Chapter 8: The First Battle

Haa ... I really hate it when I’m right. I hate it sooo much. I knew this space place was suspicious. So all those stars really are other domains. There’s just so many. Haa...

I knew the day would come, but I definitely didn’t expect the first domain we bumped into was another poison domain! Damnable luck! You’re supposed to be in the positive! Why are you such a huge pain in my ass all the time!

Calm! Calm like a gentle breeze. Ok, let’s see. The guides said we can steer the Domain about. So ... let’s run away. Unless they have some kind of rocket, let’s just see them catch us!

“You cowards! Runnin’ away aye! I’ll bet you’re noobs! Hah! The more you run, the more other domains’ll steer towards you! Then it’s gonna be noob stompin’ time! HAHAHA!”

I wonder how he projects his voice all the way over here. We’re like, 50 kilometres apart. Is that some kind of domain option I haven’t found. Oh ... voice projector? That’s probably what I want.

Hmm ... how does one respond to this situation? Should I taunt him back with something witty? Some remark insulting his manhood perhaps? Or his ancestors maybe?

Oh! I know.

“Morbid. Come. Make the sound for Murphy. Do the sound. Go on. You can do it buddy.”

“FART“

Heh heh. Yeah. Eat it you scorpion bastards. You eat that stink right ... up...

“Great Sage! Morbid what have you been eating? It’s Chuckles, isn’t it?! That little bastard has been feeding you chocolate again hasn’t he?”

“Ruff!”

“Don’t give me that look. The poor Curse Spawn are still flushing out their burrows from the last time. You tell that cheeky little bastard that if I catch him feeding you chocolate again, I’m going to tie him to the ballista.”

“Ruff!”

“Hah! He probably will evolve wings if I started doing that all the time.”

Hmm ... all that aside. What am I going to do about this? Should I set up an observatory of some description to keep an eye on all my neighbours? Arh! What does that matter for now! It’s my Domain’s first battle. I can’t just keep running away like this otherwise it’ll make us look weak.

If we look weak, we’ll become easy prey, and other Domains are just gonna gank the shit out of us. Maybe it’s like those old movies of people going to prison. I need to walk up to the biggest guy in the yard and beat the shit out of him to scare everyone off.

Ahh ... who am I kidding? The biggest bloke in the yard probably has a planet 4 times the size of earth. If I go and start a fight with someone like that it’ll be like asking to get beaten to death on my first day.

Whew ... I wonder what Seelie’s doing ... probably in her wizard tower again coming up with some weird spell. The last one she made turned the tails of half my Spawn into flowers.

Sure, their farts smelt like a spring breeze, but in the end, they grew up with their tails. It’s half their balance. It was like watching a cat after you cut their whiskers off. They just stumble all over the place looking confused. Took nearly a whole game day for them to revert back again.

Oh! That’s it ... Hah! Let’s turn this boat around and give those scorpion bastards a whooping.

Murphy played with the controls in the Domain’s Control Space and locked onto the nearest domain. With that, the domain would automatically close in on the scorpion people’s domain and move over to ‘dock’ with it. Which was really just a gentle way of saying it was going to collide with the other domain and form a bridge, which would initiate a raid.

In these cases, the raiding party is usually the side that steps foot on the other domain first. This usually leads to a very bloody and aggressive battle on the ‘bridge’ area until one side steps onto the other.

The reason this was such an integral part of the Domain Battle is that if you’re the raiding party, you can retreat and break off the engagement to run away. If you’re the defending party, your domain is in a locked state and can’t move until you’ve killed all the enemies on your domain or have been successfully raided.

It makes defending very passive, but at the same time, if your defences are strong enough, you can wipe out invaders quickly and then pursue the invader’s domain and initiate a raid of your own.

Normally, a domain’s speed through space is determined by its size. Smaller domains are much faster by a general rule of thumb. There are methods to increase your domain’s speed or slow down other domains, but those are usually very expensive.

The reason this is mentioned is that, after a battle, the raiding domain is slowed down to 2/3rds the speed of the domain they attacked. It meant that if the defending domain cleared all the raiders fast enough, then their domain would be faster and they could counter attack.

Murphy marched out of the still half-finished castle into the little wizard tower. After some searching he found Seelie teaching some weird magic spell to some of the Curse Spawn. Through a few quests, they’d managed to get some Spell Tomes to allow the little tricksters to cast other magic apart from their innate spells.

The problem was that spell tomes were expensive and apart from the initial tome, so they could summon a book, they couldn’t simply give them all more books and let them learn spells how Murphy normally did.

They instead had to learn new spells the hard way. Which was learning about them from reading or another mage and then practising them.

When Murphy arrived, they were busy trying to cast a curse magic that slowed a target’s movements. Murphy used this magic frequently against other monsters, but he suspected the reason the Curse Spawn were learning it was because it had the complete opposite effect on the Spawn.

Instead of slowing them down, it made them hyperactive and incredibly fast. It only had a short duration and required a high mana cost, but when used in the right situation is was very powerful.

Regardless, Murphy didn’t come here for that. He came to ask Seelie about another Curse.

Out in space, the two domains were rapidly approaching each other. One had three rings of different biomes, and the other had only one type of biome. Although seeing multi-biome domains isn’t unheard of, it’s still very rare.

Most others usually only have a single biome. In the case of the Raiders trying to attack Murphy, the biome they had was a sandy desert that continually released puffs of poisonous smoke.

The smoke all accumulated around the floating island that was the domain and gave it a very sinister appearance. A poisonous desert.

The leader in this domain was a huge scorpion that had a human head instead of a scorpion head. All his brethren were similar, in that they were scorpion creatures with human faces. The only difference was, they were about as big as a dog, whereas the leader was about as big as a car.

It was rather clear that the pecking order of this race is whom was bigger is the boss. Either that or this man faced scorpion had some midget complex and only allowed similar raced creatures that were smaller than him to exist on his domain.

He called his brood of man faced scorpions to the edge of the domain and readied to charge forth and do combat the moment the bridge was formed. He then witnessed a somewhat strange sight. Something was shot from the other domain.

At first, the distance was too great, and it simply looked like a glitter of light. It was quickly followed by another, then another and soon nearly a dozen. The leader man faced scorpion simply scoffed. He assumed they were blindly trying to fire arrows at him before he could make contact.

Even if they were elves with their amazing enchanted bows, there was no way they’d be able to fire across the remaining 2 or 3 kilometres before contact. Even if they could, their accuracy would be so poor that they would most likely hit nothing.

He then seemed to become shocked for a moment and his gaze focused in on the glittering specs which were clearly getting closer. Before he could fully comprehend what he was seeing, a huge bolt the size of a tree suddenly fell into his domain.

The moment it made contact, a little purple demon, somewhat dizzy and shell-shocked, cut loose the ropes holding him to the bolt and then started darting off into the domain. Following this scene were a dozen more bolts and then the familiar sound of a system prompt.

‘Ping! Murphy’s Domain has initiated a raid. Your Domain has become locked until all invaders are dealt with.’

Murphy was still in his domain, standing next to a huge ballista that he’d had the Spawn build leading up to the last day of protection. Now that he had to go to war with another domain, he was going to use the rules to his advantage.

By sending some elite special forces suited to sneaking about in poison, he could lock down the enemy domain and claim the initiative in this battle before their two domains even met and formed a bridge. It was an incredibly devious method of battle and was also an original method.

Although there were other races that had tried this, they were usually flying races and travelling through the space between the domains was impossible unless you’d already built up enough force to carry you across. Thus, they usually had to wait until the bridge was formed and then fly across.

After all, there’s no atmosphere between the Domains. Just empty space.

That said, there’s also no gravity, which makes what Murphy achieved even more impossible, seeing as anything he launched out of his sphere of gravity should not have made the seemingly huge arc that the bolts did.

This was more a result of some carefully placed phials of volatile concoction for direction and propulsion ... essentially turning the tree sized ballista bolts into rockets instead of simple bolts.

If he could get the aim of the ballista’s right and properly control the flight path of the bolt instead of just being able to hit the general area of the opposing domain, he could probably just strap a bath tub sized container of concoction onto the tip of a bolt. He would then be able to treat it as something akin to a cruise missile.

Unfortunately, the technicalities and precision needed for something like that was still beyond him. Even Seelie who had the Calculation skill couldn’t properly account for all the variables with their medieval level of equipment.

Anyway, the point is, that man faced scorpion and his brood of angry little scorpions had been cheated of the chance to take the initiative, and Murphy now had a handful of impish little demons running around on their domain.

It was too late to be able to track them down and kill them all, but in the end, it didn’t matter too much. He could just go and kill everything on the enemies domain then come back and clear his. After that, he can just disengage then re-engage. If anything, it just meant that his raid had now become a little bit of a pain.

He wasn’t too worried about them destroying his main base, which was the victory condition of a raid. It was hidden deep under the sands of his poison desert and had structural integrity enough that it would take he, himself, nearly 12 hours just to breach it.

Murphy watched with glittering eyes as the enemy remained standing at their battle front and didn’t pursue his special operatives. This would make it easier for them to complete their missions. He wasn’t too worried about them, even if they had been chased down. Chuckles volunteered to lead the mission, and he could damn near put up a fight with Murphy at this stage.

He was already level 11 and close to another evolution, so Murphy often joked about what his next evolution would be. He was actually quite curious, because over the week he’d spent hunting with the spawns on Newb Planet, he’d picked up and even self-learned all sorts of interesting new skills.

The majority of them he was rather displeased with because they were, by nature, somewhat evil and sinister. But as had become his motto since he started this game, It’s only evil if it’s used for evil.

A perfect example is how well behaved and fun his Spawn’s are. They only eat innocent creatures and people if they’re starving now. Thanks to that, they more often than not go out to complete quests which require them to kill people doing bad things ... because they’re hungry and know Murphy doesn’t like them eating just any random off the streets.

The number of bandits, evil wizards, witches, violent trolls and every other type of villain that has encountered the locust-like Spawn’s and still had a whole body afterwards could be counted on a single hand. Even then, they only had a whole body remaining because they had some weird disease or had blood that was actually considered ‘holy’ as opposed to ‘sinister’.

The demons greatly disliked blessing magic and other magic ‘considered’ to be good magic. While curses and dark spells gave them boosts, blessings and healing magic made them sick or dramatically affected their combat prowess.

Of course, as with most things, that didn’t stop them from eating it. Only the very few that had too much holy energy radiating off it weren’t consumed. This was because it would give them the runs for days, and if all 1000 odd spawns took a bite, then it would probably be worse than the time Morbid first investigated the Poison Smog.

Alas, once again this narrative has digressed. The point being made is that Murphy had made significant gains in the week he spent levelling his spawns, and when Chuckles finally evolved again, there were any number of strange possibilities he could end up with on top of his poison and endurance evolutions.

Most likely, after this battle, he would probably go through his third evolution, and among the Spawns, he was the best choice for the mission Murphy had given them.

Murphy observed as his Domain quickly approached the enemy’s Domain. The moment they were in range, the man faced scorpions started chanting or channelling spells. Creatures of this kind usually had most of their spells develop innately. Meaning chanting or spells tomes were unnecessary. But it wasn’t uncommon for them to learn some new and more powerful ones.

The moment the two domains smashed into each other, a huge shudder shook both floating islands, and the earth seemed to merge into a new biome, and a stretch of about 50 meters on both domains became barren of any biome. Just becoming dirt.

At the same moment, the Scorpions started blindly firing spells into the poison smog that surrounded the outskirts of Murphy’s domain, expecting his forces to be hiding in the dead and twisted trees and marshland.

To their surprise, there was no response from Murphy’s forces. Apart from some trees being obliterated and the smog churning and broiling, nothing else happened. The man faced scorpion was unperturbed though and simply charged forth with his underlings.

After the first 300 metres of smog, they suddenly emerged onto a rocky area filled with black rocks and dirt with only a few twisted and sinister looking trees scattered about here and there. Still, there was no movement from the enemies and apart from Murphy standing nearly 700 metres away at the top and lush grassy hill next to a half-finished castle, there was nothing in sight.

The man faced scorpion couldn’t stop from boasting at his luck.

“Hahah! So you really are a total noob! Apart from some sneaky little imps, you have no other forces than yourself. Hah! Bet you thought you were clever trying to draw us away from the front lines but you’ve underestimated This Scorpion’s strategic mind! HAHAHA!”

As he screamed his laughter, he and his minions all rushed towards the hill in an effort to quickly kill the Controller of the domain then return and clear any threats from their own.

Clearly, strategy wasn’t the strong suit of the man faced scorpion. The moment his horde of scorpions were mostly out of the smog and in the sinister lands, Curse Spawn started popping out from little burrows all over the place and spraying curses onto the scorpions like rain.

The most nefarious of the curses wasn’t any of the ones originally designed to be sinister. It was actually the earlier mentioned Flower Bum curse. It was initially created with nature mana, but when it was cast using sinister mana by the Spawns, it became even more unfathomable.

Scorpions left and right were dropping like flies as their pointy scorpion tails, their signature feature and the part of their body used for pointing and casting, suddenly morphed into a very sinister flower filled with razor sharp teeth.

The tail eating flower suddenly decimated hundreds of man faced scorpions. The strangest part was when the flower finished eating its host, it seemed to find the sinister lands quite comfortable and would instead take root in the hard black soil.

Unlike most magics, when it should dissipate, because it was cast in the sinister lands the magical sinister creature became a permanent sinister creature. They would then start eating any scorpions that were stupid enough to try and move past them, which made them suddenly grow in size.

Some of the flowers went on and absolute rampage and ate enough of the scorpions to grow to nearly 6 feet tall.

The man faced scorpion controller was at first stunned and confused and then quickly became irate when he realised that he’d just walked into a trap. The curse magic used by the Spawn was made a whole magnitude stronger thanks to the nature of the biome.

Even though this was a huge setback, the scorpion’s still numbered in the thousands and continued their charge.

When they started stepping into the lush grassy hill biome, Spawns with all sorts of strange evolutions started popping out of the place with poorly fitted armour they’d looted. There were spawns with endurance evolutions and spawns with shadow arts, or more appropriately, concealment and assassination arts.

There was also a very strange and troublesome evolution which was comparatively tiny compared to the others. It looked like it was small enough to fit in the palm of a grown man’s hand. Apart from its teeny tiny size, it looked just like other Demon Spawns.

The reason it was so troublesome was that it was lightning fast and every time they approached an enemy they would use some strange combat skill and strike nearly a hundred times in a second. Once they’d done that, they would retreat then rush in and do it again.

The troublesome part wasn’t their attack because they were basically as weak as flies. Instead, it was the strange after effects. Weird things would start happening after they struck you with their speedy fists. You would trip on a rock you hadn’t noticed or suddenly get an urge to sneeze for no reason.

You’d chant a spell and suddenly have a slip of the tongue causing a backfire, and all number of other unexplainable bad luck happened. What the Scorpions didn’t know was that these were Spawns that evolved with a few of Murphy’s luck traits.

Thanks to that, he trained them very carefully to help them utilise these normally disadvantageous traits in battle. He spent a lot of experience to find a relatively cheap skill that allowed you to strike as fast as possible in a short period of time. Then he learnt it and taught it to his ‘Luck Demons’.

Unfortunately, as a result of him teaching them how to utilise their luck talents, they became incredibly mischievous by nature. It wasn’t unusual to see them setting random traps all over the place or continuously touching people just to see what happens.

It’s usually those poor unsuspecting randoms on a quest planet that would suddenly meet the luck demons and end up losing out. Murphy didn’t discourage the behaviour as long as they didn’t pick on people particularly and spread the bad luck around to everyone fairly.

This was because every time they stole some luck, he would get a little bit. It helped to keep his luck above the negatives, and it wasn’t rare for him to send them all out on a mission to go and ‘share’ his misfortunes with people he didn’t share his views with. Generally, bandits got the worst of it.

With the sudden army of Spawns with all sorts of strange abilities popping out all over the place, the Scorpions were pulled into a battle at Murphy’s pace. They started dying faster and eventually, the man faced Scorpion leader recalled his troops and ordered a retreat.

It would be better to fall back into the poison where he and his kin would have the advantage.

Much to his consternation, he discovered that the smog of this domain seemed to be alive and avoided all the spawns. From some of the rumours he heard, that was only possible if it was a self-created biome. Which was as rare as unicorn horns and phoenix feathers.

If he knew that Murphy had nearly twenty unicorn horns now, he’d probably spit blood. After all, although Murphy seemed to be running into them everywhere, Unicorns were normally very secretive and reclusive. They were also a breed with a low population, so they are seen very rarely.

Seeing that the poison smog only seemed to be helping the enemies even more, he pulled back again into his own domain’s territory.

It was at this point in time, that a huge ‘BOOM!’ rang out from the middle of his Domain. The next thing he heard was the system prompt informing him that his domains central base had just been breached and that he had been successfully raided.

Chuckles came running back through their poison smoke above the desert with his dozen odd companions all screaming “Yah Yah Yah Yah!” at the top of their lungs.

Murphy, seeing his special operatives returning sooner than he expected, couldn’t help himself from forming a charming grin. He was quite pleased with his first battle. The use of the tail flower spell as a tail-devouring flower curse was probably the most important part along with the idea for his little special agents.

Having his Curse Spawn target any enemies that showed strange magical prowess greatly limited the scorpion army’s ability to rain down any heavy area of effort fire suppression.

That said, he’d probably lost hundreds in this battle. He was greatly displeased with that outcome. As such, he wasn’t planning to simply let the scorpion creature off lightly. He waved an arm, and his loyal Spawns all continued to rush in and slaughter their enemies.

They weren’t as worried about so many deaths as Murphy was. After all, the demon plane was littered with frequent and constant death. It wasn’t unusual for them to lose hundreds if a stronger demon decided one of them looked at him funny.

More so than that, in their inherited memories their ancestors would lose Demon Spawns from tribes and clans by the tens of thousands back when the demon planes were first forming.

Now, they had started to evolve again and were laying eggs like nobody’s business. Even back then when their population was magnitudes greater, they probably didn’t lay eggs as frequently as they do now with the assistance of sinister magic arts.

They just loved battle, and war especially. Thanks to that, they fearlessly charged forth. Now that things had reached this stage, Murphy had originally planned to pull back since the raid was accomplished, but seeing as his forces were as thirsty for battle as he was and they’d done so well, he didn’t hold back.

He too charged into the fray, and every time his sword of sharpness moved, life was taken. His right hand swung his sword, and his left hand remained gloveless as it reached out and sucked scorpions dry of mana left and right.

Occasionally he’d throw out a chant he’d been practising or form a spell pattern for some of the spells he was more familiar with. His time in the Witch’s tower hadn’t been wasted, and he’d learnt quite a bit more than he expected.

Saying that, his magic skills were still sub-par amongst other controllers that specialised in magic. Seelie especially, who had the Scholar class and gobbled up knowledge like a black hole, had magic on a whole other level from Murphy.

The reason he didn’t let her out onto the battlefield was that most of her magic would basically obliterate everything, him and his spawns included. He would only let her out if it were a last resort. Similarly for Morbid. He was an unstoppable force in battle, and if he went on a rampage, he’d decimate everything.

Probably the only thing he wouldn’t kill was Murphy.

That being the case, Murphy preferred to deal with this problem with his loyal Spawns before letting those two cannons loose. After all, you wouldn’t use a nuclear strike while hunting a deer, now would you?

During the battle, Spawns were consuming poison cure potions like breath mints, and instant recovery potions were treated like water. Most of the time the Spawns only used them if they felt they were on death’s door from the poison or an injury but the consumption was still astronomical.

They were quite proud creatures in a way. Preferring to only use them as a last resort, which was why so many had died already.

After about an hour of continuous back and forth battle, Murphy and Chuckles stood facing off against the man faced scorpion controller.

Murphy was about to reach for his sword when Chuckles stepped forward and started ‘rar’ing. Murphy seemed to get the gist of what he wanted and somewhat hesitantly removed his hand from his sword. It appeared Chuckles wanted to earn his evolution, and insisted on doing battle with the scorpion boss himself.

All around them the remnants of the scorpions were being eliminated by Murphy’s Spawns.

Chuckles stepped forward and took a little dagger from his belt, which was, in fact, the Super Pointy Poison dagger. It was a gift Murphy gave him when he evolved the second time, and something Chuckles apparently treasured.

In his other hand, he pulled the crude dagger cut from the black stone of the demon plane. He was dressed in loosely fitting leather armour and had a little metal skull cap that seemed to be a size too big. Murphy was enamoured in trying to figure out how they kept all the equipment they’d been looting on their bodies.

According to physics, that helmet should have fallen off at least a thousand times already but still somehow stayed on.

Regardless, Chuckles looked very heroic as he stepped forward at his 4-foot height and eyed the man faced scorpion.

The scorpion wanted to scoff and ridicule but lost the chance. Chuckles wouldn’t even give it the chance to be bitter in its loss or vent itself verbally. He charged forward with completely abnormal speed. The scorpion was shocked and swung a huge armoured claw out to knock Chuckles back.

Chuckles seemed to defy the laws of inertia as he froze just a few inches before contact with the claw. The swing of the claw seemed to lack Chuckles’ strange defiance of inertia and continued on its path striking nothing but air.

The scorpion shot its tail forth with an absolutely vicious speed that even Murphy had trouble keeping track of. The venomous spike of the tail connected with Chuckles and pierced through his body, injected its vile venom in as it passed through to the other side.

Seeing this, the scorpion finally thought it could gloat, only to watch with disbelief as Chuckles smiled a very grim and sinister grin as both his daggers suddenly swished, and the scorpion’s armoured tail was suddenly sliced apart at the segment of the tip.

Its tail spewed a clearish green blood and wracking the creature’s body with pain. It’s huge claws swung violently, and one of them clipped Chuckles knocking him back a few metres to roll along the sandy ground.

He got up slowly and wiped some blood from his thin lips. With a little ‘rar rar yah!’ he raced forward as fast as he could. Although he had Murphy’s endurance traits, he still wasn’t as perverse as Murphy himself in stats. The wound in his chest slowed him down and the man faced scorpion snarled as his claw shot forward to snatch Chuckles.

With a sly dodge, Chuckles’ little body hit the deck and slid through the sand under the lurching claw of the scorpion. His pointy little dagger stabbed into the armoured carapace of the scorpion’s claw, and he rapidly rolled out to create distance again.

The scorpion roared as his tail lashed out like a whip at the retreating Chuckles. He raised his daggers to block the strike, but it was still powerful enough to knock him into the ground again. He coughed up a little more blood and slowly climbed up as the scorpion loomed over preparing to lash out its claw again.

Chuckles lowered his centre and flicked his daggers in preparation. The moment the scorpion lashed out, Chuckles’ body darted to outside. He lunged forward and his little black dagger sliced through a leg of the scorpion.

As the tail whipped out again, Chuckles jumped back while stabbing both daggers forward. The moment the tail made contact with the daggers, Chuckles flicked a leg and did a strange rotating flip. The daggers spun with the rotation of his body and carved into the exposed flesh of the Scorpion’s tail, digging out a handful more of clear greenish flesh.