Jason’s POV
Jason was an editor. The key word being was. He had long found a job in a good company. They made good VR movies. He was very stressed lately. The company wanted to sponsor a holy war team. They intended to market them strongly and hoped to be able to enter the scene. They were already late to the game by a long shot. Honestly, he was not at all hopeful about his company’s future. Most major pro players had already been invested, the remaining would not be worth heavy investment. There was always the chance a new dark horse would appear or the company could make their team. The first case oftentimes, required a one-time investment more than even the named players earned. The second would have a huge chance of failure but if it succeeded could make a stable future in the market.
As you would expect from Camilla, the company’s new manager, the company had decided to invest in sponsoring a rising team and tasked the employees to find the so-called rising team. With the amount the company was willing to offer, he doubted he could find a team let alone a rising one.
He was tired of hours-long searching for the future team. He was resting when Mark called him. He and Mark knew each other briefly at high school. Mark was willing to pay good money for editing a gameplay movie. The work itself was not much so he did not mind. He was not expecting, however, to see Holy Wars. As he was going to postpone it, he suddenly was in the mood to watch a little. At least he could see what he was dealing with. He saw three players standing outside a town. From Mark’s descriptions he gathered the one with dark brown hair and yellow eyes was himself, the one with black hair and red eyes should be his brother, and finally the black-haired young lady with gleaming black eyes should be his sister.
They all looked evil, was this some kind of cosplay? He watched as the brother Elijah as he remembered pointed in different directions and they all separated. Each rushes in a different direction. Elijah in the center, Mark at the left, and Raven who looked familiar towards the right. Oh, there it was Raven was Delilah, he followed her for ages. She had a million followers and still, the count was rising upward. This was good, it meant that they had marketing potential. He nearly forgot he was not assessing a team for the company now. Focusing again, he noticed that they were making people dream. Mark, unlike some of the teams he was assessing this morning, had the decency to cut the dream files separately. Although it was a given when he watched how many people they had put to dream. The files were surprising. They were organized, if not in the sense he liked, but the real surprise was they were separated into three themes. He watched a few of the files in the first category named The Nightmare of Beasts. While the variations were commendable, most were more brutal than he expected. The people getting eaten, torn apart, and mauled by monsters was a tad bit more than his cup of tea. It made him read Mark’s messages carefully to find out why the hell they would show these.
Mark had said they were evil gods. He had heard of evil players but he did not know they had a different camp entirely. He had said he was not sure how much this information was worth but he had to give it as a token of sincerity. The humorous person he was, he had written it was clear from the files anyway. He also said they had a theme from the father of cosmic horror, whatever that meant. Fortunately, the brother’s character name should give him a clue. He searched Nyarlathotep and was quite bewildered about how someone could love these. He searched for the author as well. He read Tomb one of his works and was quite intrigued with the writing style. As someone who worked in the gaming field, he instantly recognized the style had inspired many masterpieces of the genre.
His curiosity was satisfied and sufficiently intrigued by the concept he started to watch the rest of the events with more enthusiasm. He watched as they regrouped and with a wave of Delilah, they were consumed by darkness, only to reappear in another town. Teleportation from darkness was an interesting skill. It was all the more interesting because a famous pro player had the exact divinity. He wondered if they would develop differently because one was evil. With a million followers and the divinity of a pro player she had potential, he surmised. He had to skip here because it was the same routine. He was thinking they would do this a second night when he watched some people coming out of town. He found this was the second category of dreams. The fae introduced herself as the queen of the night serving the evil goddess Raven a member of the Azathoth pantheon. He doubted the pantheon thing was real because the trio of siblings could not have reached myth tier 1 yet. The interesting part was that even a cursory glance told him that they were selected. They gathered outside the town. Raven appeared and took them to a lake in the forest. It was a beautiful scene the moonlight reflected on the lake. These people gathered, and they manifested. The trio of siblings each took the manifestation part of avatar skills to another level. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
He had seen players challenge the limitation of the skill. As long as it was generally like a human body to not harm the person in reality, it was allowed. He had seen all sorts of strange things. The player trying nudity was the least particular among them. Still, he had to give it to the trio, they had managed to pull something of an entire nature altogether. Elijah looked like a human thin enough to show the ribcage, if the human had dark blue rough skin, had hands growing out of his hands, replaced the head and hair with tentacle, and had a hollow wound on the tentacle as the face. Raven had taken a wispy, shadowy form with eyes, mouths, and tentacles swirling. The mouths looked as if a worm was hollowed, layered, and had serrated teeth on every layer of the body like a grinding machine. Mark was the most normal. He seemed like a human wearing a yellow robe but had tentacles as hands and feet. He supposed they were generally shaped human, regardless of the effects and tentacles. He did not think they were able to move the tentacles unless it was part of a skill.
They guided everyone to form a circle, one by one the NPCs would go to the center where they would pledge allegiance. The siblings had used whisper to another level too. When the NPC would hear overlapped maddening whispers of the three at the same time, they would be acknowledged to have passed the trial and would be blessed then rejoin the circle. Maybe it was the timing or environment, but this ceremony was strangely fascinating.
This ceremony was not the only one happening. There were two for the new apostles. Nyarlathotep’s apostle was also present. Then the groups were returned to town.
The three canceled their manifestation and went deeper into the forest. Mark used a skill that caused a miasma to spread in the forest. Elijah and Raven tamed monsters with some skill that caused them fear. They spent a night doing this. In the morning it was clear what they had done. Monsters went berserk and the tamed monsters led them. A huge wave of monsters attacked. Each of the three towns had their hands full. It was amazing. At this stage of the game, no one knew how much power each town possessed. The shield covers the city, the mages, and mercenaries or adventurers. The three still were adding to the wave of monsters more and more. Jason had seen the light of the leveling up several times. Mark had not been careful enough. He had realized they were probably leveling up this disaster somehow. Whether it is fear, madness, or the calamity itself, it helped evil gods level up.
He thought it was something of a grand leveling spree for evil gods. He doubted it would be something more but the cities resisted well, some people seemed immune to these dreams others were blessed and were helping. There were saints and even a player actively helping the soldiers. When the night came and the battle continued he had a change of heart. Raven brought the trio to the cities once again. During the next day, the towns became chaotic. Assassination attempts one after another, unrest, and the NPCs present that night tried to take over the towns. He checked the dream files again. He brought up the third category of dreams. Its variations were a lot more than the others, some told of a prophecy, the others told of a terrible future or salvation. Most of them had the mother goddess, the one whose body was the world, or the lord of chaos whose body was the pillar of the world in them. He had not read the game chronicles nor did he know anyone else who would at the start of the game, but Mike’s files were through. He did not remember Mark being that through, he guessed this must be the work of the genius brother, he bragged in high school about.
Taking over the town was faced with the town’s most powerful defenders. The knights who had sworn to protect the noble. Each town had a mayor and this mayor was a noble. The towns’ mayors would mostly be Counts. For a minor town, it could also be barons. Above count were nobles like marquises and dukes which had vast territory, but they did not manage. Many counts were vassals to them. They usually lived in capital cities or prosperous towns.
Players usually appeared in towns of sufficient scale to be governed by a count. As was the case of these three towns. Though the focus of the movie was the three towns he was sure the beast tide would destroy many villages.
The solution to knights was simpler than he imagined. The players were not present, saints and captains defending assassinated or weakened, and the apostles came. They were powerful but still not enough to overwhelm the knights. The knights, however, were not blessed and were fair game to gods’ spells. The cults quickly took over the towns.
Mark clearly had shown enthusiasm in editing some parts but they were amateur. However, that was why it was his job to edit them. If he worked far more than the amount Mike had paid him for and if he used the company’s resources to do it, was because first he was morbidly fascinated, second he was a fan of Delilah, and third he would rather the company stayed alive for a bit more. At least did not go through bankruptcy till he retired. It was hard to hope for that when Camilla pushed to enter this highly competitive world and yet lacked the budget to do so but now he was seeing hope. Their budget may be lacking for a full-fledged pro team but they could support Mike’s group.