Chapter Zero - King Breaker
"Okay, last bit," Warren said. "Is everyone good?"
He looked over his team, though he only used the term lightly. This party was five idiots who didn't pack a trench coat.
Professional idiots. They were attempting to break into the final boss room in record time, and they weren't on pace at all. Honestly, he might have called it quits, but the run wasn't that bad, and the practice would help.
They had spent eleven minutes sprinting through the zone, through puzzles, and then had used a few exploits and some strong movement buffs to run past two minibosses. They had ignored millions of gold worth of treasure and loot, and abused some interactions that should have been patched out months ago but the devs hadn't gotten around to it yet.
They were good. Not good enough, but that was how speedrunning worked. It was one part being good, another part practice, another part blind luck.
Warren focused on their [Tank].
The player was very good. Annoyingly good. Give him an enemy with mixed attack patterns, multiple complex mechanics, AOEs and buff timers, and he'd perform flawlessly.
Give him three seconds too many to focus on his Twitch chat, and he'd walk off the side of a cliff.
"Yeah, we're good," the [Tank] said. "Real good time through the opening rooms, huh? Think we're on pace for a new record?"
Warren shook his head, the motion carried through his character's avatar. The [Tank] was streaming. If he wasn't in-game, he might even check it out. He usually picked up a solid thousand viewers, which put him firmly in the 'somewhat popular' category for KingBreaker streamers. It did put some pressure on Warren to excel.
Technically, he was the 'leader' of their five-man party. His Job-mix was optimized to give him a ton of DPS potential while still being pretty tanky. And he had some good anti-demon skills and a few spells up his sleeves.
There was a crisp sound as the [Archmage] spoke up. Their mic was kind of ass. "Not nearly. We were too slow in the antechamber."
That was the [Tank]'s fault. He had to do an ad-read right after they cleared the chamber, which ate up some time.
This was the final dungeon in the game. The unimaginatively named Demon Lord of Hellisdalr Castle. There were a bunch of in-universe story things tied to this place, but that didn't matter. The [Demon Lord] was here, and he was one hell of a tough boss.
The castle was a sprawling estate, with an external keep, a large PvP zone around it, and then the main castle itself, which spawned a ton of NPCs that were just shy of world-boss strength.
It was a good time, really. A challenge, but not one that was insurmountable. The fact that it wasn't instanced made it cool, too. You could easily stumble into another team working through the endgame content, and if you helped them, then it made for cool moments.
Or you might run into someone who'd betray you. There was always that risk, but the community for KingBreaker was pretty chill.
"Oh, shit," their [Royal Assassin] said.
"What is it?" Warren asked.
They were on the stairs leading up to the final boss chamber. It was one long corridor away, and there weren't any NPC spawns here. Some might wander in, or be pulled by other players, but they hadn't run into any other teams so far so--
Warren made it up the last few steps, then groaned.
He regretted it when the [Tank] heard and started yapping at his stream, milking the moment for content. "There she is! Looks like our pace isn't going to be that good after all. But I still want to put her in her place!"
Standing at the far end of the corridor, back to them, was a player.
She was dressed in a maid's outfit. All blacks and whites, and was swaying from side to side while humming a tune and sweeping the floor clean.
[Maid] wasn't even a player Job. When he scanned her, her name came up over her head, with a few extra bits.
Rosario Thorn
[HIDDEN] - Level [HIDDEN]
Warren tsked. "What do we know about her?" he asked.
"She's that roleplay streamer, yeah?" their [Archmage] asked.
"She's Rosario Thorn, the Maid of the Demon Lord," their [Tank] said, then he dropped the act. If he was one of those roleplay streamers, then Warren would have dropped him like a hot potato. He didn't mess around with roleplayers, that stuff was way too cringe. "She's max level Sword Saint and Archmage."
"Seriously?" their [Archmage] asked.
It was a fair question. Reaching max level in any Job took like, a solid thousand hours, and that was with exclusive grinding. KingBreaker gave Old School Runescape--still a stupidly popular game, somehow--a run for its money when it came to grinds.
Some jobs needed previous jobs maxed in order to be unlocked. [Archmage] and [Sword Saint] were both tier four. So the player behind Rosario Thorn had... probably four thousand hours? Minimum.
Warren liked gaming, but come on, the game was like, a year old.
"At least level twenty in [Rogue], too," their [Assassin] said. "For the Job-hide skill. Weapons? Fighting style?"
"She's a close-combat specialist. Uses a level-one broom and an enchanted kitchen knife. Neither are that tough. Tier two at most."
The [Archmage] snorted. "Really?"
"She's fast," Warren warned. "Quick-cast spells, mostly, and she has a lot of sword-skills that still work with that knife. The broom is just kinda embarrassing. She pulls it out for teams of obvious noobs and just smacks them around and lets them live. She only gets serious with properly levelled teams... like us."
That was her whole gimmick. She'd roleplay as the faithful maid of the Demon Lord, then fight players in the castle and the area around it. She... died a lot. It was mostly funny. But that was also mostly owing to using terrible gear. The player behind was damned good and had crossed digital blades with some of the best KingBreaker players to exist. This was a skills-based game. Twitch reflexes, knowing enemy moves, skill-movesets, and hitbox ranges was basically the only way to compete in higher-tier PvP, and this player did it wearing a decorative dress stolen off of level 5 [Townsfolk] NPCs.
He shifted his shoulders, his avatar doing the same. "Alright. Let's do this."
***
Rosario Thorn awoke to the sound of her own heart drumming in her chest.
That was unusual enough to be worrying. Normally, her heartbeat had to compete with a small medical suite's worth of beeping and pumping and clicking. Her computer's fans and the room's air conditioning as well. There was enough white noise that sometimes she couldn't hear herself think.
Here, the only competition was the whisper of wind.
It slipped through the room in long, quiet breaths, dried leaves scraped across stone, loose cloth flicked in the air. Rosario blinked into the darkness, pushed herself upright, and immediately discovered two things. First, she felt remarkably good. Second, she was Rosario Thorn.
Not Rose acting as Rosario Thorn.
Rosario Thorn.
She recognised the body before she had properly recognised the room. The hands were hers. She had spent thousands of hours looking at them from every possible camera angle. The black sleeves were hers too, as was the white trim, the gloves, and the carefully assembled maid outfit. It was considerably worse than several end-game, rare-material-filled pieces of gear that she had, but the maid outfit was one she'd been wearing for longer, despite the lack of good stats.
Fashion was an endgame activity. Anyone claiming otherwise had simply failed to reach the endgame.
Had she fallen asleep in-game? That was embarrassing. But at least she knew where she was... or she thought she did? The corridor belonged to Hellisdalr Castle, home of the Demon Lord. It was one of the end-game zones in KingBreaker. The devs had gone a little crazy with the environmental art here. She knew this castle and its environs because it was her stomping ground of choice.
Only... it wasn't. The corridor was almost right, which made everything wrong about it stand out all the more.
The nearest window had been blown apart. Half of its wooden frame was missing, glass littered the floor beneath it, and a crack ran from one corner all the way into the ceiling. The wall beside it had fared little better. Someone, at some point, had hit it with enough force to remove a section of masonry large enough for Rosario to walk through without ducking.
The game world was realistic, and players could blast through walls, but damage usually repaired itself.
Here, there were vines growing through things, weeds poking through cracks in the marble flooring, and off to one side, a part of the floor was outright missing, crumbled down to the level below.
She reached up and touched her face.
The game was good. The graphics fantastic. But part of that graphical goodness was the devs allowing themselves to not be entirely realistic. A bit of stylistic flair made the graphics feel good.
Her hand was too real. She touched the hem of her dress, feeling the fabric in a way that was too tactile, too accurate, to be something rendered by any modern game engine.
Rosario started to breathe a little harder, and the very minor strain of that was another thing that was subtly off.
She pinched herself, and it hurt.
"Okay, cool," she said. "Very cool, very okay."
She turned and stood, then took a step towards the window and paused.
She took another step.
She jumped on the spot.
Rosario looked down, then jumped again. "Oh my god," she said, her voice a gasp. "I'm breasting boobily."
Her avatar, Rosario Thorn, was designed to be the perfect maid. It was something she had been building into the character from before the game even had its first launch. This character was Early Access.
The perfect maid character meant... well, she had been inspired by a lot of gacha games, which meant that her perfect maid could fall into a few vague camps. The tall, stoic elf, the bumbling clumsy idiot, or the reluctant grump.
She had settled on the tall, stoic sort. Which of course, required some physical cues. For the memes.
She bounced again. "Wow."
That was new. If it came to a fight, she was going to have to account for that. It threw off her centre of gravity and--
Rosario shook her head and refocused. "Game world. Or not. Real world. Or I've gone crazy."
The latter was dangerously plausible. Still... if she just assumed that, then what even was the point? So, she decided to not assume that this was her losing her mind. Probably the healthier option.
"This looks like KingBreaker," she said. She grabbed a piece of the stonework next to the broken window and flicked it outside. It clattered on the ground. The soundwork was a bit better than in the game, too. Another point on the tally.
This corridor was familiar to her, even with the changes. "It looks like... what, fifty years, a hundred have passed? What the hell?"
There were shadows on the walls where paintings of the Demon Lord and his sons had hung. A few spots had missing furniture as well.
This was her spot. It was just outside of the roam range of most NPCs. Kind of a pain to get to, but that was fine. From this spot, she could ambush all sorts of players. Some trying the endgame solo, most coming in as a group.
She didn't think anyone was coming here anymore.
Swallowing, she looked down at her hand, then around. "[Menu]?" she asked. Nothing happened. "[Log out]? [Quit]? [Alt-F4]? Ah, maybe [Settings]? [Status]!"
She jumped when a screen appeared before her. It was small, but deeply familiar, even if there were some slight alterations. Her stats were written out, though the wireframe that usually appeared to show what items she had equipped was missing. Still, the menu had a tab for her Skills and Jobs, and it currently listed her stats.
Rosario Thorn
Current Job: [Sword Saint] (Hidden)
Stats
Stats
Strength 235
Dexterity 353
Constitution 397
Intelligence 385
Wisdom 335
Charisma 78
Mana 128,975
Stamina 163,366
So far, so good. That looked pretty much exactly how she recalled. She didn't have the highest stat in any one field, but she was pretty strong overall. Last she recalled, there were only a few dozen players with two max-rank Jobs that were at level 100.
Actually...
Rosario tapped the Jobs tab.
Combat Jobs
[Apprentice Mage] - Level 25
[Generalist Mage] - Level 50
[Green Mage] - Level 75
[Archmage] - Level 100
[Soldier] - Level 25
[Swordsman] - Level 50
[Swordmaster] - Level 75
[Sword Saint] - Level 100
[Thief] - Level 25
[Rogue] - Level 21
Crafting Jobs
[Gardener] - Level 12
[Tailor] - Level 25
[Seamstress] - Level 47
[Apprentice Enchanter] - Level 25
Right, that was all correct. She had one Job, [Apprentice Enchanter], that was on the cusp of unlocking its second tier Job. She had been working on that, idly, in the background whenever she wasn't streaming. She needed to push a little harder and get [Master Enchanter], but that required another few hundred hours of grinding, and making something special. She wasn't done collecting the resources yet. It was on her to-do list.
While she was streaming, Rosario had been working through the [Rogue] Job. Its progress was slow, mostly because ambushing top-level players wasn't exactly the best way to gain experience in that Job. She would have a better hourly rate sneaking around a hostile goblin camp. The next evolution in that Job line wasn't one she cared much about, in any case. There were a few options, but none appealed. She had picked [Thief] for the disguise skills and [Rogue] for the skill that allowed her to hide her current active Job, but...
She shook her head. It wasn't the time for that.
Checking her Skill list had her nodding. They were all there. As were her spells.
Then... "Inventory," she said.
A grid-like box appeared. Within were fifteen copies of the dress she wore... only they had been split apart? Now there were tops, skirts, aprons and bonnets instead of just the dress as one piece. Strange. There were a few mid-level health, mana, and stamina potions, and about fifty [Brooms] as well as half a dozen [Knives]. No money, none of her level-grinding gear. No teleportation items or anything too strong. She'd left all of that in her player home...
"Wait... [Teleport: Home]."
Nothing happened.
Sighing, she reached over and tapped one of the boxes in her inventory. Nothing happened even harder.
Frowning, she touched it again, but the knife didn't auto-equip. Instead, she slowly reached into the box, her arm warping on the end, then she came out holding onto the knife. It felt strangely lukewarm.
She twirled it around.
The knife spun in a lazy circle in her hand, then moved faster. She'd seen some people doing this kind of thing on Youtube and...
Rosario slashed through the air.
The wall across from her exploded with dust as a whip-crack noise echoed out. When the dust cleared, there was a three-metre gash across the stonework.
"Oops?" she muttered.
That had felt so easy. In her normal life, she could barely eat without straining herself, and here she could do knife tricks with impossible ease.
Swallowing, she held the [Knife] close, then moved out to explore the next room.
It was the throne room, and if the hallway had been a little damaged, this place was ruined.
The far end had once held the Demon Lord's throne, and now it was a gaping hole. The ground had ancient soot-stains that had remained unwashed, despite the rain that likely came through the space where the roof should have been.
It felt somehow sacrilegious that the sun was up and shining prettily above. This place deserved a somber atmosphere and dark clouds.
"What am I even supposed to do?" she asked.
Then she received a Ping. It came in the form of a message box that popped up in the corner of her vision, where it wouldn't be too intrusive but where it would be impossible to miss. The box only had one line.
"Your Master Summons You."
"Okay... cool, so what does that even mean?" she asked.
Unfortunately, the world didn't deign to answer.
***