Novel Full 143 Outstretched Hand
Cronos I – Cronos Prime System
The war is over since almost a week and the hard reconstruction on Cronos I had begun, everything was to be rebuilt almost nothing worked anymore, no water, no electricity… Fortunately, the new faction that owns the planet, the “Confederation of the Eternals” had spent a lot of money to repair the infrastructure, after all it is now the capital and the showcase of their faction…
But as agreed the planet was split like a cake into exclusive economic control zones, most of the guilds that had supported the coalition of players received huge territories, for example Renovatio received the exclusive economic management of the southern continent while Tox the Mario guild received the exclusive economic control of the eastern continent…
The other allied guilds of the coalition received territories according to the percentage of warscore they had made and previously negotiated with the three SuperGuilds.
On the other hand, the only guild that really lost was Lord of War… The loss of an entire continent forced them to compensate the guilds that had claimed territories in the north with their own initial share, i.e. the western continent, and as Lucifer had predicted, this resulted in tens of billions of GC of losses and caused a huge crisis in the guild’s shares which lost almost 50% of their value, but above all deprived them of most of their land,
In reality, they only control the planetary capital.
Moreover the destruction of the Northern continent had also caused a certain frition of several hundred first order guilds which had actively participated in the conquest of the planet but which had not been sufficiently indeminized on their say and caused the exile of a small part of the guilds that supported the coalition, but overall everyone was satisfied with the conquest of Cronos I, except maybe the Goeils, but they had no say in the matter…
***
Northern Continent
After the cooling of the sea of plasma the ground had turned into a huge barren desert of black obsidian.
Lucifer was there, alone…
It’s been several hours that he contemplated the extent of his failure in front of Apophis, he doesn’t understand…
How a lesser man like Apophis had succeeded to such an extent in carrying out his plan…
Everything had been meticulously planned…every situation…every fork in the road…but almost everything had failed, yet he’d taken advantage of his guild’s enormous potential for six months to absorb as much EXP, skills, and rare equipment as possible… He had nearly thirty years of experience in MMORPGs, he played nearly 16 hours a day for the six months between the release of the game…
He had even managed to rally the main SuperGuilds and guilds of the first order, only to see all his plans crumble… and be defeated….
Before his fight against Apophis, he considered him a UFO that would one day crash into the harsh reality of the professional MMORPG world, after all it wasn’t because he was a record breaker that he was the best, even if people were easy to say so…
Lucifer knew that the MMORPG world was not a race but a test of endurance…
and that even if he could be lucky sometimes it would not last, and that the most disciplined, talented and trained players would always end up winning.
But Apophis had shown him that he was wrong…this unknown person, only a few months ago, had beaten him on all fronts, the best player in decades…
But the worst thing for Lucifer was that when he remembered the events with Apophis… It was inevitable… Even if he had sent a million men against Apophis, he would have lost in the same way, even if he had changed his plan completely, he would have lost too… It was as if it was Lucifer’s destiny to lose and Apophis’ to win…
[0)ᴠʟ Lucifer couldn’t take it anymore…It was almost a week of replaying the events over and over again…
He condensed in his hand a huge ball of light, which he tried to compress, but exploded after a few seconds…
He tried again and again to reproduce the technique that Apophis had created…but without success…each time he failed… At worst, he only caused a small explosion that could not even hurt a kitten…
He was on his 1048th attempt… But nothing… He had to accept, that he could not arrive, that he was inferior to Apophis, despite his hard work, despite his discreet advantage, despite his innate talent…
He fell to his knees on the black obsidian floor, distraught at the edge of tears…
When suddenly, someone appeared… and held out his hand…
***
HyperSpace
Apophis on his side was in the cockpit of MK.1 only his crew was still on Earth, the automatic pilot was on… He had just finished a romantic holographic conversation with Lotus.
As usual he started to lose himself in this thought, the mission on Terra would be complicated, but what will he do next? The conflict with the SuperGuilde had stopped and the preparations for a military campaign would take at least several weeks to organize on Enclador Prime…
Apophis searched his inventory and took the star map he had found in the Zetark Bunker on Era at the beginning of his adventure, it was a military map that listed all of the Zetark outposts in the galaxy as well as the areas of military importance to the empire, over a thousand years ago.
Apophis during his first trip in space had already consulted it and had read that in the outer rim there was only one outpost, the one on Era; And that it would probably be necessary to go to the “distant” rim to find other bunkers, and unfortunately to penetrate in the “distant” rim before the level 50 and the third evolution was a pure suicide, any monster would reduce you to pieces in less than a few seconds…
But something had caught Apophis’ attention the first time, there was another point of interest in the outer rim, except he had no idea it was an outpost… But it couldn’t be just a random spot, it had to be a place of interest for the Zetarks.
But anyway Apophis postponed it to later…It was time for him to disconnect, he had been playing for almost two weeks, he was just taking micro breaks to not die, but his body really needed a brain rest.
As usual he put his character in the bed of the ship, then opened his menu to disconnect…
Notification: Disconnection in 10 seconds.
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Notification: Disconnection in progress…
Alexander opened his eyes…But something strange happened… He was not at home…