Eztli stretched his virtual muscles and looked around. Unsurprisingly thanks to the photos posted in the forum there was a small group of people waiting around the north gate near Eztli when he logged in. When a player logged in it was accompanied by a flash of white light, so of course all eyes in the area found him instantly. It wasn’t hard to tell from the photos roughly where the Raid started from so there was a group of players waiting. The first thing he did was accept the guild invite from Leo, then with a smile he waved to all the players waiting for him, and raised his voice.

“Guys, not going to run this one today, I’ll be running another one a bit later, min level for that one is 60. If you want to run this one go up to the guard” He pointed to an npc guardsman “and say ‘Hello soldier, I heard your captain was looking for help with something unexpected.’ The guardsman will go into the house and bring out a short fat man. That’s the quest procedure. Anyone need anything else?”

A couple players rushed up to him. “Can I get a picture with you?” Was the first thing out of anyone’s mouth.

Eztli replied, “Sure, anyone who wants a picture come around, sorry I can’t do any solo pictures but a group photo is fine, I got to keep up with Leo, right now I’m 25 levels behind so I got to catch up.”

Most of the group circled around him for a good scene capture, then with a practiced wave of his new bone wand he transformed into a hawk and took wing, ignoring the calls for items and other random propositions. Overall, he felt he did a good job getting out of there without upsetting anyone, mindful of the advice Leo left him.

The first thing he needed to do was find a panther or python to add to his animal form transformation. When he reached level 100, he was going to leave the Aztec playing area, he figured between the new dungeon he was going to run and the power level grinding spot he’ll run when he hits level 85, he’ll only be in and around Tenochtitlan for another 2 or 4 days max. He flew south over the city, rising high into the sky.

There was something so addicting to flying with wings. He could understand why people became pilots back before most of them were replaced with computers. The more he did it the more instinctive it became, he found he was adjusting to the slightest change in wind flow without even thinking about it. He didn’t know if this was a system correct which occurred more when the player got out of the way and let it work or just how the brain adjusted to this body shape. It really was hard to tell where one ended and the other started. Still the more he flew the less he had to think about what he was doing and just did it. The old flying system wasn’t anywhere near as fun. It was basically a mini-game which you used a controller for.

His hawk vision was truly too good for words, he could see the smallest detail on the ground even flying hundreds of meters in the sky. He redirecting himself toward any body of water he saw, and avoiding human habitations, as pythons and panthers wouldn’t be found near those. Just as he was about to give up, he spotted a curious pursuit occurring on the ground. 3 players were fleeing from 6 players. Two men and a woman, with 4 women and 2 men chasing. Of course, sex was interchangeable in Underworld character creation, so they could all be men for all he knew. The 6 players were all red named meaning they had player killed sometime in the past 24 hours.

He slowed down and watched the interesting show from 1000 feet in the sky, following the chase. He had done the same several times in the past two days, only to move on. He wasn’t a champion of justice or anything, he was sort of curious about the players involved so he paid close attention to both parties. What he saw surprised him. Two of the three being chased were people he ran the PUG with yesterday. Sexy_Librarian and FISH_LOVER. Both were in the pictures that Duuca posted in that forum post. Curious he lowered his altitude a bit to see if he could overhear any conversation.

The first thing he heard shouted from the pursuers was “… silver or better item for your life!”

The three running were half dead, and the six pursuing were only slightly injured. He couldn’t tell what everyone’s level was, but it looked like the six chasing were all template players based on some of the items they were carrying. Mark wanted to help out the 2 he played with, they ran that dungeon a min of 4 times with him yesterday, he contemplated the situation and decided he could probably pull it off after examining the layout of the land, he flapped his wings and soared higher, heading further along the path the 3 were fleeing, then landed on a thick tree branch on a forested hillock.

He removed the hawk transformation and sent a whisper straight to FISH_LOVER. “See that small forest area to your front, right? Head here, I’ll help you guys out of this one. Just lead them straight into the heart of the small forest and use the trees as cover. Get ready to attack them after getting in cover, what’s the build of your 3rd guy, I don’t know him?”

FISH_LOVERs surprised voice came back over the wisper “Eztli? Our third guy is melee DPS, we lost our tanker and healer, and a couple DPS already to them. Only managed to take down their tanker and a melee DPS. They got a couple of healers that really turned the fight against us, and our healer died almost immediately to their ambush.”

“Which one is their toughest fighter, or leader?”

“The ranged dps shaman, H8KILLZU that one has some sick AOE attacks that we just couldn’t stand up to, he’s the one shouting to drop some items in exchange to be let go.”

'Cute name' Eztli thought to himself before continuing his instructions to FISH_LOVER, “I’ll tag their healer “Ocho_Libre” with my debuff, let the others know to leave him be.

“Don’t we want to kill their healer first?”

“They got two and the debuff effects the quality of heals too. He’s a shaman healer which means he’s not very good at single target healing, and his AOE heals will be weak with a wide range on the amount of HP healed with the heal effect, meaning he'll be doing next to nothing thanks to the curse. You’ll see, this will really mess with them. The priest healer needs to go though, it would be best if everyone focused on him first.”

A party invite popped up from FISH_LOVER, Eztli had no reason to reject it. Once the party was attacked every member was justified to kill in PVP. This just saved Eztli some trouble in avoiding the red name.

Once he was pulled into the party he noticed two of the dead members of the party were people he ran the PUG with the prior day, the healer Golden_Flower and the poster of that forum post Duuca. He didn’t know the other two dead players, SpikeyBoi, and Mushashi_XXX, “Hey guys, looks like you ran into a bit of trouble leveling today. What was your goal?”

“Golden_Flower got a quest for Swamp Python fangs. We must have got followed heading out of the city.” – Sexy_Librarian

“Swamp Python? Lucky day. I need a python myself. Do you guys know where to find them?” -Eztli

“Yeah, the quest marker pointed to a map location, about 20km from where we were ambushed.” -Golden_Flower

“We were going to see if Python were a good thing to grind levels on” -FISH_LOVER

“Well, lets go get your python after clearing up this rabble, FISH_LOVER fill you in?” – Eztli

There was general agreement.

“Well you dead guys, just head to where you were going in the first place, we’ll meet you down there. Don’t worry we won’t be long behind you.” -Eztli

Eztli could now see the group climbing the hill with the PK’er chasing them and shouting at them. He raised his wand above his head, he was careful about making too much motion, for fear of being spotted. And cast blood field and blood casting. Then cast “Bad Luck is Contagious” on the healer Ocho_Libre as the 3 being chased ducked behind some huge trees, and the opposition party entered the forest. Unlike NPCs, players would definitely notice the debuff, it should show up as a red debuff icon, though the specifics of the curse shouldn’t be displayed, just the name.

It was their mean looking melee DPS who noticed the status effect and seemed confused, drawing to a stop, their whole group bunched up nicely and Eztli said over the party chat “NOW!”

Sexy_Librarian and Fish_Lover both fired off an AOE on the clustered group, while Eztli cast Blood Puppet on their leader H8KILLZU. Eztli almost laughed when he saw one of the skills on H8KILLZU’s skill tree, it was the very definition of an overpowered situational (but usually worthless) skill, called “Spirit explosion”, it was an untargeted PBAOE which took half the casters FULL HEALTH in exchange for x5 the damage and 1/3 of his MP. Basically, it was a worthless nuke; there were nukes on many skill trees, some were better than others, this one was a classic template character build nuke, usually useless. The chaos was impressive when H8KILLZU cast his non-targetted PBAOE nuke “spirit explosion” wiping half his own party and obliterating half his life with the dangerous skill. He was crying his innocence as his hands moved against his will and cast spirit explosion a second time, killing himself and taking out the rest of the party.

The party was stunned after watching the PK party self-destruct and that turned into confusion when they got the XP from the deaths. Eztli dropped out of the tree and spoke to them over normal chat. “You guys keep what they dropped, you’re the guys who got hurt the most by this.”

“What was that skill?” Sexy_Librarian asked curiously.

“Blood puppet.” Eztli responded, then shared the information about the skill to the party. “It’s usually not that useful in real PVP, it’s easy to resist in PVP to say nothing for passive immunities on items or skills, it’s much better against mobs, only Boss or Field Boss level mobs get a player’s chance to save against it if they’re not outright immune. H8KILLZU was almost 20 levels lower than me, and this game is less than a week old, the chance he’d have an immunity to this type of control is almost nonexistent, combined with the level split he had no way to resist it. The PBAOE nuke he had unlocked though, that was a bonus, did not expect it to go that easy. Sort of curious how he got enough Spirit Magic Affinity to unlock a nuke. I still haven’t unlocked my nuke.”

FISH_LOVER spoke up, “Found your answer. He dropped a gold rated earing, it’s got a +100 affinity for spirit magic and +20 wisdom on it.”

FISH_LOVER tossed the earing at Eztli, He caught it out of the air and examined it. It was exactly as FISH_LOVER described, a seriously good accessory dropped from H8KILLZU. Eztli moved to hand the earing back to FISH_LOVER, FISH_LOVER shook his head and a trade pompt popped up in Eztli’s view, the earing was in the box and he already had hit accept, meaning he was giving it to Eztli.

“You sure?”

FISH_LOVER nodded, “We’d be dead if you didn’t show up, you should keep it.”

Eztli shrugged and accepted, then promptly put the earing on, it wasn’t really a help for Eztli today, other then the added wisdom, but when he opened up some spirit magic trees in the next few weeks it would really be a huge boon to him.

“Well? What are we waiting for? Time to hunt some Python.” Eztli smiled, this earing plus maybe a python? This was already a productive choice to help this crew out.