It isn’t long until they get in the general vicinity, and Julie sets up an array to avoid the vehicle being discovered before they all head over to the area around the dungeon. They can hear King before they can see them, and Julie hands out amulets to everyone, miniaturized versions of the array that makes it hard to notice you. Kang, the newest addition to the group seems terribly confused, but copies everyone in putting it on.
While someone who is already focused on you won’t stop being able to see you, it makes it quite hard to spot you in the first place unless you’re in a completely empty area, such as an arena. They recon the area the King guild is in and then start following Julie around.
Every few steps, she uses a long stick to measure out a certain distance before stabbing a knife into the ground. The walk all the way around King, stabbing knives every seven feet or so into the ground.
Once the array is placed, Julie lets out the most evil grin Sen has ever seen on her face, then channels some energy into her bracelet. Instantly the group starts to hear screams. Looking over to the King guild while staying out of the array’s effect, they see them for some reason slaughtering each other, while others simply run away from everyone else. Kang jumps at the noise, before trying to pretend like he hadn’t.
“So what exactly does this array do?” Sen asks.
“It turns anyone other than you into your worst fear, them magnifies the fear you feel by around tenfold, along with a confusion and enrage effect. Basically, you’re driven to try and kill anything you see as your fear rather than just run, and with your muddled consciousness, you can’t realize that you’ve been subjected to an illusion.”
Sen blanches. That sounds absolutely horrific. As the first of the King guild escape out of the array, the group is in position to kill them, as they’re all looking back to see if the “monsters” are chasing them. The group continues to go around the perimeter, killing anyone who escapes before they can try and help out their allies, but most of them die to each other.
Once they’re mostly collapsed, Julie hands out bracelets that will protect them from being affected, and they head into the array, finishing off anyone still alive. As the group approaches, the King members charge at them like they’re monsters, which amuses Sen.
Once they’ve finished everyone off, they leave a big sign they’d brought for this purpose, saying “Remove the bounty” and signed by everyone in the group. After the slaughter comes some monotonous work. They go around to each of the knives, and bury them along with a few D rank cores in order to power the array enough to affect the next thousand people to walk into the area.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
They’re going to hide the array knives, and let the array torment anyone who enters the area. Xue looks a little uncomfortable making the equivalent of a nuclear dump site, but the rest of the group is vengeful enough to enjoy the monotonous work.
Once they’re done, they enter the dungeon for their first run of the day. Once they’ve finished with the dungeon, they all go back to the car, and send it back to Falan before fast traveling ahead of it.
They all log out, and Sen decides to go on the public King forums. He may not have access to the private ones, but at least he’ll get to enjoy some of the responses. He logs onto the forum for the Falan region, and sees a thread stickied at the top.
There are a couple of the King members who had been streaming their gameplay as they were sitting around guarding the dungeon, and interestingly the stream actually shows what they saw, and not what was really there. So the different streams had different monsters for each person. One person has odd speedy zombie like creatures, one is actually characters from horror movies, and the one Sen dislikes the most is filled with giant millipedes.
People have speculated that it is an illusion of some kind, and eventually the thread turns into pure rage against Sen’s group as one of the members posts a screenshot of the sign they have left at the scene.
It turns out that one of the people who exited the dungeon after Sen’s group had left saw the sign after being the sole survivor from his group. The thread is filled with rage, and Sen enjoys it for a bit before logging on, going to help Julie with making yet more knives, as he expects they’re going to have to do this a few times before they properly get the message.
The rest of the week until the next round of the tournament is filled with hunting down groups of King in between running their dungeons, as King has never figured out how to remove the array around the ogre dungeon and has transitioned into hunting C rank mobs in the open.
Sen’s group will simply abuse the amulets that help them avoid notice, wait for the group to engage a C ranked monster, then kill the group and steal the monster. Eventually some of the groups stop wearing their armbands signifying them as being from King, but Sen and the group have killed them so many times that they recognize them at this point.
The bounty on the group only grows though, and they start to run into groups of incompetent bounty hunters. They start always making sure to leave the city in one of the automated vehicles so as to not be seen as they left the city, and people from the Ares guild have started joking about killing them for the bounty.
The Epic Skills group even tries to kill them at one point, but they escape quickly with their amulets of diversion, and then set up another massive array to slaughter everyone in the surrounding area of the twisting tiger dungeon, then threaten to repeat the act if they continue hostilities.
With no one but small groups and individuals hunting them, they are quite carefree, their nuclear option of large scale arrays dissuading any of the large guilds from trying for the bounty. At this point, some of the larger guilds start to research counters for the large illusion arrays, but Julie simply does her own research, and discovers an array that makes giant pillars of fire erupt from under anyone standing in the array. While it takes even more setup to make, the group is happy to help out in order to have a final option.
A downside of this is that many of the larger groups start to see the use for arrays in controlling a dungeon area, and they begin to set them up, including the Ares and Epic Skillz teams near Falan, though the groups agreement with the two allows them to have amulets to bypass them whenever they go to enter the dungeons. Eventually, the King guild rescinds their bounty, but their hatred for the group doesn’t fade at all.
Meanwhile, Kang has been bragging across every forum in existence how much he’s been pwning the King guild, and somehow manages to make the King guild hate him more than anyone else in the group.