Chapter One - Departure
Rosario Thorn did not know what to do next, and that offended her on a surprisingly personal level.
KingBreaker had spent the last year training her to expect the opposite. There was always something to do. There were Jobs to level, Skills to perfect, quests to clear, a crafting material to farm. And of course, for the better players, there were leaderboard positions to defend from sleep-deprived teenagers in South Korea who had apparently decided that Rosario's continued existence was an affront to their family honour.
Progress in KingBreaker was infinite by design. The developers had understood that the easiest way to keep players happy was to make sure there was always another number to make larger.
"[Quests]," she said, and as expected, nothing came up. "[Notes]?" That didn't do anything either.
Gritting her teeth, she crossed her arms and looked around herself. The castle was a devastated husk, and she didn't have many reasons to stay here. The place was looted to the bedrock. So, why stay?
No matter what her next step was, it would involve being closer to people. A maid was only as good as her house, and... well, if there was one thing she'd admit to fearing, it was loneliness... and maybe spiders.
The message she received had to come from someone. It wasn't formatted the way a normal System message would be. Messages did not simply appear without someone, or something, sending them, and this one had not been formatted like any KingBreaker System notification Rosario had ever seen. That meant that it came from somewhere.
She regretted not poking at it some more, but it was gone now, and she wasn't able to open her logs.
Unfortunately, the game didn't come with a glowing yellow trail of breadcrumbs to follow to the next quest objective. It was a little more old-school in its quest design, requiring players to talk to NPCs, use maps, and teach each other the solutions to prior quests.
That was a blast, until she was caught out in a situation where there were no people and no hints to use.
"[Friends]?" she asked.
No handy list opened up.
"Okay, so if that doesn't work. What about magic?"
She found herself grinning a little at the idea. Magic! That was one of the most fun things to play with in this whole world. The systems here had multiple layers of magic. There were direct magics, physical manipulation magics, meta magics, and then her favourite, elemental magics. The latter had a complex system of interactions. Causing a [Water Bomb] to go off next to someone only to hit them with a low-levelled [Electric Shock] was a good time.
Right now, however, she needed... "[Find Item: Master]," she said.
There was a twist in her gut, like acid reflux only less painful, and then more nothing happened. But this time, the nothing happened in an interesting way. It felt almost like she was missing something, a critical ingredient.
It only took her a moment to discover it. There was a spinning well of energy within herself that hadn't been there before. It was almost demanding to move.
Pulling at it, she unraveled a thread, and then following along some instincts that were both hers and not, she weaved it. A spell circle snapped into place before her in a blink, just like in the game, only now she had an instinctual understanding of the runes within. "[Find Item: Master]," she said.
The spell cast, and then trembled and returned a negative.
But that had worked!
Grinning, she cast again. "[Find Item: Rock]!"
The spell snapped, and all of a sudden every rock within fifty metres from pebble to boulder was glowing faintly.
She had the impression that more magic pumped into the spell would add to the range. It was, after all, a very basic spell. The kind of thing that most players dipped five or ten levels into [Apprentice Mage] to pick up just for the sheer utility of it.
If that spell worked...
"[Firebolt]!" She giggled as she pulled from her magical reserves and shaped that power into another basic spell. A fist-sized ball of fire rocketed out of the completed spell circle before her and raced across the room to splatter against a distant wall. It left a small scorch mark behind.
Strange... that spell felt like it could accept a lot more.
Grinning, Rosario pumped a ton of magic into it, then called out the spell's name again. "[Firebolt]!"
The resulting explosion threw her back ten feet. The wall at the far end of the chamber was blasted outwards, and when the dust started to clear, there was a hole in it large enough for an elephant to walk through unimpeded.
The edges of her skirts were singed.
"Oh... okay, oops," she said.
That was... not great. The property value had just taken a hit. Well, more of a hit, she supposed. It was kind of wrecked already.
She noticed some birds taking off in the distance, no doubt spooked by the loud noise. Surprisingly, she was unhurt. Her stats? Lower-leveled spells were notably less-effective on higher leveled players. There was no such thing as complete immunity, but levels and stats made a difference.
Licking her lips, she decided to be a little less... goofy. She was a proper, stoic maid, so she stood tall and straight, and then started to cast a few spells. First from her [Apprentice Mage] list, then [Generalist Mage], [Green Mage] and finally a couple from her [Archmage] Job.
[Mage Armour]
[Minor Ward]
[Elemental Shield]
[Deflection Field]
[Spellguard]
[Aegis]
[Nature's Resilience]
[Second Spring]
[Continuity of Self]
[Death Refused]
[Archmage's Privilege]
Rosario let out a huff when that last spell was cast. She looked like a Christmas tree with so many spell effects layered atop one another. More importantly, her instincts were telling her not to cast some of her other options. Some of them would interfere with each other.
There was a strong drain on her magic, but it wasn't quite so much that she was constantly losing mana. Rather, she was just replenishing it far slower. That was fine. Slower mana regen was an acceptable trade-off for the ability to tank a howitzer shell to the face.
"Okay, buffed to the gills," she said. "At least, defence-wise."
She had a lot of self-buffs for speed and strength and dodge chance, but that didn't feel entirely necessary at the moment. What did was finding her way to civilization, and a spell on her list caught her eye in that regard. [Teleport to City].
It was a utility spell in her [Generalist Mage] Job. One of those real handy ones that allowed players to pull themselves back to the nearest town square as long as they had visited that area before.
From here... unless things changed enormously, then the nearest city would be Alpta, the capital of the region known as Lithos. It was a strongly-contested mid-to-upper level area that had been under constant siege for much of the game's life.
Or, she could be less lucky and have the spell drop her off in the last city she had been in, which was way off on the other side of the world map.
She almost cast the spell then and there, but paused.
That was maybe moving a little quickly. First, her maid dress was in a state. No proper maid would be seen walking about with a tattered dress. It was inappropriate.
She opened her inventory, grabbed a fresh uniform, then looked around. This was... kind of out in the open. When this was a game, changing clothes was just a few clicks. She was not about to strip out in the open, so she retreated, found an unoccupied room--the Demon Lord's bedchambers, as it happened--and quickly changed.
The old dress was in a bit of a state, but it wasn't anything she couldn't fix.
Actually... if she was playing the part of a 'maid' and hoping to run into NPCs... that was, normal people, she'd best switch her Jobs around.
A few taps of her Status later and she was now presenting herself entirely differently to the world.
Rosario Thorn
Current Job: [Seamstress] - Level 47
The only way to gain experience in a Job was to have it equipped. Obviously, that didn't mean that former Jobs were useless. Stats carried through, as did Skills and Spells. Some players had made a point of collecting dozens of lower-leveled Jobs for the early stats boost, but that played havoc with their total level, and it made certain level-based dungeons trickier. She was too much of a completionist anyway, and preferred to get her current Job to max-level before moving on.
The exception had turned out to be useful crafting Jobs, but that was mostly because they could be done in-town and she liked the game's rather open crafting and enchanting system. It was a decent way of passing time between raids.
Besides, every gamer knew that fashion was the real endgame.
Now properly equipped and ready for nearly anything, Rosario stood tall amidst the destroyed halls of the Demon Lord and cast another spell. "[Teleport to City]."
Her stomach did a backflip, her eyes spun, the world twisted backwards, and she wasn't certain what was happening with her spleen, what she did know was that she was overcome with an incredible urge to pee and maybe puke.
Then with a snap of displaced air, she was suddenly about two feet off the ground.
She landed with a slight flex of her knees, then spread her arms out for balance while the world spun.
Rosario wasn't in Alpta. She would recognize that city with ease. This was more of a small town. Several two and three-story buildings were around her, with four streets running out of a wide city square. Those were lined by smaller homes and shops.
The air smelled like spilled alcohol, crushed grains, fresh bread and even fresher manure.
"Her!" someone shouted. Their voice was strange, overlaid over itself in a strange echoey manner. "She's the one that did it, not me! I'm innocent! I'm as innocent as a babe! A tax-paying, law-abiding babe!"
Rosario wasn't even surprised when she turned around and found someone pointing right at her.
She was surprised to see that person being manhandled by two guards who were very obviously carrying her towards a pillory.
"What even is going on?" she asked.
***