After brooding for a bit, he thought to ask the former leader of the goatmen another question that had been brewing in his mind. “Yill,” he began, “How is it that you were able to use skills to dodge and counterattack me like some sort of duelist, buff and heal like a cleric, and cast powerful elemental spells like a wizard? You must have used skills from at least three different classes during that battle.”
Yill thought for a moment and then motioned for Dakkon to follow him. “For my life, this again is asking too little.” The two walked into the main hall, past the heaps of battered sculptures, to a pile of rubble right at the back and center of the room. “Dig,” he commanded “I hid it.”
Trest and man pulled apart the pile of crumbled stone, tossing aside bits of ancient art and wall alike. After thirty minutes, a hole remained that was just big enough to squeeze through. Yill wiggled himself in then held up his right hand which streamed forth radiant, cascading light in all directions. Then, Yill led the way down a long, thin passageway which opened into a cubic room with a large altar at its center. Yill set his hand on the brazier to the altar’s left side and it burst into flame. He did the same to the brazier on the other side. Dakkon looked up and saw that on the altar there lay a large stone tablet with characters that were unlike any language he’d ever seen. “Read,” Yill said.
“Yill, I can’t read it. I’ve never seen that language,” Dakkon protested.
“Read it anyway,” said Yill.
Dakkon sighed and looked back up at the ancient characters chiseled in stone. “It’s impossible, Yill. I just don’t—” Dakkon’s eyes glazed over as he looked far beyond the script, the tablet of stone, and the room in which he stood.
The foreign characters began to glow and dance before him. Images filled his mind. In an instant, he watched the story of one man as he went on adventure after adventure beyond the scope of any epic. He traveled the world performing miracles and uncovering lost lands. He was a master, unparalleled in anything he set out to do. Eventually he grew old and weary, then—again—he traveled the world, creating large stone tablets which told pieces of his story and hid his closely guarded skills before finally making his way to the great stone hall of his own construction. There, he sat atop a throne and spent his time watching the world as he withered away. Dakkon’s mind was then filled with a voice. He heard a weathered, raspy, and very old voice say to him and him alone, “This tablet holds the secret of my class, the edgemaster.” A window appeared before him.
|You have discovered a relic: Mordurin’s Class
|Would you like to make the class ‘Edgemaster’ your primary class?
|Note: You cannot remove this class.
|Yes No
A rare class that belonged to what appeared to be the most successful human to ever walk this world? Dakkon wanted it more than anything he could think of. Why, though, did it give him an option to refuse? He was aware that any player could change their class during a period of downtime. They could even have two classes at once if they didn’t mind taking a 30% loss in power for the versatility it provided them. Dakkon couldn’t think of any reason to refuse, so, of course, he accepted.
The old man’s voice grew stronger, and younger, “Close your eyes and be reborn, edgemaster.” He closed his eyes and made the connection that had been lingering at the back of his mind. Mordurin must be the name of the unknown wizard who first revealed Chronicle to the world. He opened his eyes and the world shook.
The ground beneath Dakkon’s feet quaked violently. He could just make out the silhouette of Yill running desperately back the way from whence they came. A rock smashed the left brazier, scattering embers and ash into the air. Dakkon coughed and watched as the whole ceiling fell in on him.
[You have been crushed by falling rock for 8,571 damage. Remaining HP 0/425]
[You have died.]
[You will be barred from reentering Chronicle for 11 hours True Time.]
C
HAPTER 12:
T
IME
O
UT
Corbin pulled himself from his pod and checked the time. It wasn’t even 4:00 yet. Over the last real-world hour, Corbin had met a group of strangers, bonded, and formed a friendship with them. He laughed with them, hunted with them, and together, they challenged a dungeon. They overcame that dungeon, completing a quest that no others had been able to. Only moments ago, Corbin had held an object so rare and valuable that he could have sold it and never worked another day in his life. He had smashed that very object, and felt the real pain of a hard loss. He even found a rare class, one that was possibly even unique to players: edgemaster.
“Chronicle is one hell of a game,” Corbin said aloud, despite his being alone. He didn’t feel tired in the slightest, despite both the stress and elation he had felt in game. He didn’t feel hungry, either. Not even enough time had passed for him to need to use the restroom. He felt shaken and elated. At that moment, there was nothing more Corbin wanted to do than hop right back into the game. He did, however, have another great desire that he could explore while on the outside. He pulled up the wall-spanning virtual display of his AugSys and set to work.
Corbin scoured the internet looking for information on his new class. The first search taught him that Chronicle had hundreds of classes. New classes were created by the game to fill niches whenever the need arose. Because of this, there was no massive class database that listed what each one did. Sure, there was information, but that information almost entirely focused on the most common classes, or a smattered few that less guarded powerful players made public knowledge. The number of players who had made an impact on the world of Chronicle with an exotic class was small enough, but the ones who had done so and shared their secrets? Their ranks were few, indeed. For these reasons, Corbin believed it was possible that other edgemasters could exist, and were just too tight lipped to share what they had learned. He would likely be doing that very thing, after all.
Exploring deeper into the subject, after deciding that searching for information on the edgemaster class was a lost cause, Corbin began to dig up any information he could on the wizard, Mordurin. Despite no plethora of information, the name did appear occasionally in stories, but nowhere did Corbin find any suggestion that the wizard might be the man who stood before the world and revealed the game for the first time. If that connection had been made over the net, he certainly would have found a reference to it.
The unnamed wizard who introduced Chronicle to the world was the topic of seemingly endless speculation. Some believed him to be the character of the uncredited lead developer behind the game. Others believed he was merely an invention of the developers to create a commercial for their new product. Though the rumor mill turned, creating countless stories and suppositions about who the wizard was, the most common belief was that the character—be he player or NPC—was somewhere in the game world. Corbin decided that sifting through, or worse—fully reading, nothing but abundant speculation was a less-than-productive use of his time. Leaving the matter aside for now, he again changed the direction of his search toward information relating to the god whose temple he had liberated… before it all likely fell in on itself, anyhow.
At present, no player had seen a god and provided any credible proof of their encounter, but a lot was known about them. There were 10 in all, and each coincided with a complex system—such as the growing of crops or the conjuration of a living thing—that the game’s basic system AI was in control of. If something happened outside of the normal parameters that the game’s systems expected, then the decision for what the outcome would be was handed upwards to the supervisory system. If that system couldn’t properly determine what a fitting result would be, the final authority, a god, would decide and that would be the end of it. This system, of hierarchical AI passing up difficult decisions to the next rung of authority, meant that Chronicle was very good at efficiently dealing with unexpected scenarios, and most suspected it would be a very rare for any matter to require intervention by the divines. By some accounts, this makes gods extremely weak and inconsequential parts of the average gameplay experience, but others argue that the ability for a single entity to have absolute authority over how existence itself functions is power without measure. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Whatever Kuln, God of War, decides… or perhaps that question is better suited to Nokti, God of Destruction.