Chương 145: Catastrophic Instability

Meno woke to the deeply offensive bleeeep, bleeeep of his phone alarm and came within seconds of throwing it across the bedroom for five more minutes of sleep. Then he remembered Fractera, which got him moving. He dragged himself out of bed, dressed as quickly as his half-awake coordination allowed, brushed his teeth, and checked the time while trying to convince his brain that six hours had been enough.

Technically, Fractera's world-state progression was finishing right about now, but rushing there the instant it opened sounded like a good way to put himself in the middle of every top player on the server. Meno wanted the top groups to disperse first. Once Crownfall, Stormhold, Highbanner, Silverwake, and everyone else had committed to their own routes, objectives, and progression plans, they would be less likely to abandon everything just because he sailed into view.

He had briefly considered not streaming the trip at all and slipping into Fractera quietly, but that would probably annoy his viewers after they had watched him grind toward the opening for days. More importantly, he still had to solve his equipment situation. Showing up wearing Rare III armor would be embarrassing. A knock came from the suite door. Meno ignored it at first, until his phone buzzed a few seconds later. Vivi: let me in She had learned his sleep schedule disturbingly well. Not bad.

Meno opened the door, and Vivi walked past him like she owned the place. She went straight to the living room, opened her laptop, and started setting up before Meno had even closed the door.

"Hey, boss. Yesterday was great. You were number one basically everywhere, and you even got mentioned in mainstream news."

"Yeah, great. I need to log in right now, so just do your stuff." Meno started toward the capsule, then remembered the problem waiting later in the week.

"I have to go to that Streamline party on Friday."

"I know." Vivi glanced up from her laptop.

"You realize it's in Skyline, not Vernova, right?" Meno stopped.

"Amazing. Just great. No, I did not know that." Skyline meant travel, and travel meant wasted time.

"I still have to go. I also met someone called Rina here at The Pearl. Don't know her last name. I invited her." Vivi's hands stopped over the keyboard.

"That Rina?" Meno turned back.

"You know her?" Her expression told him she absolutely did. Meno raised a hand before she could continue.

"I promised I wouldn't look her up, so don't tell me. It must be something boring if she was embarrassed about it. Doesn't matter." Vivi looked like she was struggling not to laugh.

"She's doing quite well for herself. Still, as the saying goes, nobody is ever rich enough, so it could still be about boosting her numbers. Your decision either way. I'll clean up your mess."

"I'm not worried at all." That reminded Meno of another travel problem. He grabbed his phone, forwarded Vivi a contact number, then nodded toward her screen.

"I just texted you Morlando Felt's assistant. Forgot her name. She was really rude last time we talked. Tell her I want to borrow Morlando's private jet for Friday, and it better be in Vernova. The fast one with high movement speed. I'm not wasting half the day flying back and forth."

"You know Morlando Felt like that?"

"Yeah. I'm rank one. Did you forget?" Meno said it like the explanation was obvious.

"We even had a heart-to-heart. He was so impressed with my skill that he said I could call him for stuff like this. She'll probably try to bounce you off, so don't let her." That also solved another annoyance. Grandpa and the rest of Feltforge almost certainly already knew where Meno planned to go, but borrowing Morlando's jet through the normal assistant chain meant he did not have to call anyone and turn Friday into a discussion. He was not asking permission anyway. Vivi recovered enough to nod.

"Private charter is expensive, but yes, you can afford one yourself."

"I don't want to afford one myself."

"Fine. I'll handle it."

"Cool. I'm off." Meno made it another few steps toward the capsule before Vivi stopped him again.

"You should call Oxy, by the way. She was happy about the shield. I saw it on her stream." Meno slowed but did not turn around.

"She has my number. She can call if she wants. I'm not forcing it. She was pretty clear about what she wanted and why." Vivi let that go surprisingly easily.

"What about Aurelia?" Meno finally looked back.

"What about her? I'm seriously too busy for this right now. She can call too, but I doubt her father lets her anywhere near me again."

"Why not?"

"You were here during her stream meltdown, weren't you?" Vivi considered that.

"Okki dokki. I don't need the full relationship drama. Just keep me informed if something starts affecting your public image." That was probably the best agreement they were going to reach. Meno climbed into the XPro, brought the capsule online, started his stream, and logged into Westmarket. Two seconds later, a tiger was chewing on his leg.

"What the—" The pet vanished, leaving Meno in the middle of the city trying to understand whether he had just been attacked. No player was visible nearby, but a bald NPC almost twice Meno's size stepped out from a side street carrying an enormous axe over one shoulder. [Bronfeneus the Third | Grave Crown Royal Executor | Level 80] Bronfeneus looked at Meno, saluted once, then continued walking like nothing important had happened.

BRO GOT ONE BITE IN beastmaster deleted by Brofeus LEVEL 80 BODYGUARD NPC ten million bounty but the city has HR GC really doesn't care"Thanks, I guess." That answered one question. Westmarket would let bounty hunters take their shot, but Grave Crown would answer by removing their head. Good enough. Now he had to deal with the actual problem. Meno opened his equipment panel.

[Legendary III | Vervenzal's Pursuit] [Rare III | Ashwake Breastplate] [Rare III | Prismscale Leather Pants] [Legendary I | Sleepless Grip] [Legendary I | Dreamchain Greaves] [Rare III | Prismflow Ring] [Legendary I | Ring of the First Dream] [Legendary III | Vervenzal's Last Prayer]"Tragic." At least one part of Pursuit worked beautifully with Sinseeker. [Legendary III | Vervenzal's Pursuit] You deal 100% increased damage against targets outside your melee range. For normal bow usage, that was excellent.

The problem was how the game defined melee range. Weapon reach mattered, which meant a melee Quadrillionator attack would almost certainly disable the bonus regardless of how enormous the weapon became. Pursuit's old double-strike effect was also bad with Sinseeker because it required landing the special Pursuit projectile generated from a melee attack. His gear was a mess. Meno checked his Merchant profession next. Still Level 1. None of the auctions had completed either.

The 48-hour listing self-own remained alive, and his current balance sat at 5, 800, 647g. That sounded like a lot until Marcel wanted 2 million per Legendary III item. He was already missing False Hero's four-slot gearing problem. Meno headed to the auction house and opened the merchant exchange Brad had once mentioned. To Meno, it looked like a second auction interface with extra restrictions, and he still did not understand why it existed.

Selling only to Merchants seemed worse than letting every player bid, unless some profession advantage was hidden in the system. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it He still was not about to read a profession manual. That sounded like hours of suffering, and the normal auction house was more useful anyway. Unfortunately, neither exchange had any Legendary-or-higher equipment listed except his own.

"Guys, let every caster and healer know some big-ticket gear is hitting the auction house." Chat immediately started asking what.

"The healing ring is only Legendary I, but it's a ring and the effect is generic enough that somebody could still use this at Level 100. The caster amulet has uninterruptible casting and spell range. Those stats are always good." He listed both with 4 million starting bids and a 1-hour duration. He was learning. [Legendary III | Vervenzal's Last Prayer] Type: Amulet If you remain stationary for 5 seconds, enter Last Prayer. Moving immediately ends Last Prayer.

While in Last Prayer, your spells deal 100% increased damage. While in Last Prayer, your spell range is increased by 50%. While in Last Prayer, you cannot be interrupted. [Legendary I | Ring of the First Dream] Type: Ring Healing targets above 50% health grants them a shield equal to 50% of the healing done for 5 seconds. Healing targets below 50% health also heals the lowest-health friendly target within medium range for 50% of the healing done.

"If you can't afford those, I'm also listing the Rare gear at 1g bid for an hour. Get on it." [Rare III | Ashwake Breastplate] [Rare III | Prismscale Leather Pants] [Rare III | Prismflow Ring] The cheap listings were bait again, but useful bait. Thousands of viewers could participate in the Rare auctions, which meant screenshots and posts would spread faster and drag more attention toward the expensive pieces too. Meno kept going. [Masterwork III | Drowned Pilgrim's Vitality] went up for 4 million gold.

False Hero was gone permanently, and without Engulf, Meno had no reason to keep gear built around living below 20% HP. He paused on Drowned Pilgrim's Sunker. That one was trickier. Aurelia had tried to warn him about her father, even if she had done it by invading his suite, hijacking his stream, and turning the entire day into relationship PvP. Meno appreciated the warning. He did. He also needed money.

Aurelia could be impossible, the whole situation between them was a disaster, and 4 million gold was currently more useful than a gift she might not even accept. He could find her something else later if she wanted to talk to him again, so Sunker joined the auction at 4 million gold. Finally, he listed Dreamchain Greaves for 1 million gold. [Legendary I | Dreamchain Greaves] Type: Plate Boots Durability: Maximum+++ Defense: High Plate Penalty: -5% Action Speed.

While standing still, all equipped items count as having at least High+ Defense. You cannot be slowed below 80% of your base Movement Speed. The boots were fine, but nothing special anymore. High+ Defense was still worse than Very High, their base tier was only Legendary I, and the slow protection had barely mattered even before Tyrant let Meno become movement-impair immune by switching into Dual-Wielding. He kept Sleepless Grip.

Crownmind could purge control every 10 seconds, but with 10 million gold on his head, letting a group chain-stun him between cooldowns would be incredibly stupid. Sleepless Grip had already saved his life before. Everything else could become money. Meno should have listed all this crap before sleeping, but he had forgotten. Another fail, although the timing was not terrible. Most players still did not have 250, 000 Reputation, which kept Marcel's Legendary III equipment out of reach.

Even when they reached it, the faction vendor gear was deliberately weaker than proper raid equipment. Epic faction pieces had offered huge six-stat PvP packages, but the higher rarity tiers did not simply scale that layout upward. Solar had clearly prevented players from replacing raid progression by farming gold and Reputation forever. Masterwork dungeon gear was also a little worse than Legendary raid loot, so The Lost Temple still offered good value.

People just did not have time for it anymore, because levels mattered more. Meno now had so little equipped that he almost looked like False Hero again. He mounted the Gravecycle and headed toward the Military Quarter. Before spending millions, he needed data, because Tyrant did not scale around Attack Speed the way old Swing Master had. Chain gain was bottlenecked behind Quadrillionator's 10-second cooldown, which made Cooldown Recovery look incredibly valuable.

Unfortunately, CDR seemed to occupy the same premium stat tier as Action Speed. Solar did not hand either out generously. The training yard was busy when Meno arrived. Grave Crown soldiers in yellow-accented armor practiced across the field while several players used nearby dummies. NPCs saluted as Meno passed but otherwise left him alone. Meno equipped Sinseeker beside an unused target dummy and glanced at the surrounding players.

"I really hope this thing doesn't decide one of you is technically closer." The homing property was funny until it murdered somebody in a safe zone. He stripped off his remaining equipment to remove any minor Action Speed modifiers and pulled up a 30-second timer.

"You can't math this by feel. Everyone records their tests anyway, so stream is the calculator." Meno started firing point-blank. Every draw generated a glowing arrow automatically, so there was no quiver management, but the bow still had a defined firing rhythm. Meno pulled and released as fast as the game allowed until the timer ended. Then he clipped the segment from his own stream.

"Guys, count the attacks." Chat produced dozens of different answers. 44 46 45 47 YOU MISSED ONE bro just count frames 45 EXACTLY Meno replayed it at half speed because he had lost count himself.

"Definitely 45." That gave him the answer.

"So two-handed bows cap at 1. 5 attacks per second by default. That matches two-handed axes exactly." Meno rested Sinseeker against one shoulder.

"Which means the bow has around twice the base damage profile of a one-handed sword." Chat immediately started theorycrafting Xenocide.

"Yeah. It means Xenocide with a bow should be a big single-target DPS gain too, because it gives ten main-hand weapon-damage hits in 3 seconds regardless of the weapon's actual attack rate." The ammunition effect was another question.

"Magic Piercer probably doesn't apply because Xenocide isn't firing arrows. It's using weapon damage. Best setup might be Quadrillionator or some huge two-handed mace before pressing it, assuming Massive weapons have even slower normal attack speed." Meno expected something around 0. 5 to 1 attack per second for Massive.

He should have bought cheap test weapons before coming here, but too many things were happening, and he kept skipping basic preparation because the next idea looked more interesting than the previous one. At least the class fantasy was becoming clear. Tyrant was not about finding one weapon and swinging it forever. It was about carrying an arsenal and constantly choosing the right configuration.

Meno remounted, found the nearest ordinary weapon vendor, and bought a Common I Two-Handed Axe for an amount measured in bronze. The NPC handed it over with visibly shaking hands, apparently assuming that the first Tyrant and current ten-million-gold criminal wanted the starter weapon for some sinister purpose. Meno almost felt nostalgic. At launch, a Common I or II sword had been his entire life while he fought boars in front of fewer than twenty viewers. It had been true misery.

He returned to the training yard and reopened Quadrillionator before testing it. [Quadrillionator] Active. Cooldown: 10 seconds. Dying refreshes the cooldown. Combine one one-handed weapon, one two-handed weapon, and one ranged weapon from your inventory or equipped slots into a temporary Massive weapon and equip it. The combined weapon counts as all three categories, inherits the combined item modifiers of all three weapons, and can be used for both melee and ranged attacks.

Its Damage Tier is equal to the lowest Damage Tier among the three weapons used. Results vary based on the weapon types used. Melee hits with Quadrillionator gain 100% Defense Pierce. Quadrillionator remains active until canceled. Lasts for one attack.

"Here goes nothing." Meno selected Vervenzal's Verdict, Sinseeker, and the Common I axe. He was about to create the strongest Common I weapon in Veyrath history. White light burst between the three items, then darkened into violent crimson as the weapons twisted together.

The cheap axe head split down the center and peeled apart into mirrored blades, Sinseeker expanded until its limbs were roughly twice their normal size, and Vervenzal's Verdict drove straight through the middle to become the weapon's forward point. When the light disappeared, Meno found himself holding the dumbest weapon he had ever seen.

Two broad axe blades flared outward at the top, framing Verdict's blade as an oversized central spear point, while Sinseeker stretched horizontally beneath them and formed a gigantic bow around the shaft. Massive weapons were apparently already larger than ordinary two-handers, and then Weapon Master added another 100% Weapon Size because Quadrillionator counted as two-handed.

The finished thing stood roughly three times Meno's height, and from the grip at the bottom, he could not even physically reach Sinseeker's string. Every nearby soldier and player had stopped to look. [Common I | Quadrillionator] Type: Massive Weapon Sinseeker Vervenzal's Verdict Defective Component: Two-Handed Axe Catastrophic Instability Chat immediately focused on the last line. DO NOT SWING THAT why did you put that trash axe into it LMAO that is a warning PBG PLEASE READ WORDS Meno adjusted his grip.

"Maybe using the cheap axe wasn't the best idea ever." The Massive weapon felt extremely heavy even with his Level 70 warrior stats. His real body would not have been able to lift the thing at all, but Veyrath let him control it without much trouble. Meno raised the weapon overhead and brought it down toward the training dummy. The swing was slow enough that he felt the cap immediately, taking close to 2 seconds and landing around the 0. 5-attacks-per-second base range he had expected.

Then the axe head hit the dummy, and the entire weapon exploded. A deep concussive blast threw Meno backward hard enough that he landed flat on his back with most of his HP missing. Crimson fire erupted from the shattered weapon at the same moment, spread across his body, and ignited the ground around him. [Cursed Flames: Sinseeker]"Oh." Meno used Crownmind, but nothing happened. The effect was not a normal debuff.

It behaved more like an environmental effect, burning straight through his HP while Inexhaustible desperately regenerated 10% per second below half. It was not enough. [Common I | Two-Handed Axe destroyed.] Meno burned into a charred husk. Defiant triggered. [Defiant: You have been resurrected with 1 HP and 100% Absorption.] For one brief moment, the cheat death looked like it had saved him, but then the crimson flames moved across the ground like snakes, found him again, ignoring the Absorption.

Meno died a second time. [You have died.] Death Penalty: 10, 000g HE DIED TO HIS OWN WEAPON THE BOW IS CURSED LMAOOOO DEFIANT GOT FARMED TOO COMMON I AXE KILLED RANK ONE BEST TYRANT TEST YET Meno respawned in Westmarket's main square and remained still while his brain caught up with what had just happened. The weapon had blown itself apart, Sinseeker had set him on cursed fire, Crownmind had failed, Defiant had resurrected him into the same fire, and then his own build had killed him again.

His eyes moved to the death penalty.

"Why 10K? Above sixty should have been 1K tops." Then Meno remembered the obvious problem: he was Level 70 now. Getting killed by his own weapon was already embarrassing. Getting killed twice by his own weapon in front of millions of viewers was worse. If the bounty system had somehow allowed that death to count as a claim, he would have been ruined. Meno straightened and adopted the tone of somebody whose experiment had gone exactly according to plan.

"All planned. Limit testing." Chat became even more hostile.

"Remember, this is important. Now we know not to combine cursed Mythic gear with trash, and Catastrophic Instability means unusable. This is how science is done." peer review says IDIOT science cost 10K sinseeker curse confirmed hidden stat the broker did warn you DO IT AGAIN WITH COMMON II The experiment had still produced useful information. Quadrillionator cared about component quality beyond merely taking the lowest Damage Tier, and Sinseeker's curse was not just the Sin Broker messing with him.

He needed real weapons, preferably very good ones. His auctions had another hour to run anyway, and his stomach was reminding him about his missed pizza rotation.

"Anyway, quick food break. Then we collect the auction gold, buy gear, and head to Fractera." By then, the opening rush should be dispersed enough that he would not sail directly into every top guild at once.

"Just a quick reminder: I still have the two-hour logout buff. Only try to ambush me if you need a break."