Maria continued her battle in the dark and followed the sounds of the monsters screeching and skittering about to navigate through the dungeon. Outside, many players were waiting for Maria who had entered the dungeon alone. The players all thought that she didn’t know about the dungeon’s bug but they didn’t know that she had come to the dungeon precisely because of the bug.
If they knew, they’d be quite speechless at her extreme ways of training and honing her skills. People had limits, but the way Maria wanted to push past those limits would be incomprehensible to most players as they didn’t play the game as seriously as she did.
Maria’s way of playing the game could be viewed by most people as a little over the top and was too extreme for their taste. Only a few people would understand and those people would be the players who were ranked within the game.
Unitale wasn’t just a pastime for them and a place to escape from reality...no, it wasn’t an escape at all as they saw Unitale as their second life so they tried to ‘live’ it to their fullest. Maria was the same and since she had just suffered a setback, she wanted to get stronger so that in the future she’d be able to overcome that obstacle if she were to ever meet it again. It was why she came to the ‘bugged’ dungeon to further hone her battle senses. She had read and watched many books and movies regarding martial arts in recent months, so she had acquired a lot of knowledge about it.
There was something that she read in the stories and watched in the movies about a certain state when a martial artist becomes so attuned with their various senses that battles become so effortless to them because they could ‘see’ everything around them and respond to any attacks accordingly, no matter where they came from.
“Those people trained and honed their body’s senses to the point where their body could react to anything they heard, smelled, or felt. I want to attain that level too and what better place to train in than a place that permanently impairs my vision!”
Maria slashed the air in front of her and was rewarded with a monster’s shriek before mumbling, “With my vision impaired, I’ll have to completely rely on all my other senses to navigate through this place and kill the monsters...it’s the perfect training ground for me. I’ll stay here until I’ve mastered all my other senses!”
With her priorities not in their exact places, Maria decided to spend as much time as she could inside of this blind environment until she ‘mastered’ all of her senses. However, even though she had such a resolve, Maria couldn’t spend every waking moment of her time inside of the game. She was only able to spend a few hours training in the dungeon before having to find a safe place to log out.
When logging out in an unsafe place like a dungeon, a player’s avatar wouldn’t disappear but remain in place, it’s just that their ‘soul’ would have disappeared so they’ll only just stand or sit around like a doll. A player can be killed in this state but there were times in a dungeon where the players would need to log out because the dungeon run was taking too long so the players would have to take turns logging out to rest and guarding the bodies of their teammates.
It was effective for big guilds and established adventurer parties because they can do this in rotation until everyone was completely rested, however, Maria was alone so she couldn’t do this. Although she didn’t have other players to guard her, she still had her subordinates. She found out just how powerful and authoritative her [Royal Decree] skill was as Maria was able to summon her subordinates when she was on a completely different server.
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Since it was possible to do that, then teleporting her subordinates to where she was on Gaia was easy then. Thankfully, Maria was right and she managed to summon Alexa over to her side.
“Big sis, did you need me?”
“Mhm, I need you to guard me while I rest. Your level is already higher than mine so you should be fine in this dungeon.”
“Okay, do you need me to clear the dungeon while you’re resting? I can do that if you give me a platoon of soldiers,” Alexa eagerly said.
The way she was talking, it seemed like Alexa’s vision wasn’t affected by the blindness. If it was like this, then Maria thought that the dungeon truly had a visual bug that affected only the players who entered the dungeon. Well, it didn’t matter to her but Alexa’s were quickly refuted because it would defeat the purpose of why she came here in the first place.
“No need, Alexa. I want you to just guard my body while I rest. Don’t do anything unnecessary. I’m training here in this dungeon,” Maria said.
“Big sis is training? Okay, then I won’t interfere. I’ll just kill any monster that gets too close to us.”
“Thanks for the help, Ali.”
“Hehehe, of course, big sis! Just leave things to me and go get some rest!”
“Mhm.”
Maria logged off and went to sleep. The next day, she attended the IGC as a regular spectator but she wasn’t paying too much attention to any of the matches. Today’s matches were the Boss Raid and Battle Royale. The players who were participating were randomly assigned teams in the morning and weren’t given that much time to prepare before they were sent into the Boss Raid Event which was happening first. This event was mostly a warm-up for the Battle Royale which was going to be taking place later today.
Compared to Maria’s amazing battle from yesterday, the Boss Raid battles paled in comparison though they were still highly entertaining as the players participating were all highly skilled and experienced. They knew how to work with each other so well even when their parties were just abruptly made on the spot.
Maria wasn’t too interested in watching as she kept her eyes closed throughout the entire event and was imagining herself still inside of the game, hunting down the monsters inside of the bugged dungeon. She felt a little impatient to get back into the game because she still wanted to train. Lizzy was participating in both of today’s events so unfortunately, she couldn’t just up and leave, or else her friend would definitely get mad at her.
She sat through the entire day while cheering for her friend who coincidentally had been paired up with one of her rivals in the PvP event’s semi-finals, Eos, and the Free-for-all event’s dark horse, Bob the Assassin. The three worked together to decimate the boss monster they were hunting. Lizzy acted as the party’s Tank and secondary DPS while Bob the Assassin was the CC and DPS, and Eos, who played as a hidden-class magic swordsman, was the support and DPS.
Their lineup was rather odd and a little dangerous because they didn’t have a healer. Thankfully, Lizzy was able to heal herself through her skills but their progress was rather slow since they needed to heal up after each battle. However, despite this hindering her team, Lizzy, Eos, and Bob actually had better consistency in their battles than the rest of the teams participating.
This event was a bit different compared to the rest because the Boss Raid Event was styled to be an endless battle. The teams would fight against boss monster after boss monster until they could no longer continue or were defeated. Each subsequent boss monster was exponentially stronger than their previous counterpart so it was definitely going to be a challenge and the team that defeats the most boss monsters by the end of the event would become the winner.
Although they started slow, Lizzy’s team was actually making the most progress out of the rest of the teams especially once the stronger boss monsters began making their debuts in the event. Even the teams that consisted of many top-ranking players began struggling once they progressed too far but Lizzy’s team didn’t. They tackled each boss with the same steady pace as the previous bosses until they eventually took the lead.
Fighting against monsters was much different than fighting against players but Lizzy and her team were simply just stronger than the others despite them not being in the high ranks of the leaderboard.
Speaking about the leader, some big changes had happened overnight so the previous player leaderboard was no longer reliable. However, a new leaderboard ranking had appeared and this gave a more accurate portrayal of the players’ power levels.