The first thing Kana saw when he logged in was a notification window telling him that he had seven new messages. The first was from Valit around noon saying she’d finished her appointment early and was ready to start whenever everyone was online. The second was Spiral replying that he was going to be a bit late.

The rest were all from Valit, talking about the mobs she was grinding out for crafting mats, about something called a whipthorn stinger and how much of a pain it was to kite since it wasn’t slowed by frost beams, that one of the assassins they were going to be fighting for the quest had attacked her, and so on.

He dug through the social interaction options on his radial menu and found that he could see a decent amount of information about people he was friends with. He knew Valit’s level, zone location, how long she’d been online, what quest she was actively working on, and there was even a tab to show the latest equipment drops she’d obtained. If he wanted to, he could see what she had equipped in real time from his room at the inn.

He was about ten minutes early, but that was ok. He used the time to move around a bit and get a feel for the game. A quick refresher before they got into the heavy stuff couldn’t hurt. He decided to explore the town a bit and check out the shops and NPCs he could find.

Kana had almost made it down the stairs when a new message popped up from Valit saying hi and that she would be back to town in a few minutes. He took a minute to tweak the thought-to-text settings on his account and then said hi back. If it was only going to be a minute or two, he decided it was easier to just wait in the inn for her to show up.

While he was waiting, a notification box informed him that Spiral had logged in. The knight appeared next to him, having not even bothered to go up to the room he’d rented the night before. It didn’t actually matter where in the inn a player logged out, so long as he’d paid for the room.

“Thought you were going to be late,” Kana said by way of greeting.

Spiral shrugged. “Me too.”

A party invite popped up, which Kana accepted. Valit joined the group a few seconds later, and a marker with her exact position showed up on his HUD. Kana guessed that if she didn’t stop for detours, she’d be back in town within a minute. He stood up and said, “Want to go meet her half way?”

“No,” Spiral replied. “I need a minute to go through my messages. Wait, why are so many from Valit? What is this?”

Kana laughed. “I guess she missed us.”

“Sure, but 23 messages?”

Kana’s eyebrows rose up. “Interesting,” he said. “She must like you more. I only had six.”

Spiral froze in place and looked suddenly concerned. “You don’t mean… We just met yesterday, and only in-game!”

“Far be it from me to judge the whims of a woman’s heart.”

“That’s not funny.”

“What’s not?” Valit said from the open doorway.

“Nothing,” Spiral said, flushing slightly. “Just a personal thing.”

“Oh, alright. I won’t pry then. Are you guys ready to go?”

“Sure thing,” Kana said.

They left the inn together, and Kana noticed as he did that he lost the safe harbor effect that he’d gained after paying for a room, but it was replaced by a new one called well rested that increased his HP and stamina regeneration slightly. It had a duration of two hours listed, which seemed like a fair trade for 13 drol.

“The objective for this quest is to take out the chief assassin of Black Manor. Now, I happen to know exactly where she is, but if I remember correctly, Valit said she wanted to see how the rest of this quest played out. So I’ll let you guys decide if you want to go through the motions of questioning villagers and putting the pieces together.”

Valit gave Kana a questioning look, and he just shrugged. “I already made my feelings on cold calls and canvassing quite clear, I thought. But if Valit wants to, I don’t mind following her around and taking out random assassins that spawn on top of us.”

“If you guys don’t mind. If I’d known you didn’t have a lot of interest in this part, I’d have done the questioning while I was waiting for you to log on. But I did get a ton of good mats for working on my crafting, so still time well spent.”

Kana and Spiral trailed along behind Valit while she talked to various NPCs. He listened with one ear, not so much to the content of the conversations as the quality. Like everyone else in the village, the people Valit stopped to talk to had advanced enough AI that it was easy to forget they weren’t real.

They went about twenty minutes before he noticed the first assassin had spawned and was tailing them. He nudged Spiral and tilted his head at the alleyway the NPC was lurking in. “It kind of feels a lot less ominous in the middle of the day, doesn’t it?”

“Some games do operate in real time,” Spiral said, “and we would only be able to do this quest at night if Istrius was one of them. Fortunately for my schedule, it’s not. I knew a guy who was skipping classes and blowing off shifts at work because he was trying to do certain events that only happened at specific times. It’s not healthy to let a game take control of your life like that.”

“Good to hear you feel that way.”

“Hah. Anyway, if the tradeoff is that sometimes it’s a bit silly when something happens in broad daylight that really shouldn’t be, I’m happy to take that deal.”

“Hey Valit,” Kana called out. “Heads up.”

“What?” she asked. She spotted the lurking NPC and said, “Oh. Another one.”

“Should we take care of it now or wait for it to attack us?” Kana asked.

“I’m not sure exactly how its AI is scripted. I’m pretty sure the assassin likes to wait for a good ambush opportunity. I would bet that if we ignore it, it will look for one of us to get separated from the group or us to be fighting something else. I’m not sure what happens if we attack it.”

“Let’s find out.”

Kana approached the alley, and Nibelus appeared in his hand as he walked. The assassin, realizing he’d been spotted, didn’t move forward to engage. He did the smart thing in a three on one fight and ran for his life. Kana gave chase, but by the time he came out the other side of the alleyway, the assassin was nowhere to be found.

He turned to where Spiral and Valit were standing. “This quest is annoying,” he told them.

Valit said, “I guess the assassins are more of a distraction than anything. When I was playing by myself earlier, they’d pop up at really inconvenient times, but now that you guys are here, it’s like they don’t even want to attack us.”

“I guess we just stay aware and ignore them unless they make a move,” Kana said. “Did you figure out where Black Manor is yet?”

“Uh, yes and no. The game is kind of wonky, chronologically speaking. Even though we started this event last night, the villagers talk like the assassins have been at work for weeks. So, I do know that the commonly held belief is that they’re holed up somewhere north of town. I also know that there’s only a few possible locations in that direction they could have taken over. Assuming they didn’t just pitch some tents, that gives us a few solid leads to check out.”

“Hmm. Yeah,” Spiral offered, but refrained from saying anything else.

“I’m going to take that to mean we’re on the right track,” Valit said. “I think we’ve got enough information to hunt them down.”

The two men followed Valit’s lead as she led them north. Spiral was content to follow along and not say anything, and for Kana’s part, he wasn’t terribly invested in the story itself. It was interesting, but the interviews and clue hunting reminded him too much of work. He would have been happy to skip right to raiding Black Manor and moving on to the next step.

The cross-country trek took about ten minutes, during which time they were attacked repeatedly by random wildlife. For the most part, the monsters were weak and easily dispatched. It might have been because he’d so easily mowed down the low-level monsters he’d been fighting, or just because the assassins hadn’t made a move yet, but he was caught off guard when they finally did.

The group was walking through a grove of trees spaced far enough apart to allow for easy travel when ten assassins dropped out of the branches to surround them. They didn’t waste time with threats or idle words. Before he even knew what had happened, one of them landed directly on top of him and damage numbers started popping up.

Valit was in a similar state, but Spiral had managed to protect himself and was the only one still on his feet. He backed away from the black manor assassins closest to him and made sure to angle his path to approach where Kana was fighting to get the assassin off of him.

Spiral shield slammed the assassin to stun it, but the move cost him as three other NPCs jumped him at once. Their attacks didn’t do a lot of damage, but it was enough to take a decent chunk of Spiral’s HP away. The stun debuff he’d inflicted let Kana kick the assassin off of him though, and that in turn allowed him to get to his feet, finish off the assassin, and go to Valit’s rescue.

It wasn’t that easy, of course. There were still nine assassins remaining, and they worked together in silence to split the group up and surround individual targets. Kana swiped at them when they got close enough, but they didn’t seem to be in any hurry and gladly gave ground.

The strategy was simple enough. They were wearing out his stamina bar with constant movement and missed attacks. The lower it got, the harder it became to move. Once the assassins judged their victims exhausted enough, they’d attack for real.

“Shiiiiiiittt,” Spiral said. “I’m poisoned. Stamina is already half gone and HP is not far behind.”

Kana finally got close enough to help Valit, but before he could, three of the assassins closed in and attacked him at once. He pushed one of them back, but was forced to move as the other two attacked from different sides. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Valit’s HP bar turn red.

The assassin who had landed on her was blocking all of her attempts to use magic somehow, and had rendered her helpless. She simply had no melee skills to speak of. If they didn’t fight their way over to help her soon, she was dead. The problem was getting over there without getting himself killed.

A peel of thunder split the air and an electric blue orb materialized. It zipped through the grove, weaving through trees and letting off little arcs of lightning as it flew by the assassins. Kana watched, surprised, as little numbers popped up all over the place. Every hostile NPC the ball lightning got near was electrocuted, costing most of them a third of their HP or more.

He took advantage of the opportunity created by the fortuitously timed ball lightning to build up his own combo chain and let loose an arc lance that killed two of the assassins outright. The third one he finished with a rising slash. Though they were still heavily outnumbered, the sudden death of three of the assassins seemed to shift the fight in the players’ favor.

He got to Valit just in time to stab his spear into the assassin that had been whittling away her HP with repeated knife strikes while preventing her from using magic. Once she was free, she wasted no time in raining searing shards of fire down on the remaining assassins. Together, with Kana protecting her from retaliation, they began systematically killing their attackers.

Everything was going well for them until Spiral’s stamina bar hit dangerously low levels. Suddenly so exhausted that he could barely hold his shield, he took repeated hits that drove him to dangerously low HP. They were still outnumbered too, and Kana didn’t want to count on another lucky ball lightning appearing. The chance of it happening felt pretty low to him.

He killed another one, and then there were four. Valit finished off the one Spiral had been doing damage too, leaving three. The remaining assassins, perhaps sensing victory was slipping from their grasp, fled through the trees. Valit fired a few flashburn beams after them, but they had too much cover to hit.

Both her and Spiral were near death, and Kana himself was at 126 out of 240 HP. The good news was that the 105 XP he’d gained from killing those assassins was enough to push him up to level 7. There was a welcome boost in stats and his max HP jumped to 268. No new skill options were unlocked, but that was fine by him.

“OK, screw those guys,” Valit said. “I kind of thought they were a non-issue because of the party, but obviously that was not the case.”

“Told you the quest gets harder here,” Spiral said. “Now imagine trying to that without a 5-star ranked weapon in our group.”

“We would have died for sure.”

“Yep.”

Valit considered that for a second. “I’ve changed my mind. Just tell me which location we’re going to so we can move on past the assassins.”

“Heheh. Alright. Let’s take a few minutes to recover first though.”

Kana was already rapidly approaching max HP, and he hadn’t been poisoned so his stamina had never fallen below 90%. He wasn’t really sure that it had ever been low enough to have a noticeable impact on his combat abilities. Supposedly as it dropped lower, he would get a new effect that reduced his damage output and speed, but if so, he’d never noticed it showing up on his HUD.

After a five-minute breather, Spiral climbed back to his feet and told the rest of the group, “Here’s what we need to do…”