Athenadite anxiously watched the sky to the north, as if she could see her foes approaching. Around her, the village was quiet, the setting sun casting eerie shadows between the irregular buildings. The whole place was a ramshackle mess of poorly-cut wood and quarry cast-offs, held in place by far too much mortar and far too few nails. All told, there couldn’t be more than two hundred NPCs in the village, but its location on the inland sea, low zone level, and proximity to two borders made it a prime candidate for development. Flavor-wise, the main reason it wasn’t better developed was that most of the NPCs were of mixed blood.

“Dite, are all the NPCs out of aggro range?” Guild leader JohnTheLong was in charge of coordination for the operation.

“Yeah, Rumpus’s team got ‘em all moved out on the docks, despite their whinging. That should be outside of aggro and AoE range for anything Daimonus can bring. These NPCs are ridiculous - one of ‘em even tried to fight, yelling about a baby. A fuckin’ level two villager! No baby showed up on [Scan], probably a bug.” Athenadite wondered, not for the first time, whether she should buy a name-change token. “Dite” is all most PCs called her, and she wasn’t fond of the nickname. Needs must in combat, though, and the five syllables of her full username were too many. Still, would “Athena” be so much harder?

“All right, this should be an easy raid. Low threat zone, max fifty attackers, level capped, and Daimonus doesn’t know we’re here. Thanks for that Reeven, by the way.”

“No problem, boss. That linked espionage counter-quest was perfect for me. Even got two levels in stealth out of it.” Reeven was their top rogue-archetype player, and had advanced into a rare class that focused less on combat, and more on being a spy. At least, that’s what he’d lead everyone to believe. Athenadite personally suspected that he was holding his cards close to his chest. Spy-class players were always in high demand, so they were difficult to trust without sufficient history.

“Alright folks, the timer just hit thirty minutes. Everyone clear on your assigned roles? Team leads, status.” John was charismatic enough, which Athena figured was important when coordinating nearly one hundred players that barely knew one another. Their guild was formed around a core of real life friends, but they’d quickly realized that more members were needed to participate in… well, pretty much anything. They’d recruited players that had impressed them, or that they clicked with, and were slowly growing into a cohesive unit. Hopefully, gaining control of this town would bring everything together.

“We can expect fifty at-level players and, if they follow the current meta, they’ll start with a charmed horde of local mobs. Local mobs won’t be an issue for us, and it’s too far from a contested zone to bring anything beefier safely. Keeping the NPCs safe denies their primary victory condition, which leaves the orb.” John had researched metas exhaustively before committing the entire guild, their reputation points, and resources to the defense quest. Attacks outside of the “skirmish” zones were high-risk, high-reward - without defending PCs, victory was practically guaranteed.

“Don’t forget, once the control orb goes active, we need to defend it for an hour. Once the building opens, the guild leader, which is me, has to stay in the building for fifteen minutes. Standard king-of-the-hill mechanics. So that means, we can’t let anyone else near the building, and I have to stay alive. Got it?” John didn’t mention that any player could take the orb - it was better not to tempt the randos watching. Besides, it would take a guild working together to actually make anything out of this dilapidated dump of a hamlet.

Athena wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to take the route Daimonus did - torch the opposing faction’s villages, accumulate war merits, and purchase the rights to a piece of land of your choice. Sure, accumulating merits would take longer, but being able to choose your home base rather than depending on the whims of the overseer AI was looking pretty nice right about now. She crinkled her nose at the smell of fish and manure on the wind. A wind that, were it a bit stronger, seemed likely to just knock over half the buildings in sight. Even the merchant row, a standard quality-of-life feature of every town or village, seemed somehow… worse than anywhere else she’d been. They probably couldn’t even repair gear at her ilevel.

The dryad wildcaller shrugged. If the village wasn’t good enough now, she supposed they’d just have to build it up. With the forest and the sea so near, it was just a matter of getting NPCs to immigrate. Once they could get a bit of economy going, it would be cheap and easy to purchase non-human slaves from a human-supremacist country or vice-versa. Transportation would be the biggest cost, and being located on the sea would help out there.

With the timer ticking down, Athena focused on preparing her buffs and establishing her domain. Roots spread from her feet into the soft dirt of the mayor’s garden, and a ring of fast-blooming flowers spread out from her, as innocuous as they were deadly. The [Field of Flowers] ability allowed her to maintain awareness over a large area while channeled, with a side of control in the form of grasping roots she could bring up to aid allies and hinder foes.

“Two minutes! Set the firewalls!” JohnTheLong gave orders, and teams followed. The team in charge of maintaining the border set fire to the fields at the edge of the village, and the outer ring of wooden houses. They left three paths through the flames, to funnel the mindless vanguard of the enemy into a set of killzones.

Right after the outer edge of the village lit up in an orange glow, the howls of Daimonus’s vanguard peaked, and the first of the loping, four-legged wolf-analogues came into view. Silver and red fur, head reaching a human’s waist, and a mouth full of spiky teeth placed these beasts firmly in the wolf behavior pattern. What would have been a terrifying horde of wolves to a village of fishermen and farmers was more akin to a flock of lambs to the slaughter to Athena and her guildmates.

Dozens of the densely-muscled bestial killers crowded into each of the three cleared lanes. What should have been a terrifying mass of sharp claws, writhing fur, and slavering maws instead turned into a charnel house as the casters fired AoEs into their midst. It took less than twenty minutes for most of the monsters to be reduced to unidentifiable giblets and splatters of flesh, and the stragglers were quickly cut down by the melee classes that held them in place.

“Alright folks, wounded pull back, healers get them topped off. The enemy players could attack at any time. Stay with your teams and pull into defensive positions. Stay alert! Forty minutes left!” The players were chuffed about their easy victory, but JohnTheLong kept them focused.

“Rearguard, make sure to keep [Scan] on rotation around the Control Orb. I don’t want anyone or anything slipping by.” [Scan] was a situationally-useful ability that provided a list of entity levels within a radius around the user. For a small group it was a vital warning system, but the casting time, limited range, and lack of detail made it rather niche.

When two minutes were left on the countdown, everyone was on edge. Over half an hour of staying alert and ready to fight was more than they were used to, and it left their nerves frayed and brows sweaty. In the real world these were normal people, after all, not trained soldiers. The enemy commander capitalized on this and, right before the hour was up the inferior-sized, but well-rested, invading force attacked.