, you'd die in a moment. Phase two was the main reason why this specific raid boss had the lowest success rate.

Phase three turns the raid boss into a gem that doesn't move. At this state, she sends hoards of minions to attack the players and she keeps giving random debuffs every 10 seconds. This list of debuffs also included "Death door's call" but as there were so many debuffs in the game, the chances were very low. The raid ends once you beat phase three.

At the moment, the fight between Sarah and Li went to phase two, but something was different from what it was in the game. For some reason, Sarah was summoning her minions even at phase two. This made Lud realize that she may be able to use all of her abilities from each phase even in her NPC form. Even though Lud never did the raid, he was still terrified of what Sarah was capable of in this new patch.

How did Lud manage to get a raid boss to join his legion? Well, there was a brief moment in one of the quests in GFOO in which you could meet the NPC form of Sarah. It was an easy to miss event that not many knew about and the difficulty of even being able to talk to NPC Sarah was hard to come by.

You see, you'd have to convince multiple guards who are already on guard with you. Then you'd have to go to a specific place to talk to one of Sarah's friends, who also were on guard when talking to you. If you said anything that alarmed those NPCs, they'd become aggressive against you or people around them would do so.

Once you convinced Sarah's friend enough, she'd send you on a side quest to find an item that had an extremely low drop rate with the creature who carried it, an extremely low spawn rate. While doing this part, Lud thought that the devs just wanted to have fun with the players. Either that, or the AI generated an absurd sequence of events that had to be met in order to be able to meet an friendly Sarah NPC.

Somehow, Lud managed to get to that point with the guidance of his brother's friends who were also becoming his friends as well. And when it was time to talk with Sarah NPC and somehow convince her to join Lud's legion, that's when they had to rely on their imagination. And as recruitment's success rate relied on the favorability that the NPC had, Lud had to do that on his own.

"It was pure luck now that I think about it" Lud muttered while watching the fight between Sarah and Li. Brutus just said "I sure hope I won't ever anger either of the two." To which Lud said "I thought that dragons had pride in their own power and skills."

Brutus chuckled and said "We do, but those who can't let go of their pride will someday get to a point where they can't get out of just by pure pride alone. Those who have never lost something, be it a contest, item or a person, will never have the gall to empathize with those who are suffering. Or at least that's what I think anyway."

Lud looks at the screen and says "So we are entering phase three. So it is over and done with." Brutus said "Disappointed?" Lud said "No, I just didn't expect that the boss specialized in one to one scenarios would be able to beat someone like Sarah, who was meant to be beaten by multiple players."

Soon after, Sarah was defeated and the "challenge failed" showed on the screen. Soon the two appeared in front of Lud and Brutus. Lud asked "So how was it?" Li said "It was a fun exercise. Haven't had the chance to go like that since rell fought the gods."

Then Lud asks "How about you Sarah?" Sarah is silent for a moment and Lud asks again "Sarah?" Then Sarah raised her head and slapped her cheeks with both of her hands. Then she said "It is all good! It was a fun experience!" Then she turned around, looked at Li and said "Thanks for the thrill, old man!" To which Li responded "No problem, little ms. Livendig."

Then Sarah looked at Lud and said "So I assume everything went successfully?" Lud said "Well, yes and no. As you can see, we not only got the tower back, we also got the whole starting island."

Li said "I don't know if I should feel happy or sad that the whole island came to us." Lud asked "Why is that? I thought you liked it here." Li says "This… this is all basically a cemetery for my kin where the tower is the grave itself."

Sarah asked "I heard that rell decided to make a final respect to their creator and a final fuck you to the gods with the creation of this tower." Li says "I wouldn't say "fuck you" personally, but I think my breatheren would be pleased to hear how you interpet it." Brutus added "A tower piercing the heavens made with corpses that came before the gods."

The three look at the tower together and soon they can hear Liz calling them.

Li's little corner over here.

Hi. My name is Li Last. Or to be more precise, the name my official creator gave me when they created me was Li Zuìhòu. It was changed due to the simplicity of the west.

Anyways, some of you might be wondering what exactly is my purpose in GFOO, or rather was. My job was to guide the new players to master the systems of GFOO. I was their training partner from day one until they thought they were ready. And even if they thought they were ready, they could still come and train with me, should they wish for it.

I also served as the messenger for when the devs had something to say to the players. So as you can see, I was made self aware of what I am to the playerbase's race. It was something that all the players soon figured out, though some debated whether or not it is canon or not. And if you are wondering, other NPCs could learn of this truth as well, but I'll leave what happens after that to your imagination.

The tower also had its purpose. You see, when a low leveled player would enter it, they would get more experience points and level faster when they went through it. There was a limit of how many times you can go per player, so there was no abusing the system.

Well, I say no abusing it, but in its early days, the Tower of Mythril could be entered with a party of people. With some fiddling, players could go to the tower and not spend one of the times they had on their accounts. This wasn't the intended use of those parties, so the Tower of Mythril turned into a solo player only area.

At first the player base was angry, but soon the new change made its fanbase and people started to like the single player experience in a game that relied heavily on player co-operation. Single players were allowed to prosper outside the tower as well, but the general consensus of those who tried it was that it was too limiting and a grindy experience.

"But what is the purpose of the ticket that Lud had in this chapter?" I hear you asking. Well, in the game GFOO, it was, as explained in the chapter, a ticket to challenge the guardian of the tower. Beating the guardian would give equipment exclusively found after beating him. Meaning they were generally considered rare and fetched a high price on the market.

At first, beating the tower guardian would give you ten mythril class items. To balance it out, it was later dropped to seven, and nearing the end of the game's lifespan, it rose to eight.

"Was it a challenge then?" Oh yes. Yes it was. You see, most things have a countermeasure. This means each playstile has its counter playstile that it's weak against. For some playstyles, this is more relevant than with others playstyles, but the truth stands that they have a counter.

And now that I talked about a counter when I was talking about how the guardian of the tower was challenging. The answer is in your grasp, so I won't tell it needlessly.

Prior to coming to this world, the gear of the player couldn't be changed when the fight was going on, hence there was no reason for the guardian to change playstyles. But now, in this world, I can change it as I please. Meaning I'm jack of all trades. I hadn't had the chance to test if there are any drawbacks with me changing the playstyle repeatedly, but I know that I can do it after the fight with me and ms. Livendig. Perhaps, when I'm surrounded by a party of people who have varying types of fightstyle, then I can try my true abilities. Or maybe, in this world, I may be able to handle an army of people. Now I may not have a feud with the gods of this world, but… if god is a god… then I may as well…

Oops, I got a little carried away there. Sorry about that Mx. Reader. And don't worry, while you may not be one of the players that I cherish, you are still of the same place of origin. So while "the real ones" might be revered as gods in some capacity for us NPCs, you aren't likely an actual god that my kin has a feud with. But if you are… Then…

CREATORS' THOUGHTS
SanderTomson

I have to add that Li Last is a character that came from one of my other story concepts that I never managed to write a full chapter off. If you stay tuned, when it is ready, the chapter 7 will tell the backstory of Li Last and how he is connected to Sarah.

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