As they continued to travel northward, Maria, Alexa, and Raiju encountered more and more of these player skirmishes that seemed random but definitely weren't. At this point, it was quite obvious someone was targeting them because unlike before, there were some players hidden among the parties of players that were skirmishing who, upon seeing them, immediately switched targets and began attacking them instead.
Now, Maria was certain that someone was deliberately targeting her with these odd skirmishes. Why did she think that they were odd? Well, it was obviously because when she attacked the players, she didn’t receive any penalty for killing them. She had noticed this the first time she struck down one of the players by accident when they suddenly lunged at her and her group when they were passing by.
Throughout the journey, only Alexa and Raiju were attacking and killing the players that appeared in front of them since Maria couldn't due to the penalty she would receive from the system if she attacked and killed a player that wasn't affiliated with the Lycan Kingdom, but when she actually killed a player purely out of reflex because they sneaked up and ambushed her, she was surprised that she hadn’t received the system's penalty. This was naturally good for her since she didn’t want to receive such an awful penalty because of an accident.
It was her opponent’s fault for trying to attack her and this was another hidden danger that she was afraid of. If her enemies noticed that she wasn’t allowed to attack players, then they might take advantage of that information and try to employ tactics where they’d have players come at her in droves and, since she couldn’t do anything to them, force her to retreat.
Naturally, no one other than Maria's closest subordinates and people knew about the penalty, so it was unlikely that someone could get wind of that information. However, now that she was on Vanargand, someone might notice that she was actively avoiding conflicts between players that had no direct affiliation with the Lycan Kingdom.
The penalty was something Maria was extremely wary of, so when she saw that the penalty wasn’t inflicted on her when she killed someone, she began to wonder what was going on and that’s when the scary stuff started.
Zhuge Lan was watching Maria’s movements through his familiars and he was a little bit scared by what she did with some of the players that appeared in her way. She captured a few of them and began experimenting. She wanted to know why she wasn’t incurring the penalty despite killing some of them and although she didn’t figure out entirely why this was happening, she was able to find out some of the conditions that allowed her to kill another player without receiving the penalty.
First of all, the player has to have ‘hostile intent’ towards her. This ‘hostile intent’ was rather abstract and Maria couldn’t fully figure out the details of the system's classification for a player having ‘hostile intent’ towards her, but for the most part, it meant that those players who were intending to harm her even if they hadn’t made the actual move of trying to do so yet counted as having 'hostile intent' towards her.
Also, if any form of attack, whether it was intentional or not, was sent her way, then the player that sent that attack was classified as having 'hostile intent' towards her. If they didn’t have any hostile intent, then Maria would receive a notification window just before her attack struck the player and it would show her that she was attacking an ‘innocent’ player and she would be penalized for killing said player.
This notification window never appeared for her because she had yet to attack another player before, but she was glad that the system was giving her warnings because it seemed unfair to her that she wasn’t allowed to attack any of the players at all while they could take liberties with her if the system was stiff with its judgement. She always wondered what would happen if she acted in self-defense, but she got the answer to that question already.
As long as she attacked a player that was hostile towards her, she wouldn’t be penalized. She’ll only receive a penalty if the player truly had no intentions of hurting her and she attacked them first and they were retaliating.
Now, Maria no longer had to worry too much about the penalty, though she still found it rather odd because the system clearly did say that she’d be penalized for killing ANY player on Vanargand that wasn't affiliated with the Lycans. She should’ve been more cautious when dealing with Devin and Crow back in the Lycan territory because at the time, she didn't even know if just one or both of them were affiliated with the Lycans, but since she was too angry at the slavery she saw at the town's mines, she forgot about the penalty entirely and just killed them on the spot.
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Luckily, both of them were affiliated with the Lycans, so she didn't incur the penalty for killing them, but even if they weren't affiliated with the Lycans, she still would've gotten away with killing them because the two had 'hostile intent' towards her anyway.
Honestly, it didn’t help her that the system’s penalty requirements weren’t clearly stated in the system message's fine print, so she had to learn by herself how to work her way around being penalized for killing players on Vanargand.
Maria was glad that she found out a little bit more about the penalty, but even then, it was still a little uncertain, though the big red notification window that appeared whenever she tried to kill an 'innocent' player did help quite a bit. At least now, she was able to accurately determine which player was fine to kill and which wasn’t.
However, this led to another problem. Since she could only find out which were the ones that were fine to kill and which weren’t just before her attack landed, that meant she needed to be careful and not use any wide-scale area of effect attacks just in case one of those that weren’t 'okay' to kill was caught up in it.
“I still haven’t found what’s allowed for my NPC subordinates, but I think they have it easier than me…or maybe the penalty is exclusively just for me?”
Maria noticed that Alexa and Raiju didn’t seem to incur any of the penalties when they killed a player. This was something she needed to find out, but not right now. She already took a big risk trying to find out the extent of what she could do without giving away the information that she couldn’t attack the players as she wanted to whoever was monitoring her.
‘They’re only trying to probe my strength, so I’m glad they didn’t actually catch onto anything.’
The experiments Maria performed on the players she caught caused the observing Zhuge Lan to believe that she was indeed the same kind of lunatic as his master, Hecate, and he couldn’t help thinking that it was a mistake on his part for trying to ‘play’ with someone like his master.
“...It looks like I’ll have to change my plans a bit. I’ve obtained enough information about Maria and her escorts’ powers. I’ll start leading them towards a place close to Master, as the only one who can deal with Maria would be Master herself…”
Instead of sending players, Zhuge Lan began setting traps for Maria and her group, which also involved the use of his unique class's special skills. Zhuge Lan’s class was Formation Master and, just like the class's name, he was able to create formations that one would find in the fantasy stories from the east that could kill or entrap their targets in them.
The Formation Master class was a pretty tricky class to master, but Zhuge Lan was able to make the most out of the class because he was incredibly shrewd and smart. It had a huge weakness, which were rogue-class players and any kind of high-ranking tracker skills since the formations he created were essentially just traps, so rogue-class players and those with tracking skills could detect them quite easily and, since his formations were mostly stationary, people needed to walk into the area of his formations unknowingly for them to take effect or else they would be useless. If his targets obtained information beforehand through tracking skills and just circumvented the formation, then his carefully laid out traps would be completely useless.
Zhuge Lan had found a good way to mask his formations and that was to use the natural elements of the terrain he was setting the formation on. This helped him create many favorable battlefields for himself and his allies, so his class was extremely valuable to those who understood its true value.
Since he needed some time to set up the formations, Maria and her party were able to continue their journey in peace for quite a while. However, that peace was short-lived when Maria felt that there was something wrong all of a sudden. She didn’t know what kind of climate there was on Vanargand, but a strange fog had suddenly descended around them and it was obstructing her vision and senses.
“...The fog’s gotten thick. You guys, stick close!”
“Okay, big sis.”
“Got it, Master."
Maria felt that the fog was a bit unnatural because just earlier, everything was clear before the fog started rolling in. No one in Maria’s party had a tracker skill or possessed a class within the rogue-category, so they didn’t know that they had fallen into a trap formation.
“Hey, you guys, I don’t think this fog is natural…”
As she said this, Maria turned around to look at Alexa and Raiju but found that they were no longer behind her.
“...Oh, crap.”