Chapter 15: Operation ‘Surprise Buttsex’

With the portals all once again re-opened, Murphy’s domain became like a beehive, with thousands of spawn and hundreds of players all rushing about in preparations for the upcoming crusade. With the closing and re-opening of all the portals, Murphy’s 6 Star portal had re-opened on nearly the other side of the planet from where it initially was, giving the players not interested in the crusade a new and exciting area to explore.

More importantly though, the portal opened up only a dozen-odd kilometres from one of 6 Stars Capital cities, the city of sin. Aptly named because of the type of people and business it tended to draw in. Thanks to the loose lips of a few of Murphy’s citizens, the rumours of a tiny little Island-sized domain declaring a crusade against a vast quest planet stirred up the entire populace of 6 Star.

Sin city suddenly exploded with activity in response to this rumour and players started rushing here in an attempt to gain passage to Murphy’s domain. Many were interested in the cause, taking advantage of the battlefield to train or just wishing to take advantage of the enormous amount of resources needed for war and wanting to trade for some profit.

Murphy had never expected the news of his crusade to be so stimulating that it caused such an uproar from all of the players on 6 Star. He was dubious about merely letting random people start storming into his domain, but decided it didn’t particularly matter in the end.

His domain wasn’t a quest planet and as such his domain lord status gave him a great deal of freedom in how he manages it. For example, he could set something similar to permissions which allowed him to limit the movements of people inside his domain.

As such, he set a kilometre radius around the portal altar were un-associated players were free to roam trade and squat. He also moved the mission board for the crusade into this space and had the spawn erect some make-shift lodgings and conveniences in this area for passing travellers.

It had only been a day since he re-opened the portals, but already an influx of nearly 500 players had rushed into his domain chasing their goals. Many naturally followed the endless stream of spawns into the portal for the battlefield, simply having come to join a substantial chaotic battle, while others started setting up stalls or selling goods all adventurers need.

Murphy also took advantage of this and allowed his spawns in crafting related jobs to start setting up stalls as well. What surprised him the most was that the poisons and instant recovery potions of the spawn alchemists were selling so fast they ran out of the ingredients to make more in only a matter of hours.

Of course, there was also plenty of troublemakers, thieves and generally incorrigible people that were creating strife, only to suddenly be surged by a rush of spawn and disappear in a little burrow in the ground nearby. It was almost comical watching dozens of little spawns screaming, huffing and grunting as they tried to force a still kicking and screaming troublemaker into a burrow with an opening only half their width.

As the day slowly passed, nearly a hundred teams were sent out between the other three portals each protecting a clever spawn with mana cartography skill. Gradually, as the day passed they all started returning and the clever spawn would immediately race off to the castle.

In a rather wide circular room of the castle, hundreds of other clever spawn were rushing around under the guidance of the elder spawn as they sorted through information from the returning teams. In the centre of the room was a strange pedestal giving off a bright glow and projecting into the air a considerable planet like map of Eden.

Every time a clever spawn returned to the castle with a mana cartography map, Murphy would use his deprive skill to suck the map from them and update his own. Then with the help of this projection pedestal, he could display it easily in the war room so they could plan out exactly how they were going to run their future operations.

Thanks to this, Murphy’s mana cartography skill started skyrocketing in experience, and he began to realise that there were dozens of interesting things he could do with the map he’d never noticed before. For example, he could mark areas of the map and add various information that would be helpful.

In just the first day, Murphy had already mapped out 3 entire regions of Eden without having ever left the comfort of his castle. Not only that, but each of these areas had markings covering them denoting areas rich in resources or other towns and cities.

At the same time that Murphy was mapping and planning were to rob, spawn under the command of Serious would rush back to keep Murphy updated on the situation of the battlefront. It took nearly the entire day before the Church reacted to Murphy switching the portal location and attacking a city on almost the other side of their planet.

By the end of the first day, Murphy’s cartography skill had levelled up to level 7, and he already had a pretty good idea of the situation of 3 small regions. The only problem was, these three regions were all comparatively tiny on the huge expanse that was a planet.

Thus, he could only sigh as he realised the magnitude of the task he had undertaken. Nonetheless, when the artificial light of Holy Eden began to set and night was coming into play, Murphy still gathered a few teams of operatives and set off through one of the portals.

Naturally, Carson, Lucile, Xanzu and Tuskelly all insisted on joining Murphy’s operation. They were, after all, his primary adventuring team now, though Murphy hadn’t realised exactly when they came to this conclusion or why.

On the first night of the long war, 12 teams of citizens from Murphy’s domain, each leaning towards stealthy classes, all split off into different directions and scattered amongst the three regions that had been explored that day. The primary goal of each team was rescuing any prisoners that were being held in the larger towns and cities of each region.

The secondary goal was to capture the Baron or Lord of each region and city or any clergymen of the church they could find. Lastly, the third goal was explicitly for Murphy’s team. Amongst the three regions they’d explored, numerous geodes and a few rare creatures had been discovered during the scouting missions early in the day, and Murphy’s purpose was to capture these strategic resources. Or more aptly ... to steal them.

It had been almost an entire game week since I’d last come to Holy Eden. All of the preparations for the crusade were tiring and wearisome, certainly not a part of the game I’d expected to have to suffer through. Luckily, apart from some essential elements I was involved with, Seelie and the Clever spawn took care of most of the preparations.

Much to my liking, I now only had to do the grunt work, which is where most of the joy of the game lied. In my opinion anyway. The moment we stepped through the portal, my team sped off in our Chaos Carriage behind Morbid towards our first target.

It only took about half an hour before Morbid let out a snort and slowed to halt under the canopy of some ancient looking old trees at the top of a fat hill. Lucile, Carson and Xanzu hastily left the carriage and began to investigate our target while Tuskelly gooped off into the forest as a puddle of sentient mud.

I followed Seelie as she stepped out of the carriage and moved to the edge of the tree line on the top of the hillside. As we stepped out from the shadows of the trees, we took in the sight of a massive hole in the ground covered with wooden strata and rickety elevators suspended by rope and pulled up by teams of slaves being industriously whipped by generic guardsmen with generic mean faces.

“Work harder scum!” and other familiar catchphrases of unimportant side characters rang out into the night sky along with the cracking of their whips and regular grunts of slaves.

Guard towers only a few stories high and looking as if they would collapse in a stiff breeze were placed about the area generously and had huge flaming torches along with what looked like some kind of lens that focused the torchlight as a spotlight.

As we watched on, the slaves hauled up another creaky elevator which was slowly unloaded by some more slaves in a very mechanical fashion, only showing the rare burst of energy for a minute or two after a whip reminded them about good work ethics.

Just seeing the condition and treatment of these people had me clenching my fists. After surveying the area for a while longer, my team started to reassemble on the hill.

Lucile was the first to return, and I almost didn’t even notice her presence sneaking up on me if not for the great deal of effort I’d been spending training my hearing recently.

“The patrols on the east side have been cleared out. Xanzu has a good spot nearby and is tracking the location of the guard captain.”

I merely nodded as I watched a strange puddle of mud slowly seeping out from the ground and working its way up Lucile’s slender white legs.

“Ugh! Get off me you disgusting bastard!”

“Oh! Oh! Don’ fight it baby ... wait ... I mean, I’m just so tired, let me rest a little. You know how tired I get when sleuthing about as a puddle.”

Tuskelly, never a gentleman, slid up along Lucile’s body in such a disgusting manner that I felt embarrassed enough for the both of them. After firmly attaching himself to her chest, groin and thighs like a second skin, he finally reported.

“No problems on the west side. I set up the thingy just like you said to.”

Hearing him refer to the very technical summoning circle as just a ‘thingy’ filled my heart with some doubts but I chose to just ignore them for now. We had numerous stops we needed to make tonight, and we couldn’t afford to get bogged down in one place too long.

After waiting a few more minutes, I detected a faint glinting like a distant reflexion of the sun from the north side of the giant hole. Seeing this, I took out a little silver mirror that seemed to be glowing with moonlight and flashed it back. Once the other side stopped, I grinned.

“Looks like everything is ready. Let’s go. Try to take out as many as you can before they realise what we’re doing.”

With that, I made a clicking sound with my tongue, and Morbid suddenly launched out of the woods behind me like the shadow of a dark cloud covering the sun. Without hesitation, I reached out and grabbed onto his fur. By the time I’d pulled myself up to his back, he was already halfway to the edge of the encampment around the hole.

Before we even made contact or were noticed, a pillar of light shot up from where Seelie was standing on the hill, distracting the slaves and guards attention towards it. A continuous stream of arrows took advantage of this bizarre distraction as they flew out from the east side of the encampment and started piercing into the legs and arms of anyone that looked even remotely important.

I couldn’t help but be impressed with Xanzu’s skills with a bow. He was indeed a monster of long-range combat, despite being a creature renowned for its cruel and vicious close combat potential.

At the same time, a strange gas began to pour out from the northern forest and billowed into the encampment like a rolling wave. Everyone engulfed by it would collapse to the ground paralysed, and the few strong enough to fight against it quickly found themselves getting a punch in the guts from a grey midget that seemed to be spewing this fog out from various open containers on his body.

Finally, the mesmerising glow of Seelie’s spell faded, and an uncountable number of light rays pierced through the night overhead like lasers, instantly overloading anyone they touched and sending them into a stunned state. Nearly half of the hundreds of guards were struck by this one attack and just started staring off into space as if they were daydreaming.

Someone finally realised that something was very wrong and started screaming; “Attack! We’re under attack!”, at the top of his lungs. Unfortunately, he was quickly silenced when Morbid very unceremoniously arrived at the encampment and stomped him flat.

Seeing a giant hellhound towering as high as the guard towers suddenly appear nearby drove the few remaining conscious guardsmen into a panic and they fled for the only direction of the encampment that wasn’t being attacked.

Seeing them all fleeing in the predetermined direction, I pulled out an old parchment from my inventory and ripped it in half. Just as the scattered remnants of guardsmen were rushing into the woods, an eerie red glow lit up the darkness of the tree line and a resounding roar echoed out.

‘Ping! Murphy’s Law has caused an Unhappy Accident! -7 luck.’

“Damnit!”

Although I’d been desperately hoping nothing would go wrong, I should have long since known that Murphy’s law was going to interrupt my plans tonight. I have no idea what ended up being summoned and decided it was better to not find out.

I gathered my party at the edge of the dark abyss and quickly prepared ropes from my inventory as I charismatically started giving out orders.

“Hurry...”

With that, our figures disappeared over the edge as we started to slide down the ropes into the darkness. The pit turned out to be a little deeper than expected. It took nearly 10 minutes for me to reach the bottom and that was at an almost complete free fall.

As I was falling, I suddenly noticed a slight glow of torches and abruptly caught hold of the rope, which immediately dislocated my shoulder from its socket. If not for the quality of the rope, it probably would have snapped. If not for the quality of my body ... it also probably would have snapped.

While dangling from the rope and pressed against the rocky wall, I observed numerous slave whipping guards diligently whipping slaves and uttering derogatory insults towards them. The slaves appeared incredibly malnourished and sickly. How they’d even survived to the point that their bodies could degenerate to this state was a mystery to me.

All the slaves were slightly less diligently hauling sacks of a dirty black ore out from a tunnel almost directly below where I was hanging. As I observed the scene, the remainder of my comrades caught up to me. With a simple nod of acknowledgement to each other, we all dropped the last 15 odd meters into the hole.

The instant I landed, my very much outdated sword of sharpness sung as it was freed from its sheath. I rapidly approached the nearest guard and swung at his fat body.

‘CLANG!’

My sword was deflected by a skilful counterstrike from the guards dirty leather armour ... which barely had a scratch left on it.

‘What the fuck! I can’t even cut through the scum of this quest planet ... I thought the baron was just an exception.’

I quickly retreated as his sword thrust towards me, slicing through the fabric of my meagre black t-shirt and scrapped across my skin like a knife across the surface of a boulder. I barely even got scratched enough to bleed, despite that strike being dead centre with my shoulder.

Seeing the shocked expression of the guard as his sword deflected from my skin, I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. Taking advantage of that shock, I shot forward at my fasted speed only to be parried by his leather arm guard ... which was in no way the panicked guards flailing of his arms and was definitely skilful ... otherwise, all the levels I’ve poured into my weapon mastery would be pointless ... right?

Once more I raced in, this time anticipating his ... skilful swordsmanship. Using my body’s absurd levels of endurance to my advantage, I allowed him to deflect my strike with his flimsy looking cotton scarf ... wait ... I mean, he skillfully dodged and hysterically ... eloquently struck back at me, only for me to continue forwards relentlessly. During the moment he seemed to believe he would kill me in a single strike, I too swung my sword once more towards his neck.

To both of our shock, my sword err ... missed again?

‘Stupid fucking cotton scarf ... the thing must be made from dragon silk.’ was definitely not what I was thinking at the time because it would be embarrassing to admit I was thwarted twice by some common fabric worn by a generic low levelled guard.

As I struck, he stabbed into my stomach only for his sword to act as if meeting a solid wall and barely penetrating a mere few millimetres through my skin. As the force of his strike pushed me back, an arrow shot out from nearby and pierced the man’s chest.

I could only watch on helplessly as my skilful foe struggled with gasping breaths and collapsed. When I returned my focus to the surroundings, I noticed the dozen-odd guards nearby had already been killed by the others. It was about this time that I finally realised a fatal flaw with the distribution of my stats and skills.

My offensive ability was absolute shit. Sure, I could take a beating like nobody’s business, but I couldn’t kill anything. Well, not unless I used magic, which despite its convenience I somewhat despised. On top of that my most significant attribute, taking damage, was useless if I kept enough distance to properly use magic from my spell tome.

I now remembered that even the baron had been felled by a single arrow in an instant while I had mindlessly engaged him in combat for nearly half an hour. The moment of realisation must have shown on my face, as all my compatriots looked at me with eyes of pity or encouragement.

“Sigh...”

Juwan, the huge jackass, simply patted my shoulder and laughed as he praised and encouraged me.

“Heheh! I always knew you were a kind spirit little brother. To have spent all your time here training to defend and take damage while everyone else focuses on killing each other. Truly worthy of admiration.”

‘Peh! What admiration! I want to do damage too! It’s not my fault, ok? I’m just too afraid to get better equipment in case I ruin it. And my magic is potent ... mostly ... probably...”

I then also came to a disturbing conclusion, during my internal ranting, that most of my magic was utterly useless. The few spells that actually could harm someone were nowhere near high levelled enough to take out soldiers of Eden, which were quite highly levelled in comparison to other domains we’d visited.

On top of that, many of my other abilities were focused around debuffs and delayed damaged as well. My Luck is entirely fucking unpredictable and even more so when I’m stealing it from other people. My poisons are only useful if they make skin contact or if they breathe them in. If I had no allies with me, I wouldn’t have to worry too much about that, but one slip up and then I’ll be left standing here watching as my teammates dissolved into puddles around me.

This led me to wonder just how much stronger my party was than me. Well, damage wise anyway. When it came to taking a thrashing, I seemed to be unrivalled.

As I was cursing at the world for being so unfair, and ignoring Juwan’s entirely misplaced bragging, I stalked off towards the gloomily lit tunnel all the slaves were dragging bags of ore from. It was only a few minutes of travel and calming down the many frightened and curious slaves until I came to the edge of a large ore vein.

While still slightly upset at having realised just how useless I am in battle, I reached out and began to deprive the ore vein. Slowly but surely, a large black rock with a metallic lustre gradually formed in my hand. This was the geode that this stone was connected to.

On a domain this size, a geode could sprout out veins of ore for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Luckily for me, and thanks to some testing on my own domain, it was apparent that I only needed contact with an ore vein connected to the geode to be able to rob it from the planet.

Once the black geode had fully formed, we quickly started to herd the slaves towards the elevator and rushed them all up to the surface. Using the corpses of the guardsmen, I summoned a group of spawn to lead these hapless chaps back towards the portal.

As the last few refugees were hurried away by my diligent minions, I finally took notice of our surroundings and realised Morbid wasn’t guarding the entrance like I’d expected and had rushed off somewhere. Straining my ears, I finally heard the sounds of roaring and thumping from off in the distance.

I could only assume that Morbid was keeping whatever was unexpectedly summoned busy in the forest somewhere. Letting out a loud whistle, the team gathered up near me in preparation to flee the moment Morbid returned. It wasn’t long before we felt the ground shaking and heard the crisp crack’s echoing from the trees as a house-sized dog launched out of the forest with...

“What in the fuck is that thing?”

Murphy’s party watched on with varying horrified expressions as Morbid raced towards them with a few bleeding gashes and cuts across his snout and body. His left ear had drooped down from a deep laceration, and his teeth were bared in a vicious snarl and covered with black viscous blood.

Following hot on his trail was a small army of black creatures that looked entirely foreign to anything Murphy had seen before. Dozens of them flittered through the trees like ghosts, occasionally disappearing from sight in a puff of black smog that was summoned from their bodies, only to reappear twenty or thirty meters away still running at full speed.

They advanced through the forest and subsequent open field on four long gangly legs, each adorned at the tip with four serrated, jagged talons equally distanced on the foot like an X. Their bodies were completely black, thin and looked half decomposed with various wounds still gaping in their flesh and pouring diseased black blood.

Each and every one of them had an almost unnaturally spherical head armoured with something akin to a chitin carapace, atop a long neck. They sort of looked like a smooth black marble and was completely featureless apart from the ‘jaw’, which was more akin to someone merely having cut the creatures spherical head halfway through and sewed it back together. The wire somehow keeping their heads together seemed to stretch and deform along with the jaw as they opened mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth.

The head almost looked like some kind of disfigured evil Packman. The creature had what could only be a thin dexterous tail. Or more precisely, they each had nearly 7 tails, running along the spine of their back like a Mohawk.

As if this creature wasn’t already disturbing enough, its leathery gaunt skin was covered in pustules that occasionally popped and released a cloud of smog that effectively kept most of the creature hidden from view in the dark of night.

Murphy’s party, after a short moment, to try and comprehend exactly what the creature they were looking at was, burst into action as Morbid arrived. Xanzu was already silently drawing his bow back as Seelie flipped open her tome of magic and began chanting a spell.

Murphy was the fastest to react among them, as he raced forward to embrace the giant sniffling nose of Morbid who was giving him soft whines and growls like a bullied kid, as if he’d somehow been wronged by the world and expected Murphy to enact vengeance for him.

Before Murphy could get adequately enraged at the fact someone had kicked his dog, Xanzu released his bow, and a stream of arrows began to pour forth towards the dozens of shady black monsters. Juwan and Carlson both advanced towards the front of the party to intercept incoming enemies while Lucile and Tuskelly stood close behind them, prepared to start picking off any monsters that left themselves open.

The monsters spread out as they approached, occasionally disappearing in an almost inaudible ‘poof’ of smog and reappearing nearby. They began to circle around the group like vultures, all the while pouring haze from their bodies and slowly engulfing the party in the miasma of smoke.

Xanzu’s arrows, for a rare change, didn’t appear to take any casualties from these creatures, as they passed into the smog and then harmlessly flew out the other side. Presumably, this pollution was some kind of skill innate to these beings, which allowed them to make short distance teleports and sense projectiles.

Considering these creatures all looked like a form of undead, their surprising dexterity and nimbleness could only be attributed to their multiple tails, each allowing the creature an absurd amount of reflexive balancing in their footwork and running.

As they circled around the group, they began to let off an eerie low moan, like an old woman who fell over and couldn’t get up. The most disturbing part about this was that as more and more of the creatures joined in, the moans seemed to resonate with each other causing the ears of the party members to reverberate and begin producing some light vertigo effects.

By this point, Morbid was growling back menacingly. Troublingly, however, he was growling towards the dark forest in the distance and didn’t appear to pay these creatures any mind. This worried Murphy far more than the creepy feeling these monsters gave him. If Morbid the vicious demon dog the size of a house was worried about something in that forest, then, of course, Murphy was doubly concerned.

“We need to leave, right now.” Said Lucile, who amongst them all had the highest danger sense. It was clear from a single glance that something had her hackles raised. If she were in her panther form, she’d most likely have all the hair on her back standing on end right now.

Murphy looked around them at the creatures and then glanced back at the forested hillside they originated from. In the distance, he spotted a dozen of his Minion’s shepherding the slaves away towards the portal.

“We can’t yet. The slaves ... If we leave now, those creatures...”

Seeing the determination on Murphy’s face, everyone in the party knew that Murphy would be unable to abandon those slaves. Although this entire war had the benefit of stealing from a rich quest planet, the people that knew Murphy best were aware that his primary focus for this whole operation was explicitly to free as many slaves as possible.

In addition, being the kind of people that they are, Murphy’s teammates all agreed with his perspective. If they couldn’t even save the first slaves they rescued, what was the point of this war? It would be a total farce.

Seeing the retreating slaves, everyone made gloomy expressions as they focused back on the creatures around them and the encroaching smog. At last, Seelie, who had been chanting some spell this whole time, finally finished and flourished her hands outwards. A mystical light with no visible origin pierced through the dark sky like the sun parting clouds and rained down on them, engulfing the party in a protective glow that slowly spread outwards towards the creatures.

The reverberating and disorientating moan of the monsters became screeches and cries as they quickly leapt back from the circle of sunlight pouring in like a godly reprieve.

Seeing this, Juwan took the initiative and launched himself forwards with a loud battle cry.

Before anyone could fully realise what was going on, Juwan slashed his sword towards one of the creatures and cleanly separated one of its legs. He then launched himself backwards with surprisingly nimble steps, considering the bulk of his obnoxiously shiny silver armour, and prepared to start forwards again.

Before he did, however, he let out a long sigh and seemed to fix his face with a half pained half proud expression.

“I’m sorry little brother, but only you can bear the Sins of this pitiful older brother.”

“I elect Murphy Law as the bearer of sins!” He shouted.

Following which, Murphy felt a strange sensation wash over his body. Moments later he felt the usual guilty pleasure of taking damage as Juwan parried a strike from the angered monster, which had enough power behind it to completely lift Juwan from the ground and throw him back nearly 5 feet.

Almost as quickly as Murphy took the damage, his unnaturally high endurance and vitality began to patch him up. Juwan stared at the sky with some shock for a moment as he felt the damage he’d taken already repairing itself. Although it was one thing to witness it, it was totally different to actually experience it. He now realised just how monstrous his brother’s regenerative abilities were.