He was curious how Arturus and Kyle had fared. The first two of their towers had fallen before Elijah, Bo, and Annika had finished with their first tower. But their third had taken longer than it had taken for Sasha’s Babysitting Service to do two. There had been some concern that they would need to intercede in the final tower, but the towers both activated at the same time, limiting the amount of Mana that was being pumped into the atmosphere.
Benjamin had taken the rest of the party to assist where they could on the front lines. According to Nicholas, the Commander of the tanks was a good man and would appreciate the help from the team.
Elijah had stayed behind.
Nicholas didn’t argue once Elijah had made his point clear. He didn’t feel comfortable fighting on the front lines in large team engagements and that was exactly where the Commander would try to put him. Instead, he planned on dealing damage to Whir directly. This whole situation was his fault, and he needed to let out some anger and aggression against the world boss.
With his team cleared out of the tower, he restricted the mana flow, then activated his own teleport. He wasn’t sure that the game would let him, but it finally locked onto the roof of the tower after he funnelled too much mana into the spell.
This close to the unfiltered beam, even being reduced as it was, the mana overload was intense. But that worked for Elijah.
He’d been stupid back when he considered whether or not to summon his familiars, worried about them suffering an excruciating death from the Mana Overload, but that was because he still struggled to account for the interplay between his three classes. That was going to continue to be his largest hindrance towards getting to Celestial. He always seemed to be so ignorant of what felt so obvious in hindsight.
His familiars had a way to burn off mana, as long as Elijah did one simple thing for each of them.
Summoning the three Bitter Brothers one by one cost more mana than summoning all three at once, but he needed to explain what he was doing to each of them. Their debug menus hung heavy in his vision as he quickly explained that he was giving them a new spell. They had to be smart about it, though. They needed to figure out how many ‘Dragontooth Bombs’ they needed in order to counter the effects of the area debuff, but not so many that they’d drain themselves completely from the upkeep cost.
Each one had a slightly different intelligence stat, Bitter Root having the lowest of only one, but in the end, they wound up finding the proper balance.
He summoned three scouts after that and replaced their entity IDs with his own. He could have done so with the Bitters as well, but they always got a little weird when they were allowed to be clones of him.
He focused his will, and with a single command, their assault began. Bomber bats sprang from the shadows of the seven creatures standing atop the tower. It was like an artillery strike. The bats rained down on Whir’s colossal form, now too distracted by the threat of the celestials and other damage dealers to even pay any attention to where the artillery that was his bats were coming from.
From the fall of the last tower to the final destruction of Whir, barely twenty minutes had passed. With his death, the towers began to crumble. He cancelled the link to the six summoned creatures and quickly teleported back to the plateau. Having survived a Celestial-tier world boss, and didn’t want to further sour his mood by dying at the end to a crumbling tower.
The sound of trumpets, loud and unmistakable, echoed over the battlefield. Although Whir’s massive form was collapsing in the distance, he didn’t feel satisfaction or joy. He only felt that he had completed his task. Even with as sloppy a completion as it had been.
A pop-up shown in his vision, radiating the soft red light of Celestial-tier.
[World Event]
Players defeated Whir the World Miner, a Celestial-Rank world boss. All players will be rewarded based on merit, both those who survived the encounter and those who died.
Total number of participating adventurers: 853
That was a significantly larger number of people than Elijah had expected, but the battlefield had been huge, so it wasn’t that much of a shock. He did the quick math in his head. If the game rewarded experience equally among all the players who participated, it would be something like twenty thousand experiences each. More than he had earned during the entire time he’d been playing, but he knew that the ‘merit’ metric was a way to combat that. Of course, the higher-level combatants, those who needed more experience to level up, would have an easier time gaining merit and thus earn a larger share of the rewards.
[World Event]
Numbers finalized. Distributing reward chests now.
Across the battlefield, Elijah saw red flashes of light up the dark. A light rain had begun to fall from the black clouds overhead, and the flashes seemed to refract in the air. Finally, Elijah’s own chest appeared in front of him.
[Reward Chest]
[Rank: 167 / 853]
Open?
1. Yes
2. No
He was in the top two hundred out of almost nine-hundred adventurers, which wasn’t bad. Though it hurt a little that he wasn’t higher considering he had figured out the key to effectively taking out Whir.
He tried to push it out of his mind, but he was feeling hurt. Sure, he hadn’t been the one to deal the killing blow, or even dealt most of the damage, but it was his contribution that had secured victory in the face of defeat. If the celestials had their way, they would have either flooded the battlefield with mana and minions, or cut off the resource needed to ensure victory.
Off in the distance, the sounds of triumph broke through the haze of the rainfall. They were celebrating their victory, but to Elijah it felt hollow. Somewhere out in the chaos that was the battle-torn field, his enemies were probably celebrating their achievement. Arturus no doubt ranked higher than him and would get a large prize, even though his power was stolen from others. Even Bob, or Alan, would benefit from his own immoral misdeeds, both the imbalance of his class and ordering the mages under his command to feed his damage.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“It’s not all bad,” spoke a gruff voice from behind him. He wheeled around to find Kole standing there. “You did great in the towers, from what I was told. Don’t let the low rank on the chest get to you.”
The man was sitting on the ground, his bat wings held over his head, blocking the rain. His armor, very similar to Elijah’s but much bulkier, had several marred and dented places.
Elijah just stared at the man, unsure of what to say. He knew Kole had voted with Annika to allow him to continue operating uninterrupted, but he had grown distrustful of the Celestials after everything that had happened. Arturus’ villainy, Mara’s betrayal, and Annika’s kiss. Every celestial he’d interacted with was working under some kind of ulterior motive, and he feared what Kole’s might be. Some greater storyline linked this man’s class to his own, and he had yet to uncover it.
“Your class says ‘Reality Warper’, but everything I’ve seen from you. Your armor, your summons.” He pulled the shadows from his armor and formed a Batwing Blade, though his version was much larger. “Even your weapon. It’s all reminiscent of my own Celestial class. So I think it’s time we had a chat.”
Some part of Elijah instinctively wanted to demand that Kole just spit it out. Tell him what the Dragontooth Guardian knew without these games or politics. The Dragontooth Guardian was nothing but a servant for the Dragontooth King. This man was by all rights his subject.
“I don’t know what there is for us to chat about, Kole,” he snarled, he made to turn his back on the man, but his next words caught Elijah’s attention.
“How about we chat that your class is telling you I am your servant?”
Elijah stopped. He felt the blood rush away from his face and could feel his heart thumping harder in his chest. “So what? You’re a mind reader now?”
Kole laughed and let his sword dissipate back into his shadows. “No, but my class is telling me to bow down and serve you. I take it you found some kind of sovereign type class in one of the old abandoned forts? That your unique class somehow integrated with the Dragontooth one?”
Elijah took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. His heart was still pounding away fiercely, and he could feel himself taking shallow breaths. He was on the verge of a panic attack, and being close to this Celestial-tier player wasn’t helping that.
“King,” he finally relented. “The class was The Dragontooth King.”
Kole nodded his head. “Makes sense. My class quest never really explained what the hierarchy was in the old empire, and the Dragontooth Armorer specifically refused to discuss it with me.”
Elijah remembered the mad bat-woman who had helped him to form his sword. She’d mentioned meeting the Dragontooth Guardian, though had implied that he knew what had happened to the King but would not tell her. He told Kole as much.
“So you met Volga too? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” Elijah realized Volga must be the name of the Armorer. It made sense that she had a name; everyone in this game had one. He just hadn’t thought to ask her what it was. “She’s a bit crazy. Wouldn’t teach me to summon my blade until I ‘spoke’ to her master and found out what happened to him. I couldn’t find the King, so I made up a story that I wasn’t allowed to tell her. I guess she believed me more than I thought.”
He stood up, causing Elijah to take a step back and nearly trip over his reward chest. “Here’s the thing, Elijah. There’s something broken with our classes,” Kole told him, making no move to get any closer. Off in the distance, thunder and lightning ripped across the sky, threatening that the storm was about to get much worse. “I don’t know if we received them before they were finished, but they mess with our minds. Even worse than the other Celestial-tier classes.”
“That’s why, even though I know I could take you in a fair fight, I’m still scared of you. Because my class is telling me you are my liege,” Kole told him, his voice taking on an air of pity towards Elijah. “I heard about what happened while you were picking up your healer. The brutality of cutting off Carl the Cleric’s hand. You can’t let being the Dragontooth King change you, otherwise you risk losing yourself to this game more than we already have.”
He pulled a chest out of his inventory and showed it to Elijah. “Your rank is nothing to scoff at. It’s only because you are being told that you are the King that you are so upset.”
Elijah saw the text box open up in front of Kole’s chest.
[Reward Chest]
[Rank: 404 / 853]
Unable to Open:
This chest is soul bound to Kole, the Dragontooth Guardian.
Once he made sure that Elijah had seen the chest, he placed it back in his inventory.
“We’ll talk again sometime; I can sense that you still haven’t completed the class quest. I have a feeling we’ll meet again before you’ve done so.”
With that, bats sprang up from his shadow and surrounded him in a cyclone, carrying him off to wherever he was going.
Elijah took a moment to look over the rain-soaked field. Whir’s body was still lying off in the distance. It was curious that it hadn’t shattered like every other monster did when it was killed. Just one of those weird things about world bosses, Elijah assumed.
Looking down at his chest, he tried to feel better about the rank he had received. He’d gotten a better rank than Kole, who was a Celestial. But that was only right, wasn’t it?
He stopped and inhaled slowly, trying to figure out if that was him thinking that or his class. He didn’t know if there was a way to really know.
He bent down and turned the latch on the chest. Fanfare played in his mind as the chest opened itself. Inside, there were two smaller compartments. The first one opened.
[Reward: 1 / 2]
Congratulations for your contributions you have received:
6,231 Experience Points!
Bonus Skill Experience for skills used during the battle.
That wasn’t bad, far less than the twenty-thousand average, but far from a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It was enough to catapult him up eight levels. That was going to be a nice chunky amount of stat points to assign once he found a safe area. He was about to open his skill menu when the second compartment began to open.
[Reward: 2 / 2]
Congratulations for your contributions you have received the following item(s):
He felt something added to his inventory, but before he could even process what was going on, a splitting pain shot through his skull. His Reality Awareness flared up, but it was a garbled mess and he couldn’t make heads or tails of it as he fell to his knees clutching his skull. It felt like there was lightning trying to burrow its way out through his eye sockets.
The pain refused to go away, and he couldn’t focus on anything. He couldn’t summon any help, open his chat menu, or even access his inventory. All he could manage was screaming in pain.
Through squinted eyes, he saw something move. A person? For a moment, he thought maybe Kole had returned, but the figure was too thin.
“Well. Well. Well,” the voice hissed. “If it isn’t my old friend Elijah?”
He knew that voice.
Tom.
The man’s form solidified slightly in his vision, just enough that Elijah could see his player tag.
[Player]
Name: Tom
Class: Acolyte of Flesh | Level: 80
Tom had not only gotten a major boost to his level, but now he had a new class. One that sparkled with the red outline of Celestial-tier.
Fear gripped Elijah, and he tried to fight through the pain to activate his teleport. He had to get away. Tom casually walked over to him. Elijah’s vision went black as something solid connected with the side of his head.