Chapter 55: The First Cry
The steel-gray canyon walls of the northern wilderness boundary acted as a natural amphitheater for the wet, rhythmic slicing sounds of dynamic combat.
Naktamim kicked his heels into the limestone gravel, shifting his center of gravity to execute a textbook low-tier vanguard rotation. He didn't have an elite corporate guild sponsor. His arsenic-bronze khopesh was an ancient, porous piece of garbage that should have shattered three days ago, but right now, its curved edge was gleaming with a pristine, deep mahogany-red crystalline sheen.
Best three coppers I’ve ever spent in this game, Naktamim thought, a wide, euphoric grin cutting through the thick exhaustion on his face.
For the last 24 hours, he had been camping the narrow boundary paths right on the edge of the high-density zones. Before he bought the insert from the soot-faced scrapper's black-market pipeline, he was entirely locked out of the local economy, frozen by Merlion Holdings' twelve-hour foundry repair queues and extortionate silver rates. Now? He was clearing Level 28 horned vipers in three frictionless strokes. The molecularly sharp glass edge completely sliced through their chitinous scales.
A low, gentle rustle sounded from a patch of wild clover near a parched wadi bed twenty metres away.
Naktamim spun around. His vanguard targeting reticle snapped instantly onto a small, docile creature. It was a Level 12 Desert Gazelle—a completely harmless, non-aggressive beast that spawned simply to fill out the wilderness scenery. It didn't possess an "aggro table," meaning it lacked the hostile code that programmed standard monsters to attack players on sight. It was completely defenceless. It simply dipped its head, nibbling at a patch of dry, parched mountain brush.
"Easy experience," Naktamim muttered under his breath. He drove his boots into the dirt to close the distance.
The gazelle didn't run. Its lifelike eyes simply tracked his approach with quiet curiosity as Naktamim raised the heavy, red-toothed khopesh above his shoulder. He swung the blade downward in a high-velocity, maximum-stamina vertical chop.
Sliiiice.
The deep-red obsidian blade tore through the creature's soft throat with frictionless velocity. The gazelle's structural health bar didn't tick down slowly; the sheer laceration dropped its vitality straight to zero.
The animal collapsed into the white dirt, its limbs twitching as the breath of life left it.
But as the fountain of fresh, hot, innocent blood erupted from the wound, spraying directly across the smooth, light-absorbent mahogany glass face of the weapon, the system's kinetic calculation engine locked.
Under the intense friction heat of the heavy swinging strike, combined with the sudden chemical contact of the fresh innocent blood, the hidden, un-cleansed organic lipids trapped deep inside the glass matrix reached an absolute flashpoint. The microscopic protein pockets left behind by the ancient massacre layer began a sudden, violent thermal expansion.
The glass didn't shatter outward. It began to crack from within, tiny, hair-line white fissures webbed across the crimson stone face like ice under a heavy boot.
SHIIIIIIIIKK!
A bizarre, high-pitched, metallic screeching note tore out of the weapon housing, echoing through the narrow rock canyons. It wasn't a standard game audio file. It was an ear-splitting, vibrating multi-voiced frequency that rattled directly through Naktamim’s haptic audio filters.
Naktamim stumbled backward, dropping the khopesh onto the gravel as he clutched his ears. "What the... is this a bug?"
The weapon lay in the dirt, the mahogany red core vibrating so violently it kicked up small clouds of white limestone dust. The high-pitched sound didn't fade; it began to multiply, layering onto itself until it sounded like a chorus of low, agonising screams rising directly from the hilt.
Naktamim turned his head toward the ridge. His face went completely white behind his visor. From the dark, un-mapped caverns of the boundary cliffs, the first shadows of a hyper-aggressive monster wave broke over the canyon crest.