When Maria saw the message, she finally remembered that her friends were here on Gaia.
[Lizzy: Mary?! I saw your Switch Post earlier and tuned in a bit on your stream! How come you didn’t message me that you’re here on Gaia too?!!]
“Ah! I forgot!”
Maria quickly messaged her back and forgot about her previous battle with the bounty hunter who was after her head.
She and Lizzy quickly set up a time and place to meet up later when she was finished streaming and playing around in the Arena. When Maria checked her map, she saw that it was somewhere in the center of the city which was the most bustling area besides Discordia’s Colosseum Arena.
Maria queued up for her next battle and she finally saw something that she had missed earlier. When she defeated SoaringFeathers in such a spectacular manner, her Arena level had risen from 1 to 2. She hadn’t seen it earlier but with the fanfare that came when she looked at the Arena menu before finding her next match, it was hard to miss.
She finally read up on what the level was for and apparently, it was there to act as a limiter for new Arena participants from participating in any other battle modes and most importantly, the Ranked Battle mode. One needed to be level 10 in order to open up the Ranked Battle mode. As for the other Battle Modes, they also needed a specific level to unlock but Maria wasn’t too worried about that right now since they were for the Ranked Battle mode.
Normal Team Mode didn’t require her to be of any specific level to participate but she wanted to stick to the 1 vs. 1 PvP mode for now. She read the descriptions of all the other modes and found that most of them required her to be in a team but she wasn’t so keen on playing with random people that weren’t her friends or acquaintances. Maybe if it were her viewers then that might be okay.
Some other streamers were already doing that, playing one of the battle modes that required them to be in a team to play, like Battle Royale or Team Battle. There was one called Battle Arena but it was still currently under maintenance and needed some time before it was accessible. Battle Royale was supposedly the last man or team standing kind of mode where you can play in a team of 3 or solo. In all, there would be a total of 60 players placed randomly together in a large map that was set in the Void Realm and their objective was simple: be the last player or team to survive on the map.
The win condition was quite straight forward and many players particularly liked this battle mode since it was thrilling and the progress of the matches was very unpredictable. Everyone’s stats would be made uniform and from the start of the battle mode, the players would get to choose only 4 of the skills in their vast arsenal to bring into the match with 3 of them being locked at the start until the players acquired the necessary resources to unlock them.
The gist of this battle mode was to first hunt the monsters scattered around the large map and kill as many as they could. The monsters provided gold and would sometimes luckily drop equipment, powerups, and on very rare occasions, a skill book that can be used to unlock one of the three locked skills that the players selected at the start. Depending on importance, the players that were in teams would have to agree on which of their members’ skills to unlock first.
As for the equipment, they would be uniform as well, adding a fixed number of stats and a breakable shield to the players with powerups scattered across the map, dropped by monsters, or purchased from the shops that could be applied to the equipment to bolster or add additional effects to them. The monsters on the map were limited so the players that found and killed them quickly before any other teams or players arrived to steal them would have an advantage at the start.
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Killing other players would also provide the same benefits as killing a monster and additionally, one could loot power-ups and equipment bonuses from the players they killed if they had any on them when they died, so a fat ‘sheep’ or ‘wolf’ would always be a priority target for everyone else in the match.
Since there were many teams and players on the map all at the same time, the beginning would be very chaotic and things would only die down once there were fewer teams and players present on the battlefield.
Once a player was killed, unless a skill or item was used to revive them, they’d have to wait until the game was finished as a spectator or they could just leave. However, if a player left without waiting for the battle to finish, they wouldn’t be able to obtain the rewards from their rankings in the battle. Every rank, even last place, would receive a reward. Obviously, those with a higher rank would be rewarded better than the ones in the lower ranks. The game mode was quite thrilling and Maria wanted to try it out herself and since her friends had contacted her already, she planned on dragging them to the Colosseum Arena to play with her.
For now, Maria wanted to fight other players, 1 versus 1, to gauge where she stood among the player base. Obviously, from her previous performance, Maria was definitely categorized somewhere at the top. When her next match was found, Maria quickly accepted it and entered the stage again. Her stream’s chat was moving quite quickly when they saw her next opponent because everyone wanted Maria to one-shot the unfortunate victim as she had previously done before.
It was the first time everyone in her stream saw what it was like when Maria released all of her restraints and showered someone with her numerous skills all at once. Whenever Maria hunted, her power would always seemingly be downplayed because she didn’t take hunting mob monsters seriously and the monsters would usually be much higher leveled than she was because if they weren't, she wouldn't be gaining enough EXP to level up.
The times where Maria would use her skills like in her fight against SoaringFeathers was very little. The only time she would display her full power was during a boss battle but since most of the time she was just grinding normal monsters, her viewers hardly ever saw her true strength. Her ventures inside the Sin Devil skill books were unrecorded and not streamed because they were confidential information about her character’s skills and equipment so she obviously wasn’t going to show it to her viewers.
When Maria read her chat just before the countdown on her battle finished, she frowned and asked, “What? You want me to destroy this person too?”
She naturally got positive responses so she shrugged and changed her Calamity to its second-form, Death’s Scythe. When her opponent saw the transforming weapon, they were a bit startled but it was too late for them to think about it because the timer had reached zero.
Immediately, Maria sent a [Calamity Cleave] at her opponent before she started channeling her [Dark Ray] and releasing a little bit of its limiter by pouring in more Mana into her spell. While her opponent was dodging her weapon skill, Maria had finished channeling her spell and immediately sent it at her opponent. The last thing the person saw was the dark halo behind Maria’s body and the eyes that had opened up on all 8 of her wings before they were ejected from the stage.
Maria’s viewers all saw how her skill had dismembered and pierced numerous holes into her unfortunate opponent and felt a bit sorry for requesting Maria to do such a horrible thing. Her opponent didn’t even get to do anything but dodge her skill before immediately dying in the next instant.
“...Why are they all so weak? I want a challenge!”
Maria continued finding a few more matches after that, but with the combination of her [Dark Ray] and [Gehenna’s Eye], she just stood in place from the start of the battle after sending her opponent a [Calamity Cleave] and would just kill them in the next instant once she had finished channeling her Mana into her spells. No one could understand how Maria was able to do this because they didn’t know about her Magus subclass skill, [Mana Manipulation], which allowed her to manually adjust the power and scale of her skills and spells by injecting more mana into them. Since she had an extremely large mana pool, Maria never hesitated to use more mana than needed when using her skills and spells.
Skill Name: Mana Manipulation Rank: B Description: Enhances the manipulation of Mana, enabling the caster to increase or decrease the energy output for all skills and spells Enhancement Ratio: 1 Unit of Mana = 0.0001% increase/decrease in spell or skill power and effect Cost: 1,000 MP
In just a few hours, Maria managed to level up to Arena Level 8 and that was really fast. Her Arena experience gain was quite large because Maria had won matches continuously without dropping a single one and she finished her matches in the shortest time possible, so she was able to search for another match quite quickly after that.
Maria ended her stream because it was about time for her to meet up with her friends on Gaia and she was a bit tired from consistently beating players using her somewhat mindless tactics. She didn’t know it, but the forums were blowing up by the new Arena players that were unfortunate enough to meet her and share their horrible experience from being immediately destroyed by her.
“Well, let’s go meet Lizzy and Milly, I hope they aren’t too mad that I forgot to contact them first when I arrived on Gaia…”