The air on the outskirts of a volcanic region in Elysium, far from the trade routes of the nearby major cities, was heavy and thick with the acrid, burnt-meat smell.
Amid the sharp, black rocks that looked like a giant’s teeth, two players moved with extraordinary coordination, as if they had years of practice doing things like that together.
Dan was breathing with difficulty; each gasp from his chest sounded hoarse and dry, as if the lungs in his body were about to burst at any moment.
In the real world on the planet Babel-9, Dan had been only 18 years old, with an athletic, handsome, and confident physique, but his integration into the Epic Race of a Wizard in Elysium had taken a cruel toll on his appearance.
His body in this world was extremely thin; his skin was pale and blotchy, stretched tight over protruding bones, and his head, almost completely bald, bore only sparse tufts of greasy hair.
His features resembled those of a decrepit, repulsive old man ,a physical price he had to pay because of the corrosive magic flowing through his veins.
Near him, floating like a pale, bluish mist that barely distorted the light, was his brother, Sam.
Sam was a Ghost, another Epic race that the Elysium system classified as purely spiritual.
With a body like that, Sam couldn’t wield a sword or feel the heat of fire... he was an intangible observer of the physical world, a solitary existence that depended entirely on external means to interact with the real world.
"To the left, Dan... three of them hiding behind that obsidian formation." Sam’s voice echoed directly in Dan’s mind.
Fortunately for Sam, the compatibility of their races meant that his brother’s high magical affinity allowed him to see Sam ,albeit with great difficulty and only when he was certain his brother was present.
In front of them, a group of small Imps ,creatures with scaly red skin and eyes brimming with malice ,emerged from the shadows. They hissed like snakes, preparing small spheres of black fire to hurl at the "old man" who seemed like easy prey.
Dan flashed a crooked smile, revealing yellowed teeth.
He raised his bony hands, and without uttering a single word, the Mana around him began to vibrate.
Unlike Lohan’s golden light or Lisa’s white flames, Dan’s magic was a dark, sticky mass.
Suddenly, a burst of unstable purple energy shot from his fingers, striking the central Imp. The creature didn’t even have time to scream; its body began to wither and collapse instantly, then that same purple light flew back to Dan and vanished.
However, despite how easy this battle seemed, the effort caused a drop of dark blood to trickle from Dan’s nose.
His magic was too powerful for his physical vessel, deteriorating his body’s cellular structure with every spell he cast. He was like a mana bomb inside a cracked crystal body.
"Don’t push yourself too hard, bro... remember what that mage said," Sam warned, his ghostly form wavering with concern.
Dan wiped the blood away with the sleeve of his tattered robe. "That mage’s magic is totally different from mine, Sam. If I don’t get stronger, we won’t be able to get out of the sewer that pig put us in."
The mention of their father brought a bitter silence.
They were the children of a mid-level businessman in the Upper Zone and a woman who worked in the recycling plants of the Lower Zone on the planet Babel-9.
When the Elysium integration began, they saw the game as their only chance to get ahead in life, using all the savings they’d accumulated from the gifts their "father" sent each year to buy two helmets.
But their luck was mixed... they managed to acquire powerful builds, but with appearances that the major guilds of Elysium had absolutely no interest in.
In recent weeks, the two’s routine had been a succession of humiliations.
Dan vividly remembered calling the Vance Guild and the Hogue Group, trying to secure a spot as a frontline player, confident that an Epic Class could land them a good position, but reality was cruel.
"Even though you have Epic bases... you’re that disgusting ghost and a decrepit wizard?" The voice of the woman who interviewed them sounded disgusted after seeing a screenshot of their in-game characters. "The Young Master prefers players who don’t make our group look like a bunch of losers... Ghosts and... whatever you are... aren’t welcome in our ranks."
There was a smaller guild that agreed to meet with them at Novata Village 92802. Dan and Sam went there full of hope, but as soon as the guild representative saw Dan’s appearance ,and couldn’t even make out Sam’s ethereal and terrifying form ,he recoiled in disgust.
"I’m sorry, but we’re looking for the elite... not freaks that look like they came out of a horror dungeon. That would scare off our investors." The man said before kicking them out of the meeting spot.
They had still tried to meet with a few more guilds, but although some were willing to accept them because of the two epic bases they possessed, they would be relegated only to secondary groups and wouldn’t be allowed to say they were members of those guilds.
Although they were nearly desperate, the brothers didn’t need to endure such humiliation just to feel accepted. Elysium already had a way to convert money on their own, and even if the conversion rate was lower than that of those guilds, it was still enough for them to recoup their investment in the helmets.
Since then, they had given up on seeking protection. They began grinding alone in dangerous areas, fighting for scraps of experience while watching other players’ announcements celebrating futile achievements with a touch of envy.
But everything changed just a few minutes ago.
The sky of Elysium, previously tinged with the red of the volcanic sunset, shimmered with the golden notification that froze every player on the server in their tracks.
[Congratulations to Astralis Requiem for killing Elysium’s first Level 15 Elite Monster!]
Sam, who had just left the body of an Imp and was floating near a stalactite to recover his spent spiritual energy, froze upon reading that.
His spirit form even glowed with a hint of hope. "Dan... did you see that? Level 15 Elite. Astralis Requiem did it again."
Dan looked up at the sky, the light from the announcement reflecting in his seemingly clouded eyes as he compared this announcement to the guilds they’d visited. "They’re on another level, Sam... now that’s what an elite guild looks like..."
Sam floated until he was face-to-face with his brother. "Dan, we’ve never tried to contact them. Think about it... if they’re this successful, do you think they have the same prejudices as the other guilds?"
Dan hesitated, gripping his black wooden staff. "They’re the elite now, Sam. Why would a guild like that want two ugly bastards like us?"
"No!" Sam insisted, his voice vibrating with a hope he hadn’t felt in months. "To achieve results like that, they probably focus on quality, Dan. Maybe they don’t have corporate sponsors like the guilds we’ve talked to ,in fact, aside from those ads, I’ve never seen anything about this guild in the real world. If they don’t care about that, maybe they’ll accept us for what we can do, not for what we look like. I feel alone here, bro... I feel like we’re slowly dying in this isolation."
Dan looked at his own hands, seeing the peeling skin and the tremors caused by the corrosive Mana saturating his body. He knew Sam was right ,not only was his body physically deteriorating, but Sam was also struggling to stay anchored to the real world after so many possessions of enemies... without the support of a larger group, Dan wasn’t even sure anymore if their Epic Base would be able to overcome these disadvantages.
"How would we even get in touch with them? No one knows where the Astralis base is. Every group is going crazy trying to find them, and no one has turned up anything," Dan argued, though his resolve was waning.
Sam gave a ghostly smile, his form becoming clearer. "I’m a Ghost, Dan. I can pass through walls, hide my Mana signature, and fly distances that human Players can’t. If I use my racial advantage to investigate the rumors of where they were last seen... even in the nearby major cities... maybe I can find a clue. We’ve got nothing to lose."
Hearing Sam’s question, Dan fell deep in thought.
A new group of Imps, this time led by a larger specimen with twisted horns, sensed the brothers’ distraction and charged forward with a deafening howl.
"Watch out!" Sam shouted, instantly diving toward Dan.
Unlike Lohan’s fusion, which is a physical merger, Sam performed the process of Possession.
His ghostly form collided with Dan’s back, and in a split second, the wizard’s pale skin began to glow with a bluish, ethereal luminescence. Dan’s eyes, once weary, became orbs of pure light.
The symbiosis between the two was terrifying.
Under Sam’s influence, Dan’s magical potential was pushed beyond the biological limits of his body, while Sam acted as a spiritual heat sink, absorbing some of the strain that the magic placed on Dan’s organs, allowing him to unleash the full fury of a Wizard.
Dan raised his staff, and the ground beneath the Imps exploded into columns of black energy.
The magic acted like accelerated decomposition; the monsters struck by the shockwave saw their shells turn to dust in milliseconds.
Now Dan moved with an agility his decrepit body shouldn’t possess, floating centimeters above the ground as he fired bursts of entropy that cleared the battlefield with brutal efficiency.
The lead Imp attempted a desperate strike with a bone dagger, but Sam, from inside Dan’s body, projected a shield of ectoplasm that repelled the attack with a kinetic force that shattered the monster’s arms.
Dan ended the battle with a pulse of energy that incinerated the life essence of the remaining Imps, leaving only black ash on the obsidian, with small black flames flying back into his body.
When the battle ended and Sam detached himself from his brother, Dan fell to his knees, coughing violently.
Sam floated beside him, feeling exhausted as well. Although the possession drained his spiritual power at an alarming rate, it was still better than possessing Imps.
"Did you see that...?" Dan gasped, catching his breath. "We’re strong, but our flaws are a disaster!"
Sam nodded, his form flickering. "That’s why we need to try to contact the Astralis. If that Guild is what we imagine... it might be the only group that can see the power behind our shell. I’ll do it, Dan. I’ll spend the next week tracking them down. I’ll find out where that Guild is!"
Dan looked at his brother, and for the first time in a long while, a glimmer of determination flashed across his old, weary face. "All right, Sam. If we can talk to them... if they give us a chance... I swear I’ll make every corporation regret throwing us on the scrapheap."
While the two brothers rested in the shadows of the volcanoes, throughout Elysium, the announcement of the Level 15 Elite was causing a silent domino effect.
In a fishing village on the east coast, a girl with the Medusa Class, who hid the snakes in her hair under a heavy hood so she wouldn’t be stoned by NPCs and players, stared at the Astralis Requiem banner with tears in her eyes.
She had already been kicked out of three player groups after revealing the snakes and turning players in the group to stone.
At a miners’ camp near the mountains, a player with the Ogre Class ,who possessed exceptional intelligence but was constantly treated as a "dumb muscle" and cannon fodder by mercenary guilds ,gripped his pickaxe tightly.
He was tired of being used and discarded in exchange for a few copper coins. Upon seeing that fourth ad for that elite guild ,and confident in his own potential ,a faint glimmer of hope arose in his heart.
However, not everyone felt the same hope.
At a cheap inn in a small village abandoned by the kingdom, a group of Common Base players ,who had lost almost everything after being massacred by guilds out to farm ,drank in silence. They stared at the global notification with bitterness.
"Forget it..." One of them muttered, slamming his mug down on the table. "A guild like that would never accept people like us. They’re just another tyrannical guild, just with a different name. I’m not going to humiliate myself again just to hear a ’no’ from an arrogant leader."
Disbelief and a lack of faith had become a deep scar for many players at the bottom of the pyramid.
With billions of people seeing those announcements, billions of different thoughts crossed the minds of all the players, but one thing was common to all of them: Astralis Requiem was grabbing everyone’s attention.
[NunuNote: Hi everyone, I think I’m finally feeling better... Now we’ll be back to our regular schedule. Here’s this 2.3k-word Chapter ,enjoy!]