*SMACK! * *CRUNCH! * *RIP! * *SCHLICK-SPLAT! * *CRACK! * *SPLAT! * *SMACK! * * WHACK! * *CRACK! * *SMACK! * *CRUNCH! *

I was hiding under the sheets of the massive makeshift bed as the sounds of abuse and cruelty echoed throughout the room.

*CRUNCH! * *CRUNCH! * *SMACK! * *CRACK! * *CRUNCH! * *SPLAT! * *SMACK! *

What could be heard over all the gruesome noises was a mix of the mad cackling of a certain white-furred Rattan woman and the screams of seven Dwarven Rogues.

*CRUNCH! * *SMACK! * *WHACK! * *CRACK! * *SPLAT! * *WHACK! * * CRUNCH! * *SMACK! * *CRACK! * *SMACK! * *SPLAT! * *WHACK! *

How long had this gone on for? Should I even check the time to know for sure? Why couldn’t she just kill them already?

*WHACK! * ….. *WHACK! * ………. *WHACK! * ……………….

I slowly poked my head out from under the covers as the savage beating drew to a close. The room was dyed wall to wall in copious amounts of blood and shards of bone and gore lay strewn about the place like the remains of dozens of piñatas. The seven Rogues looked perfectly fine, aside from being huddled up in fetal positions and silently weeping as the tattered remains of their attire clung to their healed bodies. Chuu gave one of the Dwarves a good kick to the crotch before walking over to the bed and sitting down.

Out of sheer curiosity I decided to check the In-Game clock to see just how long Chuu had been beating the Dwarves for.

Time when the beatings started; roughly 2:00 PM.

Time when the beatings stopped; exactly 7:49 PM.

“…”

She had been beating them for at least five and a half hours…

Chuu was panting heavily due to exhaustion, rage, or likely a mix of both. As a Spell-caster she likely wasn’t used to physical exertion, but the fact that she had the stamina to not only paint the room red with the gore of the Dwarves for several hours, but also had the mana pool to heal them back from every bit of damage they sustained was astounding. Chuu’s pure white fur had been soaked in blood and her clothes were caked in gore and bile. The stench of urine and excrement was heavy, alongside the iron-scented odor of the over one hundred gallons of blood that the Dwarves had lost.

Thankfully, most of the fluids were draining out of the room through various openings, but the odor was still overpowering for me since I wasn’t wearing my mask and/ or clothes. I secretly tried to reequip my outfit that had been removed by the Five-Clawed Paw, and found it was still technically equipped, just disabled. This feature seemed like the infamous “Beach Party” event that took place back in the game’s first year of service, where everyone’s clothes were disabled from view and were replaced with the visuals of swimwear.

The fact that this affected everyone and there was no opt-out during the initial run of the event led several Muslim players to leave the game temporarily, while some other players left for the duration of the event since some Player Characters looked hideously misshapen. The developers and players quickly learned that when you give people nearly unlimited customization options for their characters and then put them in swimsuits you often get things straight out of H. P. Lovecraft’s dreams….

I quickly reenabled my clothing and it went from being a bundle that had been tossed to the side to actually being on me. The small magical traces from this were picked up by Chuu, who wheeled around as my clothes rematerialized on me. My face paled as I beheld the blood-soaked fur of her face and the gore-stained black studded leather that made up her ‘cowl’. Her eyes had gone from calm and collected to immediately engulfed in emerald flame as her horns shone with ominous green light.

I raised my hands up to show I was fine, and her look quickly shifted from what it was to shock and then a bit of fear. She reached out her hand to my face before pausing and pulling it back. She now had a look of concern and apprehension as her eyes darted between my face, the sheets and her own gore-stained body and clothes.

“Not like this…”

She managed to whisper a few words before rising to her feet and summoning her staff which had been embedded within one of the Dwarves. The grotesque sounds of the staff being ripped from the Dwarf’s flesh were quickly replaced with potentially even worse sounds as bone, organs and muscles regrew and stitched themselves back together. Her magic brushed the seven Dwarven suicide bombers to the side as the other four Council Members hesitantly entered with the naked, beaten and bruised body of another Dwarf. They looked around the gore-soaked room before their eyes landed upon the broken Dwarves who were silently crying in the corner. They immediately put two and two together and after throwing the naked Dwarf at Chuu’s feet they moved over to the seven mentally crippled ones.

Chuu cleared her throat and gestured towards me, and the other four immediately understood what Chuu was implying. Chuu let her staff hover nearby as she and the other four gathered together and whispered among each other for a few minutes. While they were preoccupied, the naked Dwarf managed to get to his feet and pick up a broken dagger that had been sent fling when Chuu struck one of the Rogues. As both the Five-Clawed Paw and I were focused on trying to hear what was being whispered about, we were unaware of the actions of the naked Dwarf until it was too late.

“FOR THE KING!”

With a suicidally loud battle cry, the Dwarf lunged towards me and shoved his shattered dagger into my throat. The five Raid Bosses turned around in shock and horror as my body slumped into the bed and the dwarf continued to stab me repeatedly. The shock of what I was experiencing was so intense I locked up and couldn’t process what was going on. All I could feel and see were the impacts of the broken dagger slamming into me again and again until the Dwarf was ripped from my helpless body.

As I lay in shock at what had just transpired, I hesitantly felt over my body and looked down on myself. I glanced up into the bottom left hand corner of my sight towards my health bar and as the terror I had just experienced wore off the sound of flesh being ripped, and bones being shattered began to fill my ears. I got up and looked at the dagger that had fallen from my would-be assassin’s hands and withdrew a mirror from my Item Box so I could get a better look at my utter lack of wounds.

My HP was only diminished by a few points, like each and every one of the blows had only done one damage. If this was indeed the case, then even if he had stabbed me for several days straight then he would have no chance at killing me, as due to having reached max level and wearing my current equipment I had an amount of Hit Points numbering well over 150 Million. Couple this with my equipment giving me passive regeneration and high resistance to status effects like ‘Bleed’ and even if the Dwarf had stabbed me without pause for a whole year, I would still be perfectly fine.

As the savagery committed by the five Raid Bosses continued, I realized that I was, for some odd reason, no longer concerned for my fellow member of The Races. I tried to rationalize my lack of concern for both the one being torn to shreds and the ones over to the side. After all, they DID try to kill me, and while I was almost certainly sure that PKing didn’t exist here, only murder.

I walked over behind Rippa as she repeatedly stabbed and twisted her barbed knife into the Dwarf’s flesh and gently tapped her shoulder, only to be met with a hiss as her tail swatted what she assumed to be another of her race away. Each one of them that I tried the same with ended in the same result, so I wandered over to the seven psychologically scarred Dwarven Rogues that were still huddled in a corner and checked their stats.

Average level; 23

Average HP; 3,800

Etc.

“…”

Fuck….

These guys were weak! They were newbie fodder for sure! What kind of starting area did these guys wander out of, and did they Really think they could take on the End Game Raid Boss of the 4th expansion? At the end of the expansion, Chuu had a level of over 550!

Turning back to the five females who were still tearing the idiot Dwarf to pieces repeatedly, I checked out the stats of the one who should have been roughly 1000 levels beneath my own, mostly due to subsequent expansions where the level cap increased by 100 with each. The level cap at the end of the 4th expansion was 500, so her level shouldn’t be that high…

Snikty Cut-sew’s level and HP were…

Level; ??? (This means the level is at least 50 levels higher than the Player’s Level)

HP; ~3.875 Billion

“…”

She was so far beyond me that is didn’t make any sense! Her level was supposed to be 500! This was so broken that it wasn’t even funny! What the actual fuck had happened since the game became reality?

I walked over to the bed, sat down and absentmindedly watched the five female Raid Bosses repeatedly gut my would-be assassin. This was something I was surprisingly ok with, and it was seriously unnerving how perfectly fine I was with watching this guy get his entrails torn from his body over and over. My eyes wandered around and I eventually looked over toward the clock that ticked away in the top left corner of my HUD.

“Any day now… Any day…”