Chapter Forty eight

Artha decided to maintain low profile. So he stayed silent, wore cloak all the time. Silent Night didn't come and chat with him. He was horsing around with two other people. Was cloak really that effective?

He had already felt how dissatisfied players behaved in the morning. It was repeat of the same in afternoon. Anyone would feel angry if someone comes to killsteal and here he was, personally permitted to kill steal. How couldn't they be angry? Was that all? No, they even had to keep an eye on him just for safety of their group.

On the top of it, Artha was not like most of the players. Others would search for patterns, the different skills of monsters, the aggro range , aggro reset, the cooldown of skills etc. To Artha, it didn't matter if it was wolf or wolf cub, if it was grey or black or red wolf. He was in midst of really good players. No need to use the brain. Just kill, kill and more kill.

He tried few times to support the elite group along with the reserves. He then found, unless one has worked together, it's really difficult to work in make or break scenarios and one had to be self aware all the time. To a noob and noob through, it was a bit difficult. In Bloody Rose, the whole elite party moved as one and they didn't move till the monsters in that area were sent to respawn. In Dragon Slayers, they would gather and kill once a while to increase XP of reserve team too. Apparently, these wolves regenerated HP and MP faster if they gathered more than certain number. So once in a while, the elites would slip, purposefully or accidentally, and gather more monsters and ask for backup.

This was supposed to be a good way to train the reserves.

Everytime they elites asked for backup, these reserves would rush forward without care of what happened in their current map. Why? Simple, really. As the players moved on, went to cities and stuff, the distance between experts, elites and reserves would increase and there would be no chance to get some advice from elites or even interact with them anymore. After running like fool sometimes, Artha didn't go out to support but he continued to kill. If it was not possible, no problem. He could always start gathering resources.

It could not be helped. Artha gathered far more things in the afternoon. The reserves in this group felt as if they were just passing time here before running off to play with elites. So he left Sun Lord a message telling he would be back and walked towards the village.

And found that even if it was just third day in village, few players had taken wrong route. Maybe it should be called short cut? Few took this path out of desperation, few took pride in walking this path of no return. Yep, it's the path of killing, murder and mayhem including robbery.

Artha knew that there were PK(player killing) already in the village. After all, the steele near the park near entrance had even noted down first player to die in PK and first player who turned red( who had killed a player). The steele had lots of first. It made an interesting read.

But this was the first time he saw it happen. Remember, he had never played such games before. Is it a wonder that he turned a coward and hid from this situation?

Artha was no hero. He would accept that and suffer from that. And this was not real life, despite the proclamation of being hyper realistic and better than real life. After all, if you die here, you can always be reborn. Heck, if you feel worse and are killed to level 0, you could always restart again in different places with different name and face.

But looting, robbery. Yeah, that hurt a lot. All that costed money. Robbing a person inside the game was worse than robbing outside. In real life, you could complain to police, recover part by insurance...there were hundreds of ways to move on. But robbery inside game, to whom should you complain?

These robbers had fine sense. They would rob a poor holding a jade. Few even turned it into force. They forcefully made the player sell the item for pittance or as barter, shoving few piece of rock as equivalent.

Artha had not read novels. So the frequently seen scene of siblings with cute/ beautiful sister and her sister loving brother surrounded by rough looking, rough talking men was not witnessed by him.

Instead, he saw another sort of cliche. Bunch of vibrant, youthful kids being harassed to handover the items. Maybe that player who wrote about PK in the forum's was right. These bunch of robbers were not willing to kill and become red players so close to end of the day. No one wanted to risk being unable to enter the village before night time. Maybe. Or maybe the item was not a 'hot' 'hot' item, so these hooligans were not going all out.

Having faced such situations in real life multiple times, Artha knew what should be done.

Kids would always find someone inferior or who can't fight back to bully, to increase their self confidence. And sometimes, these kids don't become wise adults at all, thus continue bullying.

If not for the reason that these bullies might harass spectators, he might have just walked pass them. Alas, Artha was not confident enough, so he just hid and wasted time. He couldn't even gather and collect items while hiding. What a waste of time!

The group of youth seemed to know either in real life. And they were also brats, talking back. Maybe they were also bullies in real life? Who knows. Who cares.

Group A ( robbers) - Why don't you try running away? If all of you run in different directions, we'll have to split and follow you. Perhaps you will be lucky that one with the item will survive and enter the village. Yeah, that was a good idea Sherlock, so why didn't you do that? Why are you moving your lips here and wasting my time?

Group B ( Victims) - Is this reverse psychology? You think this works? Moron!!!

Group A - You are a moron. Your whole family is a moron. If you wanted to run, you should have run as soon as you saw us. After wasting our time so long, now you open your stupid mouth to discuss such asinine trick. You noob!

Group B - Watch out! Whom did you call noob? I am Platinum level master in GHABA.

He was top level player in TPTDS-4. What levels were you in other games. Talk about noobs! Huh!

(Apparently being called noob was a trigger point.)

Group A - Who plays those games, sissies? Our boss was awarded sniper king in survivor season -7.

After listening to the talk which went in all directions, Artha realised that these groups were paper tigers and they were awaiting real backups. If he had not suffered similarly in real life, he might have realised sooner.

No more messing up. Before the real tigers or cats or whoever comes, he should run away. He did just that. He wasted stamina and ran away towards village till stamina bar was in red and fatigue was over 80%. That was a dangerous time.