“Oi, you idiots.”
“Your Highness!”
“Master!”
Maria eyed the two sides before turning around and walking away before her headache started to grow even worse, but as she left she said, “You’re on the same side, so play nicely now. If you destroy my city or so much as harm each other, I’ll end you fools myself.”
After hearing what Maria said, the two sides immediately stood down and just eyed each other for a moment before dispersing. The vampires returned to doing their duties while the shadow puppets returned to Maria’s shadows and the undead horde dispersed around the city. They began patrolling Transylvania, while only the big 3 Undead, Undead King Morte, Lifestealer Calen, and Nether Lich Velinda, followed after Maria and entered Heltania Imperial Palace.
As they were walking up the floors, all of Maria’s vampire subordinates that were patrolling the hallways and rooms greeted her. When they arrived at the 3rd floor maze where the imperial garden used to be, Maria ordered the 3 Undead to find a place on the floor and keep watch over it. She planned to update her castle’s instance dungeon so that her 3 Undead would appear in it as powerful mid-bosses or something.
Maria needed to up the difficulty level a bit because she had noticed during the past few days that her castle was slowly having a few players clearing it. Since it was like that, then the players wouldn’t mind if she just increased the difficulty a little.
The higher the difficulty, the more rewards they would get so they shouldn’t complain. At least, that's what she thought. Many in the game’s community already regarded the Imperial Palace as an Extreme-difficulty dungeon that could only be completed by a proper party of players, not some random players grouping together for a dungeon raid or something like that. The dungeon required synergy and the boss battles were extremely difficult to clear because a single misstep could result in a wipe out.
Now that Maria was going to increase the difficulty a little bit on the last floor of the Instance Dungeon, the dungeon would fall into the category of a Nightmare-difficulty dungeon, which was nigh impossible to clear unless it was an attack by a proper team that had levels well above that of the average player base.
In fact, the Nightmare-difficulty dungeons could only be challenged and barely cleared by those that were at level 200 or higher. A team that didn’t meet the level cut-off would be doomed to fail the dungeon run. There were only 2 other Nightmare-difficulty dungeons and now, there was going to be a third. Naturally, these dungeons gave a large payout if they were successfully attacked, but up until recently, only 3 well-known parties had managed to clear a Nightmare-difficulty dungeon and it was the dungeon that was regarded as the easier one between the two.
With the appearance of a 3rd Nightmare-difficulty dungeon, those frontrunner parties would have a new ‘toy’ to play with as they would send people to scout the dungeon’s interior and start formulating plans on how to beat it.
Maria didn’t know how the system graded and adjusted the dungeons’ difficulties, but once her dungeon became a Nightmare-difficulty dungeon there was no doubt that the mobs and mechanics would experience a drastic change to accommodate the difficulty increase.
This wasn’t the thing that Maria was supposed to be prioritizing right now, but she really needed to get her mind off of things, so despite her vampire subordinates appearing next to her as she arrived on the 4th floor, Maria dismissed them immediately after saying she needed a break. She returned to her chambers after sending her high-ranking vampires away because duty and paperwork were the last thing she wanted to do right now.
Maria had just parted ways with her patron god whom she understood had been helping her in his own way, but after the recent mission she had to do, it left her heart feeling burdened, so she needed to take a break in order to recollect herself. Thankfully, her subordinates never really reprimanded her or scolded her for missing out on work, so she was spared from receiving an earful from anyone.
Ash continued to rule in her place as Maria dove straight into her bed inside of the Ancestral Blood Hall as she opened up her city’s map and her dungeon map. She looked at the development of Transylvania and was happy to see everything was moving along just as she planned…though the partial destruction inflicted by the sudden appearance of her dark army in the middle of the core district had set her workers back just a bit, but thankfully, it wasn’t of too much consequence.
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After taking a look at her city’s development map, Maria turned her attention to the dungeon map and began gleefully looking at the completed research and development options that she had selected before going on Death’s class advancement quest.
“Hmmm, all of the options I selected have finished. Now let’s pick a few new ones.”
Maria began selecting a few new dungeon options to research and selected mostly offensive-type upgrades. For the next few days after her class advancement, Maria holed herself up in her Imperial Chambers and just managed her dungeon until she finally felt mentally better.
Once her mental state was restored, Maria exited her chambers and began looking for work which was surprising to all of her subordinates. For whatever reason, Maria was holding off from looking at her gains from her class advancement, but after she completed all of the work that she needed to do around her nation, that was the only thing she had left to do.
“Ugh, fine. [Status].”
Name: Maria Level: 128
HP: 541,680/451,400
DE: 2,216,280/1,846,900
NE: 2840
SP: 98,452/82,043
EXP: 0/25,600,000
REP: 137,890
Divinity: 1176
Race: Nephalem
Class: Divine Vessel of Sin
Sub-Class 1: Magus
Sub-Class 2: Blood Empress
Titles: Species Eradicator EX, Fallen Angel of Sin, Angel of the Apocalypse, The Sinful One, Fallen Priestess, Fallen Saintess, Harbinger of the World’s End, Empress of the Dire, Undead Ruler, Shadow Ruler, Blood Ruler
ATK: 147,408 (+5000~6250)
DEF: 46,344 (+15)
M.ATK: 26,969 (+5000~6250)
M.DEF: 115,446 (+15)
STR: 17,908
AGI: 15,637
VIT: 15,448
INT: 38,482
LCK: 43
SIN: 302
Free Stat Points: 75
Universal Currency: 31,260,412 Gold, 54 Silver, 11 Copper
Vanhal Currency: 5,024,600 Blood Gold
Faction Currency: 7,001,000 Universe Gold
“Hmm, I gained a lot…unsurprisingly.”
Maria expected this much at least. All of her stats had increased by a rather substantial amount though it wasn’t anything too crazy, but what she didn’t expect was the changes to her titles. She didn’t know when some of the titles were changed or added, but they mostly gave bonuses to her commanding and domination ability over specific races of monsters and NPCs.
The Undead Ruler gave her a domination bonus over Undead-type creatures, while the Shadow Ruler and Blood Ruler spoke for themselves. Having more domination over something meant that she could better influence their actions, and increase the number of minions she could recruit into her armies.
At the moment, Maria currently had 3 armies. Her Dark Army of Shadow and Undead Minions, her Imperial Army that consisted of Vampires and Monsters, and finally, her Dire Army that consisted of NPCs from her nation.
Maria’s collective fighting power put her on top of literally every other player in the game, since most players likely didn’t have any armies as of yet. They did have armies of players, but even then, the player numbers were limited, as not all players in the game had joined guilds or factions. Most of the player base were casual players that wanted to play the game for fun or those that just wanted to experience a second life inside of the game world.
Due to the limited number of players, guilds and player factions couldn’t properly build up any sort of significant military force inside the game, unless, of course, they already held some kind of noble title or rank. There were very few players like that and Maria was one of them who was literally at the top since she was an Empress of a nation.
One of her worries could be put to rest now, since she now had a significantly large military force at her command. If the players arrived on her planet, she wouldn’t need to mind them too much, since if they tried to create any problems in her kingdom, she could have her army put them down immediately.
With that worry out of the way, Maria had to focus on a different problem now. She needed to properly secure Calamity as her weapon because, right now, it was still Death’s property. She needed to find a way to wrest control of Calamity from him before he selected a new Champion to take her place as the Envoy of Death.
“Death told me that he was going to select a new Champion soon. I have to find a way to keep Calamity with me or else it’s just going to disappear once that Champion is selected.”
Calamity had been her partner since she first started playing the game. There was just no way she would be willing to give away such an important partner to some random player who was lucky or unlucky enough to become Death’s new champion.
“Hmph, I’m the one who raised Calamity until it became this powerful. There’s no way I’ll just willingly give it to someone else.”
Maria had a few ideas in mind already so she needed to start checking them out as soon as possible. If none of them worked, then she had to start brainstorming new ideas as soon as possible.