-Muted Infinity-

-A Cruel World: Ch4-

An eagle cawed as the sun crested the distant mountains in the horizon, signaling the start of a fresh day for the world below. Its warm rays spilt over the frost covered peaks, painting them gold, as the light raced across the land, like a child running to a lost friend they had missed.

Far above, wispy clouds of the purest white curled around one another, as though pulling one another into a soft puffy hug, in the deep blue ocean of the sky.

Birds of every color sang in a soft choir as they flew through the air, while leaves of every green danced in the wind behind them.

It was a beautiful morning… But it was fake.

It was all fake! The sun was fake! The wind was fake! The clouds were fake! The sky was fake! The birds were fake! It was all fake!

Lucy hated it! It made her want to throw up!

But what she hated even more was how real it all was! She could dash her head across the hard stone of those distant mountains and that would be it. Period. Dead. Gone. No respawn, no retry, just instant death.

REAL death.

Lucy scowled at the happy sun, but kept her head down, and continued her walk down the empty street.

It had been three days. Three days since they were all locked in this death simulation. Three days since they started to wait for the authorities, or literally anyone outside, to catch wind of what had happened and break them out.

Three days of NOTHING!

Three days of gnawing hunger, as the food portions handed out at the sharing booths continued to get smaller

Three days of continuously shrinking hope.

Three days of more and more players deciding they’d rather take their chances in the world beyond, than starve to death at spawn.

…it was about time she did the same.

-Muted Infinity-

The walls around spawn matched the rest of the architecture to a T. It was ramshackle and unimpressive, but got the job done. The thick and uneven wooden logs stuck out from the ground rising well over her head. They weren’t all the same length, they weren’t all the same size, they weren’t even all the same type of wood, but it kept out the things that went bump in the night, and that was good enough for the poor souls who still called spawn home.

Over the last few days, the guilds who were prominent in the first game began to slowly reform out of necessity, experienced players banding together with their old friends for better odds at survival. And while the majority of those had already left spawn, a number of them had stuck nearby.

The Vanguard guild was one of these, and word had gotten out that they were preparing an expedition to the east, one that would pass by “Neu Roma”, the mythical “second city” that existed outside of spawn’s walls.

The majority of players that lived in spawn were those not brave enough to leave the walls, and as such had only heard about the city in passing, from the explorers, mappers, and guilds who came back to temporarily seek shelter. And like all things that people didn’t fully understand, rumors and stories ran rampant. Many hoped it was a place with more opportunity than Spawn, with work and food. Quite a number wanted to go, but few were brave enough to leave the walls alone.

And so the rumors stewed about traders coming back with metal equipment to sell at absurd prices, and entire guilds setting out in search of better gear.

As Lucy came up upon the walls, her target came into sight- a large group of people congregating in front of the heavy wooden gates. At the front of the crowd was a small group of five Vanguard members, three male and two female. They didn’t have a uniform, or any set of symbol on them that marked them as part of the guild, but the fact they actually had rudimentary armor and gear made it obvious enough.

Separated from the soldiers by ten~ish feet, was a mass of twenty or so players, most of which were still wearing the starting gear- nothing more than a white shirt and black shorts. Some had rudimentary weapons, such as basic wooden clubs, or impromptu shivs, but the majority only had the clothes on their backs.

Lucy gave the civilians a questioning look as she stepped past them and made her way towards the guild members.

“Excuse me?” She waved her hand to try and catch their attention. “I heard about an expedition?”

The group turned to look at her, and the closest one, a boy with bright red hair scowled at her. “Oh great, another bumbling tag along.”

“Excuse me?” Lucy asked, taken aback.

“Let me guess,” The boy continued, “You heard a rumor about the expedition, and you want us to escort you across the unmapped wilderness, keeping you from getting lost, risking our lives to protect you from mobs, and splitting out supplies with you, all without being able to pay a dime, or contribute anything constructive at all?”

Lucy stepped back defensively. At least she knew now why all the others were staying so far away.

“Oh, don’t be an ass, Mark.” The large man in the middle of the group with the username [Caesar] laughed and slapped his comrade on the back, before giving him a friendly shove out of the way.

He was easily six feet tall, and had an avatar that passed over the more common player themes, such as exotic hair and eye colors, in favor of looking like something off the cover of a fashion magazine. He had golden blond hair that hung to his neck, two piercing blue eyes, a pronounced jaw, and a short but sharp beard that clung to his cheeks; starting as the same gold as his hair at the stop of his sideburns, before slowly fading into a onyx black the further south it crawled.

He was wearing thick hard leather padding that must have weighed a ton, with a greatsword strapped to his back that was covered in a bundle of cloth. And now that her attention had been drawn to it, she couldn’t help but notice that the rest of the group had metal weapons, which meant either they’d been to Roma before, or he knew some powerful people. Because despite Douglas’ speech about his claim to fame, she hadn’t seen so much as a hint of anything metallic at spawn in the past three days.

“Besides, this one at least looks like she’s been outside the walls.” He nodded at the sword on Lucy’s hip. “You know how to use that blade?”

Lucy’s eyes glanced down to the white shortsword she’d managed to make with the materials she’d kept from the boars. [Bone Blade].

“Kinda?” Lucy scratched the back of her neck. “I’ve killed some beasts before, and have been practicing since, well, this,” she gestured to the general world around them, “happened.”

There was a sound as Mark muttered something under his breath, but Caesar smacked him on the back of the head, he then turned and extended a hand to Lucy, giving her a bright smile.

“I’m Lieutenant Caesar, commander of this squad.” He said as he shook her hand. “If you want to tag along, then by all means please do. With an escort group five times our number, I’ll take any help I can to protect them.”

“Thank you! Er-” Lucy beamed, before stumbling and snapping a really rough salute. “Thank you, Lieutenant sir!”

The Lieutenant cracked a smile and laughed.

“Please.” He said. “Just call me Caesar.”

-Muted Infinity-

[!FEAT UNLOCKED!]

[Journey Of A Thousand Steps: Walk A Thousand Steps!]

[10% reduced stamina cost for walking]

[unlocked recipe: Traveler's Shoes]

[Next Feat: Journey Of A Thousand Miles]

Traveling with the Vanguard was fascinating, and a much different experience than traveling with Rue.

The Vanguard was slow but professional, they double checked their supplies, and triple checked their equipment. They lead the group of civilians deliberately and methodically, only stopping for breaks at timed intervals, and sticking to the route they’d planned on their map, without deviation.

Traveling with Rubie had been like riding the wind, wandering off course on a whim to go and see something, stopping to check out whatever piqued the redhead’s interest, and taking breaks whenever they felt like it.

Her short journey with Rue was different at its core, of course, because they hadn’t had a map, a destination, or any equipment to speak of, with their only goal being to loosely follow a herd of animals down the river. And they had been playing a game for fun- not a stressful life or death march through dangerous territory with unarmed civilians. But Lucy had a sneaking suspicion that even if Rue were leading this exact same mission, it would have been a very different tone.

…Though, she supposed that you wouldn’t want a “different tone” for this kind of mission.

“Keep your eyes open, men!” Caesar shouted as he marched forward, leading from the front of the group, with his squad’s navigator being the only member near him. “We’ll be hitting the quarter-way mark in a few minutes, and while we haven't been attacked yet, we can’t get complacent!”

Lucy could completely understand why he had been picked as the leader of this squad, he genuinely acted like a leader, rather than just a gamer playing a part. He was charismatic, confident, and tried to keep morale up, while still being strict when he needed to.

Lucy, Caesar, Mark, and the squad member with the map, were in the front of the caravan, with the last two of Caesar’s men at the back of the civilian group, to protect their rear.

“Sooo, Lieutenant?” Lucy asked in an attempt to break the ice. “What’s up with the rank?”

“Well, there’s a reason we were the strongest guild in the original game.” Caesar said, never taking his eyes off the route in front of them. “Winter, the founder of the Vanguard, is ex-military. So when she created it, she structured it with ranks and the like. It was through her leadership that we were able to be such a powerful force, even though we were small. Our string of victories brought us notoriety, and eventually snowballed until we were one of the largest guilds in the game. Definitely the largest combat based guild."

“Really?”

“Yup.” He smiled as old memories swam in his head. “We were always one of the focal points of any major conflict. The Black Crusade, the Frost War, the Battle of Flower Hill. At the height of our power, we took control of spawn, and managed to hold it for five whole months before we were forced out by a giant coalition- which was still the record time when the servers shut down. And by the end of the game, we had basically turned into the de-facto law of a fifth of the map. Some of the other guilds like the Merchants guild may have had more indirect influence, but no one could match us physically.”

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Lucy hummed and scratched her chin. “You must have been with them a long time to be a part of all that.”

“I joined relatively early on, back when the guild only had 20 or so players.”

“So then why are you just a Lieutenant? Aren't there higher ranks?”

“Because this!” He swept an arm out and gestured to the world. “Is where I belong. On the front lines, leading the charge! In the thick of the action!”

“And the whole… death thing, doesn't that change things?” She tailed off, eyeing him meaningly.

Caesar just shrugged with a bemused laugh. “I didn’t do a lot of dying in the last game, and I don’t plan on picking up the habit again anytime soon.”

Lucy frowned and looked out into the distance. Caesar must have spent a lot of time in the original LiT if he was that confident in his skills.

“And the red ghost behind you, I happen to recognise from the original LiT. Her, and her lot, are a lot of things, but they sure as Hell aren't engineers, they ain’t replicating my mill anytime soon. They’re also not dumb enough to attack a group that’s way better equipped than them, which I’ll be by the time she leads them back here to me.”

She’d been mulling over Douglas’ words from her initial trip to Roma. He seemed to recognize Rubie from the original game, and seemed to know what guild she was in.

If Caesar really had been playing the game for as long as he said, then maybe he-

“Stingers! On our six!”

A shout cut off her train of thought. Lucy’s head whipped around towards the group’s right side, and gasped.

Slowly creeping out of a large patch of grass was what could only be described as any arachnophobe’s worst nightmare. Giant black spiders with the tail of a scorpion, completely covered in dark chitinous armor that ran down their abnormally long legs before sharpening into spear-like tips. There were seven of them, each easily the size of a large dog.

“And BiteFlights as well.” Caesar hummed, and Lucy followed his gaze to the sky, where a small flock of bird-like creatures was beginning to circle above them.

He turned to Liz and gave her a reassuring nod. “Well kid, guess it’s time to see what you’re made of.” He said as he smirked and walked away, drawing his sword from his back and giving it a lackadaisical warm up spin.

“Look alive, men! Remember, these bastards might hit hard, but their armor is relatively weak, one good stab to the head should put them down. Time your strikes, avoid getting flanked, and we’ll be fine.” Caesar shouted to his squad, as they fell into formation behind him- with the navigator staying back to protect the civilian convoy.

Lucy drew her sword with clammy hands and quickly jogged to catch up with the squad, clenching the handle tight and forcibly pushing the thoughts of what would happen if this fight went wrong from her mind.

Briefly, the thought of staying back with the navigator entered her mind, but she quickly dismissed it. She, quite frankly, didn’t know anything about fighting, and being near the group of armed people who knew what they were doing was easily the best bet for survival.

…Besides, she’d promised to help. She couldn’t back out on that.

The squad fanned out with a practiced ease as they approached the monsters, and Lucy, unsure of what to do, haphazardly attached herself towards the edge of the line, earning her an irritated glare from Mark.

She ignored the look, and instead watched as the rest of the group unsheathed their weapons. Two, including Mark, had a stereotypical sword and shield combo, one had a wooden spear. All of the weapons had metal blades. They weren’t the prettiest things, somewhat lumpy and without any shine, but they were all metal.

At least, until Caesar pulled cloth covering off his sword, causing Lucy to gawk. It was a huge rock that had been filed down to a somewhat sharp point along its edge, with a tree branch as thick as her wrist stabbed into the base; she wasn’t even sure if the thing could be considered a “sword” by definition. It was almost as large as she was tall, and while she’d obviously seen similarly oversized things in other games, actually using something that big without an in-game assist or attack system had to be incredibly clunky.

She didn’t have time to contemplate for long, before one of the spider-like beasts let out a shrill screech, like nails on a chalkboard that had Lucy cringing, and things descended into chaos.

The spiders lept like demonic cats at the group, with a speed that betrayed their size, and the squad charged forward to meet them, blocking or sliding under the jagged claws as they came down- one of them even managing to catch a spider on the end of his spear as it fell upon him.

Lucy hesitated, a bead of sweat dripping down her neck, her sword held out stiffly in front of her, feet frozen to the ground as her eyes darted around the scene in front of her, her mind whirling as she tried to figure out what she should do.

But she couldn’t find an opening, everything was constantly moving, the situation always changing.

One moment a soldier was bracing himself behind his shield as serrated claws smashed into it, threatening to break through the ramshackle wood. She took a half step to help, but then they pivoted, almost spinning in place causing the monster to fall forward unbalanced, and letting them get a good swing at its side.

On the other side of the fight, the man with the spear had pushed the dead spider off him and gotten to his feet, but was quickly beset by another. He began desperately batting away the creature’s claws with the wooden staff of the spear, but when the beast stabbed its stinger forward he had to raise the spear overhead to block it, leaving him open for a claw to stab into his shoulder.

Panicking at the sight of blood, Lucy flinched back and almost fumbled her sword. But before she could muster the courage to step forward, Caesar swooped in, easily cleaving through the overstretched limb by sheer brute force, then riding the weight of his swing to pivot back around and block an incoming strike with his sword, using the oversized blade with the same effectiveness you would a shield.

There was too much happening! How was she supposed to keep up?!

A loud cry from above snapped her attention upwards.

An angry black cloud of dark shapes was soaring across the sky like a school of fish in the ocean, expanding, contracting, and swooping every which way. Then the cloud paused, all the shapes that made it up seeming to freeze in place, blotting out a significant chunk of the sky.

Then they dove.

Twenty or so birds doesn’t sound like a lot until they’re all dive bombing towards you at once, and each is the size of an eagle.

Harkening back to that one time she played a baseball simulator, Lucy reared back and swung her sword like a bat at the first bird to reach her, but it easily swerved out of the way, raking its talons across her shoulder as it flew past.

A second bird crashed into her at full speed, its claws digging into her gut like small daggers, causing her to cry out in pain as she toppled to the ground.

The third bird was forced to break off its dive at her, peeling off to the side, lest it skewed itself on her hastily raised blade.

Wincing in pain, she quickly scrambled back to her feet, sword at the ready again. But with her knocked to the ground, most of the birds had broken off of their dive to go and pester the rest of the group.

Key word being most.

A shrill cry from behind her was enough of a warning to dive to the side, narrowly avoiding the original bird that she’d taken a swing at as it took another run at her

This close she could get a better look at the monster.

It resembled a large black crow, with a white underbelly, and a bone-like mask on its face that extended into a sharp beak. It had three long tail feathers that trailed behind it, and sharp talons on its feet, each easily as long as her finger, and coated with blood… her blood.

It let out another cry as it began circling her like a hunter herding its prey.

Vaguely, an old quote about ‘the sharks of the sky’ came to mind, but she didn’t have time to remember it fully before the bird flew at her again. She swung her sword at it, but just like last time it easily swerved out of the way, nicking her side as it passed.

She swung at it again, but still, same result. The thing seemed content to slowly bleed her out, a death by a thousand cuts as they say.

The bird- err, the “BiteFlight(?)”, she’d heard Caesar call it? Took to the sky, flying much higher than it had any other time during the fight.

For a moment she thought it was running away, before it turned and dove at her, its height allowing it to pick up a frankly absurd amount of speed.

An idea came to her mind, it was a stupid and poorly thought out idea, but it was all she really had.

Letting out a (admittedly rather pathetic) war cry, she ran towards it as it dove. The monster’s eyes widened in simulated surprise, but with the speed they were barreling towards each other at, even something as fast as it didn’t have the room to dodge. Lucy swung her sword above her, easily cutting through the bird’s wing and severing the limb near the base.

The monster let out a shriek as it crashed to the ground, where it flailed about helplessly for several seconds before going limp.

“Got you!” Lucy smirked between deep breaths, feeling far too much vindication at besting a bird.

Unfortunately her moment of triumph didn’t last long before something hard and sharp smashed into her back. Lucy cried out as pain lanced up her spine like molten iron rods, and she was sent tumbling into the ground.

Acting on pure instinct and memories of what she’d seen in movies, she bit down on the pain as best she could and rolled away from where she landed, avoiding a sharp claw the size of her arm by a scant inch.

But as she rolled over, and her view changed from nothing but grass to something actually useful, she froze. Any angry remark she may have had, died on her lips as a fearful whimper.

Lucy laid on her back, sprawled out on the ground, with the thick grass stinging as it pressed against the cut on her back. Above her loomed one of the Spider-things that had attacked the group, and it was nastier, more disgusting, and infinitely scarier up close.

Eight red eyes stared unblinkingly down at her with nothing but hate, four fangs clicked and let out a hissing noise as a viscous white liquid began to drool from its mouth. The larger fangs on the outside, meant to dig into flesh and hold prey in place, while the smaller inner ones tore the prey apart to eat piece by bloody piece, unaware and uncaring if its food was still alive.

Eight long legs ended in serrated blades as large as her sword, one of which was buried half a foot into the ground, right next to her head. And raised high in the air above the beast, gleaming in the sunlight as venom dripped from its pointed tip like a leaky faucet, was the thing's tail.

For a second, it waved lazily back & forth in the wind, before suddenly freezing in place. Lucy barely had a moment to process, before it struck at her like a compressed spring.

Frantically Lucy brought her sword up, and managed to clumsily knock the stinger aside with the flat of her blade through more luck than genuine skill. The tail deflected upwards, and buried into the ground above her head. The Spider let out a hiss of anger and reeled back as it raised its claws above her- far more than she could ever hope to block with one measly blade.

But before it could stomp down and end her, something crashed into the beast’s side, breaking open its chitinous armor with a sickening crunch, and cutting deep into flesh. The sheer force of the hit hurled the thing up and off of Lucy, revealing the world beyond.

Caesar spun with the weight of his absurd weapon, pivoting with his legs to build up even more speed as he turned back around. The “sword’s” arc swerved upwards to meet the outstretched claw of a second spider mid swing, and snapped it in half like a twig. The huge sword could only continue up for so long, however, before it was stopped by the weight of its own size. But Caesar didn’t fight gravity like another swordsman would, instead he embraced it, using it to enhance the power of his own swing as he brought his weapon down like a hammer.

A similar strike with a normal sword would have been devastating, but with Caesar’s blade it was devastating. The spider wasn’t just killed, it was crushed, the entire front third of its body, just gone- the legs twitching sporadically at its sides being the only evidence that it even existed.

Caesar used the brief break in fighting to turn and give her a nod as she pulled herself to her feet, though what he was impressed at was beyond her. Was it the fact that she wasn’t as bad as he’d anticipated? Or the fact that, despite being bad, she was still willing to get back to her feet? Or maybe he was just impressed she hadn’t died yet.

…or maybe he wasn’t impressed at all, and was just trying to keep her morale up, who could say?

Caesar launched himself back into the fray, and Lucy had the question she’d asked herself when she first saw him, answered. How did Caesar fight with such an obscenely large sword?

He didn’t.

He danced with it.

The squad commander ripped his way through the fight like a whirlwind of blades, turning with the weight of his sword and using it to strike with devastating effect. One swing bled into another, and then another, allowing him to strike just as fast as his other squad members who were using “normal” weapons.

Lucy watched in awe as Caesar severed the tail of one spider, and cut off the front legs of another in a single swing. Then he kicked himself backwards, his sword coming up to rest its handle on his shoulder, the residual force of the swing sliding him even further, and out of the range of a claw swipe. Then, almost seemingly just because he could, he reached out and snagged a smaller BightFlight out of the air, and slammed it into the length of this sword with enough force for it to explode into a cloud of black feathers.

This was the level of someone who’d spent the previous decade and a half in the original LiT.

This was the level you needed to be at to survive.

…This was how far of a gap Lucy had in front of her.

For a moment, a deep feeling of despair washed over her. She’d known, intrinsically, that people who’d played these types of games and had experience in this type of combat, would have a huge leg up on her, but actually having it visualized in front of her made it almost laughable.

How? How was she supposed to catch up with this? How was she supposed to catch up, when even the slightest fumble or rookie mistake would end with her as a smear at the bottom of some cliff?

But the feeling only lasted for a moment, before she was forced to dodge another bird.

Lucy shook her head, raised her battered and blunt blade, pushed those thoughts as far back as she could, and charged back into the fight.

This world was made to challenge people on the level of Caesar. She didn’t have time for self-deprecating doubt, that would only get her killed, she needed to catch up.

She needed to catch up, or die.

-End Chapter-