"One, two, one... one, two, one..."
Amid the ringing marching cadence, the player Black-and-White Bear marched through the tightly packed ranks with his pike raised, his fish-scale armor clattering as though accompanying his steps.
"What a sight..."
Black-and-White Bear marveled as he looked around him. The columns on either side resembled two torrents of steel, advancing in perfect unison. The warriors marched shoulder to shoulder with firm, powerful strides, their weapons glinting coldly in the sunlight.
This force consisted entirely of players, numbering only a thousand. That did not sound like much-seemingly fewer people than a single secondary school had.
Yet when those thousand players donned helmets and armor, raised banners of every description, and marched across level ground in two columns, each five abreast, they still exuded the might of a vast army, their footsteps thundering and dust billowing.
This was a hastily assembled infantry regiment, its thousand members comprising both independent players and battle group members.
There was little to say about the independent players. Most preferred fighting alone or teaming up with three to five friends.
The battle group players, however, came from all sorts of places.
Besides the Extreme Warriors, more than a dozen battle groups had members sign up, including Mountain Tiger, the Han-Tang Warriors, the Liaodong Iron Cavalry, the Roman Praetorian Guard, and the Little Erlang Backpack Corps.
The infantry regiment's commander had been elected by its members in a collective vote, choosing from five highly regarded veteran players.
The leader of the Han-Tang Warriors won the vote, becoming commander of the temporary infantry regiment and receiving the rank of colonel.
Black-and-White Bear belonged to the Han-Tang Warriors Battle Group. He had originally been a perfectly happy independent player, until a few days earlier, when the group's leader took him by the hand and