Chapter 12: Chapter 11

(Rank 47) [Name: Maxim Heaviside] [Race: Human] [Grade: Steel] [Level: 77] [Kills: 161]

Forty seventh.

After four years of non-stop dedicated effort, four times that of in-game time passing, and this was the result: forty seventh. He had finally achieved his dream and gained a place in the Top 100, but all he felt was apathy and depression. His new rank was meaningless.

During Max's second year at university studying mechanical engineering, when he realised he'd missed a weeks' worth of classes without noticing and that eXalta had taken over his life, that he more than enjoyed playing (he dreamt about the game most nights) and that he was actually good at it, combined with the amount of money he was beginning to make ... he had decided to drop out of university much to his family's consternation and focused on nothing else except playing eXalta professionally.

Max hadn't expected climbing the rankings to be easy, he had been realistic about that from the start. It was the most popular game in the world with almost two hundred million people logging in each week, double that each month. The best of the best from all across the globe fought for fame and glory and bragging rights. Behind them a vast swarm of the most popular streamers, influencers, wannabes, and skilled amateurs scrabbling for power and ever higher rankings. The contest for the upper echelons was fierce, and there was so much money involved in the game's real-world economy, it was becoming an increasingly serious business. There were now training camps people could pay to join and learn directly from experienced players. So no, Max hadn't expected the climb to be easy. However what he hadn't expected was for it to be so damn hard!

Every fight, even the most seemingly inconsequential or easy, could result in death. Even walking through an innocuous empty field could mean stepping on an unseen, sleeping, venomous snake; a single bite and no anti-venom meant no death rolls, no respawns, no resurrection, just permadeath. A single random or tiny mistake and years of playtime and loot could be completely lost. You had to take this game seriously at all times and never, ever, lose concentration. Raids and expeditions took patience, intensive planning, and party members you could trust with your life.

One of the first advertising slogans for the game had been "Welcome to the World of eXalta where there is just one truth you need to remember: in this game you only get the one life." You would have thought that would have put most people off but it turned out to be quite the opposite. The old Souls-like games had been incredibly popular for a reason, being known as difficult or challenging could be a huge selling-point as long as the gameplay and rewards for success were worth it. eXalta had taken that to its logical extreme.

To be fair that didn't apply to a large portion of the current playerbase. These days not every player of eXalta left the starter zone or became adventurers. Many were quite happy to remain in the Lands of the Mists and simply live. It was as large as a major country on Earth, and full of diverse biomes and stunning vistas. There were countless areas to explore, and wonders to see, with little to no risk for the more casual player. It was also a huge revenue earner for Artifact. The accelerated time experienced inside eXalta had extra benefits. You could enter a pod at night and wake up the next morning fully rested - somehow sleep inside eXalta had the same beneficial effects as outside the game, another technological marvel created by the AIs - whilst also experiencing a full days worth of awake time inside the game. It was the perfect way to attend night classes, take a short day-break, learn a hobby, read that book series you could never find the time for. Businesses were beginning to use it to fit more meetings into a busy work day. All for a small fee paid to Artifact of course.

Even with so many casuals Max was still competing against tens of millions of other players on a daily basis. The areas of civilisation inside the starter realm populated by the six main races were expansive but with that many adventurers, places to gain experience were often limited and contested. If you excluded Sanctuaries nowhere in eXalta was instanced. Every dungeon, every ruin, every secret were on a first found, first cleared basis. Only very rarely would such sites regenerate, so it was a complete waste of time and effort for large guilds or powerful players to spawn camp such locations to farm loot and experience. It was a set of game mechanics intended to encourage exploration, especially into the vast uninhabited wilderness. There were classes, even entire guilds, dedicated to finding undiscovered dungeons or ruins, and then selling on the information to larger guilds, rich players, or the open market. It could be a lucrative career path.

So for players like Max who wanted to catch up with those already at the top, to gain the strength needed to farm the best areas, they could never stop, they had to take risks, had to explore far and wide into the unknown, and had to get into the right guild, but by the Gods was levelling and gaining rank slow! Sure taking risks would help but this was eXalta, stupid and pointless risk just got you killed. You had to still, somehow, also be oh so careful. It was a frustrating balancing act but one Max could grudgingly accept. The AIs had made this game as realistic as possible (if you could apply such a word as real to such a fantastical setting) and if you wanted to earn something useful you had to work hard for it. But despite all of Max's intense grinding, close calls, intelligent play, and over a decade of in-game time he had only recently managed to scrape into the Top 10,000 with a peak position of 9983. Tell that to most players and they would say that was amazing, it was in the top 0.1% of the playerbase. However, to Max and his professional aspiration to reach the Top 100, to be seen as an equal to those world famous players, to prove to himself and his family that dropping out of university had been the right decision, a rank of ten thousand may as well have been a million.

Without false modesty Max knew he was a skilled player with a smart build, excellent items, powerful skills and was in one of the game's Top 50 guilds. The problem was so were all the other players at his ranking. You couldn't remain in the Top 10,000 by being lucky, you certainly couldn't make it to Top 1000. Your luck had to fail only once and your character would perma. Max hadn't underestimated the difficulty of the game, he's wiped several times before quitting university and going pro, he understood the challenges, but he had underestimated the competence of the other top players. It was as if he was competing against better and more talented versions of himself.

His youthful arrogance had been left battered and bruised when he saw those above him in action. Even at his rank there were clear gaps in the strength and skills of the best players, obvious differences between those in the 9000's and those in the 8000's. Maybe not apparent to the majority of players but for those with a deeper understanding of the game it was glaring. The gulf was far wider than the numbers would suggest. Max discovered through hard earned experience and wary observation that roughly every thousand increments in ranking above him there were distinct tiers of skill and ability, each a new mountain to be scaled. He had begun to admit to himself this was maybe his limit, he could climb no further. Those in the Top 1000 were as out of reach to him as the horizon, the Top 100 as distant as the stars.

That had all changed because of the Nodel Cataclysm and with the rankings update he was still currently transfixed by.

(Rank 47) [Name: Maxim Heaviside] [Race: Human] [Grade: Steel] [Level: 77] [Kills: 161]

Max breaking into the Top 10,000 had occurred last year when he had eventually reached level 76 after months of tough struggle, following on from hitting level 75, the peak of Iron grade. At level 76 he had finally increased in grade to Steel, the highest any player had obtained so far. No one had ever reached Copper but those in the Top 10 had been close. Now they were all dead.

When he first saw his new rank, for a split-second he had never been happier, but then it quickly dawned on him; he had only obtained this rank because almost all of those above him had wiped. It wasn't through his own tenacity, or skill, or smarts, but because he'd left Nodel earlier that evening to watch a native dancing girl he had a crush on. The achievement felt empty, hollow. He didn't deserve to be in the Top 100, he was barely deserving of a place in the Top 10,000.

(Rank 1) [Name: Anomic] [Race: unknown] [Grade: unknown] [Level: unknown] [Kills: 3,158,780]

Max knew this player Anomic didn't feel that way. Their new rank was no accident. That kill count could only mean one thing, they were the individual who had destroyed Nodel and killed three million players and natives in an instant. If that didn't immediately elevate you to the top of the rankings nothing would. Max didn't know if he should thank them or curse them for the sudden jump in his own standings.

Max did not know why they hadn't appeared on the rankings immediately after the incident, that was kind of strange. The rankings weren't updated in realtime but it had been a few days since then, more than enough time. The fact their status mostly showed as unknown was also bizarre. He had no idea how they had managed that. However the appearance of the metallic gold background on their ranking was a fascinating curiosity. Max had only read about those and had never seen one in the flesh, or the pixels as it were. It meant they were a legacy. One of the first thousand people to sign up to play eXalta, there had also been silver and copper badges for the next 10,000 and 100,000 players respectively. The fact they still had the gold background also meant they were that player's original character, they had never been killed. Both stunningly unlikely feats. The rate of fatality amongst those first adventurers had been close to 100%. Anomimc may have survived until now but whomever they were, they now had the biggest target on their back the game had ever seen. Max would soon learn he was even more right about that than he knew.

---

A pop-up appeared on Max's monitor along with an audible alert. He was being invited into an unplanned conference by his guild. He put on his slimline VR glasses and gloves, then clicked accept. It wasn't the photo-realism of eXalta but the software managed a passable enough representation of the character avatars that joined.

The room he entered was a large wooden hall with a series of long, oak tables and a large fire pit at its centre, presently unlit. The tables were currently empty but were the kind that were built to hold large steins of beer, and lots of them. Maybe a Viking axe or two embedded into the table tops as well. There was an elevated platform at the front of the hall where the guild officers usually sat. They all seemed to be present for this meeting. He waved to his best friend Lars sitting up there when he noticed Max. The hall began to quickly fill with guild members and they all ended up standing by the tables, Max included. There were at least a hundred people present when the meeting eventually started. The guild certainly wasn't one of the largest but each of its players were very highly ranked, or maybe it was now more accurate to say they had been.

Ellen, guildmaster of The Seekers of the Broken Crown, usually abbreviated to just The Seekers, stood up from her high back chair. Without her saying a word the room fell silent. As far as Max knew Ellen was the oldest person in the guild yet she had only celebrated her thirtieth birthday this year and if Max was being honest she didn't even look that. The majority of the guild were around Max's age, in their early to mid twenties. The Seekers were a relatively young guild and full of those with a passion for the game, it was their entire lives. Ellen was wearing gleaming silvery-white plate armour, it's metal as thin and light as only magical armour could be. Her head remained uncovered, without the usual helmet, so the guild members could see her face - her actual face, not that of her last character. The armour was covered with gold filigree and Ellen cut a rather striking figure as she stood rigidly in front of the guild, her pale armour contrasting starkly with her warm mocha skin.

"Thank you everyone for joining this unscheduled meeting at such short notice. I'm especially pleased to see we even have enough people present for a quorum. Excellent. It's almost as if none of you have anything better to do. As usual this meeting will be recorded for the archives and for those not in attendance. Let's start.

"I attended the emergency Council conference and some side meetings afterwards and this is the latest information I have. I'm sure you all already know or have guessed from watching the videos of the Cataclysm, but just to make it absolutely clear in case any of you were holding on to some kind of hope, inside eXalta the guild no longer exists. We have lost everything, there is precisely nothing left to recover."

Max could hear low mutters and swearing at the statement. It had been expected but even for the experienced players scattered around the room, even though they had all taken hard losses before, it was still difficult not to react.

"We aren't alone in this. The few thousand other guilds who had their HQ's in and around the city's royal quarter have suffered the same fate. The only guild players left alive are those who were not in the centre of Nodel at the time of the explosion, the only gear they have left is what they were carrying on them. In our case the only member of the guild that wasn't affected was Max."

"I'm sorry everyone," Max said with real regret, "I don't have the words. All I can say is that it fucking blows."

There were several bleak laughs and some consoling words telling him not to worry.

"I died in my sleep, woefully alone," said Lars to the crowd with evident over-acting and fake grief, earning him more laughs.

Lars liked to be the centre of attention but not in an aggressive or antagonistic manner. He simply enjoyed being sociable. In all the time Max had known him Lars had only used the same character - that was true for most of the people in the guild, there was a reason The Seekers were so highly ranked - and Lars claimed it was a close match to his true appearance. Very short light blonde hair with shaved sides, pale blue eyes and a thick bushy beard. He was playing to the strengths of his Danish ancestry and wouldn't have looked out of place on a longboat of old as it crashed through the surging waves.

Ellen coughed sharply before carrying on. "There wouldn't have ever been a good time but the timing was extra freaking unlucky for our guild. We had been buying gear and supplies for all our members for our deepest ever planned run into the wilderness, and we had invested a not insignificant amount of our cash reserves, all of which will now see no return. The guild heart and everything we had stored inside is now lost, meaningless ones and zeros on some AI run server-farm.

"We have always been a guild that has favoured quality of our members over quantity so I'd like to think each of you have earned your fair share over the years and have the savings to cope with a full wipe. But if any of you are going to find yourself in financial difficulty because of these shocking events, especially newer members who might not be as well prepared, then let me know and we'll review your situation on a case by case basis. Even if we've taken a major hit to our bank account, and it might be a struggle, we will still try to support those in need. It's part of the reason our guild exists. To keep things official I'll take a vote. All those in favour of allowing guild funds to offer financial assistance, despite recent events, when and if needed."

A forest of hands sprang up around the chamber.

"Any objections?"

There were none.

Max had never met any of the people in the guild in person outside of the game but he had spent more time with, and was closer to some of them, than most of his childhood friends, even some of his relatives. Max certainly wasn't going to object if they needed the help. He knew that only those who were the most serious about eXalta had made it to Nodel and could call it home. For almost all of those players that had died, eXalta was their living. It paid for their food and bills, their rents and mortgages, the roof over their family's head, for some their children's education. In effect nearly two million people had been made jobless overnight by the Cataclysm and it would be months, possibly years, before they would be back to their previous level of income, if they returned to the game that is.

"Thank you everyone, I'm proud of you all."

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"If you haven't checked the rankings since today's update I suggest you do so now. The culprit of the Cataclysm has been revealed. They go by the name of Anomic. If anyone has any information about them, no matter how seemingly small or inconsequential, then pass it on to me and I'll forward it all onto the Council and Association. Anything you learn in-game do the same, though that means in the short-term that only applies to you Max."

Max gave her a small nod to show he understood.

After that the meeting turned into a discussion about plans for when everyone got back into the game. Who were going to form party groups to level, or if they'd go solo. Were they going for the same classes and builds, or if they wanted to try for something else, or if they would go for a more random approach and select based upon what challenges and loot the game put in their way. Ellen asked for options about the best city to place the new guildhouse in but it soon became clear that Feymarr was the clear preference by nearly everyone. Compared to Nodel it was smaller, poorer, and less grand, but only when compared to pre-Cataclysm Nodel. It was still a major city of the realm, in a good location for access to the rest of affluent Jospur and its neighbours, and close to the wilderness. The only negative was that it would take some time for people to gain enough levels to be able to reach it so the new guildhouse and the support it offered wouldn't be immediately available. None of the talk was relevant to Max so he sat back in his chair and chilled for a while.

When the discussion started to wind down Ellen called an end to the meeting. "Good luck everyone and stay frosty." 

People started to logout but Ellen asked Max to stay behind for a few extra minutes. She and the other officers took seats along one of the long tables and Max joined them. When it was just them left Ellen asked him, "Where's Maxim at the moment? Anything to be concerned about?"

"He's fine. I left him in a Sanctuary near the border with Edresh, the area for my quest is about a week away in-game, and that was the closest one I've previously tagged."

"That's some relief. I was hoping you were maybe still around Nodel so you could take a look around and tell us what's left and what's happening there but it's not that urgent if I'm honest. At least one of us made it."

"I know it's a very personal question and I'm embarrassed to ask, but are you all really going to be okay? I can't help but feel some guilt about being the only one who survived, and can still farm and enter the wilds."

"Get over yourself you sentimental idiot," said Lars. "All of us were higher ranked than you and for longer. We farmed enough loot for a basic level of retirement long ago. So unless one of us has a secret gambling addiction they'd like to admit to?" He looked around at the other officers who were all giving him condescending looks. "Thought so. So yeah, we're all good. Now to more important questions, how are you doing for gear?"

"Pretty good actually, it could have been much, much worse. Luckily I'd taken most of my gear out of the guild and put it in my personal storage ring because I'd left to go on my hunt quest." That was all true though he didn't admit the embarrassing part where he'd left early so he could take a detour to watch a certain dancer. "Nothing I've lost is critical or can't easily be replaced, not that I'll need to. I've still got all my matched class gear."

"Nice. Luck was yours that day. I still can't believe you managed to find a dimensional storage. Those things are rarer than hen's teeth. I'd kill my mother to get something like it for my new character."

Max knew what he meant. It was the single most valuable item he owned. He'd obtained it by clearing the hardest but most amazing dungeon he'd ever found. He could store a full set of gear, a few weapons, and some smaller items inside the [Rare] magic ring he'd gained as a reward for completing a hidden challenge. But the most overpowered benefit was the two extra active slots it provided. That perk alone made it a godsend. There were only a few hundred such items in the game that he was aware of and when one came up for sale at an Auction House they sold for fortunes.

Ellen gave him an amused look. "So then Max. You're now without a guild. Going to leave us scrubs and join someone else now that we are all lowly peons?"

"Don't even joke about that, you're my friends and I wouldn't be where I am without the guild's assistance. But urgh, damn, until you said that I hadn't even thought about the fact I'm now a full-time solo. Even when you guys reregister the guild will be starting with nothing, and none of you will be able to join me on any party quests or runs. That sucks. I mean, I could maybe help you all level faster."

"Don't even think of offering, we'd just refuse. That would be a colossal waste of your time, you'd be missing out on your own levelling and loot, and the money you deserve. Being self-sacrificing is all well and good but pragmatically speaking it would be a terrible idea for the long term strength and ranking of the guild. Just don't die," she said with a wide smile.

"You also seem to be forgetting we're all fucking amazing players," said Lars with a huge, boastful grin, slapping Max on the back. "We'll be back at the top in no time at all."

Max had to laugh along with the others at Lars' brazen, but not unfounded, confidence.

"Congrats on the new ranking by the way," his friend said.

"Yeah, thanks," Max replied, no longer amused, his earlier feelings resurfacing.

"Huh. You actually sound disappointed?"

"Kinda. The rank is nice and all that, but it's not like I've suddenly become a legitimate Top 100 gamer. I haven't jumped almost 10,000 places in the rankings by suddenly becoming a better player. I'm still the same guy I was yesterday."

"No shit," piped up Alicia. "Once I can sign back into the game this weekend, even as a level one, I bet I can still kick yer flat ass."

Alicia was a bit of a firecracker and the first word that always came to mind to describe her personality was spunky. Lars, if he was looking to get punched, called the diminutive brunette a short-stack to her face. Max, not completely sure what that meant, had done a web-search. Yeah, it was true, but there was no way on Earth he'd ever tell that to her. Her feisty and cavalier attitude was however just a facade played for fun, mostly. She had last been rated just outside the Top 100 at rank #103 and was an exceptionally gifted and experienced player with a sharp insight into the game's magic systems. Her statement may have been in jest but he couldn't let such an insult stand.

With a playful smirk on his face he said, "Strong words. Bring it noob."

"Oof. Right where it hurts and while I'm still reeling from my fall from grace. He's only been in the Top 100 for a few days and already he's become arrogant and a bully. How easily power corrupts the weak of mind."

Lars turned to Ellen. "I'd like to start a vote to remove undesirables with inflated egos from our guild. We shouldn't be a home to those that pick on our members, especially those of the fairer persuasion."

"I agree," said Max quickly. "All those in favour of booting out Lars say aye."

All the guild officers including Alicia immediately said "Aye!"

"The motion passes," said Ellen with a perfectly straight face.

"God dammit! I hate you all."

The jovial bantering continued for several more minutes before Ellen brought it back to more serious topics.

"It's not public knowledge yet outside of the top guilds, not until the announcement is made in a few days so keep this to yourselves; the Council and Association are offering a bounty for the culprit, and now they have a name, Anomic. It currently stands at twenty five million dollars for proof of character death, double that if captured alive. The top brass have questions for them, serious questions."

"You're shitting me," exclaimed Lars. "Fifty million bucks for a 'wanted: dead or alive' on a game character? That's insane when you think about it."

"Those up top are worried, petrified even, that this Anomic can do it again. They want them deleted from the game as soon as possible and by any means necessary. If it's true then this griefer could potentially turn the entire realm into a barren wasteland and effectively make the game unplayable for everyone. To prevent that ever happening, on balance, fifty million is peanuts."

There was only stunned silence in response to her words as people pictured such a scorched-earth scenario. If Max could no longer play eXalta he had no idea what he would do with his life. He imagined the others were having similar thoughts.

Anomic had to be stopped.

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