678 Chapter 678 - The Five Minutes Rule (1/2)
”Good evening!” Gu Fei and Sword Demon waved to greet Brother Assist.
Brother Assist mouth hung agape to the point his jaw almost touched the ground, closing it with his hand after a good long moment before he quickly asked, ”Why are you guys here?”
”Just randomly taking a stroll. However, the City War is such a huge matter, why aren't you in a rush to research on it? How could you be in the mood to grind?” The two men asked.
”I actually wanted to do so, but there have to be certain conditions to conduct the research. With how the soldiers and players are all in such a mess and falling rocks everywhere, just the rez run was tiring enough as is!” The players had begun calling the running to the battlefield after respawning 'rez run', even though the concept could not be literally understood from the term itself.
Gu Fei and Sword Demon laughed, ”You died?”
”But of course!” Brother Assist moaned.
This was not something difficult to grasp. Even though the players started to organize themselves and spontaneously coordinated with each other after the chaotic battle began, it was only an emergency response in the face of a critical moment. Take for example when a Priest from a small party happened to have died, and there was another Priest who they did not know nearby. It was not too hard to just call on them to come help Heal for a bit. Such an arrangement was a lot more passive, and it was nothing like active cooperation. After all, real cooperation would require the team to be formed beforehand.
In that sense, Brother Assist was like an army of one, without any guild to rely on when everyone else was already divided up into their teams. While everyone would be assaulting the city in these properly organized teams, he would be all alone diving into the battlefield. Furthermore, it was apparent that the system had no intention of becoming good friends with the third party either, as the city guards attacked him with equal impunity. Given the bit of skill that Brother Assist possessed, how many moves could he take before succumbing to them?
”How many times did you die?” Gu Fei asked. He was at least a little confident about Brother Assist's perseverance, so he doubted just dying once would have extinguished Brother Assist's enthusiasm toward information gathering.
”Five times…” Brother Assist glumly admitted.
”It's been hard on you,” Gu Fei consoled.
”Well, I did discover a particular constraint that not many people have yet to notice,” Brother Assist said.
”What's that?”
”Most people probably think that they would just revive upon death and would then be able to quickly make their way back to the battlefield, using such a method to repeatedly whittle down the enemy. Heh, they'll know when they die over five times,” Brother Assist shook his head, keeping everyone in suspense.
”What would happen on the fifth death?” Gu Fei asked.
”After dying five times, the encampment would restrict players from leaving the spawn point. The supposed explanation the system gave for this configuration would be due to the 'heavy injuries the players sustained, requiring them to properly recuperate'. The players would then be required to wait in the encampment for five minutes before they could leave,” Brother Assist said.
”Well… Understandably, such a limitation would be in place. But you're not a player belonging to a guild, even if you bumbled your way into the City War, and happened to have died five times after, why would you have to observe this particular constraint as well?”
”Of course it wasn't me who experienced it,” Brother Assist quickly corrected Gu Fei. ”On my fifth death, there was also another player who had died five times, and was complaining about it in the encampment, so I asked him about it. I reckon the five minutes on the fifth death is only the beginning. By the time a player dies more than ten times, I'm sure the time would increase to ten minutes or something. So, I waited over at the encampment for quite some time until I really managed to catch a player who had died ten times. Sure enough, that person had to spend a whole ten minutes 'recuperating' inside the encampment!”
Gu Fei and Sword Demon exchanged glances with each other, both men thinking about the same thing at the same time. This particular configuration was surely something that the main forces of those guilds assaulting the north gate had no idea about. Because the major guilds were collaborating together and were properly organized, none of them were about to muck around. After their careful coordination, they were now conducting their second formal assault, and it was evident that none of them had already died five times or more. But just like the explanation that Sword Demon had given to Gu Fei before about their strategy to whittle the city guards down, the crux of the plan depended on having an unlimited respawn! However, if their respawn process would eventually be restricted, the battle plan that the guilds had employed would essentially have been ruined. Thus, the information Brother Assist had learned about the arrangement placed after ten deaths must surely have not been from the north gate.
When Gu Fei asked, indeed, Brother Assist had learned it from the south gate, and that assault happened to be in the exact opposite direction from where Traversing Four Seas and the other guilds were collaborating. Even though the siege over by the west, south and east gates were all raging passionately and the players were all having great fun participating, the fact that they lacked the combat strength and with how casually they fought, none of these gates had managed to make any breakthroughs thus far. Their utilization of the repeated respawn that they had been granted for this City Wars event had automatically shifted them toward the rotational respawn method as well. But they had very quickly been broken upon reaching the five times five minutes, ten times ten minutes rule. In the meantime, the magnificent guild army up in the north gate was still kept in the dark about this restriction!
Sword Demon had become thoughtful when he mulled over this fact when Brother Assist had suddenly become excited, pulling out a booklet and flipped through many pages as a quill appeared in his hand. He asked, ”How did the two of you end up inside the city? Quick, spill it to me.”
Gu Fei was just about to open his mouth and answer when Sword Demon abruptly turned his head round and interrupted, ”In other words, this wave of attack would surely be beaten back. There's no guarantee that even someone like Oathless Sword could avoid dying in such a scenario, so we could head over to the encampment and camp him out.”
”What are the two of you doing here?” Brother Assist was astonished. He refused to believe that the two men had ended up here while taking a random stroll. Hearing what Sword Demon had just said, he was convinced that they must be plotting something against Oathless Sword.
Gu Fei merely sighed when he heard the question, ”Sword Demon, you're really too honest and honorable. What I meant was why don't we find out where Oathless Sword is located directly from Brother Assist? We'll just wait here for him to return with the information.”
”How can you think of such a sinister solution!?” Sword Demon sweated.
”This was the inspiration I got when you previously said that there must be some reason to having a third party,” Gu Fei said.
”Wait a minute. What did the two of you talk about? Tell me all about it,” Brother Assist interrupted the conversation.
”It's like this, Brother Assist. To put it simply, because the two of us belong to a Faction, we have now been assigned to be a part of the official forces belonging on the system's side. These guilds are thus seen as ruffians or rioting mobs, turning the top one hundred guild rankings in the city into a top one hundred villains bounty list. The two of us have chosen the top villain in this list of a hundred, Oathless Sword, and are now here to kill the man for the greater good,” Gu Fei gave a quick summary of the situation.
Brother Assist was stunned for quite a while when he heard this, finally saying, ”That's the announcement you heard on your end? I listened to the speech that an NPC gave outside the city, and it identified the system as a cruel tyrant, and the guilds were the revolutionaries that were seeking to overthrow the system!”
”We each work for our masters…” Gu Fei recited.
”What a mess…” Sword Demon was having a mental breakdown.
”Sword Demon, why don't you try and give me your account…” Brother Assist felt that Gu Fei might have embellished a little.
”Well… It was more or less as he had said…” Sword Demon felt Gu Fei had exaggerated a little after hearing his description of the event, but it was only after thinking about it further, did he realize that Gu Fei had actually used the original text that the system had provided. However, the terms like ruffians, rioting mob, villains and all the various derogatory terms used by the system made it feel a little off when used together all at once like this.
”Looks like this City Wars is an overarching plot, despite having no background story to speak of,” Brother Assist sighed.
”Anything else new you learned?” Brother Assist asked.
”Oh yeah, Ray is in a Faction as well, the Mercantile Trade Association. It was also a reward for a quest that he had randomly picked up from the Trade Union, and that guy isn't even level 40 yet!” Sword Demon said.
”Is that so? We had even previously judged that only players that reached level 40 could be recruited to Factions,” Brother Assist was writing all of this down even as he spoke.
”Could it be that the Faction he joined is a little unique in this respect? Just take a look at this City War itself. The quests we have picked up so far were all combat-related, but all he has been given were quests that had him transporting goods from place to place, as if he was involved in the logistics,” Sword Demon said.
”You guys have a quest as well?” Brother Assist was taken aback.
”Of course. The attempt for Oathless Sword's life this time was something I had chanced upon, which we ended up partying up together after, but we actually have our own Faction quest as well! Oh right, do you happen to know someone by the name of Small Bottlecap? He should be a guild leader,” Sword Demon asked.
”Small Bottlecap? Let me take a look…” Brother Assist pulled out a different book from his dimensional pocket upon hearing the IGN and began flipping through it. Both Gu Fei and Sword Demon regarded Brother Assist with a look of admiration as he did. The man was really too formidable, recording down everything and actually carrying all of them around with him wherever he went. It was truly something that went beyond just a mere hobby, but had become a state of consciousness in itself. Even if Brother Assist were to have an overall record of the guilds in Yunduan City, the fact remained that the information he had gathered on this hardly had any practical use for him at all. Most people who inquire after such information would not necessarily come running to him for it. This was nothing but a hobby in the truest sense of the word. Because the process by which he collected all this information was enjoyable, the result of completing his collection had thus become his achievement!
Flipping through page after page, Gu Fei and Sword Demon patiently waited on their end, it was only until Brother Assist had flipped to the final few pages when he finally got an answer. ”F*ck, I thought I had heard the name when you said it, so it turns out it was because I have recently recorded it down. This information here is what I had recently collected from around the time when we returned to Yunduan City, and it is a newly established guild. Let me see… Yes, a level 1 guild by the name of Soy Sauce Pourer. They currently have 37 members, and the guild leader, Small Bottlecap, is a level 35 Knight.”
Brother Assist raised his head to look at Sword Demon once he was done with his words, and it was evident that such a small and insignificant guild, when thrown in such a huge and chaotic battlefield, really lived up to their guild's namesake of being insignificant. He had no idea why Sword Demon had wanted to specifically ask about this person.
On the other hand, Sword Demon was feeling rather dispirited after hearing that Small Bottlecap was such a small and important player, which meant his target would be a lot harder to locate this time. Sword Demon used his experience as a guild leader to analyze this small guild, and he quickly figured that the men from Traversing Four Seas or Carouse would surely not know the existence of this soy sauce guild. And even if they were aware of it, there was no way they would even consider carrying such a burden along for their coalition of guilds. In the best-case scenario, Small Bottlecap would bring his guild out to one of the three other gates in the east, south, or west and keep suiciding themselves against the city's defenses.
”Just give up!” Gu Fei patted Sword Demon on his back. ”That quest is far too difficult. It's much more difficult than killing Oathless Sword.”