Avalon Rebirth (12 page)

“My plan? You're going to have to make some changes as well,” Leah told him. “Switch from support to manipulation magic.”

That caught him a bit off-guard. “So you don't want to have any destruction magic in the party? That's a pretty significant handicap. Or are you planning on lowering our points values so we can pick the stages?”

“That would be nice, but I'm not counting on it,” Leah said. “Even if we were guaranteed to be the team with the highest points total I'd still choose it. There's a particular strategy I want to try with it.”

“Is it the one where you attach everyone to the ground with Bind?”

“That's part of it. But Weeping Wounds is the real killer in the support magic tree, and that could be really deadly in the lower ranks. You know how narrowly a lot of them think.”

Darin nodded. Players using support magic tended to be pigeonholed as healers, used to keep the tanks and the attackers upright and in fighting condition. That was one of their primary roles, in fact, but it wasn't their own ability. Support magic was capable of changing the battlefield.

Many players seemed to forget that when they were in the middle of a match. Darin had been guilty of it more than once, content to only heal and use his weapon as his only form of offense. But the other powers….

They might seem weaker than pure destruction at first glance, but they were just as capable of altering the course of a battle. One shot from the archer in the Cave of Origin and Darin had been effectively taken out of the battle, even if he hadn't actually been killed.

“So your configuration is going to be you as an archer support, Taji as a tank and me and Erika as attackers?” he deduced.

“That's the idea. We transition to being an offense-oriented team, and that means I switch from being a damage dealer to being a supporter.”

“That's a fairly drastic change.”

“For us, maybe. We can handle that. But Erika is used to constantly being on the attack, and she has the skills and smarts to pull it off. She's the only one of us that got a one-on-one kill against the Black Wolves. And Taji's role is straightforward.”

“I suppose. But then that means I'm going to have to make a transition. And I have to make a completely new build if I want to use manipulation magic.”

“Not exactly. Everyone goes for pure speed to pair with flash step. But maybe that's not the only way to look at things. Maybe your current combat build would be able to use the abilities effectively?”

Darin thought about that for a moment. Most players that took manipulation magic also chose light weapons and armor to increase their precision and speed. The theory was that focus on one particular area would turn the user into an extremely powerful specialist.

But there could be another way. Daggers lacked the reach of his halberd, and a lightly armored player couldn't absorb as much damage as someone wearing medium armor. That limited the number of roles they could play. And while he might not be able to match the speed of a pure rogue with his current build, using Flash Step he could run circles around players in heavy armor and even all-rounders.

“The reach is going to help,” he said aloud.

“I was hoping that you'd come up with that,” Leah said. “I thought of that while watching Erika fight with her rapier, but I wanted you to come up with why it was a viable idea.”

Darin could see how a new build might be used. He'd combine speed, reach and protection, forming an all-rounder that could deal with all manner of enemy classes. It wouldn't have the defense of Taji or the quick-strike ability of Erika, but it would be able to serve many purposes.

“This might be worth looking into,” he said.

Leah nodded. “And this is why I wanted things to change. Put a little more excitement into the way we fight. Come up with something new.”

Darin remembered Chad's theory about the commission wanting to shake things up at the top. They may have done it in several unintended ways.

But the fire to compete still burned within him. Darin wanted to win. He wanted to take the top of the D-rank division and then stake their claim to the C-ranks. Changes were just a means to an end. And if they were going to make them, they had a lot of practice to do before the tournaments began.

L
eah fired off an arrow
, hoping that it would land right where she wanted. The charging ogre roared, almost like it was bellowing dire threats in a hideous, unknown language. A moment later its forward momentum stopped. The arrow slammed into the creature's right arm, and a dozen ropes snaked out and buried themselves in the ground. The other ends wrapped around the ogre's arm.

It tugged at its bindings, bellowing all the while. Leah knew very well that her Bind ability wasn't very high at the moment. The ogre would break free soon enough. But her goal wasn't to kill the monster. No, it was to slow it down for the rest of her teammates to deal with.

A series of blue-green platforms appeared in the air in front of the beast, and a blur charged up. For a moment Leah thought it was Erika, but the shape moved a little slower than usual. The leap off the last platform confirmed it. Darin jumped into the air and swung his halberd downward in an arcing blow, right onto the monster's skull.

The ogre roared in pain and thrashed about, its health bar dropping into the red from the devastating hit. Leah nocked another arrow in case she needed to deal out some more damage, but another blur came charging in. A split-second later the ogre toppled over dead, stabbed through the eye with a single rapier thrust.

“So how was that?” Erika asked over the telepathy link.

“I think that ogres would be an endangered species by now if this was the real world,” Taji said. “You two have killed more than enough of them today.”

That had been their fifth one today since Raven's Call had come to Badrock Falls. They still had a week before the tournament, and Leah wanted to take every opportunity to get her new character build down before they had to fight on the big stage.

Taking down boss-class monsters wasn't exactly the same as fighting a group of enemy players, but it could still be useful for training. It provided them with a powerful foe that could take many hits and dish out damage as well, forcing them to use all their abilities and stay on their toes.

So far it looked good. Taji and Erika remained in their normal roles, taking and dealing out damage, respectively. It was Leah and Darin that had the most to learn. Silver Star had used several combinations, but eventually settled on certain builds and honed them to perfection. Almost no one could even think of beating them when the team had been clicking on all cylinders.

But teams were starting to get wise to their tricks, or at least it seemed that way. Silver Star had lost a few matches to the second and third ranked teams, though they had always managed to win their rematches and it never dropped their rank. Their losses remained few and far between, but the myth of their invincibility had been diminished a bit.

Leah had already been thinking of making a change before the upheaval happened. If they had continued their course more and more teams would catch up, and their their championship spot would be in jeopardy. She didn't think it was going to much different in a few months or a year either. Everyone would start to use certain techniques and know how to counter them.

The trick was to come up with different ways of fighting, several, if possible. Unpredictability would be the key. If their opponents couldn't anticipate how Raven's Call would fight they couldn't focus their preparation on one thing. At the very least it would make them think, and the more time they had to spend on multiple issues the better.

“Is that enough for today?” Taji asked. “I have other things to do.”

“That's fine,” Darin said. “We're done for today.”

“Alright. See the rest of you soon.”

Leah watched as he logged out and disappeared. It was easy to forget after being a part of Avalon Online for so long, but there was a whole world outside of the virtual reality that paid them little mind. Even with millions and millions of followers and viewers, the majority of the world's population probably had never heard of the game, let alone the people that played it.

And that thought was quite humbling. The best teams in Avalon Online were celebrities, with fame and fortune. They held power inside here, and yet that didn't mean a lot in the outside world. They could take their fortunes with them, but yet they could very well be unknown by everyone they passed. It wasn't like a professional sports team, where everyone's name and appearance was known. In here everyone used avatar, and though they tended to look similar to the person using them, they could be also have significant differences. Leah didn't have blue hair in the real world, for one.

“Well that's a bummer,” Erika commented. “I had the day off too.”

“There's other things we can do besides taking on bosses,” Darin said. “There's other things we should do, too. We're going to have to get by the qualifiers, and that's going to be chaos.”

“Isn't that the one where they throw all the teams into one huge arena and let them fight it out?”

“That's the one.”

“Well, not exactly,” Leah added. “There's a few more rules to it. The top eight teams in the D-rank division get automatic bids into the tournament, so they don't have to bother fighting. So the qualifiers are to find the other eight teams.”

“Sounds like a big mess.”

“Oh, it is. That's why none of the other divisions do it, but it's a way to make the D-ranks exciting. Otherwise it's just a lot of teams that don't know what they're doing stumbling around and tripping over each other,” Darin said.

“Oh come on, there's good teams on their way up through the D-ranks as well,” Leah said. “Granted, they tend to not stay there for very long.”

“But still, the idea is to make the division exciting. And it does that. It's capped at two hundred and fifty teams, so that's a thousand players fighting it out in the same place.”

“Did we make it under the cap?”

“Yeah, I made sure to register us as soon as possible. We were number two hundred and thirty, so it's getting up there.”

“But anyhow,” Leah said, “we're going to have to fight a lot of enemies at once, and that means staying alert and keeping our heads on a swivel. We're probably not going to win if we don't do that. And we have to make sure that at least some of us survive to the end.”

“Isn't it the teams with the most points that move on?” Erika asked. “That sounds simple enough.”

“It is, so you can't just hide and wait it out until the end. But if your team is completely eliminated your point total is cut in half. So you could kill half the field and still end up losing if your entire team ends up dying in the process.”

“So stay alive. Got it. Might be hard with all those explosions flying around.”

Leah had to agree. Most teams would have one player wielding destruction magic, and with so many crammed into one arena there was always the potential for a huge number of destruction spell to go off at the same time. The stages for the qualifiers were large, but it wasn't unusual to see dozens of players killed within the first few minutes of the match.

“That's always the trick. But better to be cautious to begin with. You can't win the match at the beginning, but you can certainly lose it.”

“Isn't there a timer on it?”

“It's two hours,” Darin said. “So a lot of teams will try to score their points early and then wait out the timer, because they'll theoretically be facing the tougher ones at the end.”

“But everyone knows who's in the top eight, along with their own points total,” Leah added. “So it's not unusual to see teams making a last-minute push to try to make up ground. As long as we stay alive we should be fine, but that's easier said than done. We need to avoid the early rush.”

“So I need to get in some practice against large hordes,” Erika said. “A really large one, if I want some sort of challenge. Just so I'm thinking about watching my back.”

“Well, it's also about working as a team. Four pairs of eyes are going to spot threats easier than one.”

“But you're not going to have your destruction magic with you. That's going to change things up a lot,” Erika pointed out. “Maybe too much. Wouldn't that be good for taking out a lot of enemies?”

“You can't kill a player with one shot with a destruction spell. You can hurt them badly, but you can't kill them. That would be way too cheap. Besides, it's the person who actually kills them that gets the points, not the ones that did the most damage. So if you or Darin were to sneak in there with flash step...”

She laughed. “Huh, kill stealing. I'm sure that's going to make everyone happy. Won't we have enough trouble with people trying to gang up on us?”

“It's already going to be a problem, so what's adding on a little more fuel to the fire? Besides, kill stealing is perfectly legal. I know people don't like it, but we need to make sure we qualify.”

Using that tactic would anger some people, though. No one liked to inflict a lot of damage on the enemy, only to see another team swoop in and take all of the points. Many teams would probably target them and be out for revenge, though that could also work in their favor as well. Leah could imagine Raven's Call stealing kills to gain points and anger other teams, then leading them into prepared traps.

She looked over at Darin, who had gone completely silent. Leah noticed he had his menu scroll open and was looking at something.

“Anything interesting?”

“Message,” he said, still reading. “A priority one too. From the competition committee, no less.”

Leah felt her heart skip a beat. Were they in more trouble? Was someone just targeting their team for their own amusement?

“Is it-”

“It's a general message,” Darin told her. “Sent to all team leads.”

She felt a bit of relief. “OK. So nothing too important.”

“Well, I wouldn't say that either...”

“What is it?” Erika asked.

“They're tweaking the format. They're taking out one of the matches.”

“Which one?” Leah said curiously.

“The final. Or what used to be the final, at any rate. They're switching it to a four way match, so the teams that would normally be in the semi-finals will fight each other at the same time.”

“Can they do that? It seems pretty close to the date,” Erika commented.

“There's probably something in the fine print.”

“That's a pretty big change to make on short notice too. I wonder why they did it?”

Leah wondered that too, but her only explanation sounded completely paranoid. Someone wanted to make sure that the old Silver Star members didn't win the tournament, and the best way to ensure that was to pit them against three other teams at the same time. Even though Raven's Call could probably beat any other team in the division, dealing with three at once would be difficult.

But that was just speculation, and probably baseless at that. The more she thought about it the more it sounded like a conspiracy theory, just sour grapes from a team that had been caught and punished.

“So that changes things up a bit,” she said, trying to be diplomatic.

“It changes things up a lot. But that's also one less match we have to win, so there's that,” Darin shrugged.

“It's pretty much like what we were doing, right?” Erika asked. “Preparing to fight multiple teams. The only difference now is that there's going to be less of them in the final. That works to our advantage, right? And for everyone else in the qualifiers too. Because we were already preparing to fight a large number of teams.”

Leah had to smile. “Yeah, that would be right. And that's a much simpler way to think of things. Much better, too. We can do this. We just have to make sure that we're prepared.”

That was the trick. They could spend all their time complaining about the changes being implemented, or they could buckle down and make sure they were prepared to compete at the highest level possible. Even if someone was conspiring against them, it wouldn't matter if Raven's Call was so well prepared that they were capable of mowing through every team that stood in their path.

“I think we're going to have to make some changes,” Darin said. “Specifically with our equipment.”

Leah glanced over at him. “Does that mean we're doing what I think?”

He nodded. “Yeah, there's no use trying to mess around with the points total, not with four possible teams in the final. We can't prepared for every contingency, and they're probably going to gang up on us anyhow. So we might as well make sure our team is carrying the strongest equipment.”

That was the other thing. It wasn't just about skill points or knowledge, it was about attitude as well. Someone who she couldn't remember had explained it to her years ago. Between two evenly matched teams, the team with confidence and swagger in their step would usually win, because they expected to. That expectation drove their actions, made them fight harder and in a more confident fashion.

Their team might as well embrace it. Everyone knew who they were, everyone was intimidated by what they were capable of doing. Raven's Call would be going into the tournament with a target on their back, and everyone would be lining up to take their shot.

Let them come, though. Leah had full confidence in her teammates. They needed to win, and they were going to take the championship. Everyone else was just in their way.