Spiteful Healer

Chapter 263: Just Preliminary Things

“Hey!” Artaphernes called out excitedly to Aegis and his members, just as they began to reappear from tiny specs of light forming together. Aegis could hear him before he could see him as his body finished the teleportation process within the simulation, and by the time it had fully formed his body back into the entrance hall of the Kordas arena, he saw Artaphernes and his party walking over to him. “How was the first match?”

Aegis didn’t reply right away, instead glancing to the side where Quinn, Yuki and Tullan were all awkwardly avoiding his eyes. Their reaction made it clear that they’d been watching the ‘match’ unfold.

“Uh. Went great. Was easy.” Aegis shrugged.

“Same.” Artaphernes replied with a nod. “I bet the first couple will be like that. It’s usually only the last two that are tough in these preliminary matches.” Artaphernes explained.

“Yeah, that makes sense.” Aegis nodded.

“Alright. Well, good luck.” He gave Aegis a quick pat on the shoulder while sending friendly nods to the others.

“Thanks.” Aegis replied.

“You too.” Pyri smiled as they watched Artaphernes’ group huddle off away from Aegis’. Once they’d gone, though, it fell deathly silent amongst Aegis’ party. The awkward silence continued to linger for some time, but Aegis felt the uneasiness being placed on him, and eventually he couldn’t take it anymore.

“Is everyone really going to keep making a big deal about it? It’s not a big deal.”

“Some will, but it’ll only bug you if you yourself think it’s a big deal.” Quinn shrugged.

“Well, I don’t, so…” Aegis grumbled back at her.

“Yeah, right.” Darkshot chuckled. “You know, what I don’t get is…” he stepped forward and eyed Lina and Aegis curiously, noting that Lina’s face wasn’t bright red despite her avoiding his eye contact. “This time around, it seems like you’re way more embarrassed than she is.” Darkshot motioned to Lina.

“Yeah, I noticed that too…” Pyri scratched her chin as a mischievous grin grew over her face. “Care to explain?”

“I love it when they do my job for me.” Hae-won said to Aegis’ audience, leaning forward on her chair with a fake, virtually simulated bag of popcorn in her hand. She quickly began throwing the popcorn into her mouth and munching on it loudly.

“Mom, you said you wouldn’t be weird.” Aegis glared at Pyri.

“I’m not the one being weird here.” She tilted her head and raised an eyebrow at Aegis. Aegis saw this and turned to the others, who seemingly confirmed Pyri’s perspective.

“Uhm. It’s okay…” Lina smiled. “I’m just happy to be closer to Aegis… It’s still just a simulation and, well, it’s not our real bodies, right? It was nice to feel close though, so… I am happy.” Lina replied bashfully, fidgeting her fingers while looking down at her toes.

“Oh, what a cute and honest answer.” Pyri replied with a look of disappointment.

“Ah. Ahahaha…” Darkshot rubbed his hands together as he saw Aegis’ face suddenly go bright red again. Rakkan glanced from Darkshot, to Aegis, to Pyri in confusion. “I finally got it.” Darkshot pressed his hand on Aegis’ shoulder and let out a long drawn out sigh. “The mistakes of your youth have finally caught up with you, my inexperienced MMORPG player friend.” Darkshot shook his head condescendingly at Aegis.

“What? What’s he talking about?” Quinn turned to Yuki, Tullan and Pyri, hoping to get an explanation. Instead, though, they all shrugged back.

“Oh, allow me to explain…” Darkshot bowed politely to everyone.

“Don’t you dare, or I’ll kill you.” Aegis glared at him, causing Darkshot to quickly step back away from Aegis with no hint of him intending to stop.

“It’s very simple. Our lovely neighborhood shadow master Lina, here,” He motioned to Lina dramatically, “is a grizzled MMORPG veteran. She’s skilled in not only playing, but in character creation. She spends a great deal of time tweaking her character's body and appearance into her idealized form of beauty. That is what she presented to her boyfriend Aegis the night before.” Darkshot explained, while Lina smiled awkwardly at Darkshot for a brief moment before she too had picked up on why Aegis was acting so defensively about the situation.

“Don’t tell me…” Quinn put her hands over her mouth.

“Aegis, on the other hand… well… let’s just say, he thought character creation was a waste of time. He tweaked his hair and his facial structure a bit, and was done with it. Meaning what he presented was the raw, naturally scanned version of the real deal. The full package. Lina’s seen everything under the hood, in both real world and virtual.” Darkshot crossed his arms and looked up to the sky proudly, as he’d finished presenting his case.

“Is that true…?” Lina asked Aegis curiously, with her cheeks beginning to shine red.

“Well… I thought that’s what everyone did? Why spend all the time… whatever, it doesn’t matter.” Aegis quickly shook his head. “Guys, are we doing preliminaries right now or what? What’s with all this stupid talk? We need to focus. Right Rakkan?” Aegis turned to him with hopeful eyes.

“Yeah. Exactly.” Rakkan nodded back awkwardly, a poor attempt to reassure him. Despite this, it remained somewhat awkwardly quiet until the group was notified that the next match was ready. Aegis wasted no time to hurriedly rush over to the NPC behind the counter and let him know that they were ready for the match, and they were promptly teleported back into the isolated gladiator arena

A 5 minute timer appeared at the top of Aegis’ peripheral vision once more and began ticking down. He drew out his new shield, Lina took out her daggers, and Rakkan formed his echoes. Darkshot nocked an arrow and Pyri readied a staff, and the five of them spread out within the blue energy box that was restricting their movement in the arena until the match started.

Across from them, when the timer counted down to three minutes, their opponents appeared. It was disorienting at first to take in their opponents, as Aegis glanced between them and saw them all looking completely identical to one another. Five elves, short black hair, long pointed ears. Staves fasted on their backs with dark green silk robes. Once they’d finished forming from the specs of teleporting light magic, they began drawing their staves off of their backs and moving to stand in a line formation. Their movements at the very least were not synchronized, nor were their names, but all of them were level 150.

“What’s this?” Aegis asked as he eyed them curiously.

“Five wizards with matching gear and appearance… That’s not something you see often.” Darkshot commented.

“Typically, this means they plan to employ a cheat strategy. Expect them to focus fire with a single spell type, or use a combo attack. Teams like this tend to be one-trick ponies, but that trick can be very dangerous if you aren’t prepared.” Pyri explained to the group quickly.

“Any ideas what their trick could be?” Aegis asked.

“I haven’t seen this sort of formation before.” Lina replied.

“Me either.” Rakkan added.

“There’s too many possibilities to try and predict in this short amount of time.” Pyri said as she watched the timer count down to 2 minutes. As they spoke, Aegis saw the line of Wizards across the arena from them were silent, glaring back at him. With no need to communicate amongst each other, despite having seen their opponents, confirmed what Pyri said. They had a strategy they were planning to employ irregardless of who they were up against.

“Alright.” Aegis took a deep breath. “We’re going to brute force them. They’re wizards, their intermediates could be varied or uniform, but we’ll take on the standard wizard weaknesses. They’ve got no self-healing and low defenses, and we’ve got good gear and levels. The moment the match starts, go all out and try to kill them immediately. I’ll worry about defenses, so feel free to be reckless.” Aegis explained to the others.

“Got it.” Darkshot nodded, and Darkwing from his shoulder let out a confirming coo. Lina bent her knees and began glancing around at the shadows being cast by the arena’s central pillars, picking which one she’d jump to.

Match begins in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Start.

The blue wall that was containing both teams vanished, and immediately every single player sprung into action. The difference between this match and their first was staggering - the wizards opened up with several large form weather manipulation spells. A gigantic tidal wave began to form and roll forward, while a cloud of crackling thunder appeared out of thin air ahead of them.

“Rune: Enlarge.” Rakkan stepped forward ahead of Aegis as the waves rolled forward towards them, flooding the arena instantaneously as lighting began to shoot out of the sky into the water and spread the electrical damage out through the waves. Rakkan cast the rune on his Mosmir Spear, then pulled his arm back and prepared to throw it as the spear grew massively in size. “Rune: Echo.” He added just as he thrust his arm forward and released the giant spear. The spear quickly split into three more, each as big as the first. They crashed into the waves barreling towards Aegis, Darkshot, himself and Pyri, and broke them apart due to their sheer size. Beyond the waves, the wizards became visible once more and three of them could be seen charging up a three-person ritual spell.

“The storm and the waves are a distraction. Spells cast by multiple wizards in a ritual are extremely powerful.” Pyri quickly explained as she spotted it.

“Shadow Dance!” Lina shouted, having already teleported beyond the waves using the dark shadows that the thunderstorm overhead had projected onto the arena. It made it easy for her to rapidly teleport around the wizards and start cutting them down, dealing massive amounts of damage.

The two wizards that had cast the storm and the waves broke up their large spells in favor of defending against Lina and Rakkan’s attacks, but when Darkshot and Pyri joined in with arrows and cinderbolts, they stood no chance. Within a few seconds, all five wizards were eliminated.

[Aegis’ team has won the match. Now exiting the arena…]

A few moments later, they were teleported back to the Kordas arena.

“Nice job!” Quinn cheered at them.

“I wonder what spell they were gonna cast, though?” Tullan asked curiously as he closed out his livestream viewer to look upon Aegis’ group.

“Better we didn’t wait to find out.” Pyri shrugged.

“Still, that seemed a bit easy…” Darkshot shrugged.

“When you fight against gimmick teams, you can usually just brute force them down. At least, that’s what my research told me.” Aegis shrugged.

“Mhm.” Pyri nodded encouragingly at him. “Was a good call. In other games, we had a saying. If your opponent starts doing weird, non-meta stuff, the solution is always the same… You walk up to them and just hit them. Almost always works.” Pyri chuckled to herself.

A few meters away, a bright flash of light appeared and quickly collected, forming out Artaphernes’ party members as they had finished their matches.

“Oh, how did your match go?” Quinn asked them before their bodies had finished forming. If she’d waited to see the dejected looks on their faces first, she likely wouldn’t have asked.

“We’re out.” Artaphernes sighed while looking down at his feet.

“Heh? Seriously?” Tullan asked.

“What happened?” Yuki asked. Artaphernes shook his head and began marching away, heading out of the arena. Only Anazia was willing to look up and answer as they walked past.

“Seraxus.” She replied coldly. The name was enough to send a thick tension into the air. The laughter and small talk died from that point onward - they watched as Artaphernes’ group exited the arena, and remained completely silent until the next match was ready.”

“We’re ready to enter our third preliminary match.” Aegis declared the registration NPC.

“Very well. I will transport you to face your opponents.” The NPC replied, after which Aegis’ group was broken up into small flecks of light and teleported away from Quinn, Tullan and Yuki.

“The matches are going to start getting longer from here on in.” Trellin spoke to his crew. He was standing at the front of one of his three airships as they were hovering in the night sky, above the forests surrounding the city of Kordas. The lights from the buildings were shining brightly on the darkened landscape before them.

Behind him, armed members of the Shattered Pirates were preparing their various winged beasts for combat. They were fastening saddles to the backs of gryphons, wyverns, hippogryphs and various other creatures.

“Our intel reports that the only airship Kalmoore currently has in operation will be the Sky Darling.” He pulled out a long brass telescope and extended it, then pressed one end up to his eye and peered at the city of Kordas. “It’s currently docked at the Skyport Tower, so it’ll be an easy hit and run job on that front. We’ve also discovered that the top guild has been working with carpenter guilds to begin construction on Airships that can fly without using light stones…” He moved his telescope over the city until spotting the shipyard in question.

“Three are in progress. If we destroy their Sky Darling, they’ll accelerate construction and still likely have a way off this island. That’ll mean our mission fails.”

“So what should we do, boss?” One of the Shattered Pirates asked Trellin eagerly.

“Well…” Trellin smirked as he began fidgeting with his interface, until pulling out a large sac from his inventory. “I made a special order just for this mission. Let’s give that kid a taste of his own medicine.” Trellin plopped the sac down and opened the top, to reveal the contents of the bag to his crew members. A collection of brightly glowing red flower petals were gathered within the bag, which brought smiles to the Shattered Pirates crew.

“We attack both targets simultaneously once Aegis’ party enters their 5th preliminary match. That’ll be our distraction. They won’t know what hit them. Everyone, wings up at 30.” Trellin shouted, making sure he spoke loud enough that the crewmembers of all three airships could hear him. They replied with a resounding, proud roar of cheers.