New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Killing everything on his way out, Astaroth burst out of the gate, stopping right in front of the entrance. He scanned the incoming enemies one by one, in a mere moment.

A few players were worth his attention, but the frontline was mostly disappointing. But as he looked further away, his smile returned.

Changing the Ad Astra’s form once again, to their spell slinger mode, Astaroth started firing at the incoming players, with incredible accuracy. Even when the players dodged the attack, the ones behind them got his.

Not a single player made it past the fifty feet mark alive. Of course, Astaroth had to dodge many incoming attacks of his own, but that was as easy as breathing for him right now.

Seeing his troops get decimated, Killi decided it was time to send the more powerful members of his guild. With a quick message in his guild chat, ten players burst into action.

All of them were currently part of the top one hundred rankings and were also well-recognized pro players. Killi hadn’t been slacking in his recruitment process.

And since he wasn’t as stuck up and anger-prone as Azamus, he was able to get many players under him that would normally play solo, or start their own guild.

Killi had a vision for his Knights of the Sun guild, and in that vision, he saw his guild as the largest force, with the best players in New Eden. And right now, his eyes were on the Bastion, thinking this was the perfect place to expand his guild from.

If he could capture it, he was set forever. His guild was already the one with the most players under it, so defending a fortress like this would be much easier for them.

But currently, one thing was stopping him. The incredible resilience of the players in Paragon, specifically, their core members.

Khalor had held back a literal army, with one of his own, and it had taken much more time than they wanted to kill him, and that was only with the help of a mysterious magic phenomenon.

And now that he was dead, when Killi finally thought they would breach this damned gate, someone else came running out of it. And that person was currently decimating the players, while holding the front of the gate securely.

So he needed to stop pulling his punches. He had been holding back his strongest players since the start of this, since he wanted to have them when it came time to claim the base.

Anyone with a brain cell could guess how hectic it would become once they reached the base inside the fortress. The alliance would fall apart, and it would be every guild for itself.

Having all his top players still in fighting condition was paramount to winning the base rights once that happened. But he could no longer realistically maintain this.

For now, all the guilds had kept pushing, regardless of how they kept bleeding players for two reasons.

First, they had a mobile graveyard set up away from the battlefield that allowed them to respawn close enough to keep coming back. Second, they outnumbered the Paragons at about one hundred to one.

But somehow, this ratio seemed to mean nothing. The core players of Paragon were crushing the weaker players like they were ants, and that held especially true for Khalor and what seemed to be Astaroth.

So he needed to kick his plan into gear earlier, lest they lose too many player levels, and it became unrealistic to keep assaulting the fortress.

The ten players that charged forth all stopped at different distances from Astaroth. Of these ten, three were tanks; one pure tank, one strength-based bruiser tank, and the last one an agility-based tank.

As outlandish as it sounded, the non-restrictive class system of New Eden allowed for such a play style. Two more players were pure melee DPS classes, one being a rogue type, while the other was wielding a metal-shafted naginata.

There was also an archer and a gunner, as well as two mages in colourful robes, serving as ranged firepower. The last player was one with a weird special class, Witch Doctor.

Killi had seen him hold a full raid party alive during a level forty-five dungeon on his own. But the means he used to do so were unconventional, at best.

But methods mattered not, only results. With this team of powerful players, he hoped to take Astaroth away from the gates so his guild and the others could push into the fortress.

In terms of power, in the ‘Knights’ guild, Killi had put forth almost all his might, aside from himself and his vice-leader. Seeing him do this, many guilds were inspired to do the same.

A roster of around forty players accumulated just outside the kill zone Astaroth had been maintaining. He noticed the movements of all these players, but he let them prepare.

He thought he would at least give them a chance to resist. But he knew they wouldn’t last long once he started going at them.

Once they were ready, and started charging at him, Astaroth had around one minute left to his melding timer, and six left to his Royal Protection buff. He wondered what form his Meld with Morpheus would take under the buff.

The formation that these more experienced players took was almost flawless, and Astaroth was impressed. But it all amounted to nothing in the face of crushing power.

When Astaroth aimed his finger guns at one of the melee fighters, a tank rapidly jumped in front, to take the blow for him. Astaroth snickered as he fired a bolt of fire.

But where he thought he would vaporize the tank, the damage number stumped him.

*-0*

ƥαṇdα- ηθνε|·ƈθm

*-0*  *-0*

This baffled Astaroth. He knew there was no way to completely mitigate damage on so many attacks that wouldn’t require an extremely powerful spell or skill.

And yet, he couldn’t see any traces of intense mana use, and the people he struck didn’t seem to use big skills either.

‘What the hell is happening, and where is my damage going?’