Rafael’s eyes remained on this anomaly of a woman next to him while the notification window still showed the same thing.
[Current Event Points: 30/100.]
They had gained 30 points.
Then slowly, Rafael glanced back at the headless body lying in the street, then at the woman in blood-red armor whose whole body had just blown the fuck apart.
But before he could say anything or even understand what the hell had just happened, he heard it.
"I-I panicked..."
It was just so fucking absurd. Seeing this girl in a bunny costume, glowing like a fucking Christmas tree in her neon-pink outfit, literally rip two people apart and then simply say that she had panicked.
"No... worries," Rafael said, though his attention quickly shifted elsewhere as he grabbed her hand. "But we need to leave."
"Why—"
She noticed it the moment her head turned.
The townspeople had begun to surround them.
Sickles, swords, lances, axes, knives. It looked like something straight out of a fucking movie, with everyone staring at them while slowly moving closer.
Even more worrying was that it wasn’t just the humans.
Rafael’s eyes were on the elves and those little fuckers, the dwarves, who had been fucking insufferable even when Eldoria was still just a game.
It was enough for him to know that these weren’t the same NPCs who simply watched as Players murdered each other and burned and destroyed entire cities and towns... they were ready to fuck them up.
And right now, there was only one option left.
Get the fuck out of there as fast as possible.
"Do you have a teleportation spell or something that can get us out of here fast?" Rafael asked as his eyes remained on the crowd.
"I... I ran out of mana," she said, tightening her grip on Rafael’s hand.
Rafael said nothing back as his eyes moved across the people surrounding them, but just as he was about to look back at the girl, something on the road caught his attention.
A metal hatch.
There was another one farther down the street, and another after that.
Drainage.
"System, Class Trait."
[You have 1 unallocated Class Point]
[Would you like to allocate it?]
"Yes."
The moment he said it, everything fucking jumped into his face.
The interface changed, and what appeared in front of him was the worst fucking part of Eldoria, and the one thing every Player hated more than anything else.
The fuck-ass Skill Tree.
Hundreds of Skills appeared in front of him, connected by countless lines that branched farther and farther apart until Rafael could barely see where some of them ended.
And that was exactly why everyone fucking hated it.
One Class Point spent on the wrong Skill could fuck up the entire build.
Some Skills unlocked three others, while others permanently blocked entire branches of the Skill Tree, and there were Skills that seemed completely useless until combined with something fifty levels later.
The worst part was that there was no reset button.
If you fucked up, you fucked up until you created a new character... though now, that wasn’t exactly possible.
Nor did Rafael care about building the perfect Assassin.
"Where the fuck is it..." His hand moved across the Skill Tree as he tried to find what he was looking for.
And then, there it was.
Right at the bottom.
A Skill available even at his ridiculously low level, and more importantly, one Rafael knew how to exploit.
He selected it.
[You have successfully allocated 1 Class Point.]
[Skill Learned: Shadow Step.]
[Shadow Step allows the Player to—]
Rafael immediately closed the notification, and without explaining anything, he dropped onto his back and reached one hand toward her.
"Lay on top of me!"
Her eyes widened.
"W-What?"
"Do it!" Rafael shouted again as the crowd continued closing in around them.
The girl hesitated, but with nowhere else to go, she finally lowered herself onto him, awkwardly lying on top of Rafael while her bunny ears fell across his face.
Rafael immediately wrapped both arms tightly around her.
"W-Wait, what are you doing?!"
"Please work..." Rafael muttered, tightening his grip around her. "Please fucking work!"
He knew the exploit had worked before... more so he did it with Tim.
"My character is freezing. Can we go back to the Safe Zone?" Tim asked as their characters stood near the top of a snow-covered mountain.
"Wait, let me show you something. I found it yesterday."
Rafael opened his Emote Menu and made his character lie down in the snow.
"Open your Emote Menu."
Tim looked down at him.
"What are you doing?"
"Just open it and lay down on me."
Tim’s sigh came through the headset. He knew very well Rafael was about to do some dumb shit, but he did it anyway.
Tim’s character slowly lowered himself until he was lying directly on top of Rafael.
"You know how Shadow Step works, right?" Rafael’s voice came through Tim’s headset.
"Obviously, it works on shadows, but you know that skill is ass—" Tim stopped as he realized he was literally on top of Rafael’s alt character. "Well, it doesn’t matter to you, I guess."
"Not really." Rafael laughed. "But yeah, it works on shadows... but what if I aim at your shadow?"
"Mine?" Tim asked as he leaned closer to the monitor, looking at his character’s shadow. "It wouldn’t work, I guess. I’m already on top of you, which means I’m obstructing it. More importantly, there isn’t any distance between us."
Rafael giggled.
"Well," He selected Tim with his mouse. "Suprise!" He activated Shadow Step.
A moment later, both characters dropped straight through the mountain as if the ground wasn’t even there.
"What the fuck...?"
Rafael immediately started laughing through his microphone as their characters continued falling.
"You dickhead, I have all my shit on me!"
That only made Rafael laugh harder.
"If I lose my fucking items because of you—"
Their characters suddenly stopped.
Both of them dropped onto solid ground inside a narrow cave somewhere deep beneath the mountain.
"This is one of the best exploits," Rafael began. "If there’s an open space underneath you, it catches you. So it means dungeon hunting and exploration, caves and all the shit that’s underground can be done with this exploit."
Tim said nothing at first as he used magic to shine light through the cave, but then he realized a flaw in the logic.
"And if there wasn’t a cave? Or anything?"
Rafael laughed again.
"We would’ve kept falling. All the way through the map, but just think about it. We can do it infinite times. We just respawn and keep doing it until we find something big, like an Ancient Dungeon."
Back then, it was fun... but now Rafael wasn’t laughing.
More so, he was begging.
"Please work!"
"What are you—"
"Shadow Step!"
Rafael felt his body suddenly being pulled downward by gravity, almost like he had just jumped from somewhere high up as he hugged the girl tightly against him as they continued falling.
But there was a slight calculation problem on Rafael’s part, because for a split second, as they passed through the ground, he could see the drainage tunnel a few meters to the left.
He had missed it.
And they kept falling and falling.
Up until they stopped.
It was fast, almost too fast to understand what was happening, but Rafael felt his body drop onto something, and when he opened his eyes, there they were.
A big-ass cave.
"It... w-worked... fuck me." He laid his head down, just relieved that whatever the fuck he had done had actually worked.
Though his happiness didn’t last long... as he looked to the side and saw something that was... an anomaly on its own.
"What... what the fuck?!"
He literally pushed the woman off him, who rolled to the side, passed out probably from the fact that they had fallen through the map, though Rafael didn’t really care about her at that moment.
He immediately pulled out his sword from his inventory.
"Bow down before me, human!"
It was a High Elf.
The most noble elf of all, and more so, the most good-looking one. His skin was glistening, his long golden hair was also otherworldly, and his whole being was just emanating perfection.
The way he held out his head, the way he looked and sounded... truly like a High Elf... though that picture of him quickly shattered.
"Shut the fuck up," the dwarf beside him immediately snapped. "You’re underground. Down here, you’re nothing but a tall fucker with pointy ears."
The High Elf slowly turned his head toward him.
"And you’re nothing above ground but a bearded rat."
The dwarf’s eye twitched.
"Say that again, leaf-fucker."
"You heard me perfectly well, cave rat."
What the fuck is this... Rafael thought, but he was more focused on something else rather than those two fucks.
He knew that they were coded in the game to act like clichés, always at each other’s throats, but what caught his attention was their surroundings.
It was not a cave, but looked like a dungeon.
Paved paths beneath their feet, runes on the walls, ancient writings.
"Hm... she is seems like a strong person—"
Rafael immediately turned around and aimed the sword at the dwarf’s neck.
"Get the fuck back, you little fuck!"
"Touching an unconscious woman, how low can a dwarf be?" The High Elf asked before his eyes moved to Rafael. "Put that toothpick away, human. If I wanted you dead—"
"Oh, wait... this sword."
The dwarf grabbed the end of it and literally pulled it toward himself, making even Rafael’s body move with it.
"Dull blade, chipped sides, and crafted from Grabin metal..." He looked up into Rafael’s eyes. "You were an Executioner."
The silence that followed was something else.
Both the dwarf and the elf were looking at him without even fucking blinking.
I am fucked...
That fuck-ass sword Tim had given him was more like a curse than anything else... more so because he was still using it as if he had forgotten about the whole fact that elves had wanted to slice him up, and another Player had literally wanted to kill him because of it.
And now he stood in a dungeon with a dwarf and a High Elf looking at him, just staring without saying a word.
Two creatures, two races that could easily kill him.
More so, the fact that he was in an Event didn’t help at all.
"War criminal, a genocider like all humans!" the High Elf said as he pointed his sword at Rafael.
"Exactly," the dwarf said.
At that moment, there was only one thing going through Rafael’s mind... these two fucks were accusing him of something he hadn’t done, while their own races had done the exact same shit.
He got angry and pulled out every bit of knowledge in his mind about NPCs.
"Genocide?" Rafael asked. "You little shits started a war with the elves because one elf got drunk and beat up a dwarf!" He pointed at the dwarf. "You burned elven towns and villages and killed thousands!"
Rafael then turned toward the High Elf.
"And you noble fucks killed both dwarves and humans just because they didn’t want to be your slaves!"
"We are still better than you!" the elf shouted as he pointed his sword at Rafael. "The South killed everybody they came across. We might be racist, but we didn’t genocide entire races out of existence!"
"I agree with this pointy-eared bitch." The dwarf pointed up at Rafael. "The South massacred children and executed whole families. With that sword, who knows how many children you killed?!"
"...what?" That was the only word that came out of Rafael’s mouth as he heard what the dwarf said.
"You chopped off the heads of children in front of their parents!"
Rafael just stared at the two fuckers accusing him of atrocities... and they weren’t just making accusations.
Both the dwarf and the High Elf spoke with emotion and conviction. They had seen it. They had experienced it.
To them, this was the truth.
To Rafael it was something else.
"What the fuck are they tlaking about... there weren’t even children in the game."