“We have come to the conclusion that the ‘system”, for lack of a better word, that governs NGs and Guardians is actually two distinct systems. Yes, even the four rank system isn't a 1:1 comparison to the Guardian’s own levels. It appears that ranks 1-4 are more accurately aligned to Guardian levels 1-60, with the break points occurring every fifteen levels. This seems to corroborate our findings that night spawns are more accurately fifteen levels above our own from a Guardian perspective, not the ten as is displayed to us.”— Joint research paper presented by Malikela and AnnaLee, 12th of Viera, 0004 AT
Firestone Mine Dungeon, Territories of Rielle. Day 02.
The expression “to see stars” was one Saiph had never really understood. He’d never personally experienced the phenomenon before now.
Pinpoints of light zipped around Saiph’s field of view as he stared at the crack running down the length of his helmet’s visor. Slowly, as Saiph watched the cracked visor heal itself from the helmet’s durability, the stunned debuff turned into a dazed debuff that lingered for several more seconds. Precious seconds that monster was given free reign over his friends.
Saiph collected himself and saw Rose and Raine lying on the ground. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw they both still had a fair bit of health remaining. Good, they’re likely only stunned like I was.
The monster was now moving on Nix and his Archdruid. A bright light suddenly appeared in front of Nix and… was that a sword? Where had Nix gotten a sword from?
Nix managed to block a single blow from the monster’s own greatsword before the weapon shattered like glass that released a light bright enough that everyone had to shield their eyes.
That was Saiph’s cue.
Willing his shield, Miasma, and his sword, Durendal’s edge, to his hands, Saiph leapt to his feet and barreled into the monster with his shield. Durendal’s edge healed Saiph with each swing while Miasma’s resource draining enchantment flooded Saiph with restored stamina, health, mana, and even attributes from Slaine from each bash.
Saiph slammed Durendal’s Edge into the ground and a single life-draining chain drilled itself into the monster’s back. The slack in the chain grew taut as it pulled the monster into the magical barrier with Saiph.
Saiph heaved on the chain, throwing the monster into the wall. Mil’s Judgement appeared in Saiph’s hands and he delivered a quick blow to the monster’s head. The monster crumpled to the ground and Saiph took in this foe’s status info.
Name: S141-N3
Race: Human
Class: Berserker, Level 55
Subclass: Miner, Level 64
Health Points: 7,221/11,688
Mana Points: 3,532/4,350
Stamina Points: 6,555/7,250
Saiph froze. He wasn’t a monster. He was another player!
“Stop! We’re on the same side!” Saiph shouted.
“No!” S1 muttered, voice deep and guttural. He slowly shook himself off and suddenly launched himself at Saiph, taking them both to the ground once again.
“We don’t have to fight!” Saiph shouted, as he struggled to keep hold of S1’s arms. Holy hell he was strong. Why was he so strong?
“You hurt her, I'll kill you!”
“I'm not hurting anyone. I don't even want to hurt you!”
Out of the corner of Saiph’s eye, Rose was getting to her feet. She immediately stealthed, reappeared above the Berserker, and plunged her dagger in his neck in a critical strike.
S1 roared as his health bar dropped by over two-thirds. Saiph used Rose’s distraction to finally pin the Berserker.
“Stop! Do not hurt him!” A soft, raspy voice cries out.
Saiph turned in the direction of the cry. A short Serethi elf dressed in the basic starter robes all mage classes wore at level one had come running down the corridor.
She looked at S1. “S1, you have done enough. They are not hurting me.”
“Not true, even now you suffer,” He grumbled, attempting to break free of Saiph’s grip.
Saiph stole a moment to look at this new arrival's status information.
Name: C4551
Race: Serethi Elf
Class: Caster, Level 55
Subclass: Miner, Level 77
Health: 1,242/4,725
Mana: 7,770/7,770
Just like the Berserker, her stats were far too low for a player of her level. Nix’s mama pool was nearly triple hers, and that was before accounting for his enchanted gear.
And her health. Even now, it was steadily ticking down.
“What’s going with your health?” Saiph asked C4.
“I have a debuff called ‘hunger’ and have had it since yesterday. S1 believes it is caused by the monsters in this cave,” C4 answered.
A pang of empathy hit Saiph in the gut as he was beginning to grasp the situation. He adjusted his two-handed grip on S1’s arms to a single-handed one.
Hand freed, Saiph pulled a sandwich from his bag of holding and tossed it to C4. She stared at it with curiosity.
“Eat it, it'll get rid of your hunger debuff. And this—” Saiph set one of his weaker healing potions on the ground. “—will restore your health.”
C4 took a hesitant bite, worked it over in her mouth for a long moment before swallowing, and then began attacking the sandwich with ravenous fury. Finished with the sandwich, she drained the healing potion in a handful of gulps.
Saiph glanced down at S1. “Look, she's getting better. We can heal and feed you both if you promise not to attack us again.”
S1 glanced at C4, then grumbled something unintelligible. He stopped straining against Saiph and he took that as a positive sign. Saiph released his grip and stepped away from S1.
“Nix, can you and your Druid heal them both?” Saiph asked.
“They have attacked us. My spells will not work on enemies.” Gwydion’s reply wasn't a challenge, so much as a statement of fact.
Saiph glanced at Rose and Nix and spoke through their party chat. “Can we add them to our party, then? It's a team vote.”
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“Why? Did you forget they just tried to kill us?” Nix shook his head with incredulity.
“Yeah, but it's just a hunch, but I'm pretty sure these two are bots,” Saiph answered.
“Bots? How does that even make sense?” Rose asked.
Botting had been a problem in Annwyn Online the same as in any other MMO. Saiph had occasionally come across them, easily recognizable by the way they would mindlessly scour an area, killing mobs or gathering resources with a very obvious pattern. The loot would eventually be collected and funneled into a single account where it would be sold to make a ton of money. Most bots were banned within days of being discovered, usually after being reported by bands of bot-hunting players. Saiph was quite surprised to see these two had evaded detection for over fifty levels.
“It makes as much sense as anything else we've seen these last two days,” Saiph said. “I think they're just scared and alone. Imagine if this dungeon was the first thing you ever saw when you woke up.”
Rose winced, then said aloud, “I say bring them in.”
Nix rolled his eyes, “Fine, but I'm only saying yes because summoning that sword took all the mana I needed to refresh both Raine and Gwydion’s spell timers.”
Raine suddenly broke in, fury in her eyes. “Where did you get that sword?”
Saiph added, “Yeah, ranged mage and archery isn't enough, now you have to melee? What's next, frontlining?”
“I don't know! I've never seen that sword before in my life! What's it matter?”
“It matters because you should not have it.” Raine’s eyes narrowed on Nix.
“Why? Yours is just like it,” Nix said, pointing at her sword.
“The weapon you wield is very dangerous,” Raine replied levelly. “I hid it over five hundred years ago to keep it out of the hands of evil men. You should return that sword where you found it.”
“I didn't find it anywhere! Besides, I don't see why it's so dangerous. I got a glimpse of the sword’s stats, Saiph and Rose have much stronger gear.” Nix paused and took in a deep breath. “I am telling you the truth, I have never seen that sword before today. I have no idea where it came from.”
“If you are lying to me, then you should either end my spell now or kill me yourself and I will cease to answer your Summoner’s Call.”
“You can do that?” Nix, Saiph, and Rose said together.
Raine’s controlled anger suddenly shifted to genuine surprise. “Do none of you truly know how summoning spells work?”
Saiph didn't know how any of this magic worked. He decided to spare his friend the embarrassment of being schooled in a subject he should be a master in.
“I know I don't, I'm a warrior, not a spell slinger.”
Nix visibly relaxed as Raine’s scrutiny passed from him to Saiph.
“When a Summoner casts their incantation, they are calling us forth from the moment in time when we were at our strongest. We summoned beings choose to answer the Summoner’s Call and are under no obligation to do so. As long as our ideals are aligned, we will generally come to your aid. Do something against our personal code and you may find your next call falls upon ears that will not listen.”
Raine turned back to Nix. “I saw the way you looked at that fallen man and woman the other day. Anyone who can display that much emotion for fallen allies, even those they barely knew, is not a man capable of great evil. I want to believe you are telling the truth, but the severity of this issue prevents me from resting on hope. If you are telling the truth, then summon me when we can speak privately and never draw that sword again.”
“You have my word, Raine.” Nix said.
Raine nodded as her body began to turn into glowing motes of mana as the timer on her spell elapsed.
The group stood in the dark silence for a long moment. Nix had a deeply speculative look on his face and Saiph could only imagine his friend's thoughts. Chief among them, Saiph wondered what made that sword so dangerous.
C4’s quiet, mouse-like voice broke the quiet. “We should leave before any of the monsters reappear.”
A prompt appeared alerting them to the fact that they had reached a safe zone inside the dungeon. If any of them died elsewhere in the mine, they would respawn here in this room.
That was how these two had become stuck in the mine, Saiph realized. They could have wandered in at any time and come to the safe zone. If they'd been anywhere else and died, they would have respawned in a random city.
“I think we should take a break for now.” Saiph said. He pulled a minecart into the middle of the room and turned it on its side to use as a makeshift table.
They divided the food and ate around the minecart.
Saiph studied Nix’s status page. He had a new subclass, Soul Forger. The description for it didn't have anything written under it.
"What's with the new subclass?"
"I don't know. It wasn't in my list of available subclasses. It just appeared when I summoned that sword,” Nix answered.
Rose swallowed a bite of her sandwich. "What's the subclass do?"
Nix opened his bag of holding and set the bow Rose had given him on the ground. He held his hand up and a second copy of the bow appeared in his grip.
"It's the only spell I have, it lets me make copies of anything in my inventory and it doesn't count towards my summoning limit. As far as I can tell, that's it. There weren't even any changes to my class spells like subclasses usually cause."
Saiph pointed to both the copy of the bow and the real bow. "Can I see those?"
Nix handed them over. The enchantments on them were the same, though the copy only had one out of one point of durability.
Saiph was about to hand the bow back when he noticed something he'd overlooked. There were actually two other differences, the copy had a soulbind level of "perfect" to Nix and the weapon rarity was "Soul Forged".
Saiph had seen that combination only one other time so far. The Token of the Vanguard, a coin that had appeared in his inventory when he logged in, had granted him a buff because he had been a beta player. The coin's description said it had been forged from a piece of his soul and was soulbound perfectly to him.
"You think my new subclass could have something to do with why we're here?" Nix asked.
"Yeah, I think it's a good starting place to look. Though without knowing how you unlocked it, I don’t know what it means."
"It didn’t give you developer access, did it?" Rose asked.
Saiph agreed with her line of thinking, though he didn't recall any developer accounts using the Soul Forger subclass, either. As far as he could tell, it hadn't been in the game, and was likely unique to whatever circumstances Nix had gotten it.
"Nope. It didn't change anything else as far as I can tell. I still don't even know how I unlocked it," Nix answered.
"Maybe it was triggered by you getting attacked by S1," Saiph suggested.
Nix shook his head. "Wouldn't either of you two have unlocked it then? We could probably sit here and think about it forever. I say we find out if there's anyone else who has gotten it. Someone has to."
Changing the subject, Rose turned to C4 and asked, “How did you guys find this safe zone?”
“We woke up in it. We tried leaving, but after fifteen deaths, we decided to stay here,” C4 answered.
Saiph winced at hearing that. Fifteen deaths. And even worse, C4 had spent most of her time in a perpetual state of hunger. S1 had likely only been able to ignore it because of his high health regeneration.
“Have any of you guys come across a single monster, probably really big, too?” Saiph asked, unsure how to describe a dungeon boss to them.
C4 shook her head, but she grew hesitant, genuine fear showing in her next words as she pointed behind Lueur Rose. “We heard cries coming from down there. I do not want to go that way.”
Saiph scratched his head. “That sounds like our dungeon boss. We’re going to deal with it. I won’t ask you two to join us, I think you’ve been through enough. Whether we win or lose against it, we’ll take you out of here when we leave.”
“I do not want to leave. I feel a strange compulsion to mine these crystals.” C4 pulled out several large pieces of firestone from her bag of holding. And kept pulling them out. She had a stack of nearly fifty firestone crystals when she stopped. “I do not know what purpose they serve, but I must collect them.”
That potentially answered another question. If what Rose had said about their caer fragments reattuning was true, both should have been randomly assigned new cities. C4 confirmed that she and S1 had both been assigned Orleana. Saiph wondered if the desire to stay was some sort of remnant of their nature as bots.
Saiph picked up one of the stones. It was nearly as large as his fist, and that was one of the smaller pieces. “How many of these do you have?”
“Six thousand, seven hundred and fifteen.”
Saiph gasped. That much firestone could run not just Eric’s forges, but North Remembers’ for months or even years! Maybe even the entire eastern coast. Saiph turned to S1. “I assume you feel the same way? You want to stay here?”
"I go where C4 goes." He answered plainly.
“Well, I can't make any promises, but there might be a way to make the mine safe. If we find this dungeon’s heart crystal, we can create an instance without any monsters on it and you can mine all the firestone you want. But we’ll need your help killing the boss if we want a shot at finding it. That might mean you’ll have to follow us down the shaft with the crying spook.”
C4 looked like she was considering it very hard. She was about to say something when S1 spoke up.
“To keep C4 safe, I will go.”
At that pronouncement, C4’s face grew resolute. “Then I will go as well. Anything to make the mine safe for both of us.”
Lueur Rose raised her glass. “Then it’s settled. I’m itching to kill more things. But I think we need better names for you instead of C4 and S1, it’s like I’m in math class again. How about Cassi and Slaine?”
“Slaine…” S1 spoke the name slowly as though he were tasting it. “I like it.”
"Cassi and Slaine it is, then," Saiph said. “There is one thing I need to know. It’s been bothering me since I looked at your stats. Slaine, you should have a health pool similar to mine. And Cassi, you should have a mana pool similar to Nix’s. What happened to your stat points?”
Cassi’s eyes adopted the distant look of someone accessing their menus. “All five hundred and fifty of my points went into strength.”
Slaine echoed the statement.
Saiph, Nix, and Rose all stared at each other with mouths wide open.