When Maria cleared her quest, a long stream of world system announcements bombarded the world chat.
System notification! Congratulations to Player Maria, for being the first to clear her Ascension Quest! Player Maria has destroyed planet Irchol and has unlocked the impossible achievement: World Destroyer! Her name will be recorded in the Universe’s Hall of Fame! Player Maria… ... ... Initiating Second World Main Story Quest!
After the first two announcements, the entire UT server was sent into an uproar when they heard that Maria, the recent upcoming streamer star, had destroyed a planet.
Everyone had the misconception that she had destroyed her own planet but when people paid closer attention to the planet’s name that was destroyed, they noticed that it wasn’t Vanhal, the vampire planet that Maria was planning to conquer.
The unknown planet that was destroyed was unheard of so it was likely a sub planet but no one could understand why Maria destroyed it. A few of the smarter players linked the planet’s destruction to the first announcement that indicated Maria being the first player to complete her Ascension Quest.
No one knew what kind of quest that was but since it warranted a world announcement for Maria being the first player to complete it, the quest was bound to be something very important.
A few people felt envious of her since she had once again gotten the good stuff. They felt that it was unfair because she had probably acquired the quest from being able to explore an entire planet all to herself.
Sky was in the middle of completing her Ascension Quest and was about to kill the last Murlock Boss Monster when she heard the announcement.
“What?!”
She couldn’t believe it. Unlike the other players that were ignorant about the Ascension Quest, Sky knew exactly what it was. The quest was supposed to be very difficult to complete but Maria had only appeared on the Awakening Rankings not too long ago and yet, only a few hours after she appeared, she had already completed her quest.
This was currently Sky’s second day hunting the monsters that her Ascension Quest designated and she had only just finished.
System notification! Congratulations to player: Sky for completing her Ascension Quest!
It wasn’t a World System announcement, just a local system announcement and since she was the only person present on her planet, only she received it. There wasn’t even the option of choosing not to be shown.
“...Never mind. I guess this was for the best,” Sky mumbled.
Sky wasn’t in the public eye as she liked to stay under the radar when playing the game so it was great that her name wasn’t announced to the entire game server for all to see. Even though this was for the best, she still felt a little bitter from losing her first-place achievement to Maria.
Just when Sky dismissed the system prompt of her quest completion and received her rewards, the water under her feet suddenly began moving and engulfed her inside a sphere.
“What the―”
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Her words were cut off as Sky prepared to defend herself. Once the sphere dispersed in a burst of water, Sky had disappeared from her spot.
*****
Many players in and out of the game were discussing Maria’s recent achievements but they didn’t forget about the last system announcement regarding the second world main storyline quests.
This meant that the game was finally going to progress to the second world. Ascension was something the players would be able to luckily find in the second world and would commonly find in the third world.
The fact that Sky completed her Ascension in the first world was really game-breaking but it was very lucky of her to be able to awaken ahead of everyone else while Maria cheated in a way since she was on the third main storyline planet.
With the two of them completing their Ascension Quests, UT’s AI, Zeus, decided that it was time to move on with the game’s main story. Once the players finished the entire Second World Main Story Questline, they’d unlock the function to teleport to the next island.
The forums were flooded with discussions about the second world's main quests but there were just as many threads discussing Maria's accomplishments. All of Maria’s viewers wondered why there was no stream of the ‘planet-destroying quest’, but they soon saw a tweet from Maria’s official Switch Account that informed everyone that a video of her entire questline would be uploaded onto the platform within the next few hours.
Maria also apologized for not streaming the quest because it had come on very short notice and she didn’t have the opportunity to set up her stream because the quest was urgent.
All of Maria’s fans didn’t mind this since she was going to release a video of the questline. She wasn’t like others who deliberately kept these kinds of important quests hidden from the public until it was more common within the game.
Maria didn’t care about keeping the footage and details of her Ascension Quest a secret since she had already completed it and there would be no one to hinder her from completing the quest.
Her fans were all waiting in anticipation for the video to drop but Maria had to give all of the footage to her butler who then delivered them to her video editors. The entire quest took a few hours so her editors had to skim through the entire thing and clip out the important parts while leaving out the boring parts where she was just moving around.
Once they took all the good parts of the long footage, they began doing their best to make it a presentable and exciting video to watch. A lot of the footage had many questionable things like Maria massacring so many people and destroying towns and villages but the destruction only added to the appeal of the video’s outcome.
It took much longer than expected to edit and finalize but once the video dropped, it garnered so many views in just the first hour it was posted.
The video didn’t only attract positive views but also many negative ones. The start was fine because everyone saw their favorite Fallen Angel being bullied so it was justified that she killed all of the NPCs and leveled the city to the ground.
However, what came after had the viewers’ opinions split between positive and negative opinions. With the way the video was presented, it didn’t seem too tragic but instead, it portrayed her eradicating the villages and towns in very cool yet simple ways.
The only problem was that some people remembered she had destroyed the planet. Some people concluded that she had massacred every living NPC on that planet before completing her quest.
It was just a game but a few people became offended and defensive about the NPCs’ lives since they were ‘humans’ and not monsters. They were so realistic that it made Maria look like the villain here.
Of course, Maria wasn’t going to deny that she was indeed the villain this time. She had been tasked to destroy the planet’s higher life forms who she originally thought were every intelligent being on the planet.
She did what she had to do to complete her quest and she did it unwaveringly. Of course, the video editors portrayed the conflicted look on Maria’s face quite outstandingly so people understood that even Maria felt that it was wrong.
This allowed people to see that she wasn’t viewing the game as only a game but it also gave people the excuse to condemn her because despite knowing that it was wrong, Maria still chose to see the quest through to the end.
When they saw her blast through the walls of the planet’s Mega-city, and light the entire city on fire before running away from the large meteor that appeared to destroy it, some of the viewers even commented that this was karma for her.
They forgot that the meteor still destroyed the city and it wasn’t entirely her doing which ended the city’s existence. It was the first video that Maria posted which had a balance of likes and dislikes. It was also the first video that had so many hateful comments sections of people condemning Maria’s actions.
They didn’t know the backstory of the quest and all began writing hateful comments about her. When the video ended with the planet’s moon descending, some realized that the planet Maria was destroying was already on the brink of destruction.
Objectively, the video was interesting and good. However, many sensitive and hateful people nitpicked Maria’s choices and condemned her in the comments section.
Maria had finished today’s gaming session and was resting so she didn’t see any of the backlashes she obtained from the video. The ones that were worried the most about this were her family members and her friends.