After watching for a moment, War Hero Yi Yan suddenly praised him. "That mage has some sharp moves. High damage and fast movement speed, too. No wonder he dared to come solo-grind at the Donar River."
Kuang Dao curled his lip. "All that time just to kill one mob? He's nothing special."
War Hero Yi Yan shook his head. "Look closely. He's a dual-specialization mage, and his main element probably isn't fire, but wind. A Gale Mage... I've read the descriptions on the official site. Gale Mages don't do much damage, and with him taking up a second specialization so early, he must be short on skill points. It's impressive that he can still kill mobs this fast. If I'm right, he must have at least three pieces of blue gear."
Kuang Dao tightened his grip on his sword hilt and spat viciously. "Fuck! I've been doing quests and running dungeons, and all I've got so far is one lousy blue Jiba weapon. What pile of dog shit did this brat step in to get so damn lucky?"
"There you go again." War Hero Yi Yan pointed at Kuang Dao and shook his head with a smile.
"I just can't stand mages with good gear. So what?" Kuang Dao angrily stabbed his sword into the ground, resentment written all over his face.
"All right, all right. You can't even get at him from here." Laughing, War Hero Yi Yan put an arm around his buddy's shoulders and gave him several hearty pats. He knew all about his deputy's "bitter" past... How should he put it? It really was a story too painful to revisit.
Back then, the War Hero Family had put out a kill order on a famous mage in Light of Freedom. Kuang Dao had been very "lucky" to find and corner that mage somewhere, and so tragedy had struck...
Kuang Dao was a pretty skilled player, a warrior with a bit of a reputation in their Ninth Branch. Whether in PvP or dungeons, he was someone they could proudly put forward. But that meant "among ordinary players." The mage he had run into was... well, anything but ordinary. No, he was very, very far from ordinary!
Everyone could guess the result. Kuang Dao had suffered an utterly crushing defeat, as miserable as a defeat could get... Even with three underlings alongside him, the four of them hadn't managed to take a single hit point off the mage. He had slaughtered them without losing any health!
Kuang Dao wasn't one to admit defeat easily, but he was well aware of the enormous gap between himself and that mage-in both skill and equipment, they were worlds apart! There was no shame in losing to someone like that. Kuang Dao made up his mind: the next time he saw him, he would call in more guild members and surround the bastard!
Having settled on that plan, Kuang Dao hadn't taken the incident to heart or carefully considered the far-reaching consequences of his actions. A day later, however, he had immediately grasped a "truth," a very profound "truth"-pro players weren't necessarily a problem, but you did not mess with bored pro players. You just didn't...
Kuang Dao had considered every possibility except this one: the other guy had actually struck first and set his sights firmly on him!
At first, the attacker hadn't been that mage, but a Shadow Assassin called Xiaoxiao Xingxing. He was a very famous professional player, known as the Demon Shadow Killing God, and had been the Beaconfire Team's starting Shadow Assassin. Every assassin player in the world knew him.
Kuang Dao hadn't initially realized that this Xiao Xiao was that Xiao Xiao. After all, Xiaoxiao Xingxing was a celebrity player. It was perfectly normal for a fan to create a character with a similar name.
There were plenty of people called Xiao Xiao in the game. Names like "Xiao Xiao Sleeping," "Xiao Xiao Xingxing 520," and "Brother Xiao Xiao V5" were too numerous to count.
Professional players generally didn't show up in online games. They had to spend huge amounts of time training every day, and the professional league had dedicated game servers separate from the online game itself, so ordinary players rarely saw pros log in.
If some bored superstar came wandering through the online game, he was bound to draw a huge crowd of spectators.
Yes, that was what Kuang Dao had thought. But he soon discovered he was wrong...
Wave after wave of reinforcements died. Every time Kuang Dao revived, two gleaming daggers chased him down and "reamed his ass" until he died! Even healers desperately pumping health into him couldn't help. That Shadow Assassin's damage was just too fucking vicious! (Ass-reaming: when players faced attacks from behind, their chances of dodging, parrying, and blocking dropped sharply. Thus, many players liked to stick to their opponents' backs while attacking, especially the Shadow Assassin class, famed for its speed!)
Fortunately, pro players weren't GMs. Even he couldn't handle too many opponents. As the War Hero Family's reinforcements trickled in and their numbers passed fifty, Xiaoxiao Xingxing activated Sprint and ran without another word! Naturally, the War Hero players weren't having that. They chased him relentlessly! (Sprint: a speed-boosting skill common to the Assassin class.)
At that moment, the man who had started the whole incident finally swaggered onto the scene... Clad in a full set of orange legendary gear and wielding an exceedingly rare silver ancient-grade weapon, the mage made his dazzling entrance amid howling, icy winds!
That's right! This "very, very far from ordinary" mage was none other than our great Lan Xi... known as "Ice-Soul Archmage · Wangying Lanxi."
Not only had that bastard Lan Xi come himself, he had shamelessly called in another accomplice: the Beaconfire Team's starting Shaman Priest, Deep Blue Temptation.
The arrival of these two professional-level superstars immediately turned the battle around and made it completely one-sided. As for which side it favored, everyone knew perfectly well...
Deep Blue Temptation played a Shaman Witch Doctor, a specialization of Shaman Priest. In terms of his role, he was a healer, commonly called a nanny-and a mighty nanny with ferocious healing output and an ample supply of milk! Players generally called such talents "Bo Gods"!
With Bo God Deep Blue backing them up, the two top-tier professional "hitmen" naturally cut loose. Blades rose and fell, ice and fire flew, and they slaughtered their way from one end of the crowd to the other, charging in and out three times!
The hundred-player raid the War Hero Family had hastily assembled finally collapsed... Nearly everyone had been killed several times, hemorrhaging experience. Some had even lost two full experience bars in a row and dropped a level from all the deaths. Kuang Dao was the undisputed king of these unlucky bastards: he had lost three whole levels!
Comrade Xiao Xiao had played a constructive role in that! Afterward, Kuang Dao even dreamed of the bastard's "heroic figure," twin daggers in hand, "slipping into his pants and out through his ass"! The image haunted him, and he feared the man like a ghost!
Fortunately, manpower was the one thing War Hero had in abundance. As a second hundred-player raid arrived, then a third, then a fourth... with reinforcements pouring in endlessly, even the three-man team of Lan Xi, Xiao Xiao, and Deep Blue couldn't take it anymore. They could only exploit the terrain to fight a guerrilla battle, no longer daring to clash head-on.
Lan Xi got vicious, too, and simply called the team's starting Judgment Knight online. This fellow was another big name with plenty of fans, known as "Knightly Faith · Fire of the Fallen"!
Judgment Knight was a "damage dealer" class with tremendous burst damage, and Fire of the Fallen was a god-tier knight in a full set of orange gear! The moment he arrived, his hammer rose and fell, instantly flattening a whole swath of players!
Then the Beaconfire Team's other starting healer, the Light Priest Carefree Immortal, logged in as well...
The Beaconfire Team's five starters certainly lived up to their reputation as close buddies. The saying "brothers in a brawl, fathers and sons in battle" described them perfectly.
Once these five professional-level superstars gathered, they formed a standard five-player PvP lineup of two healers and three damage dealers! Even with several hundred War Hero players surrounding them and attacking furiously, it didn't seem to accomplish much. After all, they weren't bosses with enormous bodies. Only a dozen or so people could squeeze close enough to attack them at once. What good was that?
Characters in full orange gear moved incredibly fast. They couldn't outrun anything with four legs or wings, of course, but ordinary two-legged players certainly couldn't catch them.
As the War Hero players fought, they found their enemies slipping out of reach. They could only leave combat, mount up, and give chase. Meanwhile, the dozen or so players up front who could reach them generally lasted less than half a minute. By the time the mounted players arrived, they simply became the next batch of "half-minute contestants"...
The five of them dragged some five hundred players through a full two hours of guerrilla warfare! In a roundabout way, this could be considered an unusual form of "kiting."
War Hero's five hundred-player raids had been beaten into utter resignation. Everyone had died seven or eight times on average, losing piles of experience, equipment, and money... The guild could reimburse those losses, but they still had to spend their own time grinding back the lost experience. Wasn't this just asking for trouble because they had nothing better to do?
They're world champions! God-tier players! Charging in just means dying! In that case, we might as well go through the motions. We've already died so many times that nobody can accuse us of slacking when we get back, right? At this point, anyone still charging in is a fucking idiot!
That thought quietly sprouted in many people's minds, growing stronger and stronger!
Kuang Dao charged at the very front without hesitation. Though he knew the raid members around him had wilted, he absolutely couldn't go limp now! This whole affair had started because of him, so he had to keep going no matter what. He could lose the fight, but he couldn't lose face!
Poor Kuang Dao was chopped down over and over by the beasts on the other side, then revived over and over by his own healers. He had died who knew how many times, losing a full... uh, anyone talking about "experience points" clearly didn't know the truth. Kuang Dao's experience losses this time needed to be measured in "levels." They could simply count how many levels he had lost.
In the end, neither side settled anything. After scattering War Hero's five hundred-player raids, the five beasts who had been "bullying the weak" each logged off to enjoy themselves. By the time the War Hero leadership came to their senses and prepared to retaliate, the culprits were nowhere to be found...
The War Hero Family couldn't swallow it, so they mobilized their paid posters to write a thread titled "Pro Players Bully the Weak, Celebrity Players Stoop to Shamelessness!" It mocked those superstars' heroic, glorious deeds and sneered that they didn't dare log back in after doing their dirty work, with lines such as "If you've got balls, come back!" (Paid posters: people who specialized in flooding forums, drumming up support for their own organizations and smearing others.)
The thread sent enormous waves through the forums, and countless people voiced their opinions on the incident...
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