"The mission's out! This is a quest chain, right?"
"Finally. Main story quest?"
"It has to be. We're already at Chapter One."
"Are they serious? The very first main quest is this hard? We're supposed to fight a cosmic overlord right out of the gate?"
"Did you just notice this ga was brutal?"
"Then what happens later? If this is Chapter One, what the hell cos after?"
"So what now? Are we really forming a raid?"
"I'm going too! Carry !"
"Can we talk about how to beat this first?"
The players kept chattering like a nest of disturbed insects. After a long round of frantic discussion, they reached a decision.
First, they would gather intelligence.
That was the rational choice.
The enemy was a cosmic overlord, after all. Even the players, for all their chaos, still had so self-preservation left. In most gas, the developers had to consider player psychology. But Krypton Empire did not feel like that kind of ga.
The devs might actually be willing to let them charge straight into the Black Order, die horribly, and never get a pity scene or a scripted rescue. If that was the case, then there was nothing to say except that this ga really was unforgiving.
Still, that also ant sothing else.
Ga missions were supposed to be completable.
Unless the system had deliberately created an impossible one, there had to be a way through.
So the players got moving.
They used their own thods to investigate the enemy position.
Drex Valen had originally expected that once the quest was announced, the players would erupt into battle cries and rush the Black Order in waves, screaming "Waaaaa!" all the way to their deaths. After dying, he thought they would go back to grinding labor, learning combat courses, buying better gear, and then charging back in again, only to die a second, third, and fourth ti.
He had never expected them to actually win on the first try.
Not against the Black Order.
Not even if the Outriders lacked advanced weaponry and relied entirely on the teeth and claws they had been born with.
Drex had assud the players would need to repeat the process a dozen or twenty tis before they wore the enemy down through persistence alone. That was the point of this kind of trial, after all.
Or maybe the Black Order would eventually retreat under the sheer annoyance of it all, and Drex would have to step in and drag them back himself so the players could keep testing the boss fight.
That would have been fine too.
It was a rare chance to temper the Fourth Calamity.
But instead, the players just kept dithering.
Two hours passed.
Only then did they finally begin moving again.
About twenty of them removed their exoskeleton armor and weapons, leaving behind all valuables they carried.
That made sense. This was a real world. If they died here, their armor and weapons would not return with them to the cultivation pod. The gear would remain on their corpses.
That alone had already made Krypton Empire infamous for being too harsh, too real, and too unforgiving.
So the group set out wearing nothing but simple shorts and shirts.
Nidavellir.
Thanos had stationed his people there to watch King Eitri and the dwarves, ordering them to finish the container that would hold the Infinity Stones.
The Outriders and Chitauri were on guard duty, bored out of their minds, when a rainbow light suddenly fell from the sky.
Then more than twenty strange-looking figures charged straight at them, all of them shouting, "Waaaaa!"
The Outriders and Chitauri froze.
The Bifrost was famous across the universe. That unmistakable rainbow light was sothing almost every civilization knew about.
The Black Order knew it even better.
Thanos had once been beaten hard by Odin and chased out of the Nine Realms and the solar system. That was part of why he had never dared approach Earth directly.
So what the hell were these twenty-sothing creatures?
At least carry a weapon.
At least wear armor.
Instead, they were rushing in with nothing but their fists.
It was like seeing so primitive tribe step out of a high-tech teleporter holding stone clubs.
That single mont of confusion was all the players needed.
They swung first.
The battlefield erupted into slaughter.
So players were cut down imdiately. Others tried to run, only for the Outriders to catch up and slam them to the ground. The Chitauri were even worse, mowing them down one by one with clean, efficient shots.
Drex Valen watched the whole thing without expression.
The players scattered, got caught, were cut down, and collapsed in the dirt one after another. Very quickly, every one of them died.
If he had not already gone through the player phase himself and understood that they were simply opening the map, he might have thought they had all gone insane.
But this was a common way players approached a boss in many gas.
With no guide available, they would enter combat repeatedly to figure out the boss's attack patterns, timing, and movent habits, then build a strategy around that information.
After all, every ga monster had chanics.
Every boss had a rhythm.
As long as you understood those chanics and did not get greedy, you could usually clear the fight.
World of Warcraft. Jian Wang 3. Final Fantasy.
Gas like those all relied on that sa kind of learning process.
The players had cleared countless gas that way already.
They just did not know that Krypton Empire was not a ga at all.
It was a real world.
Whether that strategy would work here remained to be seen.
And since their bodies were gone, the players respawned from their cultivation pods.
"Well?" soone asked imdiately. "What did you learn? Boss skills? Minion skills? Anything?"
"We only fought once," another player replied. "But we did figure sothing out. The Outriders and Chitauri aren't linked to the elite enemies' aggro. You can pull them away separately, and they'll chase you a long distance without drawing the attention of the elite enemies."
In reality, they had simply failed to attract the attention of the Ebony Five at all.
"So we can pull them one group at a ti?"
"Worth trying."
"I think this has potential."
"So of us can hold the elite enemies' aggro, while the rest pull the little guys and clear them out. Stay at range, kill a few, then fall back. We don't know how many there are, but with this many people, even if we do it dozens of tis, we can wipe them out. As for the Ebony Five, we can just pile bodies on them until they die."
"Wait. Are you sure this ga even has an aggro system?"
"It should, right? Otherwise why were the Outriders chasing us all the way down? And the Outriders and Chitauri both seed to attack whatever was closest to them."
User Comments
0 comments from readers