Initiation- Neverland: part 1
"Hey Steven, time to get up." The sound of my roommate, which I've been forced to stay with until today, calling my name wakes me from my slumber. I sit up from my bed and rub the sleep from my eyes. The mirror across from me showing how unkempt my hair is along with my username and whatnot.
Steven
Beast Tamer: LVL 14
HP:2,463/2,463
MP:420/420
Guild: Neverland
I look to my left and jump as the lime green face of Anita, my roommate, fills my vision. She laughs, then snorts, then gives the same glare she always does after I hear her snort-laugh. I wave it off, knowing how gullible she is, and equip my normal attire before getting out of bed. Looking at Anita's full body, With her long blonde hair and cloth attire that come standard with melee DPS classes, and that threateningly large dagger sheathed on her back at an angle so that she can easily take it out with her dominant hand whenever the urge strikes her, and I mean urge; too many times has she used that dagger to threaten me.
Anita looks at me expectantly, and I sigh as I open my menu and activate my new pet: a vampire fruit bat. When I had found it last week on my way out of the gala, I knew I had to capture it and turn it into my pet, which I did. She smiles warmly before walking up to my bat and scratching behind it's ear lovingly.
"Who's a good bat? I know you would rather be with me wouldn't you?" As usual, the daily indirect degrading of my skill as a player before heading out the door for whatever placement trial she's accepted for the day. For some reason the Neverland guild has these placement things to help better decide what kind of group a player should be in. I'm not too sure why they do it, since they're not building a military. But it's probably just for order or something.
"Y'know today is placement day." She says, looking back to me. My eyes go wide before I rush out the door to the town hall where they're hosting placement day. Basically placement day is the day that me and Tonya get a bigger apartment, alongside getting two other roommates. We're supposed to become a squad and are to be tested while the guild leader, Pyralis, watches from above. If we're deemed unfit then we all leave the guild and are forced out of Appleloosa.
"Oh my god Steven for the last time, go up and help with Anita!" Our designated field operator, by the name of Gearbox, screams into the group chat as I hang back and try to regain health. Luckily my vampire fruit bat has the ability to drain health from enemies so the wait is cut short.
I jump back into the fray as Incognito stuns the skeleton boss we've been fighting for a few minutes, while Anita appears from the bushes behind it and summons three kunai into her hand. As she throws them, an electrical bullet flies through the air and hits the skeleton right on the head, stunning it just before I'm in range to activate my crisis skill.
"Death mark." I run my sword through the skeleton's rib cage and leave it there as it drains health from the enemy and applies a major debuff to it. Alongside losing half of your health, Death mark gives the victim a special effect that doubles any damage they receive from anybody other than the person who used death mark on the enemy. As I pull my sword out from the skeleton, Anita hits it with one final blow to the skull, dealing triple damage since she combined my death mark with a critical hit.
"All right," Gearbox exclaims as he gets up from the bush he was hiding in behind us, "that's the last enemy, and we ran through this dungeon a full minute faster than last time!" I hear Anita howl (She does that for some reason) as a message appears in the guild chat.
Pyralis:Attention initiates, the time has come for your final test. Please gather at the entrance to the Appleloosan woods dungeon in five minutes. Anybody who comes in late will only have half the time to complete the dungeon, so hurry up.
I look at the others, who're reading the message themselves. Incognito is wearing a basic cloth vest, fitting well with his camouflage fur and brown hair somehow, with his dual daggers sheathed around his waist. Gearbox, on the other hand, has a pair of glasses on his eyes, whether or not its just aesthetic I can't tell, with a dark blue full latex suit with pads on his shoulder.
Once they finish reading the message, Gearbox points his thumb towards the exit behind him.
"We might as well get out of here before the others get here, don't wanna be late." We all nod and head out of the exit, leaving the majority of our loot drops on the floor as we enter the semi-barren sands of the mild west.
I stand in a straight line, shoulder-to-shoulder with Anita and Incognito, as Pyralis gives the basic instructions on how this test goes.
"You will invite into your party so that I may hear the party chat," he says as he walks around ahead of the first group, "and you will have to run through this dungeon in less than ten minutes. If you've been training and learning the routes of this dungeon, that should be no problem for you, as I've beaten this dungeon solo in eight minutes. I will be entering the dungeon with you, but won't be attacking any enemies that are there, even if I aggro one; I'm only there to see how well you guys work together, so if I'm forced into realism mode it's immediate failure for the entire team.
"Should you fail, Kenny and I will personally walk you out of the dungeon and give you a half hour to pack your stuff and leave." Kenny is Pyralis' right hand man, so to speak, as he always seems to follow Pyralis around when he's out in public. "Now then, with that said, let the initiation begin." A cheer erupts from the crowd of veterans that surround us, as the initiation test is usually the most exciting thing that happens around here. I watch as the first group, which is around five groups ahead of us, invites Pyralis into their party and enters the dungeon.
As the group ahead of us exits the dungeon, a smile on their face as Pyralis announces their victories, I begin to sweat as anxiety fills my head. The thought of failure has been in the back of my head all day, and as Pyralis walks up to Gearbox, our designated group leader, the thought forces itself to the front of my head. I begin finding it hard to breathe until Incognito puts his hand on my shoulder and calms me down a bit.
Pyralis' stats appear in the party menu, and we're ushered into the dungeon. Thankfully the paths and enemies in the dungeon are still fresh in my mind from the earlier raid. As we enter, we take a left and Gearbox gets down on his stomach at the opening of a large circular room, and Pyralis positions himself next to him as Anita, Incognito, and I cautiously walk into the center. I summon my vampire fruit bat and draw my sword as the enemies spawn. The random spawn system this dungeon has makes predicting the enemy types a bit of a challenge, but thankfully the game decides to be nice and only spawns around five spiders.
As they circle around us, slowly advancing as they do, I wait for the signal for us to attack the mobs around us. I hear the familiar sound of Gearbox firing a shot at the spider closest to him, and promptly attack the two that are in front of me. The first spider falls without a problem, just a simple slash and a critical strike from my bat are all it takes, but the second spider leaps at me. I duck under it as Anita's kunai hit it from the side. I finish it off with a simple stab at it's abdomen, and it fades as it curls up into it's death pose.
I hear Pyralis mumble something in the group chat, before Gearbox walks up to us and signals for us to advance. That fight only took us around ten seconds, so we still have more than nine minutes to finish.
We quickly advance through the next few areas, before the mini-boss that's always given us trouble spawns. Gearbox gets on one knee to aim, and promptly fires a stun round into the naga's chest. I quickly advance, being the pseudo tank of our group, and hit the snake-human hybrid with a skill I'd learned over the course of the week I've spent in Neverland: Flurry. I was told that, as a rather strange class, the beast tamer class type can learn certain moves from melee DPS (thief, spy, etc.) and tank (warrior, royal guard etc.) class types. Using this info, I've managed to spec my character out with the right points to have a good amount of both speed for my melee DPS, and my tank attacks.
As was told in the skill's description, my arm seems to have a mind of it's own as I hit the mini-boss, a giant rat, with roughly twenty hits; a lucky strike for this move, since it normally only does ten to fifteen hits. The monster is stunned as he staggers back and is hit by four of Anita's kunai, before Incognito appears from behind the rat- he was using his cloak skill- and hits the enemy with a critical back stab that takes out roughly half of the rat's health. Gearbox's gun fires and the rest of the rat's health drains as the shot, which I'd imagine was his crisis skill since his health somehow drained to single digits, goes straight through the rat's head.
"Jesus," I say as Gearbox takes a health potion out of his inventory and heals himself. "How did your health get so low?" Gearbox just looks at me with the same deadpan stare and brings his finger up as if he's going to prove a point.
"Something I crafted. For one time only, the user brings his health down to one and can use his crisis skill as soon as the effect takes place. High risk, high reward." The crisis skill in question Gearbox dubbed Kill shot. It supposedly fires a bullet that takes out half of the enemy's current health, and can take off a limb for an hour. If the shot hits you in the head however, that's it. Game over.
I shrug, and turn around to rush into the next room, which is filled with armored bison. Anita quickly rushes forward and uses some form of dash attack to knock the nearest bison back as Incognito erupts in a plume of smoke behind me. I hear Gearbox's gun go off, and I notice a bison that's been stunned. I rush towards it and hit it with my flair attack, stunning the bison and giving me enough time to charge up one of the few skills that's specific to the beast tamer: capture. Capture is a pretty self explanatory skill; it allows me to capture any animal-type mob to become my companion in the same fashion as my fruit bat has.
The bison disappears in a red mist that begins swirling in the air, as the three second countdown to see if the capture was successful begins. I hold my breath as the countdown screen disappears. A screen pops up towards my chest, and I look down to see the results of my capture.
Capture Successful; Bison has been caught.
I pump my fist in the air to celebrate as another bison hits me in the side, knocking me over. I guess I forgot that we were in a fight... oops.
I get back up and summon my new bison as the bison that charged me begins a charge attack. I watch as a blue mist appears to my right and quickly becomes my new pet. I run towards the enemy bison, and stop as it begins charging at me. I take a quick look at my pet's skills, and shout the one that sounds most useful.
"Rush." My bison comes into view almost immediately as he tackles the enemy bison. I watch as my pet digs his left fore-hoof into the ground and lowers his head. I decide that its a good idea to jump on it's back just before it charges. As my bison charges at the enemy bison I take note of my health; which is in the red zone. I activate Death Mark once my bison gets closer to the enemy. I leap off of my pet's back, flying towards the enemy bison at a quicker pace. My blade goes through the bison's armor and straight into it's back. The telltale skull appears over it's head, showing that the death mark landed, and jump away as my bison rams it's horns into the weakened enemy bison, finishing it off.
I look to the others, who've just finished off their bison, as Gearbox speaks into the group chat.
"Alright, the final boss is in the next room, we have about five minutes left, so we'll take a one minute break since we usually only take three to kill the boss. Since Steven just got a powerhouse type pet, we should be even better equipped to fight this boss."
We open the door to the boss room, and I watch as the skeleton we had fought roughly and hour ago appear in front of us. I quickly run towards it, activating Gearbox's Tide changer item. I watch as my health runs down to one, and rush the boss alongside my new pet bison. I successfully implant a death mark on the skeleton, and jump out of the way as my bison rams it, knocking out about 1,000 point of it's health.
I equip a health potion as Anita throws a pair of kunai at the skeleton's ribcage, and Incognito appears in front of it as he uses a sneak attack on it as Anita's kunai strikes it. Gearbox shoots the skeleton in the head, stunning it, and I rush back towards the skeleton alongside my bison. I manage to get around ten hits using my flurry attack, and dodge the skeleton's next hit by jumping around him to his back. I get a critical backslash attack (self explanatory) as my bison rams the skeleton into my blade even more.
Anita appears behind me in a cloud of smoke, and I roll to the right as she uses her backslash attack on the monster. Gearbox gets another successful head shot, and I watch his health drop to one again. The next thing that he does surprises me.
Rather than using his kill shot to end the fight, Gearbox uses it to take off the skeleton's main hand. The arm, alongside the broadsword it was holding, fall to the floor before evaporating into the air. I quickly dash over to the skeleton, and I was about to hit him with another flurry attack until I noticed something weird. The skeleton's head, just the head and nothing else, turns to me. I watch as flames begin to build up in his mouth as a wide red line emanates from it's mouth. The line goes through me, but doesn't do any damage. Which would mean that it's a warning. I duck under the line as the skeleton shoot flames at me. Narrowly dodging it, I charge at it again. I notice it charging the same attack again- it probably can't use any other move since we cut off it's arm- I promptly hop to the right, but the skeleton moves it's head to face me again as it shoots the flames. I didn't have time to dodge this one, and the force knocks me onto the floor.
When I get up, I notice that the notification telling me that I'm in realism mode appears. But that can't be, I was at full health. Is this what that red line was warning me about? Do bosses now have some kind of one-hit-kill type attack? If so then they're really trying to make it hard for us to beat this game.
I grab a health potion, and watch as my bison distracts the skeleton while Anita pelts it with kunai and a few flurry attacks every now and then. Getting an idea, I rush back into the fray even though my health has only regenerated to a quarter of it's maximum. I hear Gearbox yell at me to let myself heal first, but I'm not worried.
The skeleton charges up his fire attack again. If it is a one-hit-kill then it shouldn't kill me unless I'm already in realism mode. As the skeleton shoot it's flames, I bring my sword to my chest and activate my reflect ability. I hear Pyralis make some kind of surprised grunt as the flames bounce back and stun the skeleton. I combine it with my parry attack and the skeleton's health shoots down. The parry skill becomes more powerful when a stronger attack is countered with reflect. As I thought, the one-hit-kill attack deals massive damage even to the caster.
Anita hits the skeleton with one more round of kunai, and the skeleton disperses in an orange mist, as the congratulations screen pops up in front of us. I look at my loot, and notice that I'd gotten a legendary item. My eyes widen, until I see that it's an engineer specific weapon.
"Dammit!" I shout, causing everybody in the dungeon to look at me. Rather than explain, I send Gearbox a trade request. With a sigh, I give him the weapon and close the trade menu.
"Well," Pyralis says, "you guys weren't exactly the fastest team, but I'd say you guys did good enough for us to allow you into the guild." We all cheer, and step out of the dungeon with a smile on our face and legendary loot in Gearbox's hands.
After the festivities, we were all assigned new houses that could fit all four of us in one room. I flop onto the couch that came with the house, and put all the items I won't need until tomorrow into my inventory. As the rest of our group gets into the room, I notice a troubled look on Gearbox's face.
"Hey Gearbox, what's up?"
"Nothing Steven, it's just that something feels rigged about that entry exam. We shouldn't have made it."
"Well aren't you a ray of sunshine right now?" Anita says, butting into the conversation.
"I mean we spent twelve minutes in that dungeon. The maximum amount of time we were allotted was ten." Hearing this news, Anita sits down on a chair adjacent to the coffee table. She puts a troubled look on her face I never thought I'd see somebody as cruel as her have.
"Pyralis," She says with a sigh, "Pyralis has had a rough life, and I may be the reason we're still in this guild."
"What does that mean?" Gearbox asks.
"Before this game, Pyralis's life was a bit of a hellhole, and I was the one thing that kept him from suicide."
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I am sure you play your share of RPGs to study up on this, and what I am going to say would be common knowledge. But why are thief class players wearing cloth? Cloth is usually worn by mages, Leather by thieves, Mail by archers, and Plate by warriors.
5368916
To be honest, I completely forgot about leather armor when I was writing this, and so I thought it would be a good idea to have the pegasus classes have cloth armor (easier to fly with), the Unicorn classes light armor (leather, basic plating and whatnot), then the ranged DPS classes the ability to use both-ish (they can use the heavier options of cloth armor or the lighter versions of light armor.) And the tank classes get heavy armor. Not the best system out there but I had a bit of a brain fart trying to come up with this.
5371940 That makes some sort of sense. Armor type is based on Race and Class, but it feels weird after the original methods are already drilled into my brain.