672 Chapter 672 - Secretly Meddling (1/2)

Gu Fei and Sword Demon both met up by the city gates, yet they did not see any trace of the three soldiers anywhere. Gu Fei looked all around in search for any trace of them but still found nothing.

”Where are the soldiers?” Gu Fei wondered aloud.

”Did you send them to the wrong gate?”

”How could I do that? I'm not Royal.”

Sword Demon accompanied Gu Fei to walk a whole round in search of the NPCs, but neither managed to find any trace of them. Sword Demon even recalled, ”I don't think I saw them along the road as I made my way back to the city!”

”Where did they go?” Gu Fei scratched his head and pulled open his quest log, hoping he could perhaps get a hint as to what happened. In the end, he was stunned when he took a glance, ”Ah, my quest failed.”

”Failed?” Sword Demon realized what happened. ”No wonder your soldiers disappeared.” Since his quest failed, that meant his quest had ended, so there was, of course, no reason for the soldiers to still be following his orders.

”How did I fail it? Was I not allowed to die?” Gu Fei said.

”Perhaps. Check your quest description for an explanation,” Sword Demon said. Most quests would not fail just because a player had died, and if there were such a condition, the quest would usually point it out clearly in its description.

”I don't see it say anything about that!” Gu Fei blurted out after reading through the quest description.

”Then, could it have been a special design set in place for the City War?” Sword Demon speculated.

”That might very well be the case…” Gu Fei could only make such an assumption as well. In that battle before, he simply did not see how there were any other plausible reasons that could have led to the quest to fail, aside from his death.

”You should head back to the place where you got your quest and take a look. See if you could still pick it up again,” Sword Demon said.

”Yes, I'll do just that,” Gu Fei answered before he departed for Yunduan City's City Hall once more. The building itself looked just the same as it did before, and Gu Fei deftly made his way back to the Vigilante Corp's Chambers. He spotted the three soldiers he had fought side by side with moments ago the moment he stepped into the room. The three NPCs looked none worse for the wear as they stood by the side of the room as if nothing happened. Gu Fei greeted the three, yet none of them even reacted to him. It seemed like the three soldiers had returned to their original state of having no connections with Gu Fei once the quest had ended. Gu Fei carefully examined all the soldiers in the room and did not manage to find the soldier he had sacrificed. Perhaps the system had created a new NPC to replace it. After all, these soldiers were no more than lines of code at the end of the day.

The captain of Yunduan City's Vigilante Corps did not greet Gu Fei warmly like it did before this time, and had a very solemn expression on its face. Gu Fei stepped forward to converse with the NPC, and it actually heavily berated Gu Fei. He had not expected that the intelligent AI would actually lecture him because he had failed his quest.

Gu Fei could only endure and waited for it to finish its tirade. The NPC did not seem to mind what was Gu Fei's attitude toward this, continuing to give Gu Fei a choice after it completed its 'dress down': Choose to pick up the quest again, or get a new quest.Find authorized novels in Webnovel，faster updates, better experience，Please click for visiting.

Gu Fei did not even spare a moment of hesitation as he chose to try that same quest again. That was when the system announced that choosing to repeat the quest would have quite the penalty and that there would be an increased difficulty for making another attempt.

Gu Fei was glum. This quest was a confrontation between players, and there was no way the system could tell whether it was difficult or otherwise! Would the system care whether Carouse had sent experts or noobs to guard the target? But when the captain gave the order, Gu Fei immediately understood what the system meant by the quest having an increased difficulty. The first time he did the quest, the system had given him four NPC soldiers as companions, yet it only allocated three soldiers for the second attempt. Naturally, losing a companion meant the overall strength loaned had decreased, and that meant the difficulty for the player taking the quest had risen quite a bit as a result.

However, Gu Fei was unfazed by this increased difficulty. To begin with, he never thought that he would fail the quest just because he had died, and it was his intention to mount a repeat assault with just the three soldiers he had left. Now that the quest failure meant he was only given three soldiers for his second attempt, all Gu Fei had wasted was merely the time it took for him traveling about. In his heart, he had already treated that soldier that died before as a permanent loss.

Furthermore, it was apparent that the soldiers that would be assigned to him were random each time, as the three that followed him this time round all had different faces, though their equipment was all the same. Their skills were most likely the same as well, by the looks of things. Gu Fei had wanted to take the three soldiers whom he was already familiar with, so he tried asking the captain about it. In the end, the captain ignored him, making it seem like such a feature was not available for players, so Gu Fei had no choice but to lead the three new companions out the door.

”I managed to get the quest again, but I was only given three NPCs as helpers, instead of the four before. By this design, if I were to fail again, I might only be given two soldiers…” Gu Fei relayed what had happened to Sword Demon.

Sword Demon listened to his account, before he asked, ”Since you were allowed to pick up another quest, why did you not do just that? This quest… The strength we've got is a little insubstantial, it's not gonna be easy for us to accomplish this.”

Gu Fei really thought what Sword Demon had said had plenty of truth to it. Even though he had managed to kill off 30 players from Carouse before, there was no way that they would ignore defending the place afterward, so there would surely be more players there by the time Gu Fei made his way back. If he was really just doing it for the quest, it made perfect sense for him to get another instead; he just might get lucky and get something easier. Furthermore, when Gu Fei was skimming through the quest description before, he realized that the increased difficulty did not just affect the number of NPCs that he was allocated with; as the quest was originally on a timer, picking up the quest again did not reset said time, but continued from the time that had previously elapsed. When Gu Fei took a look at the time, even the time that passed after he failed the quest was included in the count. He had already lost around an hour the first time around, so now all he had left was another hour. If he were to fail this quest once more, even if he was given a third chance to redo the quest, it probably would be impossible for him to do so, given how the system chose to calculate the time spent for the quest.

”However, I do have an idea,” Sword Demon continued.

”What's that?” Gu Fei quickly asked.

”The quest would fail if the player dies. Going by this condition, all we have to do is find and slay the player from Carouse who first picked up the quest and we can ruin their quest, which would essentially mean your quest would succeed,” Sword Demon proposed.

”That makes sense,” Gu Fei nodded. ”But how would we get a hold of such information!?”

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Forget about the fact that neither of them could make contact with the players on the other side of this war, even if they managed to make contact, Carouse might have already made the following information public.