Virtual World: Close Combat Mage

After taking such a punch that had left him bedraggled, Young Master Han’s attitude remained as arrogant as ever. The crowd truly had quite the eye-opener today. What had originally been a very liberating punch just did not seem sufficiently satisfactory anymore. The crowd began to clamor and wave their fists in the air as they encouraged Gu Fei. “Beat him to death; beat him to death!”

Under the steady chant of the crowd, Gu Fei shook his head helplessly. “It’d be great if I could beat him to death. Unfortunately, he’s just going to respawn if I beat him up here, and he will still be as detestable as ever when we see him again. That’s one thing that online games just isn’t great at.”

Everybody felt their hearts tremble, thinking to themselves that an expert was indeed an expert. PKing someone to make them lose a level was not enough for Gu Fei to vent his anger. Instead, he actually wanted to kill him for real. Sure enough, this man was ruthless to the point that it made people shudder – just like what the rumors had prescribed.

Vast Lushness was clearly upset with Young Master Han’s plan to sell her magic staff away for real, but she and Gu Fei were not as unacquainted with the man like Blue Ease and his men. They had spent quite some time around one another when they were doing Traversing Four Seas’ guild quest, and they had worked together quite a few times; it would not be too much of an exaggeration to call them as friends.

Vast Lushness would always be as icy as a winter’s day when facing enemies, but this person before her was no enemy. Even though he was very heartless, his intentions all came from the right place, which was to find a way to take care of their prickly adversary, Southern Lone Blade. With such a thought in mind, Vast Lushness had no wish to be caught up over such small matters. Thus, she went to mediate between the crowd accordingly. “Forget it. The magic staff is still with me, so nothing really happened. There’s no need to kill our own over it.” With this one statement, Vast Lushness elucidated how she still treated Young Master Han as someone on her side.

Young Master Han nodded and praised her. “You’re way more magnanimous than the rest.”

Everybody was morose; even Vast Lushness glared at him. “You should at least give us a heads-up when you do something like this next time, okay?”

“I simply have no faith in all your acting chops,” Young Master Han replied matter-of-factly.

“Is that so? I think you just enjoy this sort of situation where you can fool everyone to the point that they become livid.” Gu Fei gave him a side-eye.

“As long as the plan is effective, everything else is outside my considerations,” Young Master Han said.

“Forget it; let’s just leave the matter as it is!” Vast Lushness suspected that all these men might end up becoming irritated again after hearing what Young Master Han had to say further. At that point, she would no longer be the victim in question and would lose her ability to placate the crowd, so she quickly diffused the matter first by scattering everyone.

“No!” Gu Fei’s hand swung out to interject. “It’s not over yet!”

“What?” Everybody was startled. They became gleeful in the next moment, as they thought that their resident expert felt a single punch was not enough. Perhaps, he wanted to beat the man up further?

“Ahem… It’s this. Everyone, look. Now that our original plan has failed, we have no choice but to use the cruder iteration that we came up with earlier.”

“What plan?” Vast Lushness asked.

“Give the magic staff to me!” Gu Fei could barely hide his mirth.

“You *ssh*l*, did you intentionally screw things up before?” Young Master Han had a hunch that Gu Fei had ruined his plans on purpose to create their present failed scenario just so he could use that earlier lousy plan of his.

“Some of Southern Lone Blade’s men are still in the Auction House, so I think it’s best if we let them see us hand over the magic staff to me,” Gu Fei replied.

“Best, my *ss. What’s the point of doing this trick? If they see it being handed over to you now, you can always return it to Vast Lushness any time. How in the world have they not thought of that?” Young Master Han scoffed.

“The whole point is to convince them that there’s no such possibility, so I won’t be returning it to her first,” Gu Fei insisted.

“But they will still target Vast Lushness. What’s the point of you holding onto that magic staff, then? You might as well just leave it in the Warehouse,” Young Master Han argued.

“They’ll believe it’s not on Vast Lushness any longer after they kill her five, six, seven times. By then, they’ll come looking for me,” Gu Fei replied.

“Hey…” Vast Lushness was far from satisfied with that answer. Why did she suddenly have to die five, six, or even seven times?

“See!” Young Master Han shrugged toward Vast Lushness. “I was just trying to sacrifice your magic staff, which wasn’t really a sacrifice, since you would get a huge sum of gold coins in exchange. This guy, on the other hand, wants to directly forfeit your life and levels very inhumanely. Why isn’t anyone coming out to beat him up?”

Vast Lushness did not know whether to laugh or cry at this. “If I knew that all this would happen, I would’ve just truly sold it off!”

“It’s not gonna be valuable if you sell it off now. The people are a bit vague about the price for this sort of rare equipment since they’ve never seen it before. That’s why everyone was stirred into a frenzied bidding war when it first appeared, but if a second Utopian Magic Staff were to appear, the price then would surely be a huge drop from what you could’ve gotten earlier. The more cautious players might even suspect that there’s something wrong with the item.” It was unknown where Brother Assist had appeared from, but he gave his two cents worth based on his wealth of experience right away.

“I was merely saying that out of spite!” Vast Lushness was almost losing her mind. What sort of company was she keeping?! One wanted to sacrifice her magic staff, another wanted to sacrifice five, six, or seven levels of hers, and now this person took the words she had spoken in exasperation seriously as an honest plan…

“Are you guys working with one another to tease me?” Vast Lushness really harbored such suspicions at this very moment.

The three glanced at one another and shrugged.

“Let’s just leave the matter as it is. It’s up to Southern Lone Blade whomever he ends up looking for! In any case, I don’t have the magic staff on me, and it can be stored in the Auction House for up to a week. That guy will take ten days off from the game after retrieving the magic staff. It will be more than half a month before I can get my magic staff back, so if Southern Lone Blade can lift it off me, then let him. All right, dismissed!” Vast Lushness snapped.

“That’s just too d*mn heartless!” the people exclaimed. They had already thought the original plan to keep the magic staff over in the Auction House for a whole week was very inhumane as it was, but they had not expected Vast Lushness to be all the more vicious, to actually find someone who would not be coming online to Parallel World for a number of days after picking up the magic staff. At this rate, Southern Lone Blade would have to spend half a month waiting for the magic staff to come online before they could get a chance to loot it. How would that even be a larceny attempt by then? The seven of them would instead look like the seven Calabash Brothers, combining into one entity to guard the Utopian Magic Staff, instead.

Now that the victim in question had been angered to this point, no one else dared risk their neck to voice out their opinion. Everyone watched Vast Lushness turn her head and walked off in a huff. Blue Ease and Sakurazaka Moony ran after her with their respective men in tow.

“Don’t either of you follow me; I wanna see just what Southern Lone Blade is gonna do!” Vast Lushness was really depressed right now. She had been nothing more than a target of robbery. It was normal for players in online games to kill one another for loot, yet a simple matter like this had actually been turned into such a mess. Vast Lushness could no longer stand having to cautiously move about with a whole horde of players tagging along like this.

“That’s right. There’s no point in the whole lot of you following us tightly like this. Shoo, shoo, shoo!” Svelte Dancer leaped out and bellowed. With that, she hugged Vast Lushness and said, “Let’s go play.”

“Yeah!” Vast Lushness nodded, and the two ladies walked away while holding hands. While she was not looking, Svelte Dancer swung her free hand over his shoulders and raised a V sign to Gu Fei.

Gu Fei shook his head and sighed. Vast Lushness was trying to play it cool, but she ended up becoming a bait for someone else, instead.

Blue Ease and Sakurazaka Moony did not dare to give chase but were also feeling uneasy about not following her. The two men shared the same look of dread, which caused them to see each other as even more of an eyesore, and their bickering soon resumed once they started insulting each other.

Eternal Dominion still had no idea about the whole story of this entire situation. Scratching his head, he sought Gu Fei for enlightenment. “Just what is going on? Are we still PKing Southern Lone Blade? Why are we selling a magic staff? And why did we buy back the staff we sold ourselves? How is it that we are still angry after buying it back?”

“That’s the plan to lure Southern Lone Blade out,” Gu Fei replied succinctly.

“Then, where’s Southern Lone Blade?” Eternal Dominion instinctively looked around them when he heard his answer. He seemed to be mocking their failed ploy.

“Perhaps, he’ll appear soon,” Young Master Han replied rather abruptly.

“And just what plan do you have now?” Brother Assist could not help but shudder involuntarily when he heard that statement.

“Look at how happily everyone’s quarreling right now!” Young Master Han was gazing at the two parties Blue Ease and Sakurazaka Moony were leading, both looking as if they were about to break out into an all-out brawl.

Gu Fei took this chance to leap out and interrupt the two, shouting for the two parties to stop their fighting.

“You’re better off thinking of new ways to protect Vast Lushness if you all have so much time and energy to squabble with each other. You’ve already seen the lengths that Southern Lone Blade was willing to go,” Gu Fei said.

“Do you have an idea, Drunk bro?” Sakurazaka Moony quickly stepped in right next to the man, as if to show that he was the party more acquainted with Gu Fei.

“This guy? He’s just like that lot of comrades he hangs around with. I think the only thing he wants is to slay Southern Lone Blade. Have you guys even considered protecting Vast Lushness?” Blue Ease probed.

“You’re not wrong there. Which is why you guys are in charge of protecting that woman. Don’t slack off!” Gu Fei beamed.

“Tsk!” Blue Ease’s nostrils flared as he led his men away.

“That Blue Ease looks to be very concerned with Vast Lushness!”

“The two of them have known each other for a long time; perhaps, he’s been carrying a torch for her all this while?”

“It looks like Moony’s got himself a rival!”

“That’s what I’ve been saying; with how reprehensible Moony is, there’s no way that he’ll manage to snag himself such a good lady like Vast Lushness!”

The men from Forever in Flowers bantered, their conversation being entirely irrelevant to what was happening.

However, Sakurazaka Moony was apparently a lot more concerned with what they were talking about. He grew more alarmed the more he heard of the ongoing discussion. As such, he hurriedly bid Gu Fei farewell and swiftly left as well. Even though the two parties went in the opposite direction of each other, they had the same destination; thus, it was only a matter of time before they bumped into each other again.

All those men were now gone, leaving just Gu Fei, Young Master Han, Brother Assist, and Eternal Dominion standing there.

“So… Do we have a plan?” Brother Assist was getting more convinced that there was more to what Gu Fei and Young Master Han had done.

“It’s precisely that. Intentionally cause everyone to bicker with one another and have them disband while feeling disgruntled with one another,” Young Master Han replied.

“Eh?” Brother Assist was lost.

“It’s all for the sake of showing Southern Lone Blade that our plan has utterly failed,” Young Master Han added.

“What do you mean?”

“But what he understood from our failure is different from our concept of what truly transpired. He will see our failure as a good thing for him,” Young Master Han continued.

“What you mean to say is that we’re trying to make Southern Lone Blade believe that we’ve made a mistake by pretending to sell off that magic staff?” Brother Assist said.

Young Master Han nodded. “Since we’ve failed in realizing our charade in actuality, all we can do is blur the line between fiction and reality.”

“Then, that punch Miles threw at you is all part of your plan?” Brother Asist asked.

Young Master Han laughed bitterly. He had given Gu Fei the go-ahead to PK a few people to make their argument seemed more intense, but never had he thought that Gu Fei would just punch him, instead.

“I was serious when I said that line, though.” Gu Fei actually explained himself. “I’ve really wanted to punch you for a very long time now.”

Young Master Han nodded as well. “I was also serious about what I said before.”

“What did you say?” Gu Fei was puzzled. He could not remember if Young Master Han had said anything crucial.

“You *ssh*l*.” Young Master Han repeated himself.