The Heart is a Void: Ashes to Ashes

Chapter 6: Far from Eden

Misery grows like grey-violet mistflowers amongst the living, and like mistflower in a garden it spreads to fill life. Misery screeches with laughter in the tomb.

Cael clawed against the cold granite floor around him, until he managed to push himself up into a seated position. He saw a large crowd around him, as they respawned at Sanra's spawn-point.

"Who in hell did that?" stormed Audet somewhere to his left.

Cael sat still and listened as Jarius' pained voice replied, "I'll have to ask around. They were scoundrels, we need to hunt them down."

Cael slouched down against the floor, pain straining through the back of his neck, and passed out. When he came to, he saw SilverBullet kneeling next to him and speaking. "Hey, how bad is it? A lot of people are still recovering, it was awful. Justiciar can barely breathe, him and Audet got stabbed with daggers that have a bleeding perk, they don't just cut the skin but keep tearing into it."

"That sounds bad. My back still stings a bit, but other than that I'm alright," said Cael, understating things slightly.

"Good to hear. I mean, we aren't supposed to be feeling pain like this in the game, right? Barely anyone wants to venture out-of-town now."

"Yeah, but I guess we're stuck in here for now, eh?" said Cael, trying to force a smile.

He saw the mage Sebastienne limp up to them, and ask if they had recovered from the attack. They both nodded unconvincingly.

"By the way," asked SilverBullet, "do you guys know who did this to us?"

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"Yes, actually," replied Sebastienne, "It was a Guild that are known PKers around here, a few people recognised them. Some people from the town have corroborated that, apparently they mostly target low-level players in ambushes. They're called Hashin."

Audet walked up to the group, and let out a string of swear-words when she heard the name of the group. She calmed down, and faced the group, saying, "We'll fight them if they cross us again. Anyway, rest up for now, I'll go back and check on Justiciar."

As she walked quietly away, Sebastienne followed her. Cael lay down against the ground, and fell quickly asleep.

He was awakened by Jarius shaking him by the shoulder. "Hey, we should go and find our corpses near the dungeon. The scum could have only taken 20% of our items, we can recover the rest. They won't dare attack us when we're prepared, and some high-level players offered to go with us."

Cael nodded tiredly, and forced himself to his feet. Most of Jarius' Guild were standing in a congregation to the West of the town, and Cael trudged up to them. After gathering the rest of the group, Jarius joined them. The higher-level members of the group stood around the outside, and held out their weapons in preparation for any attack. The group set off, walking heavily and retreading their path towards Sanra Dungeon.

On arriving, they were surprised to see a gathering of corpses suspended in the air within the marketplace. While about 10 corpses littered the ground, most seemed to still be floating in the air. As Jarius walked up to his corpse, pinned high up against a wall, he stood for a few moments in frustration.

Cael reached his corpse, but he found that he couldn't loot it. Byron was beside him, and turned to him, saying, "If you die in water, you can't recover your possessions, because the game has issues recognising a lootable corpse there. That was a known problem, and they patched it early on by preventing players from walking in water or coming too close to it. But I guess that PKers have come up with an alternative griefing method. So no items or gold for us."

Cael swore, then said, "So they tried to make sure we lost our whole inventory?"

"Yes," said Byron, "it seems that way. Anyway, Jarius is fuming, I guess we're heading back."

Cael heard some loud swearing from the group next to him, as they slowly made their way away from Sanra Dungeon. He checked his inventory, and it was empty, while he had no gold. He hadn't lost any of his equipment, luckily, but he noticed a few of his companions were walking around with simple default clothes in place of armour, or were using basic weapons. There was no Storage building in Sanra, meaning that since they had left Kruxol the group had had no opportunity to store their loot safely and instead had to carry it. This was generally much faster than backtracking to Kruxol and returning, so during the rush of the game's first days it was quite typical. But the group was still seething after all of that loot was lost, and some equipment.

As the group made its way back to Sanra, they passed a few abandoned buildings, that looked like gravestones in the dark. In one of them, Jarius glimpsed a movement, and looking closer he saw an Assassin scurrying busily around the building. Jarius called out to the group to bring their attention to this, and Audet suddenly rushed out towards the narrow, white building. Its door had been removed, leaving the doorway's hole, and Audet went up to this and started screaming loudly, asking if the Assassin was from the Hashin. Her steps were fast, due to her high Dexterity, and she was clearly prepared to rush the building and start a fight.

"Yes. But my inventory is empty now, so you should just let me leave," came the simple response from someone inside the building.

Jarius motioned to some of the warriors around him to approach the building. Audet, for her part, just swore loudly at the Assassin in the building.

"Why are you so upset? Sometimes these things happen," said a mock-serious voice from inside the building.

At this, Audet charged at high speed towards the building, with her bow prepared to shoot. Jarius' warriors had begun approaching the building and were preparing to encircle it, but Audet just ran straight into the open doorway and entered. Cael saw her look around confusedly, but soon the building was lit up red and orange by the fiery explosion of bombs lining each wall, and Cael jumped back at the loud sound. The sound of the explosions almost drowned out Audet's scream, as her corpse was ripped apart and fell to the ground. The nimble shape of the Assassin appeared swiftly fleeing the scene behind the building, as soon as his [Stealth Cloak] faded and rendered him visible. A few archers and mages tried to target him, but he was quickly out of range. His name was indecipherable due to the bug.

Morality is as pious as the stare in the eyes of the dead. This truth is phrased like a simile, but is more poetic as a metaphor.

The group stood still. Cael saw that the others were uncertain whether to be mournful or angry, standing gathered like a flower pressed between two pages of a book. Jarius swore, and then motioned the group to continue back to Sanra. As they began to move, Byron walked up to Cael and said, "Audet was still in pain, she was just hiding it. That must have made this worse." Cael nodded impassively.

Byron relaxed when he saw that Cael was calmer than the rest of the group, and continued, "By the way, I've been talking to some of the other people in Sanra, and I tried to piece together what had happened. Most people here aren't in the mood to discuss it. Would you be interested in that kind of thing? We can talk about it in Sanra when we get back." Byron was sad about Audet, but found it exhausting to keep a dour mood for a long time.

"Yep, sure thing," replied Cael.

"One thing that most of Guild was already told," said Byron, "is that the game has problems with processing names and IDs. Usually, since players can use moves at almost any time, the game nullifies their pain by recognising a named move and immediately preparing to numb any pain or serious physical effects. However, since the bug, it can't do this, so it only nullifies about 80% of the pain from named moves. Further, the Hashin guys were deliberately trying to inflict pain, so that was still quite harsh. I'll tell you the rest later."

The walk back to Sanra seemed to take a long time, and by the time they reached it was almost pitch-black at midnight. So Cael was none too amused as Byron beckoned him and a couple of others to talk in the space near the South-Western haunted house, but he still went along, interested in what Byron had to say. Cael found himself in a small group with Byron, Hurricanrana, SilverBullet and a female GildedKnights warrior named [SDB].

"So you know how the bug means that the ground can appear in two places at once?" Byron begun, "I'm not exactly sure what explains it. But how it was explained to me is that the game now loads up multiple different renders of the same location, not only the one it's using. The guys who attacked us probably flipped between these versions, until they loaded in this one while inside a wall. I'm not sure how they did it, but the easiest way I've found is through going near water. Let me show you."

He walked South-West by about 200 metres, guiding the rest of the group. There was a small pond over there, next to a small, ruined barn.

"So water deflects you when you walk near it, right? But now if you can get a different render of the location to appear, then you can be deflected into it and the game will count you as being there." Byron paced a few steps across the water near a broken barn wall, looking around him, then tried to step towards it. He was instantly rebuffed, and was transported straight into the barn wall. However, he shifted slightly, and seemed to be pushed further until he was inside the barn wall. He reached out a hand, and waved. Cael waved back briefly, but stopped as he saw the grave expression of the others nearby.

Cael was starting to find the creativity of the Hashin, who had quickly strung these bugs together to launch an attack, to be in marked contrast to the monotony of passively following Jarius' disciplined, conventional Guild around. He was starting to wonder if he would have to adapt his approach to the game slightly, rather than limiting himself until he was playing by somebody else's rules.

"So yeah, as you can see it's possible to enter walls until the bug is fixed," Byron continued, "I think that a few of you were still recovering from the attack when this happened, but there was a system message saying that they were aware of the bug and were working to fix it, as well as that they were investigating whether there were any obstacles preventing players from logging out. So that should solve the problem. Well, we'll see.

"Anyway, the Hashin were probably hiding in the walls while the rest of us thought we were safe in the marketplace. But the other thing is that they must have planted their bombs within the walls, because then the game wouldn't recognise it as an attack on players outside the wall. So the combat pain reduction won't even load. This means that the pain from bombs is not reduced at all, although the bombs they were using are still not the strongest because it's too early in the game for anyone to use or obtain those. A GM has said that there will soon be a hotfix for the bomb issue, but the pain reduction in combat or from bombs will still not be fully functional until the whole bug is solved."

The group shuddered slightly. Hurricanrana asked quickly, "So if named attacks can cause pain, does that include powerful boss attacks?"

Byron walked out of the wall, and said, "Yes, some people have run from boss fights because of this. Also, people may experience more strain while using the moves, as the pain reduction effect apparently also extended to the user and meant that they didn't feel most of the strain caused by an attack."

"Bad time to be a berserker, then," replied Hurricanrana, "Also, thanks for that, the whole event was quite strange. They must have been studying this and planning it for an hour or more."

The group thanked Byron for the explanation, and walked back into town. Cael sat down near the South-West edge of town, and looked around dejectedly. Most of the town were in low spirits. Few people were entering the towns, and most people who left only returned when they respawned.

Because most people were reluctant to leave town, only a few big Guilds and the strongest players still braved the wilderness outside of the town's safe zone, and other than that it was mostly taken over by PKing Guilds who pounced on most vulnerable players. This created a situation where Cael's slow-moving mage character was easy pickings as soon as he left the town, and could barely PvP out there because his magic would just bring attention to himself. Besides, his inventory was completely empty, and he had no gold to purchase things with and no good ways of getting gold or items without being ganked.

Futility rears itself like a World Serpent of black obsidian and encircles the town tonight with stony scales, and the heavy steps of its feline avatar, risk, beset each path forwards like a highwayman. Yet this serpentine form does not bite, it strikes like a sword towards the heart - a weapon, though disguised as stone. So be it, any weapon must be used, even one which has no hilt and slithers out of attempts at mastery. A devil may reign even in the anarchic abyss.

Cael wondered if an INT-based mage was at all practical in the current situation. It seemed unlikely. He watched as SilverBullet respawned nearby, after the archer had wandered out looking for monsters to kill near the grinding spots. Cael wasn't sure if the archer had been killed by the Hashin, but he wouldn't be surprised if they were watching this town, since they had also appeared in the abandoned building not far away. He couldn't complete quests to turn in items because NPCs were for now unable to recognise those as complete, and he couldn't complete wild creature killing quests because he couldn't venture out. At the moment, Guilds were having difficulty with sign-ups due to the bug, so he couldn't hope to join a powerful Guild and get the chance at dungeons. Besides, those were probably in demand by this point, so there would be a long queue even if sign-ups were available. This left him with no good options to strengthen himself at the moment. He was in little position to grow, and if even Jarius was having issues taking revenge on the Hashin then Cael wasn't likely to do better.

He considered a few options, but as a Guildless Mage it was clear that futility stared back at him in most directions he could turn. But if he couldn't escape from this game's death-trap structure, he might as well take advantage of it. A glut of guillotines and axes is a blessing to the executioner, he mused, feeling a strange sense of deja vu.

While he wasn't allowed to Quit the game, he noticed that the game's 'Switch Character' button was still functional. He decided that the game in its present state didn't favour his current build, but based on what he had seen of Hashin, the speed and stealth of the Assassin combined with exploiting this bug was probably the best way to make something of the treacherous environment outside the town. It was also less vulnerable to close combat than ranged classes like the archer, and was lower-upkeep due to not requiring a steady supply of arrows and hence either gold or industrious Guildmates. The archery range now would be difficult to go back and forth between without becoming a target, as well. While he casually ran over a list of the classes and subclasses he had seen, just in case he had an alternative option, he saw a small group talking near the path to Kruxol.

"I'll be taking Ligate and the others who agreed to join us back to Kruxol, so that they can finish their quests. We'll leave in about an hour. Get some rest," Jarius was saying to BlackSeed.

Cael would also be returning to Kruxol, but by starting a new character.

He pressed the 'Switch Character' button, and the game prompted him to type a new character's name on a small keypad. He thought for a moment and typed out: [Crucis].

Like a Gorgon's eye, a funerary mask is passed around on the cusp of the river Styx. I must pass it to someone else, or it is mine. On the horizon, there is the hazy silhouette of a playwright's pen. I must soon hunt the moral, the martyr. Their hands grope for the mask of death, I offer it. A new masquerade begins. "And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay."