I didn’t exactly believe I was going to be Moses and lead a sea of people across Eastland County to Harehill and become king of a new land. However, returning with one 16-year-old kid was less than I expected. Still, Nick took quickly to the new environment. Graham and myself took him out to lower-level areas for him to level up quickly. He achieved Level 10 within a week. At Level 10, he firmly put himself into the Mage class. He was soon torching Level 11 Treekin with fire near-singlehandedly. Nick was finding his footing.
By the end of the first week, I was Level 14, nearly level 15, and Graham was Level 16. With the way the required experience seemed to be scaled, I figured I’d catch up to Graham soon. It was hard to tell without definite numbers, but I was getting the hang of it. I was out venturing with Nick towards the “Corrupted Water Tower” as part of my “Rosepaw Recovery” questline. The goal was simple. Clear the tower and bring the Rabbitfolk back. The game seemed to always produce quests to bring back more villagers as long as the construction quests were getting completed. I wasn’t sure how large we could grow Harehill, but it was already at 41 Rabbits.
I made it to the water tower with Nick a few steps behind me. A group of zombies sat around the tower, with 6 Rabbitfolk tied to the 6 supporting beams of the tower. A few Plague Hounds walked the grounds around the tower as well. Checking the profiles, I could see they were all Level 12-13. I drew my pistols and watched the group. At my next level, I’d get another active skill. It looked like this group would give me what I’d need to hit that.
“Nick, lay down fire ring.”
He gave me a nod and began to use his skill. His hands glowed orange as a [Ring of Fire] appeared around the group. “Done.”
The Zombies and Plague Hounds began to panic as the fire stretched high around them. I aimed my pistols and grinned. I fired [Multi-Shot] twice. 12 bullets rained on the 10 enemies. Each one took at least a single hit and they started to turn towards me. With no targets inside of the ring, they’d have no choice but to head towards me. As the fire hit their skin, they began to take burning damage over time. I fired another few times, hitting one of the zombies in the head twice and dropping it. “Nick! Phoenix!”
He nodded and summoned an eagle-sized bird made entirely of fire. His Level 10 skill wasn't just cool, it had proven to be a deadly damage dealer. The bird swooped onto the group, dealing damage and harassing the slower zombies. The dogs were closing the short distance quickly, but another [Multi-Shot] sent two of them into the dirt. The other two charged and Nick shot bolts of fire into one while I fired bullets at the other. The last of the hounds dropped.
As we turned back to the remaining Zombies, most of which had red profiles already, the Phoenix was finally dispelled as Nick was running low on Energy. The Zombies began to shuffle towards us, but a few pistol shots and fireballs killed the rest.
You have advanced to Level 15! New Active Skill Option Available!
I read the notification and decided to save the decision for later.
“I hit Level 11.” Nick was beaming.
“Nice job, kid. C’mon, let’s save these rabbits.”
------------------------------
As soon as we got back to Harehill, I secluded myself in my room in order to have some time to think on which skill I wanted to select.
Execute Instantly kill a normal enemy your level or lower that is at 33% HP or lower. Ranger's Mark Mark an enemy for death. Deal 50% more damage. Confusion Confuse your enemies, causing them to miss a large percentage of their attacks.
Unlike with the passive skills, I only got 3 options for my active skills. I looked over them carefully. I wouldn’t get another one until Level 20, and that was only if the pattern held up. All of them looked useful, but as I thought back to the Gnoll Elite that had nearly killed me and my choice was made clear. I had to be able to put out more single-target damage. Ranger’s Mark it was. As I looked at my profile, I decided to distribute my 3 points evenly across STR, DEX, and AGI. Crafting was always tempting, but I had other people to handle that for me. The rabbits were serving my needs back home, I didn’t need to make anything.
NAME
Jeremiah, L.
CLASS
Ranger
LEVEL
15 (1%)
GOLD
1,040
STRENGTH
11 (10+1)
DEXTERITY
23 (16+7)
WISDOM
3
AGILITY
23 (16+7)
CRAFTING SKILLS
Cooking (1)
SPECIAL SKILLS
N/A
ACTIVE SKILLS
Multi-Shot (7), Quickdraw (5), Ranger's Mark (1)
PASSIVE SKILLS
Tracker (6), Resolve (5), Bone Piercing (2)
MAIN-HAND
Viper Pistols (7U)
[+5 DEX]
OFF-HAND
N/A
HEAD
Roughrider Hat (5C)
[+1 DEX, +1 AGI]
CHEST
Ranger Tunic (6C)
[+3 AGI]
LEGS
Buffalo Hide Leggings (8C)
[+2 AGI, +1 STR]
BOOTS
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Stealth Boots (4C)
[+1 DEX, +1 AGI]
------------------------------------------------
That night, I was set to meet with Graham and Nick in the village’s inn, The Texas Pony. Unfortunately, no one showed up. I waited a while, but Graham and Nick had not returned from whatever mission they had gone on. By the time 9pm rolled around, I figured they had been forced to stay overnight somewhere and hoped silently that they’d be okay. I gathered my things, paid the bar-rabbit, and went to get some sleep. I climbed into my room in the inn and went to bed.
It wasn’t until in the dead middle of the night that I was awakened by Nick. “Jeremiah…Jeremiah…get up.”
“Huh? What’s…what’s up? When did y’all get back?”
“Just get up. Come check this out.”
I groaned and quickly equipped my clothes. This had better be good.
Nick led me outside into the cold night air. Snow had fallen while I was asleep, and my boots crunched on the thin layer of powder. A few of the guard-rabbits had illuminated the main street of the village with lamps overnight and long shadows were cast onto the side streets. “Where are we going, Nick?”
“The tavern.”
“Isn’t it closed?”
“C’mon!”
I rolled my eyes and followed him. Upon arriving at The Texas Pony, I was surprised. 3 other humans sat around a small table with Graham. Graham gave me a grin. “Jeremiah, meet Cain, Rosco, and Theresa.”
I raised my eyebrows as I opened the profiles.
Cain Q. - Level 13 Knight Rosco B. - Level 13 Shifter Theresa J. - Level 13 Priest
“Welcome. Graham, where’d you find them?”
“Hell. They basically found us. Apparently there’s another rabbit village just 11 miles west of here, a bit past US-283. They were on a bounty mission. We found them beating up on this massive Treekin. They started losing, so me and Nick stepped in. We were all pretty beat up afterwards, and Theresa didn’t have the energy to heal us. We decided to wait until we were up and able again to head back here.”
Cain looked at me. His dirty blonde hair and muscular stature made him look like a frat boy. I realized there was a significant chance he actually was. “Sorry to wake you up. Graham said you’d wanna meet us.”
“Yes. I definitely do. Where are you from again?”
“Softpaw Village. It’s just a bit west of here. We had no idea y’all were out here. Haven’t seen any other players in a week.”
“A week?”
“Mhm. Last ones were some high-levels moving gear for the Liberty front from some settlement out East.”
“Liberty front?”
“Yeah. Red Liberty has pushed pretty far East from Lubbock. They’re trying to take the towns around Abilene. Armistice is Level 28 now. A lot of the Lieutenants and such are around 25 as well. They’re moving quick.”
Damn it. I’m not sure why I thought they would all just die out on their own. When the group of them took my sister, they were under Level 10. “How many are there?”
Rosco smiled and I saw his teeth. They were sharp, like shark’s teeth. “Red Liberty? I think they’re in the hundreds, possibly thousands now. There’s lots of guilds in Texas, but they’re the largest one in this area. You don't have a Guild Leaderboard?"
"What's that?"
"As soon as meet more than 1 guild, you can see a leaderboard that's pretty much like the player one. It shows total number of members and levels."
I figured there were larger human settlements, but we had always been blocked in by wilderness. Anyone who wasn’t a Level 10 combatant or higher would have been slaughtered. “How long until they reach here?”
Cain gave a shrug. “They’re moving quick. Armistice is trying to ‘save’ everyone who’s stuck in little towns. If they keep moving East, I’d guess mid-February or March at the latest.”
One month. If Cain was right, Liberty was one month away from me. I had to level up quickly. “Y’all are only Level 13?”
Theresa nodded. “We were stuck in a Level 1-10 zone until the zone change. It was too dangerous to go out. We finally started venturing out once an invasion hit the RV park we were staying in. Didn’t take long to find Softpaw and then we starting doing quests and such.”
Graham looked at me before looking back at them. “Would y’all want to stay with us? Safety in numbers, right?”
Cain gave a chuckle. “One Tank, four DPS, and one Healer? We could probably take one of the dungeons in this county.”
Nick looked excited. “One of?” So far we had only heard about the mines in the West of the county.
“Oh, yeah. We killed an Elite monster a few days ago, ‘Terrorsnout the Scout’. It was a Level 11 Kobold Elite with maps to all the dungeons in this county. There’s 3. The Shattered Mines on the western edge, The Albany Crypts just outside Albany, and The Sickletail Nests a bit east of that one.”
Graham’s face got dark. “Sickletail?”
I looked at him. “You know the name?”
“Yes sir, I do. Sickletail was the leader of the Kobolds that took over Albany.”
Cain frowned. “From our map, Albany Crypts is a Level 18 Undead-type Dungeon. I think it’ll be Zombies and Skeletons and shit. No Kobolds in there, from what we can tell.”
Graham shrugged. “Maybe they just raided it and left?”
I thought about it for a second. “What if they got fought out?”
The group turned at me. I continued. “I’ve been thinking about it since I saw the reputation. The more you talk to the rabbits here, the more you learn about their history. They think they’ve existed here forever. They have their own history and goals and motivations and all of that. What if the enemy NPCs do too? What if they fight, trade, and make alliances between themselves? What if the Zombies and the Kobolds just don’t get along?”
Rosco laughed. “So like some in-game simulation stuff?”
“Exactly. It makes things slightly more complex. Maybe by beating the Ogres in Shattered Mines, or the Kobolds in Sickletail Nests, or the Undead in Albany Crypts, we are changing the layout of the monsters?”
Nick frowned. “So beating a dungeon could be a bad thing?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know and it’s just a theory, but if the NPCs are fighting each other and we take out a faction, it might shift things.”
“Do you think the monsters and bosses and stuff respawn?” Graham was thinking about something.
“I don’t think the named enemies do. We haven’t seen any evidence of that.”
Cain spoke up. “What if they breed naturally? Like humans do?”
“So Kobolds come from other Kobolds?”
“Yeah.”
Graham sat back in his chair and lit another cigarette. “If that’s the case, we can clear them.”
I looked at him. “How?”
“If we hit max level…which looks like 150 from the world map…right? Then we can just march around killing anything and everything. If we take out all the dungeons and crypts and nests and portals and rifts and whatever else is creating these things….the point is that there’s a finite number of monsters. This game is winnable.”
Rosco flashed his shark teeth again. “So those religious whackos out by Lubbock might be our best bet. They can-”
“No.” I wasn’t going to let a group of kidnappers be our heroes. “You don’t know what they’ve done.”
“Do you?” Theresa raised an eyebrow.
I thought back to watching them drag my sister into a wagon with three other emaciated humans. I only got away because I ran faster than they could catch me. “I have an idea of what they're capable of.”
Cain shrugged. “I’ve heard they are using slave labor for constructions and farming. I’m not saying they’re good people, but they are in the running for top guild in Texas.”
I pulled up the player leaderboards. Armistice, High Lord of Red Liberty, was Level 28 and the 8th highest leveled player in Texas. 5 more were Level 29, and only 2 were Level 30. The Guild Leaderboards were much more interesting. “Okay…here. In first place is the Houston Republic with 15,760 players and 94,365 Levels. Second place, San Antonio Republic, 15,222 players…90,055 Levels….” I rattled off several more before getting to the one I was aiming for. “9. Red Liberty, 3,215 players…17,850 Levels. The way I see it, those ‘religious wackos’ are not our ‘best bet’. 8 other guilds in Texas alone are far larger and stronger.” I thought on the numbers for a minute. “Still, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The top 10 guilds at best encompass 25% of Texas’ surviving population. The rest are all split up amongst towns and smaller guilds? That seems odd to me.”
Cain gave a short laugh. “You aren’t in a guild. Why would you expect everyone else to be?”
I thought on that a minute. “I guess that’s a fair point. Maybe I should be.”
Rosco raised an eyebrow. “You want to go join one of these?”
“No. I want to form my own…our own…” I looked at the five people around me.
Cain scoffed. “Brother, it’s 3am and we don’t even know you.”
Graham gave a laugh. “I can’t think of a better story for a guild formation.”
The three talked it over for a minute. There was indeed a safety in numbers, and it wasn't like they exactly had a whole lot of goals where they were. Unlike Eastland, these people weren't that attached to their home. We had a shot here.
Rosco looked at me. “What about all our stuff in Softpaw Village?”
“It’s only 11 miles away. The road there is already built, FM-576. We can secure the road and maybe establish a trade caravan. I’m sure Softpaw has some stuff we don’t have over here, and we have some stuff they don’t have over there. We can make this our home.”
Rosco grinned, flashing those sharp teeth. “You struck me as the loner type.”
I didn’t answer at first. I spent months rejecting requests to join Eastland’s guild. I guess the adventure with Danny’s party showed me the benefits of working together. Additionally, the new mechanics I’ve learned about have showed me how much larger the world was. I always figured there were large groups out there, but knowing there were 5 guilds with over 10,000 players in Texas alone was both shocking and underwhelming at the same time somehow. It wasn’t like one group was conquering the continent. There was competition. Was that what it was? Did I just want to compete? Did I just want to grow large enough to destroy Armistice and save my sister? I wasn’t sure, but I hoped it was the latter. “I'm adapting. Most of the guilds are named after where they're from. We aren't from any human city specifically. So, what’ll it be…Harehill Commonwealth?”