Say whatever you wish but it takes a very large, powerful guild to raise a divine level enchanter in Skyforge 3. The character can't have any wasted levels, which means all skill points have to be used to strengthen dexterity, mind and intelligence - similar to the old skyrim one has to do certain actions to earn such skill points at level up after sleeping, too - and said enchanter has to be pulled along dungeons for the necessary exp, so the only second skill tree that makes any sense is the illusion skill tree.

In other words, if you're an enchanter, be invisible, stay out of the way and make your guild mates collect treasures for you to destroy and fill soul gems that can only be found as rare drops in master level dungeons at the very least with powerful boss monster essence. Only to fail time and time again.

But my guild was patient. They were amazingly strong, too. And finally my character could make permanent enchantments without mana cost or interruption restrictions with 90% probabilty. We ruled.

Ironically I'm supposedly the strongest character in the guild according to my stats and skill trees, even though my character is mostly useless in a 1 on 1 battle. As in, one hit kill instant death on first attack useless. A divine Enchanter Illusionist with the physical values of an Almeri lady NPC. Occasionaly called the world's top ten dud. The funny glowing halo my character's body got when my skill broke into divinity got me the nickname squishy firefly.

Honestly, I never cared because, well, I was just playing a game as I wished.

When the sun rose above our palace walls we cheered, Paladinum waved our flag and I projected the highlights of our last battle into the sky. It was the upside down bird's eye view we had recorded with the crystals Massa Lady had grown. One side showed our army sneaking up on the enemy with the help of my wide area Invisibilty and Muffle items, recorded by me while I floated in the sky, invisible of course. The other showed Lady's view of the enemy army sleeping in their tents, only a few sentries standing guard. She was also flying and invisible during the battle. That was how things usually went.

Then, the birds I controlled with my illusions flew above the enemy camp, dumping Lady's explosives on them. There were lots of pretty explosions in many colors, just like fireworks, which sent our viewers into a frenzy, laughing and cheering. The enemy was disorderly, running away from the sudden attack to regroup outside the camp, only to be slaughtered at the edge of the camp by our waiting land troops.

Next, I sent close ups of our assassins killing the commanders that were insufficiently protected in the chaotic environment, their invisible forms stepping behind said commanders and killing them in one blow. The looks on the faces of those leaders' guards when the attacker did not become visible after the attack were hilarious! After all, supposedly only the invisibilty cap the world champion of the thief class got could guarantee absolute, unbroken invisibility since it was an enternal enchantment. Recording crystals like ours were supposedly only available as cash items, too. Noobs.

The enemy made a brave attempt at breaking through next, but this time it was Lady's creation that stole the enemy's show again. Our aerial forces threw balls down around the enemy, balls that were deflected with shields this time. Those shields had no effect - thick fog spread around them, making the nightsight items everybody above level 50 had utterly useless. They could no longer see beyond their shields, so our Destruction Mages and Barbarians with their clear sight potions broke those shields one by one, slaughtering the blind enemy starting with the weakest links.

while all of this was going on our riders trempled the less organised parts of the camp going by the time proven rule - whatever breaks was not sturdy enough and thus not worth looting. At our level at least that one was always right.

It was a slaughter and our guild, with the few fallen warriors already revived, celebrated it with lots of alcohol. Leaving the rougher guys and girls to their fun after our performance ended Lady and I snuck back into the palace and up into the tower. We were not really into partying. Inside my tower and away from the ruckus, I set a music crystal into the speaker system while half drunk bards played their war drums outside.

With a sigh and a smile I let myself flop into the comfortable armchair while Lady got some iced tea from the fridge. It was really an enchanted wardrobe, but a fridge was a fridge as far as I was concerned. Her dark braid was still shiny, unlike my windswept hair. The windswept hair was new, they had only introduced it with the last update as a cosmetic realistic effect, but it was annoying enough that wearing a braid or cutting it off had crossed my mind. Unlike me, who played a high elf due to the ideal affinity for enchanting, Lady had chosen a dark elf because those had the best basics for alchemy, so instead of my golden glow she was glowing silver. In a straight fight she was as useless as me since as her thief skills were only developed in the sneaking and speech skill trees aside from her Alchemy. Her nickname was squishy glowbug.

She placed a cup in the table next to me and I thanked her with a wry smile. Our teamwork might be great, but we were not very talkative most of the time. We had never really spoken much with most of our guildmates.

The sweet sound of a female voice and gentle flutes filled the silence as we relaxed and drank our cool tea. After the hectic preparations in game coupled with my full real life schedule as a working adult such breaks were very welcome.

After a little while I giggled. "Lime green explosions? Baby blue?"

"They were pretty. I did think about making shapes, too, but there was not enough time. Confusion bombs are not part of my usual repertoire." Lady commented dryly. Her cup clicked audibly when she set it down.

Now this I was willing to belive. "Next time we will use my Mayhem spell." I grumbled. But we both knew that this little bit of magic was probably going to stay a guild secret forever. Just like some of the things Lady could do with her highlevel speech skill tree.

About my Illusionist skills...some may wonder why nobody chose the skill tree as a main tree except, well, me, for example.

There are almost no high level Illusionists since the repertoire and power did not really increase until the top levels, leaving level 170 characters with spells that only worked on enemies with both mind and intelligence below 30 points. At level 170 only ordinary Skeletons and nonmagical beasts had such stats and those were really hard to find. Frost wolves? Intelligence too high. Skeleton archer? Mind stat too high. It was not a fighter class. Only Invisibility and muffle worked on higher levels if the skill level was high enough. For that one needed loads of mana and practice though.

So Illusionists could only muffle their steps, turn invisible and avoid opening anything, touching any magical objects, taking anything at all and casting any other spell to keep their invisibility going. Since I was keeping my health absurdly low by putting everything in mind, intelligence and dexterity being invisible the whole time was the only way to avoid getting in the way, so I got the really powerful high level illusion spells in the end by mooching off my guildmates.

Lady did the same with her stealth, but at least she sold the loot for really good prices for the whole guild, too. Her stats in mind, dexterity and speed are just as unsuitable for survival as my skills though.

Anyway, we were two special, squishy snowflakes that always disappeared anyway.

The celebrating warriors just had to give us a good pat on the shoulder and we would end up with broken bones, which was ouchie even with reduced pain feedback.

Anyway, at my grumbling Lady just crooked her eyebrows the way only elves in this game seemed to be able to. "If we hadn't decided on going full crafting with a big guild back then we would probably have lost contact ages ago."

"Not to mention we never would have gotten to a level high enough to get the stats for all the stuff we can play with in our free time now." I added. "Real life as an adult is not exciting at all. Who knows, maybe we would have started taking those rec drugs from Happy Life."

"Don't remind me..." Lady sighed.

Neither of us was the excited, curious 14 year old kid from 10 years ago when we started playing, choosing crafting and sneaking/invisibility because we wanted to be like those mysterious hidden craftsmen from xianxia novels. Pillmaking and smithing from the ki path had been our first choice, but Lady came to the conclusion that digging out metal and then beating it with a hammer was too boring for her and I decided that I did not want to make consumable stuff with little variation over and over again. So we deleted our first chars after 2 days and tried our current occupations. We never expected to play for years or for our chars to become in game celebrities back then.

By the way, Blacksmiths were not rare among high level players because they needed endurance, strength and dexterity, the same as barbarians or axe fighters for example. They had no trouble getting by. Our crafting classes were totally unbalanced, but when we complained we were told that it was supposed to be that way. Taylors only needed dexterity and mind stats, which left plenty of good jobs, too. Pretty much anything was easier to play solo than our squishy occupations. Totally not fair.

In the silence I took one of the crystals from the little bowl on the table, our guild newspapers. They collected these and put in new content occasionally, deleting the oldest news. Of course our guild library held copies of all of the important blogs, articles, info collections, all wikipedia pages, in game books and so on. First thing in this crystal was an aticle about our victory. I skipped that one. Next...fanart.

I giggled.

"Look at this!"

Lady glanced at it and groaned.

It was her face in the night sky, looking down at the colorful explosions in the enemy camp with a wicked grin.

"Next page!" Lady demanded and I obeyed.

I wished I hadn't a second later. This time it was me giving a necklace to our guild leader, with him kneeling in front of me, on my face an angelic smile. I was also floating. Rattle looked like a hero receiving a holy treasure from his golden goddess. Now Lady was giggling.

The next picture was no better but at least both of us were equally annoyed. It was a circle, half pale gold and half black, with female shapes back to back outlined in the other color. Each female shape held out one hand and above each floated a rainbow jewel. Below those two shapes was a shilouette of the palace. Above the picture it said 'Proposal for new guild flag'.

Now if you are wondering why our guild was so obsessed with us...we were girls, we were delicate girls who did not act like warriors but ladies, and they had sacrificed a lot of items and time to help us build our skills over 10 years. Our skills were a big point of pride and a huge advantage now, allowing us to take over a lot of territories within the last six months after they had persevered for years. Six months ago Lady and me became divines, our skills becoming good enough to create things that equal the most expensive cash items and best championship rewards. We became broken enough to make battles like the one the day before child's play. So obviously our guild started getting a bit weird and did all sorts of strange things to make sure we didn't leave or quit.

Not that we would do that. These guys had pulled us along for ten years, after all, with rewards that barely justified the efforts and all the weird and seemingly unreasonable things we had them do. Like when Lady demanded that the whole guild scour a low level forest for a certain rare mushroom type for a whole week until they found it. Or the time when I wanted a sample for a specific enchantment that only one chimera boss monster had as an ultra rare drop and had them kill that boss over and over again until the weapon with the right enchantment dropped. Only to extract said enchantment and destroy the hard won weapon in the process.

Where else would we find such great lack - er, guildmates again? They said they did not mind and that we made guildlife more interesting with our demands and accidents that occasionally were not really accidents. Like blowing up our first guildhouse. Or serving tea that made people's hair green for a week in our second. Or giving an enchanted weapon to the vice leader that screamed 'help, fire' every time the fire blade was activated. Or the tornado jewel that did not exclude the player from the spell effect...

"I really don't understand these guys. I would have kicked us out ages ago." I concluded as my self reflection came to an end. Lady looked like she had just thought about something similar, scrunching her face in a way that was half embarrassed and half amused.

Yes, our guilmates were idiots. Rough, loud, lovable and naive Skyforge addicted idiots. And neither of us had thought about quitting this game in a long time. Not since the great graduation test period disturbance when they thought we would never come back.

On the next page there was our guild leader's plan for the new territory, which got us into a far more worthwile discussion about how we might be able to help. Rattle might occasionally act like an idiot but he was pretty smart and could use his real world management skills even in game effectively.

And then the world changed.