It was hard to find words to describe the true scale of what was happening in front of our eyes. What the entire regiment thought was a mountain turned out to be a living being so large that it reminded me of the Titan from Greek mythology called Atlas, who carried the entire world on his shoulders.

“Nora sister, I’m scared~”

Rose hugged Nora’s back like a scared child clinging onto her mommy, and even the otherwise steadfast Aeric looked shaken.

“Mother of god,” Books exclaimed. “Look at the size of that thing!”

Nora scoffed. “You don’t get to be surprised, mister I-can-turn-into-an-ogre.”

The world shaping tortoise with an entire mountain on its back shifted in place, and let out another roar.

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

In the front, Barak was having a discussion with the commander about what they were witnessing.

“What do you reckon is that sound they’re making?” I asked.

“Maybe it’s a territorial display,” Books suggested.

Felix squinted his eyes. “Mating call.”

Nora nearly dropped her staff at that suggestion. “That’s gross! Although, maybe…”

Even Meat Shield, who was perched on Donovan’s broad shoulders much to his happiness, stopped grooming herself for a moment to snicker at that remark.

“Wait a second. Do you think we’re standing on top of a tortoise right now?”

Donovan thought about it. “It’s possible but not likely. Remember that we walked over a contiguous land mass to get here. This tortoise makes an island.”

I shook my head. “Ancient creatures could have lived so long that the ground terraformed seamlessly onto their shell. It’s very possible that what we think is contiguous land might not be so under the surface.”

“Fair point,” Books added. “Honestly, who the hell knows. We’ve run into so many surprises on this expedition so far that anything is possible.”

Solar, who was quiet until now, flinched in surprise. “Huh?”

A notification popped up on all of our screens.

“Did all of you get that notification?” Rose asked.

I nodded in unison with the others.

[Region Event: Adamantortoise of the Jaggeds]

One of the secrets of the mountainous Jaggeds is the true nature of the terrain below. The Colossal Adamantortoise has recently woken from a century long slumber, and is now calling out. Little is known about this colossal entity. Is it a god?

The description of the region event felt like a hint towards something hidden. But if I were to hazard a guess, this kind of undertaking wasn’t meant for a newly minted level 35 thief who got his ass kicked by a treant.

Another notification popped up.

Achievement: First to discover Colossal Adamantortoise

You have leveled up

You have leveled up

You have leveled up

It seemed like this achievement only gave experience. Although it was a bit disingenuous to use the word only when it gave a truck load of it, enough for three level ups. Rewards just seemed to be dumped in your face in Jagged Dorsa.

“What’s this? An achievement?” Rose exclaimed. “Wow~”

Judging by the reactions of the others in the regiment, this was the first achievement they all received. Everyone, that is, with the sole exception of Books, who just pmed me that he also received the [Kobold King Slayer] achievement with the stat bonus.

Before I could finish my thought, yet another notification appeared.

[Quest: Deal with the Adamantortoise]

S-rank quest.

Find a way to deal with the Adamantortoise.

Difficulty: Impossible

Time limit: None

Clamor immediately began among the regiment.

“Are you kidding me right now?” said Felix incredulously.

“An S-rank quest,” Donovan continued. “Intriguing.”

This was the first time any of them had seen an S-rank quest.

“Find a way to deal with the Adamantortoise,” Rose read slowly. “Do they mean they want us to attack it?”

Nora shrugged. “I’m not sure attacking that thing is a good idea. It’s way too big to be hurt by conventional weapons, and you saw the description earlier. It might even be a god, so killing it probably isn’t the right choice anyway.”

“Yes,” Donovan replied. “It does say the difficulty of this quest is set at impossible difficulty.”

“Hey,” Solar began. “Are you guys streaming this?”

“Ah, that’s right, I turned off my stream earlier to concentrate on the fight, but this is viewer gold,” Nora replied. She tapped her finger in the air in front of her, turning on her stream.

I was in a bit of a dilemma about streaming. On the one hand, the revenue was nice, and I had a substantial debt to pay off in real life. On the other hand, if another fight broke out while streaming I’d have to fumble to turn it off or risk revealing my abilities, and I had a sneaking suspicion that leaking that kind of information would be costly in the future.

In the end, I think it was in my best interest to live stream sparingly, and use the record function instead to create a video like the > that [Rick] submitted. Or, maybe play around with Death Tube when PvP situations come up. Actually, even Death Tube wasn’t ideal because I would be revealing the existence of [Heart Ripper] and other abilities.

Streaming just didn’t make too much revenue unless you were a big time streamer with a substantial amount of concurrent viewers.

I decided not to stream for now, until I figured things out a bit more. Yes, there was high value streaming material here with the appearance of an S-rank quest and a region event, but–

THUD.

A giant boulder landed on several members of our regiment, crushing them instantly. I looked up. More boulders were heading down.

“Shit! Take cover!” Commander Isaac roared.

“It’s the dwarves! They’re on the cliff above us!!” Joran yelled. As an advanced archer class, his vision was sharper than any of ours.

I looked up again and did notice the faint shape of the bearded bombardiers, pushing down boulders with the help of some sort of complex wooden contraption.

THUD.

Another boulder landed on three soldiers that couldn’t get out of the way in time, leaving a large crater in the middle of the downward sloping path. The dwarves were actively trying to kill us while we were clustered walking through a narrow choke point. As a former starcraft player, the devil inside my head nodded in approval at the strategic use of terrain to deal maximum damage.

Now was not the time to be impressed by the dwarves’ tactical genius, though. The rockbed underneath our feet was beginning to crumble, as cracks appeared on the ground near me. The diameter of the narrow mountain pass was only a few meters long, and if the pass collapsed we would be sent plummeting into the ocean below. At this height, I’d probably hit the ocean with terminal velocity.

I dove forward as the rock underneath my feet began to come apart. Behind me where the passage already collapsed, more than a dozen soldiers screamed as they fell to their deaths into the shoreline below.

“Fuck!” I yelled in frustration. I wasn’t fast enough, and I felt myself begin to fall right before I could reach the ledge. I was about to fall to my death.

“Dimension Ripper!”

Thanks to my quick thinking, my hand planted itself into the ledge, forming an indentation on the side of the cliff that perfectly matched the shape of my left hand’s fingers and palm. I cancelled the magic right after the indentation was formed.

Mana: 302/607

The level ups I got were coming in clutch, giving me just enough of a mana pool to pull off a stunt like this. Plus, I was a thief class. High dexterity was one of my biggest assets, although strength wasn’t, and my arm was getting number by the second.

The top of the ledge was just a few feet above me. I couldn’t hang on here forever, and all I needed was just needed a quick helping hand to be hoisted up. But by the sound of the other soldiers, they were too busy running from the dwarven boulder onslaught to help me.

My hand was beginning to shake from exertion, as my mind began to race. There was something about the adrenaline of a life and death situation that unlocked the full potential of my brain’s processing power.

After a brief moment, an idea came to mind. A crazy idea, but it was worth a shot.

“Summon cat!”

“Nya?”

Meat Shield appeared in mid air and floated there for a moment before gravity registered and she began to fall.

Yeah, this might actually work.

“Summon cat!”

I summoned her again two feet above where she was just a moment ago. Again, she appeared in mid air and seemed to float because gravitational acceleration had not kicked in yet. As I suspected, the dimension room seemed to neutralize and reset any force upon any object, or cat, that entered it. I grabbed Meat Shield’s fuzzy head with my right hand and pushed down, giving me some upwards momentum.

“Summon cat!”

“Nya?????”

“Summon cat!”

This time, I summoned her about a foot above my left leg. I used her as a foothold and kicked off upwards, getting just enough momentum to grab the ledge above.

Both my hands now clung onto the ledge, and I pushed myself up onto solid ground. The moment my feet stood on solid ground, I started running for my life down the sloping pass. The majority of the regiment was in the distance, and I saw Rose and Donovan alive within the crowd.

We lost at least forty soldiers in that boulder attack, more than in the entire kobold battle. Danger zones were no joke, from bog dwellers to disguised tree monsters that could instantly kill you, to random dwarf induced rock avalanches. I needed to be even more vigilant in the future if I wanted to continue to survive.

I did manage to invent a new technique though. It was similar to Haerin’s unique ability [Double Jump], except my new invention was more along the lines of [Double Jump on Cat].

From a quick backwards glance, I saw that the dwarves were out of range now for boulders, but they were still observing us. Was that a dwarf piloting a giant mechanical crossbow? And behind that, a trebuchet?

Ah, shit. Here we go again.

With a resounding blasting launch sound, a giant ballistic arrow flew down from the top of the mountain. This scene looked vaguely familiar, but it took me a moment to recall where I was getting this sense of deja vu from. It was during the Defense of Mountain, when the monster coalition used a giant similar ballistic device to assault the city’s archers on the fortress walls.

Maybe there was a connection between the dwarves and the monster coalition. Or, it was possible that the orcs just managed to misappropriate a dwarven siege device. Either way, thinking about it wasn’t going to stop this rain of absolute hell.

Thankfully, the dwarves weren’t interested in one lone straggler far behind the rest of the regiment. They were aiming the trebuchet and the ballista at the bulk of our regiment. This worked out in my favor.

A boulder flew across the blue skies and landed to the right of the retreating fourth regiment. We had been in the kobold cave for so long that it was already noon the next day, and the crisp early morning air was uncomfortably cold hitting my face, as I ran as fast as I could.

More instruments of hell fire rained down from the mountaintop onto the regiment. A ballistic arrow pierced a warrior’s back.

----------------------

“Ha! Another one bites the dust.”

Shouts and jeers erupted from the sports viewing center that was Eclipse headquarters. Since actual sports were cancelled due to the pandemic, Eclipse Online was the new source of high intensity entertainment.

Viewers were watching the events unfolding at Jagged Dorsa from the first person perspectives of several streamers, including the popular sorceress streamer [Nora], whose glamorous body and feisty attitude won over many fans of both genders, as male fans were drawn by her beauty and female fans loved the sorceress’ one two knockout punch combination of beauty and attitude. But nothing, not even Nora’s stream, could beat the panoramic view that the Eclipse team had on their holographic monitors of the entire fight unfolding in three dimensions.

“Hahahaha, look at those dwarf bastards go. Sons of bitches are real tough, huh?”

“Yeah, I hope they kill off a few more.”

“By the way, we need to make a new betting odds table for the other regiments that just arrived.”

“Nah, just stick them in with the one we made for the fourth regiment. Same odds.”

“You really think so? Won’t the other regiments have higher survival rates since they have more members currently?”

“Hahahah, you’re underestimating Jagged Dorsa.”

------------------

Around twenty more soldiers were killed by the long range bombardment before we finally got out of range of the dwarves’ siege weapons, and a few of the players in our regiment were actually forcibly logged out because they didn’t bank enough hours.

This game was absolutely brutal, and if you exceeded the time restrictions, you were considered killed, so they would face the month long death penalty. Fortunately, I foresaw this problem and had a sizable time bank stored for emergency purposes.

A lot of things that would be taken for granted in other games could definitely not be taken for granted in Eclipse Online. In fact, there were still many players stuck at under level 20 due to the extreme difficulty of the game, hugging city walls because of the active disaster level event and more or less unable to do much besides earn experience from basic requests. For the particularly risk averse, Eclipse Online was like Animal Crossing as long as you never left safety boundaries.

I finally caught up to the rest of the regiment, heaving and panting since I just ran a marathon.

“It’s Spoon!” Aeric said excitedly. “We thought you didn’t make it.”

I looked around. Solar, Books, and Rose were missing. “Where are the other three?”

Donovan pointed to the front. “Books is up ahead with Rose patching up the wounded. Solar died during the initial boulder attack.”

For some reason, Solar’s death hit my anxiety hard, because although I didn’t know her for too long, she was part of our squad and so the loss felt more personal compared to other soldiers that I didn’t know particularly well dying.

“I guess we’ll see her in a month, then…”

“If she doesn’t just quit, you know,” Felix added. “A month is a lot of time in Eclipse. Sure we gained a lot of levels and earned a decent amount of gold in the last few days, but a month of progress definitely isn’t worth it. Maybe if she survived for another week she would’ve broken even.”

As we conversed, the sight of base camp grew closer. Smoke was coming from campfires, and there were soldiers walking around what looked like an expanded campground that was now significantly larger.

“Is that–”

“Yeah, it’s the first, second, and fifth regiments. Check KB broadcasting, Eunjin and the fifth regiment just arrived this morning, and the other two arrived half a day earlier,” Donovan replied.