Chapter 90 : Stop It, You're Not Even a Maid
Adventurer Guild.
"Captain, look ahead..."
"I'm not blind."
The lead adventurer said irritably, feeling somewhat between crying and laughing.
This unit wasn't the guild's entire main force, but it was still considered the guild's core strength. The duke's increased rewards had led the guild leader to decide to side with the duke's camp in hunting Amaryllis. Although everyone was quite disappointed they couldn't raise Anastasia's affection, the difficulty of obtaining exclusive NPCs was plain for all to see.
They'd heard Amaryllis was near Hurst... so they brought guild members to try their luck around Hurst. This was one of the detached squads.
But what was this supposed to be? [Falling Star Rain]?
"What the hell... is someone grinding monsters? What monsters are here?"
"It's coming at us."
"Are you joking?"
The priest in the team couldn't help but laugh, seriously telling the captain:
"I think I could face-tank this."
Although they didn't know who was using Falling Star Rain, how should they put it... you've made everyone laugh.
The priest really wasn't joking. Never mind him—they could grab any farmer uncle from the street and it would be fine. As long as they were healthy, they'd be bouncing around energetically after a Falling Star Rain shower.
But the captain was genuinely puzzled. Who would use Falling Star Rain at a time like this? Treating them like wild monsters to grind? In PVP ambushes, he'd never seen anyone use Falling Star Rain as an opener... no wait, he'd never seen anyone use Falling Star Rain at all.
The captain didn't arrange for the frontline of his team to absorb damage. From experience, [Falling Star Rain] really had no use against players.
They could completely bathe in Falling Star Rain.
One of the arrows fell on the captain, triggering a damage notification.
[HP-0]
It couldn't even break through armor... The adventurer using Falling Star Rain probably didn't have good equipment either.
The captain was truly baffled. What gave someone of this level the courage to open with Falling Star Rain to the face? Fish Leong? (TN: Malaysian artist who made a song named Courage. “Did Fish Leong give you courage” or something idk. Subtext similar to the audacity of a person.)
But the subsequent changes caught the captain completely off guard.
His vision went black—he couldn't see.
The black before his eyes wasn't black, and what you call white was what kind of white.
The captain checked briefly. Fortunately, the VR headset wasn't broken—he'd just gone blind.
"Huh?"
No, wait, this was—
[Blind: You lose 100% vision]
The debuff notification popped up, and only then did the captain realize it was blindness.
Blindness was quite a common negative status in the game. Anyone who played enough would encounter it. The reason the captain didn't react immediately had many causes, but the most crucial was that his vision had actually gone completely black.
Blind skills determined how much vision was lost based on level. Common blindness just darkened the surroundings a bit—the impact wasn't particularly significant.
100% vision loss from blindness???
The pop-up information wouldn't lie, and moreover, the captain really was completely blind right now.
What the hell! The magnitude was too abnormal. But compared to the incomprehensible level of blindness, who exactly had applied this kind of effect to Falling Star Rain...
[Weakness: Your movement speed and attack speed are reduced by 40%]
[Chaos: When you use directional skills, direction is randomized (6 times)]
[Last Rites: When you cast skills, 100% chance to randomly use a different skill (3 times)]
...
Suddenly, negative statuses popped up one after another. The captain had an epiphany—so Falling Star Rain had more than one negative status. With over thirty debuffs appearing on him at once, there was probably an experienced witch on site...
Bullshit! Falling Star Rain couldn't possibly apply this many debuffs!
Players weren't idiots. If a witch—though the game had no clear class divisions, this was what players habitually called those skilled at applying negative statuses to enemies—could combine with Falling Star Rain so powerfully, then Falling Star Rain definitely couldn't be magic of minimal value.
Applying beneficial statuses to others was quite easy, but debuff stacking had rather strict requirements. Negative statuses usually couldn't be directly given to enemies but had to be successfully added through making the enemy take hits and similar methods.
More commonly, weapons like swords and spears were enchanted, becoming "my dagger is coated with deadly poison..." type weapons that could apply negative statuses when hitting enemies. It had nothing to do with whether damage was dealt—as long as they hit, the debuff would apply. The effect was certainly powerful but difficult to combine with intangible skills like magic cast by mages. In other words, witches couldn't apply blindness to fireball spells.
Magic that added debuffs to arrows wasn't impossible, but magical skills like Falling Star Rain couldn't have each arrow pre-enchanted.
The problem was that the Falling Star Rain they'd encountered actually carried poison-like negative effects, and it looked like... every arrow had them?
The captain really wanted to tell himself not to talk nonsense while awake, but the thirty-plus negative statuses on his body couldn't lie to him.
Unless—
Someone had enchanted all the arrows before Falling Star Rain was launched and fell.
Was that realistic?
Players mocked that Falling Star Rain's damage was no different from raindrops, and its release form—whether density or quantity—was extremely similar to real rain.
To enchant all the arrows of such a scale of Falling Star Rain...
The captain would rather believe the game had a bug, but since he could be chosen as the leader of this small squad, it meant he had exceptional qualities. Although caught off guard by an impossible situation, the captain was also the fastest in the team to react to what should be done.
"Priest in the team! Use [Purify]! Cast several skills to remove Last Rites!"
"Oh—"
"Captain! Not good! The priest was killed instantly!"
"What?!"
"There's an assassin!"
Damn! Blindness would affect the use of detection skills... but with so many people, no one had discovered the assassin? Even with debuffs, the formation shouldn't have scattered.
The priest... was clearly in the middle of the team...!