Players with Hero Templates

After climbing into the gaming pod and starting the game, Xiao Yu opened his eyes to find himself in the Blazing Flame Temple. He had gone from a homebody to Raglios, the Balrog Lord, who stood over thirty meters tall.

"Boss, bad news! Intruders have broken through the gates of the Blazing Flame Temple. They seem to be here to destroy the Flame Altar."

A Flame Surger suddenly emerged from the lava lake in front of Xiao Yu and spoke in a terrified voice.

This Flame Surger was also played by a player who had joined Xiao Yu two days ago. Since he only had a rare elite template and was too weak in combat, Xiao Yu had made him a messenger underling rather than appoint him as a boss guarding a checkpoint.

"Heh, perfect timing. Looks like I'm getting another feast today." As Xiao Yu spoke, he opened the monitoring interface. Inside a pitch-dark tunnel, a party of adventurers was making its way along a path of volcanic ash, advancing from the entrance of Blazing Flame Canyon deeper into the canyon.

Swarms of fire elementals, lava monsters, and hellhounds charged at them, only to be frozen in blizzards, chopped into piles of rock fragments by blades, or reduced to black ash. This adventuring party was a full forty-person raid. Two plate armor classes led the way: a male warrior in crimson battle armor and a female paladin in golden battle armor. The warrior looked especially impressive. The fierce dragon-head ornaments on his pauldrons spewed bursts of flame as though they were alive, making Xiao Yu's eye twitch.

He recognized the armor. It was the Crimson Flame Dragonscale Plate Armor Set, top-grade fire resistance gear that gave a total of 280 fire resistance. Each piece cost tens of thousands of RMB at the auction house, and even at that price, there were none to be had. A full set would cost at least three to five hundred thousand RMB, yet the warrior leading the raid had somehow assembled one.

Xiao Yu clearly remembered that in the adventuring parties he had harvested recently, usually only the MT had one or two pieces. In some parties, even the MT had none-like the group he had just harvested. Then he looked at the weapon in the warrior's hand: the Blade of the Dark Avenger! An absurdly powerful weapon with over 300 damage per second. His shield was the Titan Bulwark, with 120 resistance to all elements. That gear setup was ridiculously extravagant.

The other players were all shimmering with light too, each better equipped than the last. Every one of them also had the red aura of a fire resistance potion flickering around them. Drinking fire resistance potions the moment they entered the instance meant either they were idiots who didn't know the potions had a time limit, or they had so many that they could drink them whenever they pleased. Judging by their performance, it was clearly the latter. They also had the same guild prefix above their heads, so this obviously wasn't a pickup group thrown together at the last minute. Their guild emblem was a blue sun.

The Light of Dawn Guild? Why does that sound familiar? Xiao Yu suddenly had a vague sense that something was wrong.

After hesitating for a moment, he opened the instance command interface. The portraits of the other bosses in the instance appeared on the screen before him.

"Three-Headed Hellhound Garix, go guard the gates of the Blazing Flame Temple. You must not let these intruders enter the temple easily.

"Lava Giant Fieldegar, my valiant warrior, you will guard the Obsidian Bridge. If the intruders break into the temple, stop them there.

"As for you, my faithful servant-Flame Controller Alex—I want you to lead my fire elemental legion. If the intruders manage to reach the inside of the temple, let my fire elemental army reduce them all to ashes.

"And I will personally guard the Flame Altar. We absolutely cannot allow those adventurers to close the elemental rift."

Xiao Yu gave his orders in a loud voice. The three-headed hellhound, the lava giant, and the flame controller were all bosses under his command. He usually disliked sending them out to fight adventurers, because reviving them after they died cost a great deal of money. This time, however, he felt he had to send them. Even if they couldn't wipe out the well-equipped adventuring party, they at least had to wear them down. Otherwise, he would have a hard fight when his turn came.

The three bosses soon took their positions, and the adventuring party fought its way to the gates of the Blazing Flame Temple. There, they encountered the instance's first boss.

Three-headed hellhound: "Meat! Fresh meat! So much fresh meat!" With a thunderous roar, the three-headed hellhound pounced on the adventurers.

A single move was enough to tell whether someone knew their stuff. As soon as the adventuring party engaged Garix, Xiao Yu's heart sank. This is bad. They really are trouble. On the screen, the warrior leading them tanked the attacks of all three of the hellhound's heads by himself, standing firm amid their fiery breath.

That was a little frightening. The three-headed hellhound's heads each had an independent aggro system, and the damage from their fire breath could stack. Normally, three tanks had to take the damage separately; that was the proper way to fight it. Yet one person on the opposing side was tanking attacks from all three heads. How was that possible?

Wait! Xiao Yu suddenly felt that something was off. A level 60 adventurer has seven or eight thousand health at most. No matter how high his fire resistance is, he can't possibly be that tough! And the female paladin beside him was putting out a staggering amount of healing too. A single Holy Light could heal five or six thousand—what did that even mean? Thinking this, Xiao Yu increased the screen's resolution and looked above the two players' heads.

Long Ao Jiutian (Dark Avenger). The border around his portrait was a golden dragon, with two stars after it.

Phoenix (Holy Light Envoy). The border around her portrait was also gold, with one star after it.

Damn it, they're players with hero templates!

Xiao Yu was stunned. This was the first time he had seen players with hero templates appear in an instance. It wasn't that players with hero templates were really that rare. Although they made up less than one in a thousand players, Sky World had over a hundred million players in total, which meant there were still thousands of players with hero templates.

But players with hero templates rarely appeared in instances of their own level. That was because Sky World had an unwritten rule known as "kings do not meet kings": players with hero templates rarely went to war with players who had boss templates.

A player with a boss template could be revived after being killed by a player with an adventurer template, but if killed by someone with a monster or NPC template, they would truly die for good. It had been designed that way because of the needs of the story.

Sky World had a feature called the Firmament Chronicle. All sorts of events that occurred in the game were recorded in the Firmament Chronicle, and the development of the game's entire storyline followed it.

If someone was killed by an adventurer player, they were merely defeated in the game's backstory. It could even be said that the event never happened at all, and it would not be recorded in the Firmament Chronicle, because as far as the story was concerned, there was no such group of people as "adventurers."

After all, there were so many adventurers, and they could revive whenever they wanted, while the number of monster bosses was limited. If bosses died for good when killed, no number of them would be enough for the adventurers to kill. It wouldn't make sense in the story either. Suppose a certain demon king wanted to destroy the world and was then killed by a group of adventurers, whose leaders were named Li Goudan, Wang Ermazi, and I Love ******. No one could accept a script like that.

So in previous games, no matter how many times players killed a boss, it would reappear alive and kicking whenever the instance reset. That was because adventurers had nothing to do with the game's story at all; bosses were killed by heroes who were an established part of the storyline.

Sky World had inherited this feature too. Being killed by a player with an adventurer template was no big deal, but if a boss was killed by a named monster or NPC, the event would be recorded in the Firmament Chronicle and become a historical event that could no longer be changed. Naturally, the boss could no longer be revived. This kind of death was also called a plot kill.

The problem was that heroes in Sky World could also be played by players.

Just like now: if Xiao Yu killed the hero player called Long Ao Jiutian in front of him, the Firmament Chronicle would record that, on a certain date, the Stormwind City hero Long Ao Jiutian led a group of adventurers to attack the Blazing Flame Temple and was killed in battle by Raglios, the Balrog Lord.

That character would then disappear for good. Of course, the reverse was also true: if Xiao Yu were killed, he would truly die as well.