To describe the person that had appeared before the duo as beautiful would perhaps belittle her beauty. If this person were described as stunning, that would perhaps be an understatement of the effect she has on people when they first meet.
Murphy, being young, dumb, and full of cum, almost couldn’t hide his body’s instant reaction to meeting the lady in front of him.
Even Seelie was overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of inferiority when standing before her. Which was strange, because the woman almost looked like a splitting image of Seelie, only a little older, more refined, and more matured.
The most significant difference between the two was their bearing though. It would not be wrong to say that a person’s bearing can completely change how they are looked upon. In this case, the bearing of the woman that appeared in this white space was unqualifiable.
Her long black hair was as if silk and her complexion flawless without a single imperfection or blemish. Murphy and Seelie both a felt a need to reach out and touch the woman just to be sure she was real. She almost looked like a model of a woman created by thousands of years of hard work on a single computer generated image.
It was impossible for any creature in the universe to be so perfect.
The woman looked at the two, glanced at their hands, then looked specifically at Seelie with a slight knowing smile.
At last, she spoke.
“Congratulations on completing the tutorial Seelie, and you Murphy. I’m the Game Master, but you may simply call me Jasmine. Let’s get started shall we?”
With that, she waved her hand, and the duo’s status screens popped up at the same time and began to rapidly change and morph with all sorts of other strange readings that Murphy didn’t even know existed.
After a few seconds of that, Jasmine looked through their status’ and nodded with a smile.
“Looks like everything is in order. You’ve both completed at least 2 tutorial missions. Although it seems to have taken you quite a while, Murphy. You’re perhaps the person with the single longest time spent in the Newby Training phase.”
Murphy wasn’t sure if he should be proud or ashamed of that feat, so he simply nodded and remained mostly confused as to what was going on.
Jasmine started touching parts of the status screens here and there, and finally, she looked satisfied.
“OK, it’s time to join the real game. Newb Planet was just an appetiser. When you respawn, you’ll appear on your first Domain. It will have traits similar to your own. You’ll have 10 days of protection in which you can’t be attacked.
“You will have a single Warp Portal which links to a random Quest World, and you’ll have a beginner house where you can control your domain from. You will also unlock the Player Store, and everything else you need to know will require you to purchase a guide book through the Player Store, or you’ll have to figure it out on your own.
“The last thing is that from now on, if you die, you will be locked out of the system for 12 real time hours. That’s 48 hours in the game. So try not to die too often, or it will severely limit your accomplishments.”
Jasmine then looked at Seelie. “I see a young me in you Seelie. Are you sure you want to tether yourself with such an ill omen?”
Murphy, at this point, had somewhat zoned out and was in his own little world. The short speech by Jasmine had already been too long for him to remain focused and he was still busy wondering what the hell a domain was.
Seelie looked over at Murphy, who appeared to just be staring off into space like an idiot. She then smiled a most enchanting smile and nodded towards Jasmine with firm resolution.
“Haa ... Very well. Because you came through together, you will both be residents of the same domain and treated as a single entity. The domain will pull traits from the both of you in its creation, and the both of you will be the Domain Controller’s. Do you have any objections to this Murphy?”
Murphy, still gazing off into the endless white space, felt Seelie squeeze his hand and looked over with a confused expression. He then realised he’d wandered off into his own little world again and probably just got asked a question.
“huh? ... Whatever is fine...”
Jasmine felt her heart ache for this poor girl who somehow fell in love with a total idiot. She then snapped back to reality and gave a hard stare at Murphy. Being a Game Master, she had a fairly good idea about the pasts of these two people.
When they first joined the Game, the System reads their memories as far back as it can. Murphy was somewhat of an anomaly in that his memories were very scattered, and areas were rather difficult for the System to pull out of him without some effort that would probably have turned him into a vegetable.
None the less, she knew a great deal more about Murphy than anyone else did and she felt that this whole space gazing, mentally challenged act was somewhat of a farce on his part. She was slightly shocked that just now she had been pulled into his gait and was fooled for a moment.
She started to question whether the memories the system pulled out of him were even his memories to begin with. Perhaps he really was just a fool with someone else’s memories? Whatever the case was, she only became more interested in watching Murphy struggling about in the Game System.
Finally, with Murphy’s ‘whatever’ which was essentially consent, she waved an arm, and the duo disappeared. After the pair had disappeared, Jasmine simply stood there in the white space for a while as she pondered.
Before long, another figure appeared in the space. It was a handsome young man that was completely golden. He looked like his entire body was made out of golden light. As soon as he appeared, he spoke somewhat hurriedly then disappeared again.
“Haha, Jasmine quick! Come watch this war between these two fresh domains. They’re really going at it this time. That old orc fellow crashed his domain straight into the elf domain and nearly wiped half those prissy bastards out in a single shot! HAHAHA!”
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The Domain. It’s in the name of the game, but until now I’ve had no idea what it even is. When the flash of light ended, I found myself standing in a little single story, single room stone house. It was empty inside and was completely bare of furniture and usual amenities.
The only things inside the stone house were two shabby looking wooden chairs. One had my character name on it. The other had Seelie’s character name. Which was apparently just Seelie.
I then left the stone house and discovered that I was on a little island. It was probably only about a kilometre in radius from the stone house. The most unusual part of the island was that it wasn’t in the sea.
In fact, it wasn’t in any kind of water at all! Instead, it was floating around in space! In every direction I looked, I saw stars shining brightly. The next most noticeable thing about this place was it seemed to have a few sections of clashing biomes.
The house sat on a shallow hill in the centre of the island. Just high enough to be able to survey everything. The hill looked very peaceful and serene. With soft green grass and gentle, fresh, clean winds.
About 400 meters from the house was the end of the fresh grassy area and lead into a barren dirt wasteland biome. Strangely, the dirt and rock were all black and sinister looking, and the few trees or plants in the biome looked more likely to eat you than to actually be edible.
This Biome was about 300 meters long. The last one was a Biome that I was very familiar with. Somehow, the Poison Smog Marsh had followed me through from Newb planet and made its new home on my Domain.
It essentially filled the last 300 meters of the island with and impenetrable wall of poisonous green smog and twisted dead trees. The ground was covered in swampy wet areas and the whole biome stank of death.
These three contrasting biomes each circled around each other from the centre of the island like three great big rings. I was mostly just glad that the centre biome was calm and peaceful. As I explored the Domain, I came across a strange swirling mist behind the house.
It was just normal white mist, but the fact that it stayed there in one spot and surged about every now and then gave it a somewhat eerie feeling. It only seemed to take up about 2 or 3 metres of space and apart from swirling and surging now and then didn’t appear to be doing anything else interesting.
I then approached the edge of the Domain and peered over. From what I could see, my Domain was like an upside down iceberg. The top was mostly flat in comparison with the bottom, which was like a huge earth spike piercing downwards into empty space.
At last, I was satisfied with searching about and returned to the house to see Seelie sitting in the chair with her name on it. Seemingly meditating or something with her eyes closed.
Out of curiosity, I also sat in my chair. After sitting for a while, I couldn’t figure out anything special in regards to the chair and decided to check my status which is what I presumed Seelie was doing.
The first thing I noticed when entering my status space was a new 3D map. It was basically just a white, plain 3D version of the Domain. After using a little Mana, I filled it all in with the Mana Cartography skill and the next moment I now had a perfect 3D replica of my Domain.
The next thing I discovered in my Status Space was ... someone else. I hadn’t noticed at first because she was standing behind me and the map was the first thing I saw when I came in. Now that I had turned to check other status screens, I came across the smiling face of Seelie.
“About time. I don’t have enough Experience points for everything. You’re going to have to buy these upgrades.”
Seelie then went through a long list of things I was supposed to buy, none of which I understood. When she realised that I’d spaced out halfway through her explanation, she simply reached out and did an implant. Naturally, I accepted the implant because she probably knew what the hell she was talking about better than I did.
She seemed to make a habit of uploading a lot of useless stuff. For example, she could have just uploaded the bit since we got here but she uploaded from all the way back to just before we left Newb Planet when she was busy doing ... well moving on...
I, like always, then had to hide my growing erection as I tried to process the useful information, which was pretty much all in the last half hour while she’d been in here.
Basically what she’d learnt so far was how the Player Store worked and also how the Domain Control worked, which was more or less the method used to take care of the Domain.
She’d also learned that in 10 days, our Domain would lose protection from the System and other Domains would be able to come and loot us. I wasn’t really too sure why that would bother us if it happened, but then I learnt that if we got looted, we’d lose some of the land from our Domain and even any resources we’d cultivated here.
Not just that, but we’d also lose things like experience points and stat points. On top of that, if we were killed during a raid, we’d be locked out of the game for 12 real time hours, and during that time people could come and strip us bear, forcing us to basically start again from scratch.
From what I could gather of the memories Seelie gave me, if our Domain lost too much land it would reach Desolate Rank and would basically only be the house on a little floating rock. If we both died in that state, and the Domain didn’t have a controller, we would lose the privilege to rule a Domain and become normal Players.
I also understood that for a raid to be considered successful, the enemy party had to claim our main base. Which in this case was our poxy little stone house that would probably fall over in a strong wind.
Seelie, of course, had spent all of her points on books so that she could learn the rules of Domain Warz and figure out what exactly the goal of the game was. Which apparently, is to build your own world eventually.
The idea is, as you raid and steal land from other people’s Domains, your Domain gets bigger and bigger. Eventually, when it’s enough to be considered a planet, you get two options. You can keep playing, and make your planet even more amazing and gain it another Rank, or you can back out, and you get the planet all to yourself.
The only cost of that is you will be cut off from the Domain Warz, and your planet will become your new home planet and a Quest Planet for the game. Naturally, you also get to keep all your cool stats and skills from the system, and you can even keep improving your planet, it just won’t ever grow any bigger.
From what Seelie could tell, there already appeared to be thousands if not tens of thousands of Planet Rank Domains, and when they went to war to try and raid each other, the entire populace joined in. Essentially, every member of a planet was part of the game and enjoyed the benefits brought about by the system.
If they lived in a Domain with a good Controller, then that controller would set up resurrection points in their Domain for citizens. If not, then the players that joined a Domain as a citizen and died in a war would respawn on a quest planet and have to try and find a way back or find some way to join another Domain.
In the end, it was a huge game to build yourself your own little world. Then when you’ve had enough fun, you retire in peace with a planet all of your own and other players and adventurers come to your planet to earn experience points so they can make their own skills or domain more awesome.
That white mist out the back was apparently a portal to a random Quest Planet where we could farm experience to upgrade our Domain.
From Seelie’s point of view, the thing we needed the most now was to prepare our Domain to be attacked. We needed to invite players or other creatures to come and live here so they can act as the defences to our domain.
In order to invite them, we first needed to have something they needed. In this case, we had to start building structures that would draw in some players. If we built a library or something, then low-level players that are interested in magic and books would come to our Domain and request to become a citizen so they could use our facilities for free.
This was also where questing came in. If we could finish some tough quests that gave us something unique, like a unique magic spell, then we could advertise that and people would come to take advantage of it to increase their skills.
There were also plenty of players that wanted to live in a biome which reflected their nature or the magic they practised. For example, my Poison Smog Biome was unique and would probably draw in a few races that prefer to live in poison areas and found it beneficial to their stat growth.
After some consideration, I asked Seelie to hold off for a moment because there was something else I wanted to try first. I searched through the store, not holding out any hope.
Surprisingly, I found what I wanted. For 100 experience, I purchased it and then walked outside the hut followed by a curious Seelie. The next moment, her face became strange as she watched me ‘will’ the fresh corpse of a giant lizard out of my inventory.
Without explaining, I simply pointed at the corpse and willed my innate spell to activate. This was an experiment I was uncertain about, but considering the nature of the Domain, I was certain I’d be correct. Despite not having read anything to support my idea.
We then watched on as the huge body of the lizard, probably close to the size of a small truck, exploded into a gory mess. Pieces of the beast showered all over the island and then slowly started to float back and form a huge summoning spell pattern.
A bright sinister red light flashed, and then there were 26 Demon Spawns all with different types of evolution and even a few with none. When they appeared, they all started cheering loudly in their cute little “Rar rar yah!” sounds.
I watched on nervously as they all started running around everywhere and investigating everything and eating the leftovers of the corpse I summoned them with. When they moved into the black dirt biome with the disturbingly sinister trees, a little red gleam appeared in their eyes, and they all started doing naughty demon things.
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Murphy let out a tense breath and checked his status screen. Sure enough, his max summons was 24, and according to the system, his current summons remained at 0.
This showed that in his Domain, his summons were essentially citizens and didn’t use any summoning points. Most likely, it would only cost him summoning points if he tried to summon them in another domain or on a quest planet.
Murphy then returned to the Player Store and wasted about 1000 experience on some Mana Recovery Potions and a few more dead beast corpses.
He spent nearly half an hour casting Summon with all his Mana and summoned as many of the Spawns as he could.
It turned out that the Spawn species really had been on the verge of extinction. After he’d only summoned about 900 spawns, he couldn’t summons a single one more. In fact, on his last summon, even though he used nearly 80 mana for the summon, only a dozen older, sagely looking spawns came out.
They had little beards and looked ancient and withered in comparison to the rest. These were clearly the elders of the Spawn Tribes and were the only ones left to summon. Among them was a familiar Spawn, Chuckles, who immediately raced up to Murphy screaming in excitement and jubilation.
Many of the Spawns started digging strange little burrows all over the place to make their new homes, and the majority of them decided to live in the second ring of the Domain which was the strange dark and sinister biome.
The dozen elders all dug little burrows up around the stone house and Chuckles led all the poison evolved spawn, which were basically all his own progeny, down to the final ring where they frolicked and played like very evil looking wingless fairies.
Seelie had a strange light in her eyes when she watched the Spawn’s busily making little burrows and doing lots of ... naughty demon things.
For the next day or so, Murphy and Seelie planned out their domain. They weren’t certain about a lot of things yet and so tentatively spent some experience to build a little Mage Tower next to the stone house. The Mage Tower was basically like a laboratory for mages to practice and develop spells.
When they bought the plans for the tower, it turned into a little scroll that just appeared floating in mid-air. When Murphy held the scroll, a 3D blueprint of the Mage tower appeared in his field of vision, and he could move it around by will.
After some playing with the build system, he picked a spot right next to the house and the mage tower magically grew out of the ground. It looked almost like it had always been there hiding under the earth and then when he tore the scroll for it to build, it just suddenly sprouted up.
Almost immediately afterwards, dozens of evolved Spawn with the Sinister Magic Arts skill swarmed into the building and next thing he knew, curses were flying everywhere. It seemed that the Spawns could use the building to practice magic too.
The only problem was, they didn’t have any real knowledge about how magic worked and basically only had one or two curse spells that were innate. In other words, they didn’t have to summon a book and just cast the spell by some kind of primal instinct.
It was only when these creatures first evolved and started casting innate spells that Murphy realised his innate spell Demon Spawn Summoning, could also be cast without the spell tome.
Anyway, they seemed to intuitively understand the purpose of the tower and used it. After that, Murphy decided to try something else he was curious about. If it’s possible to buy a pre-built building through the store, then was it possible to simply build the building instead?
That in mind, he unleashed his rarely used design skills from school, which he had now consecutively missed for more than 2 weeks, and designed a small-scale castle to replace the dingy little stone house.
It took him almost an entire game day, which was 96 hours. When he was finished, he called all the little Spawns over and started pointing at the drawing to explain how it worked and what was needed to building the thing it depicted.
Before he was halfway done with his explanation, one of the elders walked over and very impolitely snatched the drawings. Scrutinised them for a moment then started screaming and yelling at all the little Spawns and the other Elders.
He then started pointing at things on the drawing while trying to communicate something with Murphy. In the past few weeks of interacting with them, Murphy’s charades skills had blossomed to a whole new level, and it was almost as if he could read their little demonic minds.
He then pondered for a bit and tested another idea he’d had. He gathered up a group of Spawns and marched through the portal behind the house.
‘Ping! Murphy’s Luck has caused a Happy Accident. +1 Luck.’
Thanks to his gloves and the 1% chance to rub luck off, Murphy had managed to maintain a constant positive luck modifier. Every now and then he would have to throw some trashy object away that had received -60 odd luck from him discharging his gloves, but that was only occasional.
In fact, although 1% sounds small, you touch thousands of things a day. That’s one in every hundred touches. In the span of 24 hours, it’s not unusual for Misery Love Company to activate nearly 3 or 4 times without him needing to activate it himself.
That said, even with the constant positive luck modifier, Murphy’s Law was often random in the kind of accident it caused and more often than not it was negative. Thus, it was a constant battle to keep his luck modifier above 10 luck. Especially when big accidents happened, and he got -30 luck in a single hit.
Regardless, in this case, it seemed Murphy’s Law did him a solid. The portal behind his house sent him to part of a quest planet covered in trees with huge rocky boulders everywhere throughout the forest. Without reservation, he sent his Spawn out to start harvesting materials. After checking his status, he noticed his summon limit had been reached which gave credence to his earlier theory.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
When he walked back through the portal, even though the Spawn were still on the other side, his summon limit went back to 0. This meant he could send his Spawn out to raid Quest Planets and provided he wasn’t there, then as many as wanted could go.
The only problem with that was they tended to get up to all sorts of mischief without him around, and he wouldn’t be surprised if he got a system message later telling him his Spawns had just slain the king of a country and raided the entire place for loot.
That in mind, he put Chuckles, the spawn he’d spent the most time with and had instilled all his ideals into, in charge of the resource gatherers. Following this setup, all sorts of things started coming back through the portal. Logs and stones that were cut for building, monster corpses and even loot from various dungeons and bandit groups.
On Murphy’s side, the Elder started screaming and yelling and whipping all the younger spawns into action, and the stone house was ripped down like it was made of paper, as a swarm of Spawns poured over it.
The Elder started making little changes to Murphy’s drawings, and then the other Elder Spawn all got involved and the next thing he knew, Murphy was looking at a completely different but far more magnificent set of designs and the Spawn were all running around laying foundations and starting construction.
Seelie had simply remained silent and followed after Murphy for most of this process as her eyes lit up with a strange gleam and she seemed to be having all sorts of strange ideas.
After a few days, Murphy got a message that the Portal would randomly switch to a new location. He called all the Spawn back in and then waited till the portal switched. When it flashed a bright light indicating its change in location, Murphy went through with Chuckles and a handful of Spawn to investigate.
Unlike last time, the portal this time came out in the dark alleyway right in the centre of a huge city bustling with crowds of all sorts of strange races. He now truly felt that he was part of a ‘cosmic’ game, because the number of humans he saw around the place were less than 1 in 50.
Perhaps that figure would still probably be a generous estimation.
More interestingly, most of the races all seemed like creature races. Only a few races appeared to actually be humanoid in origin. There were all sorts of cat-like races, lizard races, slugs, three-headed humanoids with six arms and centaur looking creatures with four legs and a human torso.
There were even bear races that all suddenly felt a shiver run up their spines and simultaneously looked in the same direction as if some great and evil enemy of their race had just appeared.
Even bear races on the very outskirts of the city suddenly felt a strange sensation like death was standing right behind them and rearing back his scythe for the final strike.
Apart from them, no one even seemed to pay attention to Murphy or his Spawns. In fact, most of these creatures didn’t seem to think little demon like creatures were strange at all. If anything, Murphy was even more the odd one out than his summons were.
After some thought, he returned to their Domain and discussed this with Seelie. She insisted that they go back together and start looking around. Most especially she was interested in anything that could help their domain and was interested in looking for some quests that had large experience rewards to spend in the Player Store.
Murphy didn’t mind doing some questing, as they still had 6 days until they lost protection from the system.
As he was about to walk through the portal mist, he scrutinised the starry sky. It almost looked like some of those stars were brighter than before and were getting closer.
He wasn’t sure where the light came from in this place, because he could pretty much control how bright it was in his domain when he sat in his chair, and there was no sun or sky. Thanks to that strangeness, he was curious what all those other lights in this space were, if not stars.
Letting the thought sit for a moment, he decided not to worry about it and passed through to the Quest World.
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Murphy sure was being extra spacey today. I wanted it to be like a date! You know, go and visit some interesting things, have a romantic dinner and talk about things, and then finally he would ... I was a little too wishful in my thinking maybe?
Although there was no end of interesting things and I even helped Murphy spend the remainder of his experience points, which by the way, how the hell did he get 12,000 experience points anyway?
While he was gallivanting about on Newb Planet, I was completing quests endlessly to make sure I’d have enough to help him when we moved to the next realm. I thought I’d done pretty well and managed to accumulate nearly 3000 points, but when we started our domain he was so far ahead it was unreasonable!
How am I supposed to support him if I can’t pull my weight?! Haa...
Well, it doesn’t matter. The whole reason I dragged him to this world was for a date! The only problem was, and I had a feeling this would be the case from the beginning, Murphy is just too dense sometimes!
I’ve been dropping hints like a DJ dropping beats and he still somehow remains oblivious. If it weren’t for the fact that he literally never speaks to anyone else and that his body reacts to me, I might have thought he was deliberately putting on an act to put me off.
Actually, if I’m being honest, I still think that’s the case! It’s just he doesn’t seem to show any interest in boy-girl things at all, apart from reacting!
Sighh ... the only upside was that he brought all his cute little pets with him and they seemed to take a liking to me. They almost treated me like royalty, which was strange considering every other female that interacted with Murphy, even other races, were very much disliked by the cute little guys.
Which indecently, only made me fall more in love with them.
Chuckles especially was my favourite. He seemed to understand my feelings better than Murphy! Who I’d been dropping hints for since forever!
After some shopping, and having mostly spent all our money on study magic tomes, skill books and some things Murphy decided to buy for his little minions, we went searching around for quests. Normally, it’s not difficult to find a quest in these sorts of games in the DataStream.
It appeared things were a little different here though. Since basically everyone here was considered a player and was part of the game, quests were player created. It meant you could get all sorts of weird quests from cleaning a house to crusades and dragon slaying.
It also meant that running into a good quest with a good deal of experience as a reward was a matter of luck!
We were walking through a crowded street when it happened. It was the first time I’d ever seen Murphy’s special traits in action. He’d told me all about them, and I always kept them in mind in case I could think of a way for him to use them that would be helpful, but seeing it in action was something else altogether from what I’d imagined.
As we were walking, he got a system prompt and froze on the spot while suddenly grabbing my hand. I could tell he got a prompt because he always gets this twitch in his facial muscles like he was expecting something bad.
After stopping me by grabbing my hand, which I might add completely stupefied me seeing as it was the first time ever that he’d touched me of his own volition, he then started looking everywhere like he was searching for something.
It was almost as if he was reacting to the presence of his arch nemesis. Finally, his eyes focused in on a horse-like creature with a horn on its head at the very opposite end of the street. It was almost 500 metres away, but he still reacted like it was going to reach out and eat him.
He quickly pulled me into a side alley and pressed me up against the wall while worriedly looking out at the street. We were so close. I felt my heartbeat speeding up as I looked up at his handsome face, made only more handsome by how stern and serious he looked for a change.
It was almost just like back then! It was so rare to see him not being all dazed and spacey, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’d seen it. That time, when we first met, that was the first time I’d seen him look like this! I’m pretty sure it was also then that I fell in love with him.
The alleyway was quiet and secluded, and the only thing I could hear was our breathing. Our faces were close together, and he had my body pinned against the wall with his body pushing up against me as if he wanted us to merge into the wall and disappear, which in the very next moment, we did.
I couldn’t help but try to think back on his abilities. He’d said while he was training his creatures he’d found all sorts of weird skills and learnt tonnes of strange technics! I could only assume this was the one he very dejectedly said he learnt while running away from some kind of ... Unicorn Bounty Hunters?
It was some kind of concealment technique that allowed him to merge into the shadows and disappear. At the same time as we disappeared, Chuckles started making some quiet “rar rar” sounds to the other 23 Spawns. They all then started climbing buildings and getting up high out of the street.
They then started looking around like sentries as if they were keeping a watch out for something.
Every now and then I’d hear one from up above somewhere making some kind of sound. The more often he sounded out, the faster I felt Murphy’s heart beat get. Soon it was pounding! I felt like the only thing I could hear was his heart beating like a drum!
It was only at this point I realised that whatever was going on, now wasn’t the time for me to be dreamily staring at his face and imagining him finally kissing me! If it had him so worried, then it must be something incredibly dangerous.
I turned to look out to the street and saw that Unicorn creature standing at the entrance of the alleyway making snorting noises and looking around. Occasionally its pointy horn would let off a glow of light, and it would snort some more.
Finally, it turned around and started to walk back out of the alleyway. Just as it turned to leave, Murphy stepped back from the wall, breaking his concealment technique, pointing both his middle fingers towards the sky with his arms pointing towards the unicorn.
I saw those black gloves he always wear’s suddenly flash with light. The next moment part of the building that made up one side of the alleyway exploded. A huge ogre like creature was blown out from the building and smashed into the Unicorn.
The force of the impact sent the unicorn hurtling into the other side of the alley wall and seemed to knock it about. Just as it was preparing to get up and retaliate, a tiny little dwarf man with a big bushy red beard shot out from the now destroyed wall and smashed into the ogre again, making it once again smash into the unicorn.
“You try’na cheat me aye?! Think you can cheat ol’ Greggor you great lunk?! Im’a chop that stubbly little head’o yours off’ya big fat body!”
Murphy then turned around, grabbed me and started sprinting out of the other side of the alleyway. I was completely confused as to what had just happened. The Demon Spawn apparently weren’t though, as they risked their lives to rush in and drag the body of the unicorn out of the alley.
After they had dragged its mostly crushed body out onto the street, Murphy touched it, and a stream of beautiful and majestic mana poured out from the corpse into Murphy. After which, he simply touched it again sending it into his inventory.
He then started walking off nonchalantly as if nothing had happened, his little demon’s falling into step behind him like truly loyal underlings.
I was a little shaken by the sudden actions when he became alerted till now. I raced to catch up to him as he, in his normal dazed spacey manner, would look at something in a street stall for nearly a minute then start walking off again.
“Murphy, what just happened?”
As is usual of Murphy, his answer was succinct and to the point.
“ ... Unicorn Mercenary ... Since the accident with the Unicorn King’s son...”
A what and the what? I then pondered back to a story he told me where he felt like the system had set him up to assassinate a Unicorn. Then, later on, started getting attacked by them all over the place.
From what I understood, they just started turning up as he was hunting with his Spawn and accusing him of murdering the Unicorn King’s Son while he was doing the Game Tutorial. Apparently, the Unicorn King’s Son received so much trauma from the event that he refused to return to Newb Planet to complete the tutorial unless Murphy had been killed.
Thanks to that, he had apparently developed a sixth sense of sorts ... but it only worked with Unicorns.
After that, it was only one strange incident after another. I know Murphy was once an orphan, but I never realised how serious he took being an orphan. Every time we met and orphan and they asked him to do a quest for a pittance, he would gallantly race off to accomplish it.
The few times he had to decline a request for some reason, it looked like it was very literally killing him.
The more time I spent with him in the city, the more I would see him somehow subverting some terribly unlucky accident.
It turned out, it wasn’t only Unicorns he had a sixth sense for, but bad luck as well! Which from some old fairy tales I read are close to the same thing, seeing as according to ancient lore, unicorns consider themselves somewhat to be ‘luck police’ and hate when people play with luck. Something about subverting the natural order of the universe or something.
They hate demons and spells that can change people’s luck and they especially hate ‘leprechauns’ whatever those are, I’ve never found much information regarding them.
Anyway, by the time we’d spent nearly a full day exploring the city and completing odd quests here and there, I decided that any chance of this turning out like a date was ruined and opted to head back to our domain to keep getting ready for any oncoming attacks.
Before we left, Murphy decided to do just one more quest. It wasn’t one either of us found, but rather one that a few of his Spawns had overheard a conversation about and had dragged him towards. They seemed rather interested in the quest, so Murphy dotingly agreed to take it on with them.
I decided that I may as well join them because I needed the experience. At the rate things were going, I saw Murphy pulling away from me faster and faster, and I felt my slight inferiority complex starting to burn up.
It wasn’t a complex of being inferior to others like you might think. I didn’t care much about anyone else, it was a complex about being too inferior to be his woman. That was what burned me up the most and was my driving force to become, if not as strong as him, then strong enough that I wouldn’t need him to protect me!
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Seelie seemed very contemplative today. Like she was thinking about lots of hard things to think about. She also somehow seemed a little depressed about how the day was going. I thought she’d be happy that we got so much cool stuff for our domain but it seemed there was something else on her mind that completely eluded me.
I thought Chuckles had been trying to tell me what was going on with Seelie at one point but it turned out he was just telling jokes. Apparently, demon humour is weird because I didn’t really get it but I chuckled just so that he felt like I thought he was funny.
Instead of making the excited “Yah yah yah!” sounds he usually makes when he thinks I’m pleased with him, he simply palmed himself in the face like he had given up on some difficult puzzle. Clearly, my chuckle wasn’t convincing enough, and he’d realised his jokes weren’t very good.
I just gave him a consoling pat on the head then followed after the other little demons. It was shortly after that, they all disappeared into the city. When they came back, they were all telling me about some grand quest with lots and lots of loot and experience.
They seemed fanatical about doing this quest, and since it wasn’t every day that they wanted to go and do something other than rooting and looting, I acquiesced. After all, the happiness of my loyal minions was important to me too.
Chuckles led the way towards some magnificent looking garden filled with all sorts of strange bird people. When we arrived, I saw some of my minions making “rar rar yah!” sounds towards an old owl person.
The owl then made hooting sounds as if it actually understood the crazy talk of my summons and then turned to me and Seelie who’d just entered the garden.
The owl, and all the other birds, were huge! I called them bird ‘people’ but that’s only because they are sentient life. Really, they’re beasts with human-like intelligence, and in this case, bodies as big as humans.
The owl’s big eyes seemed to survey Seelie and I for a short moment and for a brief second it felt like it could see through my heart and read me like a book. It gave a loud ‘Hoot Hoot’, flapped its wings and waddled towards us.
“Young Human creature. These little fellows tell me that you are looking for a quest and would be the best applicant for our task. On our homeland, the floating island of Treesal, some ‘Hoot Hoot’ has summoned a demon.
“He lost control of it and it’s now rampaging uncontrollably about our island. We need someone with experience with demons, and these little ones claim to be demons summoned and controlled by you. If you truly are a Demon Tamer we beg of you to heed our request.”
Like I always do in these situations, I carefully considered my words and structured a well thought out statement to properly convey myself.
“ ... sure...”
They seemed to take the long minute of silence I left to consider my next words as the end of the discussions on my part, and the Owl and another Bird Person let out their huge wings, flapped up and grabbed both me and Seelie before flying off.
I was still trying to figure out how to broach the subject of a reward when I finally realised I was already in the sky outside the city and rapidly approaching a speck off in the distant skyline.
It was difficult to make it out until we were almost there because the sun was getting close to setting and was directly on the other side of the island meaning I spent most of the flight with my retina slowly burning away.
If not for my Please Sir constantly making my eyes stronger and helping regenerate them, I’d most likely be blind when we landed.
Seelie seemed to have some spell in her arsenal that allowed her to dim the sun’s direct light and protecting herself. I felt it was a little rude that she didn’t bother to cast it on me, but perhaps it was because she felt that the experience would make my eyesight stronger.
After considering this, it seemed that I’d forgotten about that prospect in my training. If I sat next to something producing a deafening sound or stared right into the sun all day, I could probably increase the durability of my senses and in turn, increase their sharpness.
I would have to consider later on how best to train my senses. I could tell that my sense of touch was very different than it once was. It was definitely stronger than ever, but at the same time, things like pain were somewhat muted.
When I rubbed my finger and thumb together my sense of touch was precise enough for me to feel each individual ridge of my fingerprint, but I sometimes ended up stabbing myself while eating and could only tell the degree of pointiness of the fork but not feel pain from it.
This was win-win in most situations, but there were some things I didn’t particularly like about it. For example, dandruff drove me absolutely nuts, and I often found myself sitting around picking it off my head with precision accuracy.
I ended up having to return to earth at one point and buying a shit load of specialised shampoo, which made my hair look so silky smooth I wouldn’t be surprised if people mistook me for a girl. It was probably only because I kept my hair so short that I never had that problem.
Anyway, I digress. The bird people dropped us on the island and then quickly fled into the distance where they could watch from the sky. Some of them were kind enough to give Chuckles and the other Spawn a ride up, so they all spread out around me protectively the moment we landed.
It was very quickly that we encountered the demon. Seeing as all the birds had fled, it was the only creature on the island and the only source of noise.
We encountered it after half an hour of walking around in the huge forest of trees on the top of the island, as it crashed through the forest making a mess in its wake.
The moment we made eye contact, the huge demon suddenly sat on its haunches while its tongue sat to the side of its mouth drooling slobber and spit everywhere. It seemed to review us with some curiosity and especially looked at me a few times.
The Demon creature wasn’t anything like the Spawns. It was actually something I’d read about, so I was somewhat familiar with it. The creature that sat in front of us was a dog.
More accurately, it was a Hell Hound. A vicious and violent creature that was born of pure brute strength. The Hell Hound in front of us was the size of a house at the very least, and its huge evil looking fangs protruded from its mouth like razor sharp spikes.
If it were angry, it would probably be incredibly frightening, but at the moment it was acting like a cute puppy and had the most adorable big puppy dog eyes while it looked at me. It almost looked like it was begging.
The Spawns reaction was completely different however. By now they had equipped themselves with all sorts of loot from various enterprises and were fitted out with shields armour and helmets all of which were amusingly too big and looked somewhat dorky on them.
When they saw the Hell Hound, they all started yelling excitedly and clanging their little black daggers on their shields or helmets as they started jumping everywhere.
Before I’d realised what was happening, they’d swarmed over the dog and were hanging off its pitch black fur or its big droopy dog ears seemingly trying to be sucked into its beautiful coat. It turned out my Spawn had a huge soft spot for monstrous, violent, fluffy dogs.
The dog didn’t even seem to acknowledge them as it stood up and approached us. Seelie backed away a few steps and summoned her spell tome in preparation to do battle.
She didn’t seem to understand, that against a creature like this, even if we all went out at full strength, the best we would achieve was a draw. Hell Hounds were especially good at killing magicians because their coat was like a big magic sponge.
The only way to kill one of these things with magic would be to pour more magic into it than its body could handle. Which is a shit tonne of magic. Even with my 140 odd mana, I would probably need ten of me to cause this beast to suffer Mana Overdraw.
I wasn’t too worried though. As soon as I saw this beast, I felt like I’d met a kindred spirit. As if we’d been buddies since forever. I suspected this was because of the Sinister Undying class which gave me a great affinity with the demon races, but it was also just something about the Hell Hound itself.
Hell Hounds were usually solitary creatures and only got together when they were in heat so they could mate. After that, they basically split up again and rampaged about the Demon Planes doing whatever the hell they wanted.
I felt like that was something like me. I wasn’t good at socialising either, so I immediately felt a bond to this huge solitary beast.
When it was only a few steps away from me, it sniffed a few times then tentatively reached out its big dog head the size of a small car. Feeling some compulsion from within, I too reached out my hand until my hand and his big wet nose made contact.
After which a huge spell formation appeared around us, and the system started throwing out prompts at me.
‘Ping! You have created a contract with the Demon Beast Race, Hell Hounds.’
‘Ping! New innate spell, Summon Hell Hound.’
‘Ping! You have completed the Quest, Save Treesal!’
‘Ping! You have completed the Hidden Quest, Morbid wants a Home!’
‘Ping! Summoning Magic has reached level 5.’
The moment the system prompts finished, Morbid, the massive Hell Hound, reared back and let out an excited howl. It then started playfully jumping around like an overexcited dog and wrecking trees left, right and centre.
Demon Spawn were thrown about like being shot from the back of a bucking bull, and the ground was shaking like an earthquake as Morbid jumped about the place in his jubilance.
“ ... Heel!...”
With a command from me, Morbid stopped jumping and rushed up to sit down in front of me obediently. I then reached out my hand again, and Morbid lay down to let me touch him.
I could now no longer control myself as I, much like the Spawns had, threw myself into his fluffy black coat and hugged him so fiercely it looked like I was afraid he’d escape. I rubbed and petted him for nearly an hour before Seelie finally reminded me that we had a quest we were supposed to have completed.
Morbid seemed a little unhappy that I stopped petting him but quickly cheered up when I climbed onto his back to ride him as my mount. The fact that Hell Hounds usually were so violent they hardly ever took a master was apparently completely lost on Morbid and I.
After helping a rather nervous Seelie up onto Morbid’s back, and all the Spawn jumping on too, we marched off towards the edge of the floating island to report the completion of the quest.
Unfortunately, when I had to send Morbid back to the Demon Plane for a little bit so we could leave the island, he became so upset he almost went on another rampage, and his howling wails could be heard even from the city which was only a tiny speck far off in the distance.
It was only because I made promises to feed him Unicorn meat and have the Spawns give him a belly rub that he somewhat reluctantly complied and stepped into the de-summoning spell pattern before disappearing in a flash of red light.
The rewards from the bird people were plentiful. For suppressing the demon, we got nearly 4000 experience points and some gold and magic crystals for crafting. We also received some strange seeds which I wasn’t too certain about, but it took me too long to question their purpose, and we were dropped off back in the city before I could voice myself.
It seemed to me that people were just too impatient these days. I’d only been thinking about my question for 10 minutes, and they’d already lost patience. Perhaps it’s because they’ve got little bird brains? Who knows, who am I to judge?
Finally, after a very long day, we returned home to our Domain. Where I immediately summoned my new best ... seeing the sly glance from Seelie as this thought crossed my mind, Morbid was immediately delegated to ‘second’ best friend status.
Appearing in his new home, Morbid got a little bit too excited and started running around sniffing everything. When he encountered the poison fog in the outer layers of the island, he discovered something even his robust endurance couldn’t fully handle.
Luckily I’d somewhat expected it and had the Spawn all pull him out. Even though I had some cure potions by this point in time, they still weren’t strong enough for a beast the size of Morbid. His first day in his new home and he immediately ate the rat poison and got sick.
Unfortunately, when dogs get sick one of two things generally happen. The first is, they barf. The second and slightly more troublesome, is explosive diarrhoea. It was rather disturbing watching Morbid going into the crouched position on his haunches and releasing his stomach’s displeasure.
If it were to be likened to anything, then it would be similar to forty firemen all grouping up together and turning their hoses on simultaneously for a few short seconds.
Take a moment now to imagine that scene, then replace the 40 fire hoses all grouped up with a big star shaped dog’s anus that could swallow a man whole if he was standing in the wrong spot when the said dog sat down.
Then try to imagine that the moment those hoses turned on, instead of clean water pouring out in a geyser-like fashion, it’s more akin to very sloppy mud and thickly chopped stew mixed together.
It was only a few seconds now and then when it happened, but almost 40 Spawn lives were lost in the resulting explosion of earth and flooding from the event. The squad of Spawns acting as emergency services had to dig huge ditch’s to drain everything off the island where it would just sort of ... float off into space.
I was amazed at the ingenuity shown by the Spawns when their lives had suddenly been endangered by the huge house sized Morbid. Even after this incident, the Spawns didn’t seem to hold those few deaths against Morbid and if anything looked at him with a sense of pity and comradery in having experienced similar pain and heartache when encountering the Smog.
It was only after all this happened that I remembered I could simply ‘will’ the smog to avoid Morbid. By then though, it was too late. Morbid had developed and innate fear of the smog and refused to go near it unless he absolutely had to. Even then, he would clearly be holding his breath as he approached.
Even after I taught him that the smog would stay away from him from now on, he remained cautious whenever he was near it.
It took an entire day, and cost 200 experience points to cause a full day of rain and wind before the smell and leftovers of Morbid’s encounter with the smog had been washed off the island. It was somewhat of a pity actually, because I discovered what the seeds did the next day.
Turned out the seeds grew into rapid growth trees. In just the span of a day the few seeds I’d planted had sprouted and grown to my head height. The most amusing part was, they gave us a sack of these seeds that appeared to have no end.
It was almost as if the sack magically created the seeds. I wasn’t sure though because even my level 6 identify couldn’t see through the attributes and status of the sack. Nonetheless, this was a boon for us in that we could use it to grow tonnes of trees in the green part of our domain, then use those trees for construction.
However, the reason I said it was a pity we’d washed away Morbid’s accident was because every time he dug up the ground and shat somewhere, it was like it had suddenly been cultivated into the soil of heaven. Everything we planted there would grow twice as fast as usual.
Thanks to that, I ended up teaching Morbid that he had to shit in a special box. There were then various unlucky Spawn that had the task of processing his shit into compost for my herb garden.
Morbid, being a big dog, often went potty at least once every 20 to 30 hours. Which was more than the little herb garden I’d started for my alchemy could handle. In the end, we discovered that selling the excess on the Quest Planet raked us in a fortune.
Alchemists were clawing each other’s eyes out and bludgeoning one another to death with beakers and cauldrons to try and get our compost. Turns out, Hell Hound shit is like the A grade compost for magical herbs and plants.
The only people more excited about it than alchemists were people from plant-like races ... I didn’t ask what they did with it and chose to ignore the hungry looks in their eyes whenever we were visiting the planet.