V1 - C12 | The Plague and the Yellow Rabbits

VOLUME 1

- CHAPTER 12 -

THE PLAGUE AND THE YELLOW RABBITS

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A long time ago, or actually, somewhere about two years back, I was hired to be a mercenary by a major guild. I wasn’t the strongest in a fight, much less I knew how to teamwork, but even so, I was placed as a squad captain in a group of ten people.

Back then, I always used my main account for anything serious that came up, and I didn’t know how to play well in any other classes besides Arcane Assassin. I always felt that my plays were sloppy with any others.

Warriors, archers, mages, tanks. None of them were nearly as interesting as the assassin’s class archetype. I didn’t care about it being weaker, I always felt rewarded to have quick thinking and fast reflexes, the only class that does exactly what I want to.

I remember everything like it was yesterday. My character wearing a black leather assassin’s trench coat, equipped with my old oversized scimitar swords, those which could separate their blades in parts to increase their attack range, making it almost like a whip. I always liked the idea of a weapon that was both melee and ranged, besides it wasn’t as popular, so people never knew how to react against it.

At this night, I was standing on a plain field of a Legendary region, somewhere east of the old territory.

I met my group just a few months before, they were all skillful players that were being paid with real money just like me. Our job was to secure the territory of the biggest guild of the time, the Yellow Rabbits.

At this time, the game was at its peak after the usual annual update. They had unified the parallel servers and the Plague events were introduced, in which random mobs transform into something more disgusting and rotten, having parasites-like veiny flesh tubes pulsating out from their insides. The simplest creature could suddenly transform into a boss and villages would be attacked by swarms of infected.

It was especially hard to contain them in the Legendary difficulty areas, so they spread like wildfire there. Villages and cities that once were safezones turned into the monster’s territory.

The infected were more powerful, giving rarer items than the normal ones, and NPCs were forced to give numerous missions to kill the Plague or reconquer what was lost. Which made things extremely profitable.

That’s why the biggest guild of the server put a secret plan in motion: to safeguard the plagued territory and farm both on quests and the mutated mobs. No one without the direct permission of the Yellow Rabbits could enter those regions. That way the Plague wouldn’t be wiped out and all its profits would go to them.

Sure, its area was enormous, and they needed way more manpower than their guild had, that’s why mercenaries were called in.

Kill anyone who trespasses.

And so we did it without fail.

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But as time passed, more and more people became aware of the shadiness that was happening in the plagued area, and so, on a fateful day, we were told that a group of smaller guilds was preparing an attack to break one of the fortresses we had in the borders.

My team was placed to defend it with four others, there were fifty people in total on our side; and for our enemies, it was expected to be at least double that.

As I said earlier, we didn’t have nearly enough manpower to protect the entire border. That was the best we could manage to spare.

First, we formed a group in-game and joined in a voice chat, then I had to enter a second call where the squad leaders of the operation were in a push-to-talk communication. While we talked by voice in the group, I received and sent reports to the other squad leaders.

Communication is one of the most important features of teamwork, after all.

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“Dark, this is going to be so much fun! A whole guild war, with a fortress and everything!” – a guy a little younger than me exclaims from the other side of my headphones.

The others in the call laugh at it.

“It’s just like those medieval movies! Are they going to bring catapults? Or maybe those towers to climb the wall!? Maaaan!”

­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ “For what I know, that doesn’t exist in SFO, so I hope not,” – I respond joking. – “It’s going to be like always, the only difference is that now there will be way more people.”

The ten of us were on standby at the forest outside the fortress’ walls, some seated, others making poses, or even dancing non-stop.

“I heard they were three hundred strong,” – an old man jests with a trembling deep voice. – “they posted it online and everything. ‘Today the conspiracy of the Yellow Rabbits will fall’, Hahahaha!”

“We will show them! What is three hundred, anyway?” – someone says with an annoying voice of a teenager. – “Like- each one of us needs to go against four of them?”

“Six, dumbass.”

“Easy breezy, man. They are a bunch of noobs, I bet they won’t have the balls to bring their main equip. ‘OoOoh, I’m going to lose all my loot if I die, OoOoh, I’m going to cry,’ Hahahah!”

Everyone laughs. All of them were excited about what was going to come, being paid to play was a dream for some of them, and participating in a big event like this was their heaven.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

When the enemy arrived, exploding the gate with a hail of fireballs, some teleporting on the roof of the fortress’ towers to shoot downwards with their magic crossbows, and cannonballs were exploding everywhere… It became pure chaos. Ultimate abilities were being used left and right, dragons flying in the sky, giant beasts breaking down the walls.

My head was overwhelmed by the screams and calls of both my comrades and the other squad captains.

There weren’t three hundred attacking us, it was about two times that. After their public announcement, smaller guilds and independent groups joined the war at the last moment, even some random players that were passing through and saw the giant army blindly followed their march.

Most of them ended up having their main equipment on. From what I heard, they were so confident they would win, that they made an insurance system to give anyone’s loot back after the war ended, increasing their confidence even further, and so thousands of print screens were saved beforehand as proof of ownership in case they were found later. Even so, I doubt any of it would have worked in that mess.

Our squad's objective was to flank and kill their back line from outside the walls. And that’s what we did at the beginning, it was relatively easy as the enemy clearly wasn’t well organized. But once one of them died, they would reconnect with another of their characters and keep pushing us.

After a while, my team’s battlefield became the insides of the forest, where we needed to keep going in circles, using the trees and bushes to hide and separate the enemy into smaller groups to kill them. Occasionally going back to the fortress to continue to kill and agro more of the enemy.

Sometimes the attackers even killed themselves by mistake, all because they weren’t in the same group or guild to discern friend from foe. It wasn’t like we mercenaries were under the Yellow Rabbits’ guild for them to use as targets, actually, all players in my group were under different guilds, when in none.

All I could hear was the endless killing reports, be it about the enemies or my teammates. Their scream echoed in my head about doing a killing spree or about reconnecting with their second char, or their third, or fourth. Some reached a point where they had none left, but even so, they kept promising to arrive in time with their alts, ones which didn’t have enough level to use any near Quick Travels yet.

I didn’t die once in that fight, all because I wasn’t exposing myself to danger as my comrades were and because I had higher mobility than them. To keep our strategic formation and relay reports, all I did was methodically kill a couple of players, retreat, order what the group should do, then repeat.

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It lasted three hours.

We lost any kill count in the first minutes of it. We didn’t know how many of us were left, or how much of the enemy remained. All we did was keep on fighting each other.

But then, from far away we saw something coming, it was a surprise attack by another army. Though it wasn’t the Yellow Rabbits nor a guild against them. In fact, they weren’t players at all. It was a sea of monsters, mutated and infested by the Plague.

If we thought that the warzone was chaos, it was because we hadn’t seen the swarm of mobs coming at us from the other side.

Some players had their game crashed just by the amount of them charging in the distance.

It was impossible to fight or to run from it. Some tried to disconnect but the seven seconds delay was enough for the Plagued to reach them. Others managed to kill one, two, three, maybe even a few dozen of them before being engulfed. Others tried to fly away on their mounts, but they were shot down by acid; or ride in the fastest horses of the game, just to be impaled by roots coming off the ground.

From bosses in equal sizes with the fortress to the smallest mobs like big bees, we were swiped through.

After we saw them, it didn’t last five minutes.

All of us on the side of the fortress and the ones who were attacking it were obliterated. Completely wiped out.

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In the next hours, the swarm of Plagued advanced further in the territory. Not only our fortress was destroyed, but also all the others that were trying to contain it.

At the end of the weekend, sixty percent of the server’s territory was overrun. Players died by the millions, hundreds of cities and villages were lost, entire guilds were erased from the map, and regions that had a lower difficulty rose to the highest level there is.

In a Legendary region, the death penalty is the loss of your level-up progress and every item in your inventory, that was enough for any common sense player to get out of the horde’s way. And those who tried were overrun and remained with their characters dead for an entire week. It’s rumored that a dozen of Unique items were lost trying to defend against the invasions.

It was an apocalyptic level of disaster.

For some reason, the Plagued was moving as a hivemind, strategically swarming to take over our territories and add the newly killed NPCs or mobs to their ranks in a snowball effect. It was so planned out, that it collected as many infected as it could before launching its attacks, and its army was separated according to the biomes each infected species would be most effective at.

However, the biggest SFO guilds joined forces and organized a strategy against it. In a major calculated assault, they were able to hold off the invasion and destroy the core responsible for the Plague’s intelligence.

The swarms lost strength and the recapture of territory became easier. Cities were rebuilt and new villages were spread out to guard against the infected. To this day, part of the old Gonkdim is still outside our server’s limits and being infested by the Plague.

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All of it was a major event in the world. It was so popular, that people from servers across the globe came to visit, either to help or to observe what was going on.

Soon after, it was discovered that the Yellow Rabbits were the sole responsibles for such catastrophe after proof came to the public, which showed that they knew about the Plague’s intelligent core from the start and they had plans to protect it as a way to keep farming over the infected.

And so, they were forever banned from commercializing or making alliances with other guilds. It was even raised a campaign entitled “Hunting Yellow Rabbits”, or HYR for short, in which players were rewarded with real money if they recorded a video proving that they had killed someone of that guild. Consequently, the great majority of its members left.

Nowadays, some areas the plague took are still occupied by high-level monsters. There were some movements of cleansing but they were nearly impossible to accomplish, plus there aren’t any good rewards for it. In due time, everyone forgot that the plagued areas were even supposed to be playable, and the majority gave up on the idea of retaking them.

The Yellow Rabbits was reduced to a small guild of old acquaintances of its founder, the majority of which don’t even play the game that often anymore. That founder’s name is “Willrus Strongblade”, current leader of the Yellow Rabbits. He was the one who commanded to monopolize the plague as a farming resource for his guild, thus he was recorded in history as responsible for the entire event’s disaster.

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