Chapter 63
[NoName(NoName)]
[World of Arseria – Priest Nightmare 10/10/10]
[Stream Time - 0:36:08]
[Viewers – 1931]
After shoving a knife into the observatory keeper’s neck, all the quest windows that had been giving me a headache disappeared.
I opened the settings and turned off every option that got in the way.
[▶Quest Notification – OFF]
[▶NPC Subtitles – OFF]
[▶Navigation Assistant – OFF]
[▶Minimap – OFF]
[▶Hit Effects – OFF]
[▶Critical Effects – OFF]
[▶Kill Count Notification – OFF]
The chat window was no exception.
During combat, bizarre emotes like [●▅▇█▇▆▅▄▇] and even grotesque ASCII art would flood the chat, making me lose focus and nearly die several times.
[▶Chat Window – OFF]
My field of vision cleared up.
The only thing now telling me this world was a game was the HP and MP bars in the lower right.
Aside from the NPCs’ unsocial interactions, this place was realistic enough to pass for reality.
[‘펠스타치오 아몬드’ donated 10,000 won!]
-It’s all your fault! It’s all your fault! It’s all your fault!
[‘쀽뺙스’ donated 22,000 won!]
-Boss, it’s so cold here... We’re all going to freeze to death at this rate...!
I couldn’t turn off donations.
I did have reasons to need the money, but the game company had designed the game so that the donation window couldn’t be disabled in the first place.
I could at least be grateful that I could turn off the TTS voice.
“Where next?”
“Materials warehouse—”
“Guide me.”
Adella meant nothing more to me than a guide.
I realized it during the battle at the observatory just now.
Adella’s combat sense was zero.
Of course, she was far above an ordinary person’s ability, but at least on Nightmare difficulty, she was completely useless.
I had to assume the worst and treat her as if she didn’t exist—or, rather, as dead weight—to get through a crisis.
“Forest Keeper, you were lucky at the observatory. You should be grateful that the keeper wasn’t awake at that hour.”
Despite having done nothing, Adella whined and grumbled.
“But the materials warehouse is full of explosives, like mana stones, so it’s guarded around the clock.”
“I don’t want to hear it. Please just be quiet for a while.”
“We should attack together. I’ll infiltrate from the roof and subdue the warehouse keeper first. Meanwhile, you stall them at the main entrance.”
“Say something that makes sense.”
Adella was a glory hound.
She had no skill, yet she wanted to make herself useful somehow, so she tried to take on the biggest task.
The worst kind of person: stupid but diligent. In a war, she’d be first in line for execution.
It was no wonder that the other Abyss members, including Cisciela, hated her.
She was even an NPC, so I couldn’t interact with her properly, and she absolutely wouldn’t listen.
I was seething, unable to tell whether I was talking to a person or to a damned cat.
“All right, wait here! I’ll be up the wall in no time and—”
Her claws scraped at the wall, producing an unpleasant sound.
My hope of seeing a cat beastkin in action for the first time collapsed instantly.
Crash!
“Nyaaaah!”
“Intruders! Catch those guys!”
As expected, elite guards came rushing out again.
A priest couldn’t equip close-range weapons such as swords or spears, and bows and throwing weapons were no exception.
The penalty was far too severe to ignore.
Then what the hell was I supposed to fight with?
There were staves, grimoires, ritual implements, censers, and so on.
All of them were items that could use powerful curse skills or healing-reduction skills in exchange for mana.
That’s when I realized why Adella was forced into the party even during solo play.
The Priest class had no means of attacking in the first place, making a clear impossible.
The original creator had clearly intended players to use Adella as both their main tank and damage dealer.
Apparently, body-enhancing aura consumed something called ‘ki’ rather than mana in this game, and since I wasn’t a tank class, I had to suffer a 50% reduction to its effectiveness as well.
The healer’s only advantage was that its Health filled up quickly, resulting in favorable Perfect Clear judgments; everything else only hindered a clear.
Did I trust Adella, then?
No.
Entrusting my life to someone else was no different from suicide.
I pulled out the ritual implement I had picked up at the observatory.
[Moonlit Orb]
[It is said that if you make even the most wicked person keep gazing at a core imbued with moonlight for 1,000 days, you can reform them.]
[Spell Power +40, MP +200]
If there was one thing I learned while jostling against dozens of sweaty men at the observatory, it was that in WoA, at least, ‘weapons’ weren’t part of this virtual reality.
Strange.
Normally, when a strong metal collides with a weak one, the weaker metal wears down and eventually breaks.
But the swords and arrowheads here never wore away from outside force unless I deliberately broke them.
Was it a limitation of the coding? Or Waresoft’s consideration, telling players not to get worked up over items alone?
If they made us account for weapon durability too, people would call it a trash game, not a god-tier one.
But that wasn’t important right now.
What kind of result would I get if I struck them with a ritual implement?
[Advanced Casting, Circle 1: Arc Welding]
[It applies an alternating voltage between the welding medium and the base metal, generating arc heat of 6,000°C, comparable to the temperature of the Sun’s surface.]
The finely chopped sword blades embedded themselves in the ritual implement with a quick skitter, like thorns.
My mana instantly dropped to rock bottom.
Though my aesthetic sense wasn’t good enough to make it anything but somewhat crude and grotesque, I had completed an excellent dodgeball.
Even smashing it into armor would be like clubbing someone with a bowling ball, while merely grazing a joint could inflict a deep wound.
The ritual implement’s greatest advantage was that it could ignore the laws of physics and move freely through the air.
I squeezed out even my last bit of mana and raised its mass as high as it would go.
Then I put my strength into it and threw the mace head, like a scene from a Pokémon anime.
Was the mace head from the Mario series?
One thing was certain: they shouldn’t try to block it. They had to dodge.
* * *
“Gaaaaaah!”
A guard’s arm was ground away by the spinning ritual implement.
The soldiers, suddenly transformed from aggressors into victims, scrambled to save their own skins.
-What the hell did she make!!
-They told her to fight with a ritual implement, and she’s actually fighting with oneㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Ritual implement (physical)
-Look at her diligently aiming only for their heads
-That’s freaking cruel
The spiked ritual implement flew around, smashing the guards’ helmets.
-What the hell is Adella doing, though?
-Is she just standing there by herself, watching the situation?
-Streamer!!! That damn cat is causing trouble again and again!
-Yeah, I closed the chat. If you want me to tell you, donate~
-No way, she’s getting in without anyone noticing?
While the guards fled in a panic to avoid being stabbed by the ritual implement, Adella slipped through the main entrance of the materials warehouse.
And when the worst-case possibility became reality, Adella dragged out every last soldier inside the materials warehouse as well.
-Stealth assassination action game where?
-Whenever she does anything, a whole crowd comes rushing outㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Master of poking beehivesㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Now I get why they call her Dark Adella;; she’s such a cancer
-I know what the materials warehouse is for. It’s the quest where Professor Princeton asks you to bring him the Flower of Inferno from the academy.
-Ah, no spoilers
-There are only LoL no-lifers who won’t even try the game and WoA junkies with over 1,000 hours here anyway, so what does it matter?
-I was wondering why the number of people suddenly went up. Did someone post the link in the WoA Gallery?
-Flower of Inferno? What’s that?
-It’s an awakening material for the illegal mage Gisele Phoenix in the Academy’s first year.
-Did she ask for it on behalf of her disciple?
-Nope, she wants to use it to make her own aphrodisiac.
-????? Is she insane?
-The academy professors all have a screw loose anyway.
Remnant Observatory and Materials Warehouse were familiar locations to WoA gamers.
At the observatory, there was an event where you infiltrated the place to fulfill the ice knight Luna Pavillis’s wish and stop the keeper’s conspiracy,
while the materials warehouse was a quest location where, after clearing it, you could awaken the illegal mage Gisele Phoenix, even though the requester’s intentions were impure.
There was also a side quest to free the illegal monsters and slaves locked inside the materials warehouse, and you shouldn’t forget to clear it if you cared about experience and levels.
On Normal difficulty, you passed through countless episodes while building friendships with your academy friends.
On Nightmare difficulty, all of that was compressed into one enormous event called ‘Academy Invasion,’ forcing you to clear it in a short time.
At least, the observatory keeper was an honorary professor in a noncombat field who had stepped back from the Central Academy because of his old age.
In other words, his difficulty was clearly lower than that of the other bosses.
It was Waresoft’s first and last act of kindness before plunging us into the boundless despair that lay ahead.
The moment the exploration-based healing RPG World of Arseria received the Nightmare tag, it transformed into a Soulslike game with no dreams or hope.
“What is this commotion?! You flea-sized things!”
-Ah, he’s appeared
-GG. Getting this far was impressive enough
-I saw the Observatory cleared at 10/10/10 on VTube, but this seems like the first time someone’s done it with a Priest
-Even on Nightmare, the warehouse keeper’s body is the same size?
-Wasn’t he weak?
[The Young Noble of the Study/Warehouse Keeper · Vallum Venaons (0/1)]
On Normal difficulty, he was little more than an extra whose name most people didn’t even remember.
So let me ask.
What exactly is scary about a middle-aged man who looks like a subway molester straight out of an erotic comic?
He had respectable Health but low attack power, giving him an ambiguous presence that users could overcome without much trouble as long as they brought enough potions.
A tank only had to let him hit them a few times, and a damage dealer could simply go all-out without a problem.
Even a healer could clear the fight with the ice knight Luna and Gisele doing the work, as long as they didn’t die to a stray attack.
But hardcore WoA Gallery users had trauma from this mid-boss.
The boss with the most guides written about him on Nightmare.
Vallum Venaons.
The nickname born from the resentment of hundreds of thousands of users was ‘Potbellied Son of a Bitch.’
“I’ll stuff every last one of you and put you on display in the warehouse!”
[Vallum Venaons consumes the forbidden elixir ‘Heavenly Moon Star Elixir.’]
[Vallum Venaons uses the skill ‘Moon-Transcending Body.’]
[Warning! Under the moonlight, all of Vallum Venaons’s skill cooldowns are reset, and he recovers 100% of his Health over 10 seconds!]
A special gimmick found only on Nightmare difficulty.
The being that first plunged gamers who had steeled themselves never to die even once into despair roared.