Chapter 10: Everyone Loves Treasure

Murphy jumped down from Morbid’s back. His heart in his throat and his voice raspy and filled with killing intent.

“Morbid. Kill him.”

With a single command from Murphy, Morbid let out a ground shaking roar. The pig man’s entire body locked up as the effects of an innate spell, ‘Fear’, fell onto him and froze his body like a statue. His fingers grew limp and shakenly dropped Seelie from his huge fat hands.

Only a brief moment from ruining Seelie’s life forever.

Morbid’s mighty roar echoed through the surroundings and was still sounding out as he lurched forward. His movements for such a huge beast were so fast it almost seemed as if he’d teleported. His rage was corporeal as with a single swipe, pig man was launched into the forest like a huge sack of meat from a catapult.

Trees snapped in half from the force of his projectile motion. Before he could even touch the ground, Morbid was already a step behind him, swinging his paws as huge sharp claws scratched down and took with them the pig man’s arm.

Murphy quickly raced up to the lifeless body of Seelie, only to be stunned when he discovered she was already dead. Her mouth was filled with blood. Although he was no coroner, he could guess that she’d bitten the tip of her tongue off to escape her fate.

He could only let out a long breath when he came back to his senses. You couldn’t log out when you were in the midst of battle or outside of a safe zone, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t kill yourself and force a logout.

He felt somewhat relieved that Seelie had escaped the fate of suffering this foul creature’s touch. If she’d still been logged in when he arrived, and something had happened. Perhaps Chuckles, Morbid and Juwan truly would come to understand the phrase ‘wishing for death but cannot die’.

He eyed the swirling portal nearby and reached a hand towards it. A little zap of lightning sparked out and forced him to retract his hand.

‘So they already have wards on their portals? They must be fairly advanced. No matter. I will seek redress for this situation in time.’

“Morbid. Come.”

Morbid finished ripping the corpse of the pig man to shreds, then walked over to see Murphy holding the lifeless corpse of Seelie in his arms with a dark expression. Morbid, feeling some guilt for this situation let loose a long mourning wail into the sky.

His cry was filled with sadness and anguish. As if he was crying over the death of his closest kin. The forests shook, and creatures for kilometres in every direction fled as they felt a huge killing intent suddenly engulf the entire forest.

Every living thing nearby felt their body’s become cold and it was as if they were on the verge of having their tiny little lives snuffed out by some enraged deity’s wrath.

Murphy looted Seelie’s corpse then jumped onto Morbid. They raced back to their domain so that Murphy could log out and check on Seelie.

Shit, shit, shit! I’ve fucked up! I’ve fucking fucked everything up! Murphy is never going to trust this stupid older brother! I’ve delivered his most beloved into the hands of some deviant and then fucking lost them!

I hadn’t planned for any stranger to show up and rescue her before Murphy did, but I thought at the time it would create more pressure, so we agreed to simply follow after them and make sure nothing untoward happened until Murphy turned up.

Then we lost track of them in the haunted forests. Murphy would have only just logged back in at that time, so we raced back to get him. With some luck, the direction they were heading in was close to our portal, so it wasn’t far. But every second that passed without Seelie in my sight was like a needle stabbing into my heart.

I’d created this mess to help Murphy out, but in the end, I had created a catastrophe. When little brother left, I felt how angered he was. Although it wasn’t directed specifically at us, I felt something I’d never felt before when I saw his eyes.

Since I’d always considered this a game, I never really feared or despaired when I faced death. When I saw his eye’s though. I felt like I was actually seeing something that could kill me. I felt like how those old era earthlings must have felt when they watched all those missiles landing off in the distance and then the resulting cloud of radiation and dust blowing towards them.

Haa ... brother will surely be upset with me. More importantly, Seelie will be upset with me. Even if Murphy hates me forever, I still had hope that I could hang onto Seelie and be close with brother that way. Now though, she will most definitely consider me to be an idiot and a menace.

It seems, trying to do something good isn’t as easy as little brother makes it look.

Chuckles and I both anxiously waited for Murphy to return. By the time he got back, we’d worn a trail in the ground from our back and forth pacing and chewed our nails to the finger in worry.

Although we were worried about how little brother was going to react. We were more worried about Seelie. We’d met enough players now and been around long enough to hear stories. Just because it was a game, didn’t mean it couldn’t leave scars.

When Murphy finally returned, he didn’t even acknowledge our existence. He simply dismounted from Morbid and logged out. It appeared that Seelie had been killed, because she didn’t come back with Little Brother.

We expected to be reprimanded, or punished, or anything. The thing that hurt the most though, was that we weren’t punished, just ignored. Even when Murphy came back, he acted as if we didn’t exist. He simply walked through the Portal to 6 Stars and didn’t come back.

48 game hours later, Seelie re-spawned in the domain. She was obviously upset about something, but whatever it was it clearly wasn’t us. In fact, she even thanked us for trying so hard. It was difficult to accept such a thing when she described what happened.

When she found out that we had no idea who the pig man was and explained we never recruited him, she became silent for a short time then let out a long sigh. After that, she did the exact same thing Murphy did. She left Chuckles in charge, and walked through the portal.

Raid day came and went. We were targeted by another domain on Murphy’s list and regained 5-day protection status after Morbid went on a rampage. Then we geared up and prepared to set out. From what Seelie said, someone else had directed that rescue from the dragon’s tower.

We didn’t know what the reason was, but even if Murphy and Seelie didn’t blame us for our stuff up, we blamed ourselves. Therefore, we were angry. Someone had taken us for fools and very nearly took advantage of Little Brother’s woman!

Just before we left, Murphy returned looking like a shadow of himself and covered with dried blood and wear and tear on his coat and clothing that could only have been from endless numbers of near fatal injuries.

He said nothing, and only went to the half-finished castle where he spent nearly 40,000 experience points and extended our raid protection for another 5 days.

Murphy still acknowledged nothing and no one. When he walked back through the portal, he looked like a half-dead robot. Simply making the motions, with no true soul or motive behind his actions. While still preparing, about half an hour after Murphy left, Seelie returned and did the same thing. Adding another 3 days.

With the just completed raid, we now had 13 days of amnesty and could completely throw ourselves into the mission we had set out to accomplish. We would find out everything we could about Seelie’s abduction.

With wrath and regret mixing together like one of Murphy’s volatile concoctions, we set forth to find the perpetrator and right this wrong.

When we finally left to 6 Star and reached the nearest city, there wasn’t a single worthy quest. Everything with more than 500 experience as a reward had been consumed. It didn’t matter too much though. We didn’t come here to quest, and instead came to gather information.

Chuckles used his summoning to call forth his Shadow Squad, and they spread out across the city like clandestine shadows, sucking up information from everywhere they could.

I wanted to be angry at those three morons. I really did. But when I looked at Morbid’s huge puppy dog eyes, and remembered the heartbreak he expressed when we finally found Seelie, I couldn’t bring myself to hate him for what happened.

Juwan was a different story. I regularly and very frequently hated on Juwan but the simple truth of the matter is, I didn’t really hate him. I was more afraid of creating a relationship with him than anything, and so in my head, I vilified him. It was about the only way to keep distance between us.

In the end though, he is nothing if not persistent. He thought he could help me out behind the scenes this time but failed. In a twisted sense, although I could definitely blame him and finally have my reason to actually vilify him, in my mind all the blame came back to only one person. Myself.

Even Chuckles, who I felt somewhat betrayed by at first, had set out on this misguided endeavour for me. At the end of the day, the only person to blame was myself.

And so I did. I took all that blame I thought I’d be piling on those three idiots, and took it upon my own shoulders. Even though Seelie had escaped some horrible incident, she still suffered. A little bit of innocence she once had, was now taken away.

When I went to see Seelie, she seemed calm and unperturbed, but I’d known her long enough to tell it was an act. I may ignore the world around me, but I am not a complete fool. My wisdom stat may be in the negative when it comes to social interaction, but even I could pick up on the clues.

Thus, I set out onto Planet 6 Star in order to get even stronger. Strong enough, that even if Seelie were taken to the other side of the universe, I could still find her and protect her. Just like I promised to do the first time I met her.

I took many advantages of Murphy once I started learning magic. Chief amongst them was a tracking spell. Although it has a rather limited range, it helped me inadvertently set up moments when he catches me getting undressed, or I trip into his arms just as he’s turning a corner. Silly things that seem stupid in retrospect of everything else going on in our life now.

But it’s all part of my plan to subtly increase my presence in his mind until he can’t forget about me. Seems so childish, but at that moment when I was distraught and wishing I could die, it was useful.

I could sense my tracking magic suddenly light up so close it was almost on top of me. I knew that Murphy had finally come, just in the nick of time! However, I then felt ashamed of myself to an escalating degree. I didn’t want Murphy to see me like that, and no matter what, I didn’t want him to remember me like that.

Weak, powerless to protect myself. Incapable of taking care of my own issues. Although it warmed my heart that he’d come, I didn’t want him to think that I couldn’t take care of myself. It was the whole point of learning magic and becoming strong!

I then had a brain fart that I wished I’d had a minute sooner. I pushed out my tongue, and mustered all the force left in my weakened body to bite it off. The pain was excruciating, and I almost stopped myself until the thought of Murphy finding me in this situation, still logged in, made my stomach churn and my ego burn.

I wasn’t going to let this man pig take anything from me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to suffer the indignity of this situation when Murphy found me.

The best part was probably watching the face of the pig man distort as blood overflowed from my mouth and poured down my throat into my lungs. I want to say that killing myself in that situation was easy, but it really wasn’t. Dying like that, it was mostly quite quick, but also incredibly painful and frightening.

I’d died a few times in the game, but never from something as torturous as drowning in my own blood. Just as my final brief moments of clarity faded, I heard Morbid’s enrage howl, and then it all went dark.

Murphy was then at the door of my house within the hour. Which lead to a very awkward scene. He was obviously incredibly worried about me but wasn’t sure how to ask about it, so I did what has become mostly habit now and gave him an implant, obviously altering the end a little bit, so he thought I’d killed myself the moment the pig man grabbed me.

He looked at me sceptically, and worriedly at the same time, which almost seemed cute. I talked for a little bit and for a rare change he didn’t seem to space out once. When he finally left, his face was that stoic, serious gaze I fell in love with.

I was worried he might be angry at those three morons, but in the end, he didn’t seem to blame them at all. Which led me to ask myself who I blamed for this situation developing like it had, the answer to which was myself.

My lack of power, preparation and my arrogance nearly cost me that most important thing that I was saving only for Murphy. Well ... mostly. Technically I was only a virgin in that I hadn’t had a dick. I’d popped my cherry quite some time ago on my own terms.

The point is, I was angry at myself for being powerless, and so to fix that, I planned to get power. The next time something like this happens, it’ll be some pig man wanting to rape Murphy, and me racing to his rescue!

Then after rescuing him, it’ll be all, ‘Oh Seelie. Oh Murphy... ‘ Ahem!

I’m gonna store that one away in my spank back.

Anyway, in the end, the person I blamed most for this was me, and so I set out to correct that the moment I could log back in. When I returned and discovered Murphy had already left and was most likely doing the same thing as me, I felt that gap widening again.

So I didn’t hesitate and set forth. Every quest worth doing, I would set out and do. Even the lower end quests I would set out and use them as an opportunity to strengthen my weaknesses. Which in this case were body stats and close combat skills.

In the end, this huge cluster fuck resulted in proving that all 5 people involved were complete idiots. They all unanimously blamed themselves like a bunch of self-righteous pricks and raced off to become godly strong or find someone behind the plot to abduct Seelie so they could vent themselves.

It turned into a long 13 days were the lot of them just raced around 6 Star planet stirring up all sorts of trouble and then on the 13th day they all returned, sat down, and silently drank very strong liquor to drown themselves.

In the end, this 13 days had been a cooling off period which everyone used for some soul searching. Murphy came back and acknowledged that in the end, he was just running away from admitting his feelings.

That, of course, didn’t stop him from still ignoring them.

Seelie came back looking like a war maiden, clad in armour and sporting a serious looking sword almost as tall as her body. She’d clearly become quite a bit stronger, but at the end of the day, she didn’t feel like she’d actually accomplished anything.

It was only after she’d slain countless dangerous beasts and thwarted who knows how many evil plots that she came to acknowledge she was running away from the same thing Murphy was. She was a little different in that she already knew how she felt, but was instead running away from telling Murphy and finally forcing the issue.

Even after recognising this, she remained too shy or too scared to actually do it.

Chuckles came back and acknowledged that he had failed his master and even betrayed him. His guilt was like tar that could only be washed off with a lifetime of effort.

Unlike the two domain controllers, who were both idiots and clearly needed a life coach or some kind of serious help, Chuckles vowed his literally undying loyalty to Murphy and swore to always keep his master’s intentions in heart. Even if they didn’t align with what he actually needed most.

Which was the case with him and Seelie.

Morbid was just a big stupid dog, and like he had amnesia, completely forgot about the whole thing. Apart from seeming a little more protective of Seelie than before, he remained innocent and stupid.

Juwan had always been doing exactly what he felt he should be doing from the start. He had no great insight to his motives during these 13 days and if anything only became more fanatical about getting his little brother’s approval.

The next day came, and everyone woke up with hangovers as the protection of the system finally finished and their domain was free to be attacked. Because Seelie and Murphy both ran off with the desire to become strong enough to protect each other, the domain had made little to no progress.

Apart from the castle finally being finished, the spawn didn’t go out of their way to improve anything else.

While the controllers were away, the Spawn spent their entire time rooting and making babies. Thanks to that, their population had tripled in the 13 days Murphy was gone, and the entire place was teaming with the little bastards running everywhere and causing all sorts of mischief.

Murphy was stunned to discover that he had almost 5000 spawn living in his domain. Which wasn’t a good thing because they didn’t have the space to support that many Spawn. Plus, every time they had a festival or held some ritual, the place would be flooded with Spawn juices.

Which he quickly discovered after they used the excuse of him coming home just to hold one.

Because they’d both done some soul searching and seemed to understand what was really driving them, and because what they discovered was in fact how it had pretty much always been, everything seemed to fall back into normalcy between Murphy and Seelie.

It was almost like everyone suddenly forgot what happened and seemed to be unanimously blocking it out.

The only exception being Juwan, who still fully intended to push Murphy and Seelie together. Unfortunately for him, talking to Murphy was like talking to a brick wall. Although he had some more success talking to Seelie, he only felt the weight of his mission growing when she declared that she wasn’t going to play a damsel just to make him come for her.

After all, even after this whole incident, he just ended up running off and killing things to drown himself in combat instead of actually manning up to his feelings.

Come the end of the day, no one seemed game enough to attack them directly, so Murphy and Seelie started planning what to do with the domain. Although during the 13 days the domain hadn’t progressed at all, Seelie and Murphy had both finished a boatload of quests while running away from themselves and had so many quest rewards it wasn’t funny.

They’d even had to sell some of their stuff because their inventories were so full.

Among the things they’d kept were gems, ores, herbs and other ingredients for crafting and alchemy. Among the most useful and interesting things was something called a Geode. Which was a crystal you could plant that would steadily grow certain resources like iron or stone. Even other precious gems if you were lucky.

They started planting these things all over the place. Unfortunately, they weren’t a one-day growth kind of thing and needed about a week to properly start creating. Once they reached that point, they would continue to grow to a fixed size, and then they stopped. After that, once you start harvesting them they just keep growing back.

They were clearly designed for the purpose of creating a renewable resource point on domains, but Murphy wasn’t really surprised by the technology of this game anymore. Whoever created it had a disgustingly godlike level of technology and power.

Murphy then started designing and building some more things, even going so far as to spend experience on some rather expensive stuff for his construction efforts. For another 4 days, the entire domain lit up as Spawn raced everywhere completing all sorts of tasks.

In the end though, their most limiting factor was land. As such, everything Murphy had started preparing was to achieve the goal of getting more land. They simply floated around, running form larger domains.

All the smaller domains were too afraid to try and make a move against them, and the few domains that decided to try and team up against them received a single ballista bolt with a Spawn that raced around everywhere being almost untouchable. This locked their domain down in raid status and allowed Murphy to escape.

When they thought they’d finally caught the little bastard, Murphy would cast summoning magic and recall him.

The Spawn were rather special in a way. They maintained a somewhat semi-player status because they were originally summoned by a player. They received all sorts of benefits from the system, but were still bound by certain limitations due to the fact they didn’t actually have a dimension key on their home plane.

Murphy could create a respawn point for them, but that too was limited in its function. Although it allowed them to respawn in the domain after 12 hours, the Spawn didn’t get sent home and instead sort of just floated around in limbo.

The respawn point had to be specialised, and it only worked for Spawn. It also became their lifeline. If the Respawn point were destroyed, then the Spawn in limbo would die. At the same time, a price was paid for every spawn that resurrected.

Based on their stats and skills, the respawn point would consume experience from the domain’s communal Exp. If the Controller ran out of Exp, then the respawn point wouldn’t operate.

It wasn’t quite the same as an NPC, which had a no freedom, fixed status and couldn’t improve, but it wasn’t quite a player, which had complete freedom and would just respawn elsewhere if they died.

Turned out that summoned semi-player creatures were the mainstay of domain defences. It was quite cheap for a Controller to purchase a Race Specific Summoning Scroll. This allowed most controllers to summon beings of their own race which then filled a semi-player roll.

There were only two problems with this. The first being, anything summoned in such a way only had one life unless the controller set up a spawn point. The second was that the summoned beings would generally be as weak as weak could be, and would have to train skills and stats from nothing.

Although players were more expensive and harder to keep, they were worth far more than summoned units because they already had significant levels and training, making them worth hundreds of summoned units.

Murphy had been quite lucky in having innate summons such as Morbid and the Spawn. Morbid was a born tank and unstoppable force already, while the Spawn evolved rapidly and took on many traits from the Master in doing so.

Although it made his minions a somewhat mixed bag, and no two evolved spawn had the same skills, traits or stats, it gave his army and undeniable edge over the competition. Both in the speed they could gain levels, and the diversity of their strengths and weaknesses.

It just so happened, that today was the day Murphy decided he was ready. He splurged from the huge stores of Exp he and Seelie had pooled together from their mostly pointless soul searching trip, and bought the scroll that would grant the Spawn’s altar the ability of a respawn point.

He almost felt his heart bleeding from the huge amounts of resources used on this endeavour, but none the less tore the scroll anyway.

A huge beam of light seemed to generate from nowhere and fall onto the circular courtyard. Spawn from all over the domain were popping out and screaming while banging poorly fitting shields or helmets.

In almost the same instant that the lights faded, a huge festival was being thrown by the Spawn. They didn’t particularly care about being able to respawn. Death was inevitable for these creatures, and they had readily accepted that before now.

They were more celebrating that their summoner was such a great man who looked out for their species. Which at the end of the day was worth more to them than having a second chance at life after a glorious battle in which they died.

That was the mindset of the Spawn, and if someone could actually understand their jabbering and incoherent noises, they would learn the Spawn placed less value on their own lives and more value on killing things. Having life was just a means to go and kill more stuff.

They’re Demons after all, and no matter how deep Murphy’s philosophical teachings are, these creatures can’t change their innate nature overnight.

With the respawn point ready, Murphy then rounded up his most powerful spawns and started teaching them about tactics. He had some plans he wanted to try out on this raid, and he needed the spawn to be capable of carrying them out.

While he was doing that, Seelie was following his instructions already and controlling the domain to float about near other domains they’d targeted. At first, they didn’t seem to react too much. Most of them were in protection status so weren’t worried about being attacked, and they also knew that they probably couldn’t take on Murphy’s domain alone.

At first, it seemed rather innocuous and innocent. The enemy was just floating around scoping them out. They’d then fly off to another domain hundreds or thousands of kilometres away and do the same thing.

After a while, they just started ignoring them. Even the domains that weren’t in protection status started to loosen up and ignore them. This was because all the domains they floated near were almost 3 times the size of Murphy’s little island of land.

Not to mention they were filled to the brim with far more powerful defenders and fortifications.

Then things changed a little when they floated up to only a few hundred meters from the edge of these domains, and the two gravity wells and atmospheres intersected and formed one. Murphy called this an ‘air bridge’. Unlike normal bridging, which is the earth forming a single midpoint between two domains, air bridging happens well before that. Often as far as a kilometre of two from the target.

In this case, the domains were still two small for something like that, so Murphy had to be quite a bit closer to form it. But the best part of this was that he wasn’t actually forming a ‘real’ bridge and their two domains still remained independent and mobile, just sharing a single gravity well and atmosphere.

Eventually, at a particular forested domain, things devolved slightly.

All the Spawn lined up along the edges of the domain and started banging their shields or screaming at the top of their lungs while jumping around. It looked as if they were all getting ready for war.

Making the inhabitants of this domain even more nervous, was the huge Hell Hound that patrolled the border and glared at them rather menacingly from across the gap. Dodgy catapults were hauled up to the edges of Murphy’s domain, and all pulled back ready to fire.

The only thing was that each of them was empty. The thing that made the creatures hidden in the domains forest the most nervous, was when Spawn started hauling huge sacks down to the catapults then loading them up.

Despite much threatening and posturing on the part of the big domains via voice projection, Murphy remained silent as his Spawn prepared for the task ahead.

Finally, after all this posturing from Murphy’s Spawns, Murphy’s domain just started floating away again. Just as they were starting to get some speed and distance up, and the air bridge was about to break, the Spawn lit all the sacks on fire and launched them into the other domain.

At first, nothing was thought about this. It was only a dozen odd catapults, so no matter how much Murphy tried, he would be unable to actually hit anything in the massive area of land these domains had.

Turned out, all he really wanted to hit was the domain in general. The flaming sacks hit the ground and exploded into pieces. Spraying flaming dog shit everywhere.

The entire domain was raised to the highest level of alert when the putrid stench of flaming shit filled the atmosphere and citizens of the domain either fled from the turbid smell through portals or were immediately paralysed as they vented their lunch.

The Spawn all cheered and laughed loudly as Murphy’s domain raced off into the starry sky. The beauty of this plan, was that each of the domains he’d targeted were so far apart, that by the time they caught up to Murphy, he will have already shit bombed another one and moved on.

Morbid’s box had been filled to overflowing precisely to fulfil this purpose.

By the end of a game day, which was 96 hours, 6 notorious domains had all been bombed with shit, and their rage filled the heavens. The more civilised controllers that were often bullied by these domains lost their civility and started projecting their raucous laughter hundreds of kilometres toward these shit covered domains.

In a single day, Murphy had successfully enraged and humiliated the 6 biggest and most notorious fish in his little sector of space.