Chapter 34: The Main Quest Line and a Sense of Mission

The whole dungeon was full of wounded men — it felt like these players had just come down off some brutal battlefield. And in point of fact, the players really had just been through a vicious battle.

They'd been standing around the Spider Nest entrance gawking at the suddenly-appearing kobolds — and then the pack of kobolds charged straight at them. The players, meeting kobolds for the first time, discovered they absolutely could not win, and immediately whipped around and ran for it.

One player was cradling his own leg — a leg that looked like it had been torn clean off by hand; another player's whole arm was twisted at a bizarre angle, like something blunt had smashed into his shoulder; one player lay on the ground unable to move, chest caved in, coughing up blood without stop; and some were already dead, being dragged along the ground by the legs, hauled by their equally battered buddies.

The scene before them was beyond grim — and yet, amid the thick reek of blood, the entire Eternal Kingdom dungeon was bathed in a relaxed, festive atmosphere.

"Who pulled that BOSS? Or did the system spawn it?"

"Looks like Arthur pulled it. I saw him soloing a spider, and then a whole pack of kobolds came pouring out of the nest."

"Who knew the aggro range was THAT huge. We were standing way off and they still charged us."

"I'm dying — forget aggro range, you couldn't even shed the aggro. Those kobolds are still hanging around the dungeon entrance right now!"

"Kobold BOSS, meanwhile: 'one hammer swing, one kid.'"

"Our whole approach was wrong anyway — we fought like a mess. When the kobold pack showed up, nobody touched the adds. You ALL dove on the big kobold, and half our deaths were the little mobs' work."

"Everybody was chasing drops, obviously."

"I wasn't on the BOSS — I was on the adds, and barely anyone helped me. I kept calling out and nobody paid me any mind."

"Excuse me? I helped you! I was covering you with my short bow. Burned through every arrow I had — I don't have a single one left!"

"Son of a — how many of OUR guys did that full volley of yours kill? You tell me. If your aim sucks, maybe go practice before you pick up a short bow?"

"Shortbow players are about to get blacklisted, I swear. That thing kills friendlies."

"Seven hours LFG and nobody's taking you, huh? HAHAHA!"

"HAHAHAHA! I can't — I'm gonna die — I'm literally dying over here. I was already critically wounded and you guys just keep CRACKING ME UP, and every laugh opens the floodgates, HAHAHA... Damn it! I'm dead!"

And with that, the guy keeled over sideways into his own puddle of blood, breath gone for good.

Moros stood on his training grounds, taking in a scene that could fairly be called horrific, and felt his soul shaken to its core yet again. Sure, in his younger days he'd been a legendary gladiator; he'd served other lords; he'd fought dragons, brawled with sea monsters, stared down priests; he'd even watched xX_ShadowBlade_Xx grin in the face of life and death. But THIS? Dozens of people dead or maimed, and the rest still laughing and chatting away?

He knew they could be revived by His Lordship. But ONE xX_ShadowBlade_Xx who didn't fear death or pain — that he could understand and accept. Look, though, at all those goblins visibly standing on death's doorstep, still chatting. Look at the goblin who had straight-up laughed himself to death. This was no longer a question of bravery.

Moros's long-cooled warrior's heart lit up all over again, and deep down he caught himself fantasizing about one day standing beside these goblins, every bit as fearless.

While Moros was off fantasizing, a wave of magic pulsed out of the dungeon's core hall — and then the towering demon lord, His Lordship Sharlock, came walking out of it.

NovelPhoenix's website carries the author's chapter, while the text shown here was copied without their permission.

The moment the core Bru had notified him, Sharlock had rushed straight back to the Eternal Kingdom — and on the way, he'd already gotten the broad strokes from Bru and hammered out a solution with him in record time.

Step one: clear out the kobolds crowding around outside the dungeon.

How? Just stand there.

The kobolds loitering at the dungeon entrance had bolted the moment Sharlock appeared. The lower the creature, the more instinctively it feared its betters — Sharlock didn't even need to release his dominating aura before they were already beating their retreat.

Seeing the kobolds withdraw, the players all got antsy:

"Shit! The BOSS got away!"

"Did we lose the aggro?"

"Damn, I was counting on them camping the dungeon entrance — soon as I could respawn, we'd corpse-run them down and beat them to death. Now that they've gone back to the nest, it's gonna be a way tougher fight."

"Damn, why are you thinking exactly what I was thinking? Why didn't you say so earlier?"

"Well, you didn't say anything either."

Sharlock paid the players' chatter no mind. He walked over and healed and revived them one by one; as for the corpses outside, the other players hauled those back. Players whose corpses couldn't be found would stay unrevived for a long stretch and would end up choosing to reroll a character to come back — their combat skills would carry over, naturally. Those were techniques they'd learned themselves, things carved into the soul; so long as the body could express that power, no problem there.

Setting those trivialities aside, Sharlock had to hurry up and deal with the emergency in front of him.

Once Sharlock finished handling the players' minutiae, he temporarily closed the dungeon's road to the Spider Nest, then had Bru publish a new server-wide quest:

With the quest published, the players had something to do again in no time — grinding coin, chatting, training — and nobody wondered why the whole dungeon had suddenly been sealed up.

Once he'd soothed the players' restlessness, Sharlock left the dungeon alone, cloaked his presence with magic, and crept along in the direction the kobolds had retreated. Before long he spotted the retreating kobolds at the Spider Nest entrance.

They were clustered around a huge kobold in gleaming armor wielding a giant iron hammer — clearly that burly kobold was their chief.

These kobolds had obviously come out of the Spider Nest. Some kobold tribes used spider nests as their own den sites, living in peaceful symbiosis with the spiders, protecting one another.

As for why these kobolds had shown up camped at the Spider Nest entrance — Sharlock ran a quick analysis. Most likely, the players had been slaughtering a few too many subterranean spiders lately. Or there was some other reason, but that had nothing to do with Sharlock. Right now he had to deal with this pack of kobolds — how could he allow yet another kobold tribe like this one to run wild inside his servants' playground?

But just as Sharlock was about to strike and sweep these kobolds away, Bru's voice sounded in his head:

"Lord Sharlock, a suggestion: make this kobold the BOSS! Those players from another world have been grinding spiders for days on end now. Along comes a whole kobold tribe, and the leader LOOKS plenty strong — let the players challenge him as a BOSS, shake things up a little. Wouldn't that be nice!"

Bru suggested as much at this point:

"And while we're at it, we could roll out the main quest line. By 'main quest line,' I mean: we need to give these otherworld players a sense of mission in this world. Something along the lines of saving the world."

"Hold on. Wasn't their mission settled on day one? To see through my construction of the greatest dungeon ever built; to serve the greatest Demon Lord in all history; to dedicate their whole lives, laboring unto death? And as servants of a Demon Lord — what does saving the world have to do with them?"

Sharlock shot back, frowning.

"That's all true, but we have to dress it up nicely, put a little polish on it. Life is hard enough as it is — we ought to give them a sliver of hope, make them feel like chosen ones, one-of-a-kind, with extraordinary and irreplaceable value to their existence in this world. As for the mission itself, I suggest something a bit more positive. On that point, the agreement Your Lordship signed when summoning those players spelled it out very clearly." So saying, Bru laid out in Sharlock's mind the summoning agreements that had been signed back then.

The Dungeon: The Eternal Kingdom Virtual Network Agency Contract Terms, the Season 1 MMO Approval Confirmation, the Disclaimer, and the rest — all of it materialized one by one inside Sharlock's head, with the clauses about the game's theme having to be positive and uplifting, guiding young people toward healthy growth, neatly flagged for easy reference.

Then Bru went on, in a tone dripping with sympathy: "Setting those clauses aside — Your Lordship would surely also like these otherworld players to stay loyal to you forever, no? Then just roll out a main quest line that lets them achieve self-actualization. Very fitting for their otherworld culture. 'Saving the world' might be a touch grand, though — so let's start with saving the dungeon. Once they have a mission and a goal, they'll grind coin all the harder. Trust me on this, Lord Sharlock."

Sharlock thought Bru had a point. Given his current conditions, if he lost this batch of otherworld players, developing the dungeon would probably mean dusting off those century plans he'd drawn up earlier.

If it was just about sculpting these kobolds into a BOSS image and using that to launch a main quest line — letting the players have more fun and put more elbow grease into their labor — Sharlock had zero objections. It cost him nothing, and the perks were plentiful.

The more the players died, the harder they'd grind, and the longer they'd stay "online" — that, Sharlock could only welcome.

But launching a main storyline would take a well-crafted, reasonably airtight script. Luckily, on the copywriting front, Bru could handle it based on the other world's cultural quirks, which saved Sharlock loads of work. That left one final question:

"Bru — what do you think I ought to name this big lug of a kobold BOSS?"