“Mages, fire!” the commander shouted. “Don’t let those buggers escape!”

Spells began channeling across the battlefield, as frontliners dove to get out of the way. With a deafening clamor, multiple spells flew across the cavern into the backs of retreating kobolds.

The damage was being dealt, but it was just impossible to get all the kobolds. A majority of them managed to duck out of the cavern and into the wilderness outside. The mad scramble was almost reminiscent of a group of shepherd dogs herding sheep.

Within a few minutes, the cavern was clear of life. All kobolds had either fled or were taken down. Commander Isaac walked over the corpses of both kobolds and soldiers, puffing a newly lit cigar.

“Hm….” he said contemplatively. “Status on casualties, Joran?”

Joran was the ranger officer that injured the Kobold King in the fight earlier. As a higher level advanced archer class, rangers had keen senses and were used for scouting and reconnaissance duties. And of course, they were still a formidable source of ranged dps.

The veteran ranger jumped up to a ledge to get a good look around the cavern, counting bodies at lightning speed with [Hawk Eye Vision], which was the second upgraded version of the ability [Eagle Eye Vision], the base ability that archers received at level 30.

After a few minutes of scanning the area with [Hawk Eye Vision], Joran leapt down from the ledge, landing deftly in front of commander Isaac.

“An estimated seventeen soldiers and forty seven kobolds dead, sir.”

The commander nodded, taking in the news without stopping his cigar smoking. “It could be worse.”

Commander Isaac walked over to the Kobold King’s corpse and knelt down, running his hands over the massive body. There was a conspicuous wound in the Kobold King’s chest, made by [Dimension Ripper]. Then he looked at the loot that had dropped, and picked up the jewelry. It didn’t seem like he noticed that I stole two pieces of loot.

“You there, boy! Get over here,” the commander demanded, looking at Books.

Books walked over a bit bewildered. “Here, sir.”

“You’re the soldier that turned into a giant, correct?” the commander inquired.

“Yes sir, it was me,” Books answered somewhat hesitantly. “I used a Potion of Giant.”

Commander Isaac broke into a smile and patted Books on the back. “That’s a good lad. You saved many of our soldiers’ lives, and I understand how expensive a potion like that can be.”

He handed over two gold necklaces. “Here’s a bit of compensation for what you did today. One necklace for today’s fight, and paying one forward for the next time we need your services.”

The commander gestured at the [Heart Ripper] wound on the Kobold King’s body. “Were you responsible for this?”

Ah, shit.

I quickly opened my messaging services and sent a pm to Books.

“Ah, it was–” Books started.

His eyes flashed for a moment as he received the message. “I’m not sure, I think it was me. It was hard to tell in the midst of that fight.”

It seemed the commander was okay with that explanation, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I really did not want the world to know about my [Backstab] level execute ability. Having the element of surprise could save my ass in PvP situations in the future.

“Sir!” an officer shouted from the other end of the cavern. “We’ve found survivors. Although they’re not doing so well… anyway, they’re over here.”

“Let’s see.”

The fourth regiment made their way to the inner part of the cavern, which was getting progressively darker and more damp, lit up only by the animal fat wax lamps hanging from the side of the walls. I ended up finding the rest of my squad and walking with them.

Aeric walked with an exhausted limp, his heavy steel square shield with a dent hoisted on his back. “That was one hell of a fight.”

“Yes it was,” Donovan patted his belly. “A good core workout too.”

“Ugh, can you guys be any less morbid?” asked Rose.

We didn’t have to walk for long before arriving at a dome shaped dead end in the cave. Seeing the horrid state of the dead end space made me gag reflexively.

Several mutilated female soldiers lay on the ground next to the remains of a fire with a spit. The kobolds seemed to have been cooking the soldiers, starting with the females for whatever reason. Maybe the taste was different…

“Oh my god…” Rose exclaimed, covering her eyes.

“What, first time seeing a dead body?” Felix laughed.

“You better shut your mouth before I sear it shut,” Nora replied.

Felix ducked backwards as Nora tried to elbow him. “Whoa, relax there girl.”

I was going to say that it was cannibalism, but to be fair, kobolds were a different species from us. And it wasn’t like humans didn’t eat beef, pork, and poultry with reckless abandon, so I couldn’t really find fault here no matter how gut wrenching it was to see from a human perspective.

In short, the empathetic part of me was crying out in disgust, but the rational part of me just nodded and acknowledged that this was understandable.

There were about twenty soldiers locked inside a large bamboo cage, although they were slumped together, under some sort of sedative. Two of the soldiers lay there dead, having committed suicide.

“Cut them loose!” Isaac barked.

Several warriors walked forward and hacked at the bamboo cage, splitting it into pieces with a few swings of their swords. At the commander’s orders, the sedated soldiers were hoisted up and carried by two soldiers each, with the unconscious soldier’s arms wrapped around their backs.

Unsurprisingly, Donovan was carrying one of the unconscious male soldiers single handedly. And I mean literally single handedly, with the unconscious soldier slung over his right shoulder, supported with just one arm.

Now that our soldiers were rescued, we turned our attention to something else in the distance. At the far end of the room were two treasure chests, which were opened to reveal charred human and animal bones. Sitting below that were some talismans and a fat stack of gold, which was given to the officers to take as custody for the Empire.

We were all distributed a hundred fifty silver bounty from the kobold treasure stash, as a morale booster from the commander.

On our way back to camp, I took a look at my accomplishments and new abilities, as well as the items I lifted. After all, what I just managed to clear was a high penalty zone dungeon boss.

[Achievement: Kobold King Slayer]

[+20 Strength, +20 Vitality, +20 Physical Defense, +20 Magic Resistance, +20 Dexterity]

Holy shit, this was the jackpot! Achievements could increase stats, and by a significant amount too. And I got a fat 20 in all the stats that I had zero growths in. +20 vitality and physical defense was a quarter of the effect of my entire iron platebody set.

In the future, I needed to go achievement hunting. That was the only way to improve my stats without resorting to items. It was of critical importance for me to improve my defensive stats to a stage where I could actually tank a few hits. Because right now, my character felt very much like a speedy chipmunk with a bazooka.

Hell, with enough achievements, my class might even become semi viable and not just a cheesy gimmick that relied on the element of surprise and absurdity to win fights.

Actually, what surprised me the most about this was that I never heard about stat increasing achievements until the notification hit me in the head earlier. At least a few people out of 1.6 billion players must have run into it already, but decided to keep it secret because of the implications. One achievement was decent already, but imagine stacking them one after another? Even a fisherman class would be overpowered with enough achievements!

Onto the next bounty–my level 30 class bonus. Level 30 was a big milestone for many classes, and was usually the first major power up a class got. I received two abilities from hitting level 30, [Theft] and [Pickpocket].

[Theft]

Level 0

???

Description: For a thief, theft is a way of life. But what if you steal more than you can handle?

0.80658% experience to level 1.

[Pickpocket]

Level 1

D-rank thief ability

Description: A combination of sleight of hand and deception is needed to master the art of pickpocketing. Use this skill to pilfer the pockets of the more fortunate, but be careful not to get caught.

Items available to be pickpocketed increases with dexterity and level.

Detection chance decreases with dexterity and level.

0% experience to level 2.

As always, the [Dimension Thief] class couldn’t be straightforward. These were the first two abilities I got that actually scaled with use, but why did [Theft] start at level 0 and [Pickpocket] start at level 1? What was with the question marks on the [Theft] skill description? Well, at least [Pickpocket] was straightforward enough.

Wait, stealing two high value items ended up giving me less than a single percentage point of experience for [Theft]? What in the actual fuck?

…

Oh well. I was pretty curious what the outcome would be if I leveled up [Theft]. Knowing this class, the reward could be amazing like [Heart Ripper] or extremely bad like [Special Cat Food].

Time to check the rest of my loot, which I carefully stored in my inventory.

[Golden Necklace]

A precious necklace made of high purity gold alloy. Can be used as an ingredient for high level alchemy, or worn as jewelry.

Rare

A-rank Alchemy ingredient

Contested.

Stolen.

Two tooltip notifications popped up on the side of my screen, similar to the warning I received for the [Wanted] status. One was for [Contested], and the other was for [Stolen].

You have unlocked the database entry for the Contested item status. You may access this through the main menu.

Contested is a neutral item status. When an epic grade monster is killed, its loot is physically dropped on the ground. Anyone can pick up this loot, but it will be marked as [Contested].

If the holder of a [Contested] item is killed, the item will be physically dropped on the ground.

[Contested] status lasts for a period of time dependent on item rarity and other factors.

Additional factors may be added as Eclipse evolves. We thank you for playing Eclipse Online.

Not going to lie, the fact that the rules were subject to change at any time was a little disconcerting, although I was sure the developers would keep it within reason if they wanted to keep their massive player base happy.

The Eclipse AI though… let’s just say that the AI didn’t have a great track record so far, and clearly demonstrated that it wasn’t interested in upholding conventional rules. A month in and we were already moving from one disaster to another.

I opened up the next tooltip notification.

You have unlocked the database entry for the Stolen item status. You may access this through the main menu.

Stolen is a negative item status. When an item that is marked as property of another entity is stolen by a player, that item is marked with the [Stolen] item status.

If the holder of a [Stolen] item is killed by the owner, the item will be returned to the owner’s inventory with normal status.

If the holder of a [Stolen] item is killed by another party, the item will be physically dropped on the ground, and the [Stolen] status will be refreshed.

[Stolen] status lasts for a period of time dependent on certain factors.

Additional factors may be added as Eclipse evolves. We thank you for playing Eclipse Online.

Certain factors it said… it was even more ambiguous than the last description. Well, time to check the crown.

[Crown of the Forgotten King]

???

A golden crown of human design, from a time long forgotten. Still carries some vestiges of the power it once held.

+30 Intelligence

+30 Wisdom

+30 ???

Passive: ???

Ah, the infamous question marks. As if this game wasn’t hard enough, information was not given easily either. If I had to guess, I needed to take this artifact to an expert capable of identifying it. The question mark locked stat wasn’t accessible until identified either.

Interestingly enough, the crown gave me a stat that was a commonplace basic stat in other games, but not present on the Eclipse status screen as one of the basic stats– Wisdom. The word wisdom was highlighted, so I clicked into the hyperlink, which brought me to a tooltip page.

[Tooltip: Wisdom]

Rare Statistic

Wisdom represents a player’s understanding and mastery of the arcane. Eclipse Online’s magic system has deep complexity and responsiveness, and a high wisdom statistic will allow the player to explore possibilities previously unknown.

A rare stat? While the concept of a rare statistic didn’t make sense up front, the more I thought about it the more it was starting to come together. If I had to guess, there were certain stats in this game that could only be acquired through unorthodox methods such as achievements and items.

This information… forget about selling it, this information had to be protected. From what I had seen on the forums so far, nobody knew about these game mechanics, or at least the few people that did know about these mechanics were keeping it a tightly guarded secret. It was also possible that only the danger zones carried monsters and treasures of this level.

In addition, the fact that the tooltip for wisdom alluded to the fact that players could explore previously unknown possibilities in the magic system was intriguing. So far, my experience with magic was using abilities at their face value, whether it be [Dimension Room] or [Thunderbolt].

But what if there was a way to manipulate the functionality of the magic itself? I was already using the recoil from thunderbolt to great effect, and that was a straightforward application of a side effect. The tooltip was a hint. There were more mysteries to be uncovered within the magic system in Eclipse.

After all, I was an intelligence scaling thief with access to what I could only call dimensional magic. What exactly was the [Dimension Room]? Could I repurpose it for use in another way?

My mind was churning at full throttle, but I needed to refocus my priorities. First, I had to hunt down more achievements, since just a few more stat points in the stats I had F- growths in would make a world of difference. Because right now, a single slip up meant a month long death penalty.

Achievements, treasures, and monsters. What other secrets did this high penalty danger zone hold?

The ground began to shake as we made our way down the narrow rocky corridor of the mountain. From here, we had a view of the valley with the river on the west and a precarious drop into the ocean to the north.

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

Pebbles on the ground shook in place, as the deep guttural sound reverberated across the landscape. There were gasps all around as the entire regiment looked for what made that sound. I looked to the side and swallowed my spit in surprise.

What originally looked like a mountain just began to move, revealing a head and four legs in the shape of what looked like a massive rock tortoise.