“I don’t see your name on it,” Maxi replied to the heavy metal beefcake who could send her to the resurrection chair with one well-placed fist. It was funny to think that casual murder didn’t have much of a penalty when resurrection chairs were a thing. While the Company did have some strict PVP rules regarding permadeath, there was nothing to stop him from taking her head off in front of all the gawkers, who were so quiet she could have heard a mouse skitter across the floor.
Much to her surprise, and most likely everyone else's, he said, “You’re the one who found the weakness on that suit.”
“That’s me,” Maxi said with a grin.
The mail clerk boy came running back with a pad of yellow post-it notes. His face went pale when he saw the man squared off with Maxi. He sheepishly slid the notes to Maxi, and hissed something that came out somewhere in between a plea for her to leave and panic. Maxi nonchalantly slipped the item in the front pocket of her shirt and picked a piece of lint off the incredible bulk’s armor.
“I got some rollers in my office if you need them,” Maxi said, and turned to go. The man grabbed her arm. He was strong. It felt like she was caught in a press, but she didn’t let the pain register on her face.
The guy said, “You did us a solid.”
He let her go and turned to the mail clerk, who could barely stammer, “May I help you?”
I guess I can strike Meathook off the suspect list, Maxi thought, as she walked past the bewildered onlookers and saw Yancy holding a package. He gave her a sly smile.
“Yancy, what’s up? How was the quest?” Maxi said, as if nothing had happened.
“You know who that was?” Yancy whispered conspiratorially.
“Meathook, Beefcake, Rex. You know, I don’t think I caught his name,” Maxi said out loud, as if nothing were amiss. She started toward the elevators, and Yancy followed.
“He’s one of the Power Twelve,” Yancy said. “His name is Sledge, and his impatience is legendary.”
“He was nice to me.”
“Just don’t push it. Not if you value your life,” Yancy said.
“Relax,” Maxi said. “I've got the resurrection chair.”
“No,” Yancy said and squeezed her arm. His eyes turned black and his voice deepened. “You can’t take risks with your life. You cannot permadie.”
His grip dug into her arm. Her arm flared in pain. “You’re hurting me,” She said.
His eyes went back to their normal color. “The chair doesn’t cover all the ways you can die. Not to mention if he’d sent you to the resurrection chair, the janitorial fee is based on your level. That would put you in debt, which would affect your job performance.”
What Yancy was saying was true, and probably even more so for a lower-level player. Debt was a nasty cycle that was hard to break. Also, the PVP rules around permadeath were more to prevent a power player permakillling another player. However, accidents happen. Sufficient damage taken from one hit was not resurrectable. The only reason she was still alive after her confrontation with the raid boss was they were restricted by damage-mitigation protocols that reduced their damage to just under the resurrection limit, which was some exponent of a player’s life total. Even a mundane attack that caused damage to a certain threshold beyond her life total would make her unrevivable when she wasn’t in a damage restriction zone.
From what Maxi understood, raid bosses used to wipe out low-level players in droves with no resurrection possibility, so regulations were put in place to prevent them from just sending something so OP that it was more like a corporate takeover. At least now, each company was given a chance to defend itself from others wanting a piece of their pie. She had also learned that raids were only allowed every other month.
They would have the month off from the daily struggle for survival, which gave her about a month to figure out which one of the Power Twelve was out to kill her. Since the damage mitigation protocols only affected the boss during the raid, she could see why the raid was the perfect place to do her in. A member of the Power Twelve could just incinerate her and say that Maxi was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Considering that Maxi had shown a proclivity to jump into the fray, it would have been easy to stage an accident.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
While going off grid had gotten her out of this raid, she was pretty sure that tactic wouldn’t work for the next one, even with her uncle pulling some strings on her behalf. There was also the fact that the concept of crime didn’t exist in the Company as it generally did on Earth. It was playing by a separate set of rules.
There weren’t any prisons or jails, just rewards and penalties. Behavior that the company encouraged was rewarded and behavior they didn’t want was penalized with loss of credit, experience, and even items. Maxi wasn’t sure how she felt about this particular brand of justice system, considering that a person’s urge to disintegrate her could be reduced to a simple equation of the penalty being worth her death.
And on the topic of who wanted her dead, she didn’t have the slightest clue. She had figured it would be easy by finding out which member of the Power Twelve was on her Purple Team in the last raid assignment. However, there were none. They were all on other teams. Which meant that if someone had planned to end her in a friendly fire incident, it would have been carried out by someone working for them.
It did give her some leads, though. Lo had analyzed the damage logs of all the players and found that only seven players on the Purple Team were capable of one-shotting her into oblivion without relying on a critical or special item, which was still a possibility. Which suggested to Maxi that at least one of the seven was working with the Power Twelve seeking to undermine the Company. Of course, it could have also been none of the seven. A lower-level player with a power item could one shot her as well, and there was no way to tell the loadout of each person on the raid.
“You’re doing it again. I told you not to risk your life.” Yancy yelled at her while his eyes went black, and Maxi realized she was about to call the Power Twelve elevator. She shrugged and pressed the button. She knew that she was walking the line by becoming a nuisance, but what other way did she have to meet them all in the next month? Not to mention Yancy was being a bit creepy.
The elevator opened, and she stepped inside. Yancy tilted his head to the side as the elevator door shut and gave her a cold stare. She half expected the Tier 1 elevator to smell like flowers, and have servants fanning with palm branches, peeling grapes, and serving wine, but it was just like any of the other elevators – bad 80s Vegas-style casino. She called Bobby’s coordinates left in the instructions of his quest, and the elevator complied.
The door opened to yet another post-apocalyptic office landscape. If divine beings did take interest in the lives of mere mortals, this would be the time they all take a drink. However, whatever had happened here was in the distant past. The corpses sprawled from cubicles were nothing more than skeletons. The papers littering the floor were yellowed with age. There were cobwebs and a thick coating of dust on everything.
Still, she pulled out her sword and scanned the area, keeping her ears open for any noise. But there wasn’t any sound. No nature reclaiming the building, no hum of a computer or whir of an HVAC unit. It was completely silent and still.
She examined the calendar on the nearest desk to check if she was still in her world and, sure enough, the dating system was all wackadoodle, though she supposed the calendar she had grown up with was probably weird to her parents at first.
She was about to go back, fearing that the timestream differences would put her back several more weeks, when she noticed that her glasses were still connected to the network. At least there was WiFi in this world.
“Terry,” she asked. “Where am I?”
“You are in an office building. Late Luna-Trigond Century, judging from the equipment and clothing styles,” Terry cheerily said in her Bluetooth headphones.
“Okay, Terry, I’m not wikimultiverse, and kind of just stumbled across this recently, so I’m going to need a little more information than that.”
“My apologies. Usually, employees with your clearance level get annoyed if I’m too basic.”
“Clearance level? Like top secret or something?”
“Sort of'. Accepting Lo Key’s quest has granted you access to certain topics not privy to every employee. I trust that you know the penalty for divulging information to someone not in your–”
“Yeah, yeah, termination. So what time is it back on the Earth?”
“A fraction of a second after you left. This timestream is much faster than Earth’s. About 142 years have passed since Bobby created that quest.”
“I guess I’m not getting paid.”
“On the contrary, employees must deposit all rewards in Company holding in the event of their death.”
“But I can’t exactly deliver the sticky notes to a corpse.”
“There’s a contingency for that, too. If you fulfill Bobby’s need for the Sticky Notes of Wonderment or provide sufficient evidence of why that’s not possible, you will be considered as having completed the quest.”
“Sounds like a job for a Paranormal Investigator.”
“Quite right. If you want, I can transfer the quest to the PI quest liaison–”
“No, no, I’m here. May as well put Bobby to rest,” Maxi said. While she was not at full life points, she didn’t think there would be any combat. Just find some bones, and prove Bobby was dead.”
She sheathed her sword, and wandered in the direction of Bobby’s office, who was kind enough to leave a room number on his delivery instructions. She thought it was going to be an easy 50 credits. She hated being wrong.