When Maria exited from the arena’s lobby, she immediately queued up for another match.
“Hmm, that was a good warm-up.”
Hearing her off-handed comment, DarkNight, who had just joined the stream immediately began commenting with tearful emotes when he heard her words.
The battle she had with him was only akin to a ‘warmup’. This meant she hadn’t even gone all out on him. If she did, DarkNight shivered at the thought but while he was slightly moping about this, the rest of Maria’s viewers were sending him teasing messages and emotes in return.
Maria wasn’t reading the chat and didn’t see any of this because she was focused on reading the other rules of the Arena while paying attention to the matchmaking menu to accept the match once it was found.
It didn’t take long before she heard the upbeat background music that notified her that a match had been found so she immediately accepted and was teleported back to the arena stage.
“Alright, guys. Second match of the day. Let’s go!”
Maria looked at her chat and hyped herself up. She looked ahead and saw a player, who seemed to be in the Thief-class, sizing her up. She noticed that this player had white angel wings on their back and this caused her to exclaim, “Oh! An angel player!”
The participants of the battle were muted at the start but they could turn this feature off and have it so that both sides could talk to each other but Maria hadn’t tweaked with her arena settings so they were muted.
This angel player was part of one of the 3 main guilds of the angel player base and just like everyone who played as an angel, he was also part of the Heavenly Order Faction. Previously, Maria had received a large bounty on her head placed by the Heavenly Order so the player who was against Maria noticed that there was a unique bounty icon above her head. Not only that, but the icon was a crisp crimson color that had golden borders around it, indicating that she was a target of the highest kill order and was of utmost priority.
The angel player was called SoaringFeathers and he wasn’t all too skilled or anything, but had somehow managed to get above level one hundred and was lucky enough to be part of the first wave of angel players to make it on Gaia.
He was quite surprised to see Maria’s bounty and couldn’t help but cheer inwardly because this was definitely a lucky day for him. Earlier, he had won a bet against one of his cohorts and just acquired a piece of high-grade armor and before that, together with his team, he had managed to land the highest roll of the equipment drop for a high-grade weapon from one of their clashes with some of the players and NPCs from the Celestial Order.
Today was a really lucky day for him and this new bounty from some person he didn’t even know about would definitely make it even better. While waiting for the battle to start, he opened his faction menu to check on this bounty and noticed that it was under a player named Maria.
It was a familiar name but he didn’t care about that. He was only thinking about how lucky he was because the bounty could be collected as long as he defeated the person in question since a kill would still count as a kill even if it was in the arena and judging by the green name on top of his opponent's head he had no reason to be scared at all. It was quite obvious that the girl in front of him was someone much lower leveled than him so this would be a piece of cake.
SoaringFeathers unfortunately had a little misconception about the bounty. Although Maria’s name was indeed highlighted in green which meant her level was way below his making the bounty seemed doable, the fact that her kill order was the highest of grades couldn’t be overlooked and in his euphoria of getting lucky all day, he completely ignored that. This was something he didn’t take into account and once the battle started, he immediately placed the bounty marker on Maria.
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*DING*
Player: SoaringFeathers of the Heavenly Order has placed his bounty marker on you. You will now enter Bounty Hunt mode and dying to the bounty hunter will cause you to experience the bounty’s ramifications!
*DING*
Crimson-Order Heavenly Bounty: Should you fall to your bounty hunter, you will be locked within the Heavenly Order’s Void Space for 180 hours!
When Maria saw the notification she immediately went pale. She knew that the Heavenly Order was probably a Light faction power, but she didn’t know that it was actually the angel players’ faction which was separate from the Light faction. With the bounty marker on her, Maria didn’t dare to be negligent and hold back her power. She didn’t want to experience being locked up in some confined place like before when she had to do all those quests on planet Eur to learn how to use magic.
Since the battle had already started, she immediately went all out. SoaringFeathers had already been charging straight at Maria from the moment he placed the marker on her and seeing that she was stunned for some reason, he saw it as a good opportunity to launch an attack.
Unfortunately, he failed to see what DarkNight had seen since he was too giddy with excitement from thinking he just won an easy, high-grade bounty. He was lucky, but stupid. There was no such thing as an easy, high-grade bounty.
Maria wouldn’t have been designated as a Heavenly Bounty target in the highest Crimson Order that’s reserved for only those high-level boss NPCs from the devil faction’s Satanic Order and the evil NPCs that weren’t aligned with anyone if the difficulty of hunting her was not on the same level as those high-profiled NPCs. SoaringFeathers learned this lesson the hard way when Maria suddenly disappeared in a cloud of smoke just before his lance punctured her body and reappeared above him in the air.
When he looked up, SoaringFeather’s face went pale as he unbelievingly croaked, “W-What the hell? Why―”
His words were cut off as he was sent to the afterlife in the next instant by a rain of black and red lasers, a storm of black-colored feathers, and a bombardment of black hellfire.
Maria didn’t hold back at all as she used [Gehenna’s Eye], her new [Unholy] skill, and even broke the limit of her [Dark Ray] spell by infusing just enough mana that it wouldn’t force her into a [Weakened] state, and fired a buck-shot version of it at SoaringFeathers.
She didn’t think that SoaringFeathers would immediately die, however, and neither did her viewers. If they slowed down her battle and took a closer, careful look, people would have noticed that SoaringFeathers had already died even before all of Maria’s skills and spells hit him. What she did was literally overkill and she only did that because she was afraid of the bounty.
Some people in her chat even started spamming ‘Bully’ or ‘Maria the Bully’ to indicate that what she did was a little bit BM, or bad manners. She didn’t have to kill the poor guy and further desecrate his cold corpse by bombarding it with so many skills and spells. Even when the rivalry between the angel and devil race players were pretty bad, they didn't do this because it was just not nice.
“I-It wasn’t my fault!” Maria protested before she showed them her system log and the message she received when the bounty marker was placed on her.
When they read the penalty, they all felt like what she did was necessary but still excessive, however. She didn’t need to overreact like earlier and should have instead tested the waters first like with her earlier match. Maria didn’t even know her full powers and neither did the viewers. She had only been fighting and killing monsters for as long as she’s streamed and never fought against a player, so they couldn’t gauge her PvP skills but now, the viewers had a pretty good picture of where she stood.
The player she just defeated was level 120 and that was pretty high but she erased his existence with just a single multicast volley of her skills and spells. The poor player didn’t even have any time to defend himself before Maria wiped the floor with him. Despite all of this, many of her viewers were intrigued by the Crimson-Order Heavenly Bounty that was placed on her. It was such a long and complex name but it was the first time they all heard it.
When one of the more investigative people on her channel went to search it up, they found out that it was a unique, angel-race faction term. There were many different levels of Heavenly Bounties but the Crimson-Order ones were placed only on those high-level NPCs from the Satanic Order and the evil NPCs of no alignment. They couldn’t understand why Maria had one placed on her but one thing they knew was that Maria was enemies with the Heavenly Order and basically all of the Angel-race players in the game.
Having an entire faction of players as your enemies, everyone watching her stream thought that was something only Maria could do but they weren’t sure how to react to this. Of course, Maria wasn’t happy to know of this. With an entire faction after her, there was no way her time on Gaia would be peaceful nor could she just leisurely spend her days playing casually in the Arena.
“Agh, I didn’t think I’d meet the Heavenly Order so soon!”
A headache was kicking in as she thought about this. Maria grasped her head in annoyance when suddenly, she received a message notification.
*DING*
“Hm?”