Published at 7th of February 2023 10:58 am

Chapter 87: The Second Wave

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The first thing Donovan commented on was that his white shirt seemed to have a small blood stain on his sleeve. When he asked about it, Arthur just showed him that his hand had been cut.

"How are you always so accident prone?" Donovan remarked while shaking his head. "What did you do?"

"I actually don't know how I got this one." Arthur said while staring at the wound on his palm, "It's not that big of a cut, I'll just deal with it at home."

The rest of the drive was mostly quiet, Donovan asked a few questions about Arthur's conversation with Olivia but the incident of his mother was never brought up again.

When they arrived home, Arthur made his way into the house and Donovan drove back to the laboratory parking lot. Arthur made his way up the stairs to his room, he washed his hands and found a bandage that seemed to fit the cut pretty well, fortunately it didn't seem to be bleeding anymore.

He changed into something more comfortable before bringing his clothes into the laundry, he tried to wash the blood off the sleeve with cold water but it didn't seem to do anything.

"Damn, I liked this shirt." Arthur groaned to himself, he left the shirt in the sink and started searching around the laundry, eventually finding a bottle of hydrogen peroxide to remove the stain.

After dealing with his laundry, he made his way back to his room. He dealt with his daily chores, such as dealing with his garden, before checking his computer.

The girls weren't on, Acai wasn't on either, the only person who was online was Quinn, and he was in the middle of a game.

The rest of the day flew by quickly, Arthur played a few games with Quinn, ate a meal with his family and did his bedtime routine before eventually going to sleep. The next morning he helped himself to some breakfast and later in the day Donovan picked him up and drove him to the facility.

A larger crowd had formed outside of the facility today, there were plenty of fresh faces that were filled with child-like excitement, it was finally time for the second wave to begin.

As expected, Arthur saw Kyle making the rounds and trying to size people up, but it didn't seem like things were going to go his way today, as he would soon find out. The doors to the facility opened, and a developer poked his head out and requested that group one entered first.

All the familiar faces started piling in to the briefing room, where the developers started giving a rundown on some last minute changes. The most important change being that level zero players were protected from player versus player combat. Another protection added to new players was that those level three or higher would incur twice as much penalty to their karma when attacking players under level three.

Kyle didn't seem pleased with this change, but he didn't dare voice his discontent. Meanwhile everyone else seemed to appreciate this change, and even wished that it had been implemented sooner.

Eventually everyone was led into group one's capsule room, it seemed that they were getting shuffled through with pretty quickly so that the second group could start their briefing. They passed by the second capsule room, noticing that it finally had its lights on.

Arthur hopped into his capsule and started the login procedure, eventually his consciousness faded away and he was brought back into the familiar white room. The server hadn't started up yet, so he checked out the active lobbies, and like usual there was just the one room that had the title "Beta Testers Join!".

When he joined the lobby, he found himself at a ski resort, and the freezing winds blew against his skin, forcing him to enter the main building. Snow wasn't something that could really be found in Australia, so through virtual reality was the only time Arthur had ever experienced snow

More people started joining and immediately started playing in the snow. A few familiar faces popped up, like the roleplayers and his two friends. Arthur watched as Acai was hit perfectly in the face by a snowball thrown by Alvira, starting off a snowball fight that just became a one-sided slaughter as she was easily destroyed by Acai's counterattack.

Eventually the server had launched, giving everyone a notification that it was finally online. Everyone began slowly vanishing into a flash of white light, and Arthur did the same.

He received the welcome back message like usual and his invulnerability countdown had started counting down from ten seconds.

He found himself on the side of a road, but a little bit into the forest, exactly where he left himself last time. Thinking about his next move, he decided to quickly deal with his karma score before doing anything else, so he made his way back into the forest.

After roughly twenty minutes of killing wolves non-stop, Merlin noticed a bright flash of light that illuminated the sky. Had he been closer to the village, he would have seen that the light was caused by a beam of light that was shot straight up into the sky from the temple on the hill, but he knew this already.

Merlin killed one more wolf, and at this point his karma had finally hit fifty-one, meaning he was no longer considered an evil player, and his name had finally returned to being white. He still needed to kill forty-nine more creatures his level to cap his karma out again, but he figured it could wait. He didn't receive any penalties for it not being exactly a hundred, the only thing that mattered was that it was above fifty.

Taking a break from killing wolves, Merlin sat down on a large enough rock and took the diary he had been putting off reading until this point, the diary he took from the Redmond mansion.

"Oh, this explains a few things." Merlin started grinding his teeth together as he read the diary, it seemed this was a full recount of all the wicked things he and his associates had done. "The guy kept receipts to use as leverage against his peers, just in case they turned on him, how cunning."

The diary contained years of records of political crimes and other dastardly schemes. But the most annoying piece of information he found was that there was clear evidence that several nobles based in and around the town of Orchomenus were conspiring with the Despoina cult.

"That explains the necromancy I suppose." Merlin mumbled to himself as he continued reading.

There was a section in the book that talked about what had happened to Evaline Redmond. It turns out that Evaline had caught on to the Redmond's illicit dealings and criminal conspiracies, and due to her suddenly becoming a risk to their operations, the Despoina cult had her killed while giving the Redmond's head an alibi for her murder.

There were a bunch of maddened scribbles ranting about a curse, the devil and his wife in the few pages that followed, it seemed that the man had been afflicted with the curse for at least a month or two prior to his death.

Merlin thought of a specific individual who could use this information better than he could, so he threw it back into his inventory with the intent of handing it over.

Without entering Orchomenus, Merlin made his way to the western side of town before setting off to Macedonia. He was certain that news of Arwell Lychester's death had spread all over town already, so he didn't want to be seen in the same place, it was highly unlikely that he would be suspected, especially because of his planning and assigning a scapegoat beforehand, but it didn't hurt to be cautious.

It took quite a while to travel from the town to the city, but fortunately it seemed as though there weren't any bandits that chose to retake the road yet, so Merlin made it into the city unharmed. Knowing where he wanted to go, he didn't bother with any detours and started making his way directly towards the slums.

"She knows what you did..." Merlin felt someone whispering directly into his ear, goosebumps rose on his skin, but when he turned around, nobody was there.

Becoming somewhat perturbed by what had just happened, Merlin scampered towards the thieves guild as fast as he could.

It seemed as though they were still using the same hideout, which was fortunate as he really couldn't be bothered checking them all out at the moment. He entered the shady looking run down tavern and made his way over to the woman who was standing at the counter.

"Password?" A familiar looking woman with slightly pointed ears and fair blonde hair asked with a smile on her face.

"Apple bottom jeans." Merlin blurted out the first thing that came to mind, knowing she was only joking around. But when she looked at him with a confused expression, he shook his head and briefly explained himself. "It's an otherworlder thing, don't worry about it."

The receptionist looked at Merlin with confusion for a few seconds longer, but she snapped out of it and lead him downstairs.

"It's the ghost!" A few people sitting at the gambling tables noticed Merlin enter and gave him their greetings. Merlin waved back while he searched around for someone in particular, his eyes quickly locked onto a familiar looking elf sitting at the bar, Merlin slipped between the various tables and made his way over to him.

"Hey boss." Merlin greeted the elf as he took a seat beside him.

"I heard that you made a bit of a mess in Orchomenus, several messes in fact." The elf responded while swirling around his glass of liquor. "I take it you're done with your obligations now?"

"Yeah, all done. Thanks." Merlin pulled the diary out of his inventory and placed it on the counter in front of the elf. "And I even managed to get you a gift."

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