Chapter 12: Barron Von Boff

On the questing planet, Holy Eden, Baron Von Boff had just awoken from his slumber and wiped the sleep from his eyes. In a practised and habitual manner, he pulled his fat body out of his most luxurious and unnecessarily huge bed. With heavy steps, he ambled over towards the chamber pot in the corner of the room to relieve himself.

A bevvy of beauties slowly flowed out of the bed after him while giggling and chattering. As the fat Barron pulled apart his silk gown to do his business, a knock sounded at the door. The Baron paid it no heed and focused his full attention on completing his daily ritual.

Baron Von Boff was a man very susceptible to superstition, and under no circumstances would he allow his daily ritual to be disturbed. If it was, he believed that his luck would be like a flickering candle flame facing the onslaught of a cyclone. So superstitious was he, that even if his county was being raided and he was on the verge of being hung in the streets like a cur, he would still complete his daily rituals.

The knock sounded again, just as Von Boff started talking to ‘the little baron’.

“Knock knock!”

“Don’t you worry little buddy. Who’s a big guy? Huh? You are! Yeah, you’re a big guy! You’re the biggest guy in all the lands. You’re a humongous towering giant among dwarves!”

“Knock knock!”

For another 10 minutes, Von Boff went through the process of talking to his cock to convince it that it was huge. He then burnt incense, did a shamanic voodoo dance, which would most likely get him hanged if the church ever discovered him doing it, and then finally reading a few passages from the Book of the Holy God.

Following on, he sent one of his many concubines to open the door, as he very meticulously dressed in the most ostentatious and regal looking clothes in his entire county. Which one would hope they were, considering every decent tailor in the county had been kidnapped by him to work solely on his clothes.

As he was putting the last touches on his gaudy outfit, the Bishop of the local church was ushered in by the still barely dressed concubines.

Although the Bishop had many things he wanted to say regarding this, he chose not to. After all, the upper royalty of the kingdoms and the empires were all granted a significant amount of leeway by the church.

With a flourish, Von Boff spun about with a huge smile on his face to greet the Bishop. Unfortunately, his glowing smile was not reciprocated in the least, and the glowering dark clouds that were metaphorically hanging over the bishop’s head quickly erased all vestiges of a smiling face from the Baron.

“Baron Von Boff. I know that you are insistent on worshiping the Lord God in pray at the beginning of the day, but sometimes you must understand that the Lord God has many things he needs you to do. It’s best if you pray to him at the church, where we can contact you in times like these!”

Von Boff’s fat face scrunched up slightly and his bloated cheeks turned his eyes into two squinty little lines. He seemed to shake for a brief moment from the indignation of the situation, but quickly regained his senses. In a very plain tone, he questioned the Bishop.

“What’s the matter that has you so riled up this fine morning Old Greg?”

“The matter is that demons have attacked the city and freed all those sinful, ungodly creatures from the guardhouses!”

Von Boff’s face quivered once more, and the shock of the news forced him to sit down. He then very quickly made some religious motions with his hands and kissed a little sickle on a chain around his neck.

“What creatures did they take?”

“All of them! During the night they cleaned out every single guardhouse in the city, the only exception being the castle dungeons! Some of those creatures are a plague on all of humanity!”

“Manny! Manny! Get your ass in here!”

With the yells of the red-faced Baron, a disturbingly thin old man that looked like he was skin on bone clambered into the Barons room with a pile of documents.

“Gather the Knights Manny! Send out the trackers! We must find those demons vermin at once!”

With this order, Von Boff rose up looking far more dignified now that he’d thrown some orders around and moved to head for breakfast. His lackey/squire/castle manager Manny, stared at the Baron with wide eyes before making a gulping noise.

“My ... my lord ... the um ... we sent out the first detachment yesterday before they appeared, but it seems the Demons are far stronger than we thought and managed to fight off our detachment. From the reports of the few survivors, it was a bloody and fierce one-sided slaughter.”

Von Boff started to turn red, and his fat body jiggled about as if he was barely able to restrain himself. Finally, after it seemed he’d just averted some kind of heart attack, his beady squinted eyes turned on the bishop.

“Old Greg, send a request to the Cardinal for the support of some Holy Knights. Manny, gather the remainder of our forces in the city. I want the location of those demons and the location of those prisoners within the hour. And find out how the hell they got so many evil creatures out of the city without anyone realising what was going on!”

Murphy and his gang were presently seated at a small camp they’d set up nearby their portal. Around them were dozens of other creatures, humans and beast people that had been rescued from the dungeons of the Baron. Most of them were just innocent bystanders that were unlucky enough to spawn on this planet and be forced into shackles.

The most degrading part was that the Holy Church seemed to have developed a method to create skill books from them. As if they were trapped here and refined into their base stats until they were a useless level one player again. Only then would they kill them, and allow them to respawn elsewhere.

Normally, if a person needed some quick cash or experience points for the player store, they could convert the experience of a skill into a skill book. For example, Murphy could technically get rid of all his crappy skills and sell them. Unfortunately, this process carried certain penalties.

For example, if he converted his masochism into skill books and sold it, he could sell nearly 1.2 million worth of Masochism Exp. The penalty for such an action though was dependant on just how much he sold in one go. One level’s worth technically wouldn’t even effect his Pain Mastery Score. To create a single level 1 skill book only needed 1000 Exp, which in comparison to his 1.2 million was almost negligible.

If he created a level 10 skill book, then it would eat up 500,000 Exp. The penalty though would be severe. For a level 1 skill book, there would be almost no repercussions. He would simply get a debuff from the system for a day or so that limited how quickly he could raise experience in that skill again.

On the other hand, if he made 32 level 1 skill books, or an equivalent level 6 skill book, he would be penalised with something huge, like a debuff that prevented him from levelling any other skills until that skill reached the level it had been. Or even worse, he would be afflicted with something that ate through his Exp and dropped the skill another level.

Regardless of the outcome of such a thing, the point is that converting a skill into a skill book would eventually cost a player a lot more than just skill points.

That said, there were methods to get around this sort of thing, and many players focused solely on the act of levelling a skill and then selling skill books in the player store to others. How they avoided the huge penalties of the system was a mystery and closely guarded secret of these people.

In the case of the Holy Church, it was something to do with their religion that allowed them the ability to refine players into skill books. The only upside of this was that using such a method against an unwilling participant granted them a huge buff allowing them to quickly replenish their Exp the next time they respawn.

Murphy could see that these people Chuckles had lead out of the city were distraught and stressed from their time in the Baron’s dungeons. Many of them had planned to kill themselves and suffer the 48 hours of game time lost, just so they could escape this planet and start levelling again.

It was only thanks to Murphy kindly agreeing to make them squatters in his domain that they chose not to. If Murphy agreed to them joining his domain, it meant they were guaranteed a safe place to respawn so that they could focus on levelling again without worries.

As the group rested, Murphy was busily trying to learn a new skill. Apparently, this was a skill Seelie had started with, and it was powerful beyond reason. It was called multitasking. It was quite literally the ability to focus your mind on two separate tasks at the same time.

To train this skill, he was doing something complex and something simple. The complex thing was his Mana cartography. Thanks to Morbid climbing almost every high-altitude mountain in the area, Murphy now had a pretty good layout of the Baron’s county, and was now mapping it all out in his Status Space.

At the same time, he was busily sorting through all the loot they pilfered from the dead knights that had chased after them the night before. They were quite highly levelled, and even their warhorses were frighteningly powerful. Turned out, Murphy had greatly underestimated the strength of his companions.

When he originally encountered the Knights and was fought off, he hadn’t managed to kill any of them, and it was 5 against 1. If they’d only had three knights at the time, he may have been able to kill two and escape from the last one before the damage overwhelmed him.

He initially suspected that his adventuring party would be strong enough to take on 20 knights, especially with Morbid present. In the end though, he was greatly shocked to discover that the other adventurers in his party were all monsters ... both metaphorically and literally.

After leading the Knights into the forest, Murphy had planned to charge in with Morbid and attract their aggression while his companions picked them off at the sides. To his shock however, Lucile and Xanzu didn’t even wait for Morbid to turn around and had already jumped out of the carriage to engage them the moment Murphy made it clear he was about to fight.

Lucile was fast and flexible, and her speciality was close combat. The moment she was within a few meters of a charging Knight, her body disappeared, and moments later the sexy panther lady was wrapped around the Knight’s back with her claws and teeth digging into the soft parts of his armour.

Xanzu’s traits were well hidden, and Murphy was uncertain what his nominal battle style was. Being a werewolf, Murphy was certain his close combat would be no less powerful than Lucile’s. However, despite that being his suspicion, Xanzu never entered direct combat and simply flittered about launching arrows like some kind of machine gun.

His accuracy was unnervingly precise, and before anyone else had joined the battle, he’d already blinded the 3 knights that were moving towards Lucile.

Just as Murphy and Morbid had turned to face the enemy, Tuskelly had already appeared amidst the knights and had turned into a giant blob of jelly, which sucked in a knight and his horse. He then seemed to just pause in the middle of the battlefield as he busily dissolved them.

It was about this time that Murphy realised Carson had somehow reached the battlefield. For a little dwarfish fellow, he sure was spry. It was like watching rookies trying to catch a leaf in a storm. Even more surprising was whenever Carson struck a blow with his spiked gloves, the armour of his target corroded away into flaky rust.

Even more disturbing was seeing the corrosion continue until it reached the body underneath the armour and start causing huge lesions and unstoppable decay.

By the time Seelie, Juwan, Murphy and Morbid joined the fight, 8 knights were already dead or dying, and another 6 were sporting heavy injuries. Seeing the way the battle was turning, the Knights ran as fast as they could. Although Morbid could most definitely catch them, Murphy didn’t want to pursue them into a trap, so let the last few survivors go.

With this battle, Murphy now had a slightly better understanding of his team’s strength, and it would make it easier to plan in the future. On top of that, these knights had hoarded no small number of interesting things from all the people they’d extorted that were unlucky enough to respawn here.

Thanks to his deprive skill, if he got to a Knight before their soul was sucked into the reincarnation cycle, he could deprive them of all sorts of things. Depending on what it was, it needed more effort and focus from himself. In this case, he deprived every Knight he touched of a random number of items from their player inventory. The reason he did it randomly and left it up to luck was that it required far less focus and mana then if he was focused on only taking specific things.

He was sure he could also deprive them of experience and stats, but for now, his skill level and control weren’t strong enough for something like that. It was also factored by many other things like the player’s willpower or wisdom. Seeing as the Knights were this strong, he didn’t even try to steal stats or Exp. He could barely suck the stats and experience points out from a run of the mill cat or dog, let alone a powerful player.

On top of all this, he also wasn’t stingy with the bad luck and called in a dozen odd luck spawn to steal as much luck as they could from these knights before their soul passed on. This made it far easier for him to equipment steal from them.

This all led to him accumulating a great deal of random and interesting equipment. Every now and then, the grateful prisoners they’d rescued would glance over towards Murphy, only to witness him taking some powerful looking artefact or equipment from his player inventory and then biting it.

Watching him simply eating such rare looking and interesting equipment left them all dazed.

As he explored his loot, Murphy came across something interesting. It was a stone that he couldn’t identify. The interesting part wasn’t that he couldn’t identify it, because he seemed to find a new ordinary looking rock almost every day that he was unable to identify.

The interesting part was that this rock had something engraved on it. After a while of trying to decipher the scratching, Murphy gave up and went back to exploring his inventory. The moment his focus left the rock in his hands, his body started making the very habitual motion of going to eat something he couldn’t identify.

Without thought or effort, he popped the rock into his mouth and started chewing. Everyone nearby heard the shiver inducing sound as if some primal beast was chewing the bones of a comrade into dust.

Everyone glanced over to see blood pouring from Murphy’s mouth, and a disturbing grin spread on his face as his teeth chipped and cracked while that stone was munched into powder.

The whole time, Murphy remained oblivious. He could feel that he’d eaten something weird again, but it had become so common now that he just ignored it. It felt good anyway, so his focus remained on the inventory and Mana Cartography.

After a few minutes of everyone breaking out into a cold sweat and slowly backing away from the mad man who was self-mutilating by eating rocks, Murphy finally swallowed the strange rock and in a matter of minutes his teeth had all somehow magically reformed into brand new perfect pearly whites.

Everything then returned to normal. The only remaining indication that Murphy had just brutally destroyed his mouth and eaten some magic rock was the blood stains on his chin and mouth.

Everyone decided to simply ignore it. Most of these people were ‘evil’ races anyway, and many of them had their own strange and unnatural rituals that others frowned upon. Thus, the magic rock was quickly forgotten by everyone.

After their short break in the camp, Murphy led everyone back to his domain and left them in the care of Uncle Calligso. After stocking some more supplies, they then raced off back to the Quest Planet of Holy Eden.

Although Chuckles had been a busy body and rescued all the villainous looking captives, his real mission was only to collect information, and so he and his operatives remained spread out through the city gathering information.

The most useful information gatherers were the 2nd evolution spawn with Luck and Shadow traits. All luck spawn were small in comparison to the others, and the Shadow Luck spawn used their tiny bodies and advanced speed to their advantage. Places that were difficult to get to for the other spawns were a piece of cake for the luck spawn.

In this case, the church in the city was heavily guarded and seemed to have no few number of enchantments to limit shadows and fill every nook and cranny of the building with light. The scene certainly made the place look like it was blessed, but that wouldn’t stop these daring little bastards from sneaking in.

The reason it was so fortified was that the church was actually the greatest power in the area, and they kept records of everything for as far back as its establishment in this county.

Now, one might think it difficult for a spawn to use the shadows to sneak into a place with no shadows, and they would be right. The only exception was the luck spawn, who were fast enough to be nothing more than a tiny blur in the very corner of a person’s vision.

Those moments when you think you saw something out of the corner of your eye but when you looked over there was nothing. This moment became a disconcerting norm in the church since sunrise today. The guards were starting to freak out just a little bit.

Making it worse was all sorts of strange things happening. Light gems in the ceiling suddenly cracking, satiny curtains and lush carpets suddenly falling onto someone head or bunching up and tripping them. Being a very backwards place to begin with, the guards of the church were starting to get a little paranoid and thought the church was possessed.

On his return from the castle, the Bishop cast an endless number of holy protection spells and lift curse spells and everything else in his repertoire that he could think of. The only problem was, they only seemed to make things even worse.

Things started lighting on fire, a guard tripped over something and stabbed himself in the jaw with his own sword. Stuff falling over, things moving around. Even shadows slowly started filling the church, which technically should have been impossible.

With the greatest haste, the Bishop closed the church to prevent the citizens getting wind of this situation and creating a panic. The last thing he needed right now was for all the citizens to start panicking and spreading rumours that the church had been cursed.

Unfortunately, the strange things within the church only grew more common and devilish. The Bishop believed he could contain it until the arrival of the Holy Knights that he requested from the Cardinal arrived, but before the sun had even reached a quarter of the way through the sky, the first death came.

The guard captain of the church, and the highest in stats and levels, was the primary target of the luck spawn. Naturally, they couldn’t simply reveal themselves and start pouring bad luck into these guards, so they did the next best thing, and started pouring bad luck into the building.

Although stealing luck was most regularly used by the spawn to give people a terrible day, that didn’t mean they couldn’t give negative luck to inanimate objects just the same as Murphy did. After all, it was basically the same trait.

Therefore, the devilish little bastards chose to wait. First, they just flittered about out of sight and touched everything they could. Walls, pillars, chandeliers, benches, carpets, floors. Everything they had a chance to touch they touched.

Finally, after that guard stepped onto a negative 20 luck carpet and accidentally stabbed himself in the jaw, a moment of distraction came. With that, the 4 Shadow Luck spawn of Chuckle’s special operatives appeared like ghosts at the back of the distracted guard captain.

In a few short seconds, they’d already lightly touched him thousands of times. His luck plummeted into the negatives and he never even noticed. The whole time, the guard that had just stabbed a sword into his jaw was the only person that could see them sitting on the guard captain back. He wanted to shout and scream, but he was now more or less effectively mute.

One could say that it was just bad luck that he didn’t stab himself somewhere else. Being the little demons that they are, the spawn naturally capitalised on this and spent half the time mooning that poor guard from the captain’s shoulder and slapping their butts and giving the bird.

When that guard turned white with fear at seeing those little demons inside the holy church, and everyone finally realised he was looking at the guard captain, the spawn were forced to once again disappear.

The whole time that they’d been in the church, the spawn had been using the spell ‘dark domain’. Every now and then when they had the mana stored up for it, they would cast the spell. Although their dark domain spell was only low levelled, with all four of them casting it as often as possible, the effect started adding up.

At first, it was almost imperceptible. Thanks to the various enchantments that kept the church internally bright, it was like very, very, very slowly lowering the brightness on a monitor. If 100% was normal brightness, then every cast of dark domain only took it down 1%.

It wasn’t until things started becoming even freakier that everyone finally realised the brightness of the church had already dropped at least a staggering 50% of normal. The only reason none of the guards noticed was that it was so gradual and prolonged, fooling their eyes into thinking it was normal.

Unluckily for these hapless guard fellows, the guard captain was now cursed with horrendously bad luck, and his every decision led to the death of a comrade. At first, he wanted to immediately send someone to inform the Bishop, who had long since retreated into his inner chambers.

That poor fellow was squashed flat when one of the huge 20 meter high stone pillars suddenly fractured and fell straight on top of him.

He then ordered his guard to lock the building down, while at the same time sending another person to inform the Bishop. The second guard heading towards the bishop tripped over a communal plate used for gathering donations and crowned himself so thoroughly on the edge of a metal candle frame that he’d never get back up.

Following that, the first guard to start moving to lock down the church slipped on communal wine that had somehow leaked out of a wine bottle that shouldn’t have even been nearby. The resulting fall was catastrophic as his sword left his grasp and then stabbed right into the shoulder of the guard captain.

Moments later, while the guard captain was freaking out and starting to question his beliefs, lighting gems all over the ceiling and walls started cracking and shattering for no reason at all. Without all the lighting gems fuelling the eternal light enchantment, the accumulation of dark domains suddenly enveloped the entire church in an eerie darkness.

A glass pane high up in the church suddenly exploded as the black shadow of winged demon suddenly burst into the church. With a wave of his hand, chuckles cast his innate spell from his Commander evolution.

The horrified guardsmen watched on as one of the dead guards suddenly exploded into a gory mess of meat, a red light flashed, and then two dozen evil looking spawn were standing there chewing on the scattered body parts. As if previously rehearsed, they all simultaneous looked towards the guards.

“Yah...”

“rar Rah!”

“Rah! Rah! Rah!”

They seemed to just share a few confused strange demon words and then suddenly all burst forth while chanting Rah! In unison. The guards were dumbfounded, shocked and frightened. They’d never witnessed anything like this before. If it were a normal day, the 15 odd guards still remaining in the church would actually have no problems slaughtering these 2 dozen spawn.

The only problem was, Murphy had recently been teaching Chuckles about the importance of manipulating morale on the battlefield. This wasn’t something Murphy was an expert at either and was something that he’d been taught by the Elf Witch.

Needless to say, Chuckles loved the concept. As a demon and a warrior, manipulating people and then killing them were his two favourite things to do. In this case, he’d long since reduced the morale of the church guards to nearly gone. All it needed was that little push over the edge. In this case, his sudden abrupt entrance and the summoning of 2 dozen evil looking demon spawn.

Adding on all the strange curse like happenings and the sudden realisation of how dark the church had become, the guards were all frightened out of their wits, making them easy pickings for the spawn. Chuckles took the guard captain by himself, and in a very unclimactic victory, beheaded him right there on the altar of the Holy God.

It would be a lie to say that it was a hard battle. Mostly because the guard captain had such dramatically poor luck stats that every action he took resulted in self-injury. Chuckles probably wouldn’t even have needed to touch him before he somehow managed to behead himself.

With the church emptied, barred from entry and more or less cursed by numerous Dark Domain spells all stacked on top of each other, Chuckles and his operatives were now free to ransack the place and take as much information as they could.

Before that though, he very silently snuck into the Bishop’s chambers. The chambers were very spartan and bare, and the Bishop was hunched over his desk scribbling a letter to the Cardinal regarding the ongoing evil curse invading his church.

Unfortunately, this letter would never reach the Cardinal. With quick, stealthy steps, Chuckles snuck up so close behind the Bishop that it was a surprise he couldn’t here Chuckles’ breathing. Then like a snake from the bush, Chuckles’ stabbed his pointed poison tail into the neck of the Bishop.

Before the Bishop could fully register what was going on, he felt dizzy and a great deal of pain from every part of his body. It only took a few moments until his body seemed to become cold and the spark of life in his eyes had dimmed.

Outside of the city, many citizens had come to a stop in front of the church. Their faces were paled in fright, and unstoppable shiver travelled up their spines at the sight of the church.

What was once a glorious beacon of Holy transcendent light had now fallen into darkness. In the time of half a day, the church had lost its shining light, and large cracks had split along the once perfect walls. With the light gone, the shadows cast from within the church gave the stained glass windows an ominous and evil looked.

Where there were pictures of virgin saints and past glorious Pope’s, was now the visage of men bleeding and tormented by spears. A dark mist seemed to flow out from the ground and enshrouded the church in a very evil atmosphere.

By the time Baron Von Boff got word of the strange happenings at the church, Chuckles and his gang had already cleared out everything and fled into the shadows of the tall city buildings.

When Von Boff finally arrived with a contingent of guards and bravely sieged the cursed church, he was appalled to find all the guards of the church had been gnawed to death by some kind of beasts and what little remained of their bodies were strung up about the church in very standard Spawn Feng Shui.

Skulls of the braver and more valiant guards that the spawn respected for their battle prowess were adorned atop spears, and their blood was smeared across the walls depicting demons devouring men and all sorts of other standard Spawn artwork.

Although the Spawn believed they were helping to increase the culture of this world by leaving behind some decorating tips, the very sheltered and well brainwashed citizens of Holy Eden were appalled. This was something straight out of the book of sinners.

Von Boff and his companions all found it difficult to contain their lunch, and a few of them couldn’t even hold out long enough to get outside, which only added to the corruption of the already defiled church.

It seems that in the short absence from Holy Eden, Chuckles had returned to the portal to meet us as we came back through. The first thing he did was to report on his efforts to encourage cultural awareness on this planet. It couldn’t fault the little guy for his efforts, even though I felt they were somewhat counter-intuitive to his goal.

Regardless, I rewarded him with a huge leg of Cursed Rhino from the player store. It’s hard to say why exactly the spawn loved about this meat. To them, it was something akin to catnip for cats. The moment I took it out of my inventory all of the spawn, even Chuckles, starred at it with menacing glares.