POV Random Tom:
The sun slowly rose from behind the horizon, painting the sky in orange and red tones. Smoke was rising from chimneys. Tom, a young tall and muscular man wearing above-average colourful clothes fitting his stance as a merchant’s son, walked down a wide street.
“Aaaaah!” A loud female shriek shattered the quietness of the morning.
Hearing it, Tom immediately changed his direction, running in the direction of the shriek. He kept running, sweat pouring down his body, dampening his clothes, his breath turning ragged.
However, he didn’t stop running, his libido-fueled determination making him move faster than usual, ‘If there is a girl in trouble, then I must save her.’
Tom stopped only after spotting a small crowd gathered around a building entrance, making it impossible to see what was happening.
Loud and quiet murmurs were resounding through the crowd.
“These fanatics.”
“How can they call themselves a charitable church when they did something so terrible.”
More and more people started to gather, pushing to see what was happening.
Tom also pushed forwards, using his muscular stature to get through the thick crowd of people wanting to see what the commotion was about. He kept pushing until his eyes fell upon a gruesome scene, his face immediately turning pale.
The building’s sturdy oak doors were covered with a large bloody painting of a candle with the sun instead of flames. An old man was nailed to the door, blood leaking from his injuries, pooling under him. He was still breathing, his chest moving up and down.
Tom immediately recognized the symbol as he quietly murmured, “Church of light….”
Such a gruesome sight almost made him vomit his whole body looking with disgust.
“Why is no one helping him? He is still alive.”
A hushed voice entered his ears, “Be quiet, boy, or the inquisitors will come for you too.”
POV MarcAntonius:
A group of players stood in a dark valley, forming a circle around a pile of blood-stained white robes on the dirty ground. All of them were decked in plain-looking civilian clothes. Their faces were hidden in the shadows of the two tall buildings on two sides.
“Time to get rid of the evidence.” one of them grinned, his hand igniting in flickering orange flames. He flapped his hand, and orange flames jumped on the pile of robes, instantly engulfing them in flames.
“I bet that the church will be now so confused trying to find out what happened that the inquisitors will get busy to go and steal our target.”
Antonius kept looking at the flames dancing around the robes, feeling guilty for beating random NPC that felt so lifelike, ‘No, they are nothing more than a few lines of code. And they are still alive!’
He steeled his consciousness and brought up the next part of his plan, “This will buy us only a few days at max.” his gaze turned to the skinny female player next to him, ” So, do you have them?”
A grin formed on her face. She had shortly cut brown hair and a large bag in her hands. Above her head glowed a nametag: SunSucker
“Yes, but it cost me a lot to ensure that the blacksmith would remain quiet.” the girl opened her bag, and shiny metallic masks glittered inside in the orange light of the flames, grins growing on the faces of all the surrounding players.
Excited, Marc clenched his fists, “This will teach these arrogant pricks from the church that kill-stealing is a bad idea!”
POV Vesuvius:
The dragon jumped from the tower, his black body turning into a blur as he flapped his massive wings, launching into the air. The tower grew smaller, quickly vanishing behind the layers of thick smoke.
Vesuvius spent lots of time trying to decide between the option, but he still couldn’t make the final decision, with the advantages of both being too good to ignore. So he decided to solve another problem that needed to be resolved before he reached level fifty to clear his thoughts.
‘I still didn’t get any fire affinity materials for my metamorphosis, and my level is already in the forties.’
Vesuvius flapped his wings, his body flying high above the mountains, his eyes scanning the ground under him for anything of interest.
‘Where to get it… either in a fire-themed dungeon or ideally from fire elementals. Or maybe I could get my players to get it. I could exchange some fire elemental cores for my dracodactyls.’ in the end, he shook his head, putting the third option away, ‘My minions are too poor for now to get some of the sufficient quality.’
There was no way that he would compromise with materials to make his fire and magma powers even more robust, as they were one of his most potent weapons.
The glowing yellow shadow in the shape of a dragon quickly flew above the mountains. White peaks, green valleys and occasional blacknesses of dungeons moved under him.
‘Fire dungeons are relatively common, but how can I distinguish them.’ Vesuvius already knew how to distinguish harder from easier dungeons. It was about the size of black pits working as entrances into dungeons.
He already flew above multiple dungeons, but he couldn’t decide if to enter them, knowing that he had no time to randomly try to enter dungeons, hoping they would be fire attributed.
There were complex magic tools that could extract information about a dungeon without entering it, but all of them were hard to find in the underdeveloped region he was currently in.
Suddenly he got an idea, ‘I am a true dragon. My senses are far above even top-notch magical sensors. Maybe I can detect it myself. I just have to find out what I am looking for.’
He tilted his wings, gliding towards the ground, quickly closing towards a hole filled with infinitely deep-looking blackness, the space and air around it shivering.
The dragon stopped, flapping his wings as he hovered above the dungeon, redirecting a little bit of his magic into his eyes to empower them. The golden lustre of his eyes immediately increased, and the world around him turned brighter, with dozens of colourful lights and streams flowing around him. It was all magical radiation.
However, when his eyes looked at the black entrance into the dungeon, there was nothing except blackness.
‘No magical radiance is escaping out of it. That is not good.’
With his most powerful sense out of a game, his confidence immediately plummeted. He ignored his hearing and directly pushed magic through the veins and capillaries in his snout.
His long neck stretched as close to the darkness, and then he sniffed. A strong scent of the mountains around him entered his nose. It was a mix of smells of animals, plants, stone and even the air itself.
He sniffed more, something faint but distinguishable provoking his sensitive smell, he couldn’t pinpoint what it was, but it felt out of place for the local biome.
He deeply breathed in, letting the smell linger in his nostrils, ‘Is this smell of cows?’
Not daring to make any assumptions, he flapped his wings even stronger, his body moving further away from the dungeon. He kept periodically sniffing as he flew, the unusual smell getting weaker and weaker as he distanced from the dungeon.
The hope returned to him, his brain working overtime to try and figure out what the smell could be. In the end, after circling the dungeon for a few more minutes, he came to the conclusion, ‘It is really coming from the dungeon…’
However, his finding brought even more questions to his mind, ‘Magic can’t escape out, but it looks like microscopic particles can still get out. Why is that?… Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter to me now. That is something for scholars to care about.’
Filled with enthusiasm, he launched towards the sky, his eyes searching for more dungeons as he glided above the mountains.
Soon he spotted a new one; widely spreading his wings, he glided down in spiralling motion, mana already flowing into his nose.
The black hole was enormous, easily closing towards a size of a football field, its black colour looking as if it wanted to suck all of the surrounding light.
Vesuvius lowered his neck closer to the black hole in the world and sniffed. The smell of fish and ocean entered his nostrils, ‘This one must definitely be water themed! This means that this method can work.’
He knew that it was constrained, making it hard to truly discern the contents of a dungeon with more peculiar themes. However, he knew that fire-themed dungeons would likely smell of burning and ash as they were bound to be present in most of the fire-based dungeons.
In an instant, his body lifted up, rising towards the sky, his hearts happily pounding in his chest as he felt like he had a significant chance to obtain the materials that he needed.