Chapter Nine - Coming to blows

Artha became a silent spectator to the war of words between two groups. Be it the ever arrogant Supernova guild or superior sounding Bandit's bash, no one was ready to back down.

He had heard that the novel authors would either use spectator's comments for info dump or just to increase the word count. But really...the authors could not be blamed at all. The people were always gosspiy, especially when they were letting loose and just relaxing, playing games. In few minutes while the groups were like 'do you dare, I dare', 'don't mess with me' he had heard all about the two guilds, their leaders, their famous players and what not.

The lowest level maps were never point of contention to the guilds. They would seek higher level maps which could drop higher XP.

From the list of tasks even Artha could see there were atleast a dozen maps for 0-5 levels. Level 0 moles had whopping 50 HP. Wow, so high!The basic skills or spells learnt automatically at level 0 was mediocre. For example, Artha had mana ball blast wher he could compress the mana into a sphere and blast it on monster. Theoritically, he could cause 5-10HP damage per blast. So he needed to blast the same mole 5-10 times before killing it. And it should be remembered that he had haggled and tormented the skill teacher, a half retired mage with level?? to learn skills which were on higher end, the spells which would cause more damage. The only downside of these spells was that they were difficult to learn and execute.Good news was that each hit on monster gave some XP. But first and last hit got more XP. Moreover the player who hit last would get the monster drops if he was not in the party mode. In party mode, XP was assigned in an entirely different manner. Whack-a-mole was just to get into game mechanics and for party member interactions.So, technically this level of map and game mechanics was actually just on par with prevailing VR games.So, after killing required moles, the players and teams would go on, towards higher level maps and complex game mechanics.But sudden increase in players meant that there were not enough moles to whack, I meant to kill. This has already streched patience of many players. The initial tasks available in this map was to kill x number of moles, thus players would not budge till the kill count was complete.

Now comes a bunch of players, all haughty. Who wouldn't get angry? On Supernova guild's side, it was their misfortune that one of their senior member getting a task of collecting paws of the moles. The senior member, to be more precise, the son of that member was used to be tyrant. He had no time to purchase that sh*t dawg! And monster drops were absymmal in this map, thus not many were selling such items. Instead of purchasing them at higher price and getting scalped by those stall owners, just get them ourselves- save money and XP too. The idea was brilliant. Only flaw in this plan was that they had to kill lot more moles. If they could just occupy the whole map or even majority of it, they could finish the task in few hours, probably. But would such idea feasible. As one of the scions of the guild, with multiple superiors and managers as backup, this was easy as snapping the fingers. Fine, let's show our power, he thought. His lackeys didn't think at all. They were paid to not think but just follow the orders. So all were struck in that map using mouth because none was ready to start a pointless massacre. Normally, after you are killed, you had options of reviving on the spot or near revival fountain in the park. It would take nearly half an hour to revive. This much gap is given to ensure that if the party has a healer with resurrection skill, he could revive the player. Resurrected player lost 1/4th of the level whereas others would lose 1/2of their levels after death. But wait, it gets worse. You will lose anywhere between 1-3 equipments or coins after each death. Is that the end? Noooo. Whether you are revived or resurrected, player would still have weakness debuff for half an hour. That would not be much of a problem of Richie riches as you can remove the defuff by paying coins to the system.

So basically dying in the game was bad and would put you way back in the track. Plus, your enemies get to use or sell your items. Burn!

Still, when the talk is about the face and pride, these things are not a consideration. So why were these groups not fighting but daring the other party to kill? Duh! The newcomer bonus - for 8 hours after creating a new account, there would be no death penalty. So fighting now would be really pointless.

While players formed circles to see this 'exchange of words' , as this thrilling scene could not be replicated again, the moles respawned. Maybe the game AI respawned it at higher rate based on the number of players in the map but it looked a lot more moles were there in the map. Maybe it felt like that because moles before were murdered before they could take even few steps.

Few sharp eyes ones in the periphery noticed the respawned monsters and slowly moved away from the spectacle to kill them quietly. Artha was one of them. His Mana ball blast was superior version of fire ball or others because when the ball blasted, pure mana would explode thus causing more damage. Thankfully, mana ball looked similar to a fire ball, so no one took extra notice of him. The first spell used showed him that he had to practice, a lot. He targeted one mole but the ball dropped elsewhere. It was just his luck that the blast radius included the mole hole thus injuring few moles who had come to scurry into the hole.

Bad thing- these moles were being perstered by other players.

Good news-...