MMORPG: Rise of the Strongest Shadow God

Flynn returned to the desolate village near the dungeon entrance to turn in the last of his outstanding quests. Since they all came from the standard difficulty run, the rewards were nothing to get excited about. He received a couple of green-grade items, each with a single stat bonus, the sort of equipment most players would barely glance at before tossing to a vendor. To Flynn, they were little more than inventory clutter.

Once those were finished, he set off for Moster.

There were still two tasks left on his quest log. The first came after Duke Ceylan’s defeat, a straightforward delivery mission that required him to report the results to the city’s guard captain. Flynn located the man without much trouble, handed over the written report, and received a respectable chunk of experience in return. No equipment, unfortunately, but he hadn’t really expected any.

The second quest belonged to Mia at the Rogue Guild. Considering she had already rewarded him with the Cloak of Swift Winds earlier, Flynn doubted the final turn-in would yield anything particularly valuable.

Still, a completed quest was a completed quest.

With everything else finished, Flynn made his way into the Rogue Guild and headed straight for the lounge.

The guild lounge functioned much like a private tavern, something almost every class guild maintained. It was a place where players of the same profession gathered to exchange advice, discuss strategies, and occasionally form parties with people who actually understood how their class worked.

These lounges also had a reputation for housing powerful NPCs tied to the game’s deeper lore.

The Rogue lounge, however, felt noticeably different from the others.

Where the warrior and mage halls were often filled with noise and activity, this one was nearly silent. A few empty tables sat scattered across the room, and the faint smell of old wood and spilled drink lingered in the air.

Behind the stone counter at the back of the room, the attendant Linda had her head resting on her folded arms, completely asleep.

Flynn walked over and tapped lightly on the counter.

"Miss Linda?"

She stirred slowly, blinking as if the world had personally offended her by continuing to exist. Her eyes drifted up to him, half-lidded with exhaustion.

"Oh... another young adventurer," she muttered. "Fine. What do you want? Wine? Maybe a Bordeaux? Or something stronger, like rum?"

Flynn blinked, slightly caught off guard by the casual offer.

"Uh... I guess I’ll take a glass of wine."

Linda immediately shook her head.

"Sorry. Rogues need to keep a clear mind at all times. Drinking is discouraged inside the guild." She gestured lazily toward a shelf behind her. "You can have juice though."

Flynn stared at her. ’If you don’t even serve wine, why offer it like that?’

He suppressed the urge to point that out and instead waved the offer away. "No thanks. I’m actually here because Mentor Edruson told me to find you."

The reaction was immediate.

Linda’s sleepy demeanor vanished as if someone had flipped a switch. Her eyes sharpened, and she leaned forward across the counter, glaring at Flynn with sudden hostility.

"Edruson?" she repeated, her voice dropping dangerously low. "You mean that old creep sent you?"

Flynn froze.

"I thought that man was still rotting away in the Ceylan Ruins."

’Old creep?’

A quiet alarm bell rang in Flynn’s mind. Linda clearly wasn’t pleased to hear that name, and for a moment he wondered if he had just walked straight into some kind of NPC trap.

Linda muttered something under her breath, then suddenly slapped her own forehead as realization dawned.

"Right. I heard the news this morning," she said with a scowl. "The old pervert somehow crawled out of those ruins alive. A real miracle."

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Don’t tell me you were the one who rescued him."

Flynn shook his head immediately, his expression becoming the picture of innocence.

"Nope. Not me. Definitely not me."

"Hmph."

Linda studied him for a moment, clearly unconvinced.

"If it wasn’t you, then why did he send you to me?" she demanded. "Start talking. What’s your name?"

Flynn sighed inwardly. There was no real point hiding it.

"Night-Stalker," he admitted. "Alright, fine. Mentor Mia asked me to find him, and my party helped get him out of the dungeon."

"I knew it."

Linda leaned back with a long exhale.

"Well, if Mia was involved then I suppose that makes sense. Hard to refuse anything she asks." She shook her head, still looking reluctant, then opened a drawer behind the counter.

To Flynn’s surprise, she pulled out a bottle of deep red wine. A moment later she filled a glass and slid it across the counter toward him.

"Here. Have some wine. The good stuff."

Flynn looked at the glass, then back at her.

"I thought drinking was discouraged."

"It is," Linda replied flatly. "But since you rescued that old creep, you’re technically a guest of honor at the Rogue Guild."

She paused, then frowned slightly as if the wording bothered her.

"Well... guest of honor might be pushing it. You’re one of us, after all. Not exactly a hero yet." She waved the matter off with an impatient flick of her hand. "Whatever. The point is, you helped the guild avoid a lot of embarrassment."

She reached into another drawer and placed a small metal medallion on the counter.

"So as a special exception, you get the wine and this. An Elite Rogue Medallion."

Flynn picked it up, turning it over in his fingers.

"Protocol?"

"Yeah," Linda said, lowering her voice slightly.

"That old creep Edruson has managed to get himself trapped in ruins twenty-seven times since he became a guild elder."

Flynn blinked.

"Twenty-seven?"

"At first the other elders didn’t care," Linda continued bitterly. "But after a while word started spreading. A Rogue Guild Elder getting stuck in dungeons over and over again? It turned into a running joke among the other guilds."

Her expression darkened.

"We were becoming the punchline. So the elders decided to handle the problem quietly. Anyone who rescues him gets this medallion, along with a friendly reminder to keep their mouth shut."

Flynn nodded slowly.

That explained why Mia had given him such a strangely specific quest that no other class seemed to receive. It wasn’t a normal mission at all. It was a private guild matter.

He did wonder about one thing though.

If their party hadn’t included a Rogue, would they still have gotten Edruson’s help during the boss fight? Probably. Without the old man’s intervention, Markel’s shield would have been almost impossible to break.

Still, the whole situation left him curious.

"This Edruson sounds like a walking disaster," Flynn said thoughtfully. "If he causes that much trouble, why keep him as an ’elder?’ Any normal Rogue would’ve been kicked out by now."

Linda gave him a flat look.

"You think it’s that simple?"

She crossed her arms and leaned back against the counter.

"Edruson is a big deal. During the Decadel War he killed more orcs than anyone can count. The man’s a war hero. When he agreed to transfer to Moster, our Guild Master nearly celebrated for a week."

She shrugged.

"So yeah. No matter how much trouble he causes, the guild protects him."

Flynn raised his glass and lightly tapped it against the counter. "You still don’t seem to like him very much."

Linda’s face turned bright red almost instantly.

"Would you like an old bastard who keeps patting your backside and calling you sweetheart?"

Flynn nearly choked on his wine.

’Good lord.’

So Edruson had those kinds of habits.

The image of the supposedly legendary rogue suddenly felt a lot less heroic.

He had heard about the Decadel War before. Amy and Chad had mentioned it several times, and Flynn had also skimmed through the lore pages on the game’s official site.

Thirty years earlier, the various races that had been driven underground had formed a massive alliance to reclaim the surface world. What followed was a brutal conflict that lasted ten full years.

The devastation had been enormous.

Entire regions were destroyed, and the surviving nations struggled to rebuild afterward. One of the first laws many kingdoms enacted after the war was a population recovery mandate. Young couples were expected to have at least three children within five years, or face financial penalties. Families that had more children than that were rewarded instead.

The world had nearly lost a generation.

Many heroes had risen during that war. Most of them never lived to see the peace that followed.

To be called a hero of the Decadel War meant something significant. It meant you had changed the course of battles, perhaps even the course of the war itself.

And yet according to Linda, Edruson was also a clumsy old pervert who kept getting himself trapped in basements.

Flynn found himself wondering if the man used Stealth to sneak into women’s bathhouses.

How someone like that could also be a war hero was... difficult to reconcile. Still, the Rogue Guild had not expelled him, they had even kept him as an Elder.

That alone said a lot.

’Edruson is definitely an interesting character,’ Flynn thought, narrowing his eyes slightly as he recalled their encounter.

The man was clearly powerful. You did not become a war hero by accident. But his performance in the dungeon still felt strange.

How could someone with that reputation get captured by a level fifteen boss like Markel?

Flynn shook his head slowly.

Then again, the item Edruson had used to shatter the Trinity Stone’s shield had shocked even the Prince. Even if the stone was a fake, the shield protecting it had been incredibly durable. Whatever the old rogue had used was definitely high-tier equipment.

’Maybe I should go back to the dungeon and try to find him again,’ Flynn thought.

But another question immediately followed. Now that he had already rescued Edruson once, would the NPC still appear during the next dungeon run?

He didn’t have enough experience with the game to know how those systems worked.

After thinking about it for a moment, Flynn opened his chat window and messaged Amy. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Light’s knowledge, but Amy was simply easier to talk to.

Her reply came quickly.

Dungeons, she explained, were unique instances. Unless an NPC was directly tied to a one-time story quest, the characters players encountered inside were usually just shadows or echoes of their real-world counterparts. They existed to fulfill specific mechanics within the dungeon.

In Edruson’s case, the version inside the Ceylan Ruins was there because the story required it.

Now that Flynn had completed the rescue quest, the Edruson appearing in future runs would simply be a generic NPC with no further story relevance. At most, he would hand out the basic "report back to Moster" quest and nothing more.

Meanwhile, the real Edruson continued to exist somewhere else in the game world, going about his business as his true self.

Amy’s explanation cleared things up.

If Flynn returned to the dungeon now, he would only find a placeholder version of the old rogue.

If he wanted to meet the real Edruson again, he would have to search for him somewhere else in the world.