"Tell me again," Will says through gritted teeth, giving Ed an irritated glace. "why the hell you made Steven leave?"
"I- I don't know." Ed says in response, tears forming at the edge of his eyes. "I wasn't thinking clearly, and my anger just took over. I lost it and blamed Steven for Ed's death."
Will brings a hand up to his head, and begins to massage his eyelids before sighing in thought. He turns around and begins to pace the room we found right behind the snack tables at the entrance of the Gala.
"Alright," Will says after a minute or so of thought. "Did anybody see where he was going?"
Xavier raises his hand and opens his map to show us.
"I didn't know he was running away from us at the time but he ran to what seemed like the Canterlot gardens." He says, putting his finger on a blank spot on the map. I open up my map, and my eyes grow wide as I discover that the spot Xavier is pointing to isn't blank on my map.
"What the hell?" Will says, looking over my shoulder at the anomaly that is the inconsistent map. I look at the title of the map to make sure I didn't miss something, and I realize just how much of an idiot I am when I see exactly what's been going on.
Canterlot Castle: Dungeon area.
Well tickle my anus and call me Samantha, they forgot to change this to an event area.
"That explains it," I say, announcing it to all of us. "I have this area mapped out because the developers who created this event forgot to code it as something other than a dungeon."
After a collective "huh" from everybody, I quickly close my map screen and start heading towards the gardens. Rather than follow me, Will tells everybody to split up and start covering more ground. A surprisingly good tactic as it'll let us have more of this place mapped out before we even begin to combat whatever lays within the recesses of this place.
I walk through the hedge leading to the center of the small maze, and begin looking around the clearing as I decide that it would be a better idea to focus on finding Steven rather than plucking thorns out of my arm, even though the stinging sensation does start to get bothersome.
I see an arm going into a hedge to my right, and begin jogging over to it, hoping the arm belonged to Steven.
"Hey Ste--" I start to say, but my sentence is cut short as somebody appears in front of me, brings out his dagger, and swings it in my direction.
I jump back in surprise, and open my menu to quickly equip my non-social attire. Before I can equip my sword and shield, the mysterious person jumps towards me, forcing me to close my menu, and take another step back to dodge. Being clever, he feigns a slash, before taking a leap forward and activating what I imagine would be a ranged attack.
Kunai flash into his free hand, and he tosses about five in a horizontal line, with no time for me to dodge. Three of the Kunai hit me in the chest, the other two scraping my shoulder before disappearing in the hedge behind me. I open my menu again, and turn to run while equipping my shield.
Once I have my shield, I hurriedly scroll through my weapons menu to find my sword. I don't have the time to find the one I'd prefer to use as the assailant starts running towards me, another fistful of Kunai alongside his right hand which he uses to hold his dagger. I tap the first sword I see, and quickly look up to the notification to tell me which sword I equipped.
Beginner's sword
attack: 5
accuracy: 5
malice: 10
magic: 3
Perfect, a level one sword to deal with a level fourteen enemy. I've practically crippled myself in a serious fight.
I look back down in time to see my assailant bring up his dagger and put more weight on his left leg. He's going to lunge at me and use his close ranged weapons and swift attacks to try and catch me off guard. I quickly bring my shield up as he leaps into the air. He brings up his dagger, ready to stab me with it, and hits my shield. I stumble back a bit, but quickly catch my footing as he goes in for another strike, which I block with less ease than other times.
Shields are a funny thing in this game. Rather than reducing the amount of damage you would take without a shield, it reduces your magic bar, before your ability to block goes down significantly and you become unable to block most attacks. This thought goes through my mind repeatedly as this guy's large amount of swift strikes makes my magic bar deplete at an alarming rate. He's attacking too swiftly for me to be able to try an offensive attack. So, rather than actually attack, I take a leap back and prepare my Flair attack, which should give me enough time to escape.
Once my sword glows, I shift my weight and prepare to spin. My assailant somehow knows exactly what I'm about to use, and jumps backward before tossing his kunai at me. It's too late for cancellation, but on the bright side my attack deflects the kunai. He's at a distance now where I can anticipate his next move and strike before he does.
I crouch my knees and wait patiently for him to lunge at me again. He hesitates for a moment, as if somebody had just told him something, and then goes back to trying to attack me. He shifts his weight for a jump attack again, but decides against it midway through and uses the weight for a quick leap rather than a jump. I move my shield to block, but rather than attack me when he gets in range, he just whispers something to his weapon.
"Four."
Slightly taken aback by this guy's unusual speech, I barely have time to notice that his dagger has lit up in a purple hue. I try to prepare for the oncoming strike, but I didn't react quick enough. The dagger hits my shield, and the impact leaves a purple ring around the impact area, and depletes all of my magic as my shield, alongside the arm that was holding it, fly off to my right, leaving me open.
He wastes no time in getting ready for a followup attack, which I doubt won't be a critical hit, and whispers another number to his weapon.
"Two."
Rather than his dagger lighting up, the man's entire body glows in the purple hue his dagger did. Before I know what's going on, my body is engulfed in smoke.
I cough and sputter as the smoke goes down my throat, before feeling a familiar heat coming through the air. My blurred vision focuses on the light of one of Xavier's fireballs. But something looks different about it, as though the fireball is bigger than what Xavier normally conjures. I look upward as the fireball cuts through the smoke, and see Xavier standing side by side with Tonya, both of them in a post-fireball throwing position. Sucking in a deep breath, which was a bad idea as I'm surrounded in smoke, I leap towards the nearest spot that doesn't have smoke, which ends up being right in front of everybody.
As I get out, coughing and sputtering, Will comes over to me. I trip over a rock, and Will comes to support me as I continue my coughing fit.
After coming down from the deep coughs as the smoke finally leaves me, Will uses a healing spell to get me back to my normal self. The same rush of energy comes through my body, as though I was lightly shocked, and I sit down on a nearby bench as Will begins a flurry of questions.
"Who attacked you? Did you see anything? How the hell does somebody go through PvP in a PvE server without a duel request?"
I hold a hand up to him, still getting my bearings, and look back at the gardens where I just had one hell of a fight. The assassin, as I guess I'll call him from here on, has completely disappeared with nothing to show for our fight except my slowly refilling magic bar and a cloud of smoke that is only now dissipating. I turn back to Will and open my mouth to speak, but Xavier cuts me off instead.
"Holy hell Tonya that was one bitchin' fireball we just did."
"Hell yeah it was!"
I watch as they give each other a high-five, before turning back and realizing that everybody saw them do that. It takes everything I have not to groan as Xavier puts on his fake sheepish smile that Tonya seems to replicate well.
Birds of a feather, I guess.
Will comes back to the topic at hand, and hits me with a question I can't quite answer.
"Jake, did you see anything, you know, besides a cloaked figure slashing his dagger at you?" I look to the ground, and try to recap the past few minutes in my slight daze, and the afterglow of a losing fight.
"Right before I was attacked," I say, "I saw a hand heading into the hedge, one the same color as the fur Steven chose when we first stepped into this game."
Will sighs and pulls open his map, now filled with the lines of the halls in this dungeon, and starts scanning the area around the gardens to see where Steven could have gone.
"Shit," he says, "with how long that fight took, Steven would be well on his way out of Canterlot and stepping off of the train to wherever he's being taken."
After a collective sigh of disappointment from the group, I stand up and start heading towards the train station.
"Whelp," I say, putting my hands on my hips. "I don't think he'll be going anywhere too exotic. So we can just wait until tomorrow to start the hunt for Steven."