Chương 77: The PvE Server is Live

[Time]: Day 48, Friday, 09: 00 AM [Location]: Royal Rosas Hunting Reserve · Primary Hub The sky gondola crossed the last stretch of open air, and below them, the terrain transformed. No more manicured resort promenades. No more floating tea gardens or lacquered pavilions suspended in the clouds. The gondola dipped below the cloud layer, and the main island of the Hunting Reserve unfurled beneath the glass floor in one enormous, uninterrupted sweep of ancient, hostile green.

Seven thousand, two hundred square kilometers of dense jungle, folded spatial arrays woven into the perimeter to push the actual navigable terrain past fifteen thousand. In every direction, over two thousand smaller floating islands drifted in slow orbit like broken teeth. A different expansion pack entirely, Hathaway observed. Loading screen was the cable car. Map: significantly larger. Enemy types: unknown.

"Look southeast." Rhode pointed lazily through the glass, toward a cluster of floating islands shimmering with heat distortion. One of them wasn't an island. It was a volcano—active, trailing a permanent column of white steam.

"Milan'thirskaya property. They bought the volcano, hollowed it out, ran the magma through jade coolant filters, and piped the output into seven heated soaking pools. Tasia wanted warm feet after a hunt, apparently. Nobody argued with her about the execution budget." Hathaway stared at the calmly venting caldera.

"They filtered a volcano," she said.

"For her feet," Rhode confirmed. The lobby of the Reserve's primary hub had the organized violence of a very serious operations center that had been tastefully decorated by someone who deeply enjoyed killing things. The walls were lined with meticulously crafted scale-model dioramas—miniature sculptures of the local fauna, arranged in hunting poses—except that every model had been fabricated from the actual bones of past trophies. Tiny articulated skulls. Actual claws, lacquered and mounted. The horns were real.

The props are made of the final products, Hathaway's quality-assurance brain noted. That's a very efficient use of materials. In the dead center of the hall, a holographic topographic sandbox stretched thirty meters in diameter, projecting real-time terrain in perfect relief. Thousands of glowing coordinate points pulsed across it—each one a live tracking tag on something large enough to warrant monitoring. A dedicated map display along the perimeter showed the smaller float islands in individual rotating renders.

"Those." Rhode stopped beside a rack of heavy, rune-inscribed flare guns behind reinforced glass. She tapped the case.

"Signal flares. One shot, and the main board lights up with your position. The club runs a permanent rescue rotation—high-speed broom-riders, thirty-second response time, anywhere on the map." Rhode's expression didn't change.

"Of course, if you actually fire one, they archive the rescue footage and loop it on the Wall of Shame in the members' corridor for the rest of your natural life. Every time you walk in, it plays. No sound, just the clip. On repeat." She picked up the VIP locker key from the front desk.

"Gear up. If you walk into that jungle wearing your everyday street clothes, you'll be chewed into a sieve by the insects before the first dragon gets a turn." [Location]: Locker Room 04 Hathaway stood in front of the full-length mirror, and something in her spine finally unwound. Not comfortable. There was nothing comfortable about the hunting gear. It weighed somewhere between five and six times more than her standard combat uniform, and it didn't compromise on a single gram of that weight.

The inner layer was a high-tension, alloy-threaded shirt stitched through with heavy fiber, its dense micro-weave engineered specifically to catch shrapnel. The main coat was cut from the treated neck-hide of a lesser drake, its joints and vital zones reinforced with overlapping boiled bull-leather and sewn together with steel-and-mithril wire. Twelve waterproof internal pockets. Eight external plate-carrier pouches. Reinforced riding breeches and flat-soled boots with steel toe caps.

Topping it off was a heavy leather tricorn hat, its wide brim subtly lined with an impact-resistant kinetic mesh. Twelve internal pockets. Inventory slots, Hathaway catalogued, pressing two fingers experimentally into the deepest pocket. This coat has an inventory. She looked at her reflection. Armor Class: significantly upgraded. The weight settled around her like a fortification.

It was the deep, animal security of the Onion Knight's armor—all those overlapping rings, impractical and magnificent—crossed with the engineered solidarity of a man being welded into an iron suit for the first time. Hathaway squared her shoulders, watching the leather creak and shift. She couldn't resist. She turned her back to the mirror. Tilted her head over her shoulder, half-lidded eyes, right hand resting casual and confident on the back collar of the heavy coat.

Her left hand reached up, tipping the front brim of the tricorn down just enough to cast a sharp, cinematic shadow over her eyes. The full "box art back pose"—brooding protagonist, city burning somewhere in the unspecified distance, game title watermarked across her shoulder blades. Perfect. Someone should be selling this. Click. The adjacent stall door opened. Rhode stepped out, adjusting the buckle on her left bracer, and stopped.

She took in Hathaway, who was frozen mid-pose, head at a precise angle, eyes doing something atmospheric under a dramatically tilted hat. Rhode's gaze traveled over the display with the unhurried evaluation of someone cataloguing a problem.

"Want me to queue up some epic orchestral boss music for you?" Rhode asked. The question contained a complete absence of mercy. Hathaway's hand dropped from her collar at approximately the speed of falling masonry. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Her toes impacted the soles of her steel-toed boots with the rigid, concentrated shame of a person who has just been witnessed.

She aggressively straightened her coat, cleared her throat once, and stared at the middle distance with the expression of someone who had simply been standing there, existing, doing nothing remarkable whatsoever. Rhode walked past her toward the door, visibly containing something. BANG. The main locker room door banged open.

"The tide of darkness stirs in my blood—" Bella swept in. She had abandoned the Gothic Lolita architectural dress—Hathaway would note this as evidence that genuine bloodlust outranked aesthetic commitment, which was the most comforting thing she'd learned about her cousin to date. The hunting gear had been custom-dyed with thorny vine patterns in deep burgundy. The signature black eyepatch was firmly in place.

Bella covered her right eye with one raised hand and struck a pose that made Hathaway's earlier mirror performance look like anxious fidgeting. Smack. Rhode reached out and slapped the back of her head. The dramatic silhouette disintegrated.

"Save it for the dragons," Rhode said.

"Let's get the hardware." [Location]: The Armory The armory smelled of gun oil, whetstones, rust-proofing grease, and the cold moral clarity of a room that had never once housed anything decorative. Racks of weapons lined three walls. Not display weapons. Working ones. The sort of equipment that existed to solve large, physical, teeth-having problems. Rhode walked straight to the heavy melee section and lifted a full-length greatsword from the rack with one hand. She twirled it once, just to check the balance.

The blade moved through the air and generated a low, sustained whistle that Hathaway's lizard brain registered as threat before the sound finished. Rhode rested the flat of it against her shoulder.

"My first hunt," she said, scanning the edge with professional disinterest, "I was twelve. Brought a double-barrel shotgun. Blew the left flank completely off a Slender-Serpent Drake—small variant, practically a warm-up. Reload speed's garbage for hunting, though. Cold steel gives you more control when you're working through bone." She said this the way other people said I prefer the afternoon train. Bella drifted toward the polearms.

She bypassed six technically superior weapons and selected a massive leaf-bladed spear wrapped shaft-to-socket in blood-red bandages. The spearhead took up a full third of the weapon's total length—less of a spear, more of a glaive designed to function as a cleaver. Bella ran one gloved finger along the edge with the focused reverence of a ritual.

"The Sorrow-Eater," she whispered.

"Standard-issue C-44 Riot Halberd," Rhode said, not looking up from her own weapon.

"The armory has forty of them. They're re-sharpened every Tuesday." The ensuing silence from Bella's direction carried the specific weight of a person choosing, with great dignity, to continue feeling what they were feeling regardless. Hathaway had stopped listening approximately three seconds into the greatsword demonstration, because her eyes had locked onto the far corner of the room and had not moved since. It was a Gun-Axe. One heavy barrel, single-shot, rising from a dense dark-wood handle.

Below the muzzle, suspended at the perfect functional angle: a half-moon axe blade lined with jagged, serrated teeth along the back edge. The whole assembly looked like the answer to a question that the question hadn't finished asking yet. It looked like what someone built when they were told they had to choose between a shotgun and an axe and refused to compromise on either. The inner game designer was not merely interested. The inner game designer was crying. An armory attendant materialized at her shoulder.

"That's the Shatterer Model-VII. Fires 17. 00-caliber armor-piercing slugs—they penetrate scale, then detonate the secondary payload inside the muscle layer." She indicated the axe head.

"The blade is rated for small-variant drake spines. The entire chassis is a mana conductor. Channel enough power into the frame and the output converts to raw kinetic force—Tier-3 to Tier-5 impact equivalent, depending on what you push into it." She paused.

"The drawbacks are significant mana expenditure and the fact that it is, by any reasonable physical standard, extremely heavy." Hathaway closed her right hand around the dark-wood grip. She routed a thin, deliberate current from that vast reservoir directly into the fibers of her arm. Raw pressure—an ocean, redirecting a trickle. The Gun-Axe rose from the rack. She lifted it one-handed, feeling the weight shift and balance in her palm like something that had always been meant to be there.

She swung it once, a short testing arc. The displaced air hit the weapon stand on her left hard enough to topple a rack of short swords.

"I'll take it," Hathaway said. [Location]: Outer Fortress · Jungle Perimeter The cable car ran its tethers all the way down to the canopy and docked at a small fortress of black obsidian and reinforced steel perched right at the jungle's edge. The thick airlock doors unsealed with a hiss, and the jungle announced itself immediately—the damp warmth of wet earth and rotting leaves and something faintly electric underneath. The ambient mana of a place that had resisted every attempt at a yield assessment.

Rhode stepped out and planted the flat of her greatsword in the ground. She did this with the easy authority of someone who had done it a hundred times.

"Hunting Rule One," she said.

"Prioritize your safety by any means necessary." Hathaway had expected something about target selection or tracking methodology. She did not say this.

"That's a surprisingly cautious opening," she offered.

"It isn't caution. It's biology." Rhode tapped the side of her head.

"When Witches first appeared in the records, the natives didn't document us as explorers. They documented us as natural disasters."

"Because when we feel genuinely threatened, our first response is to empty our mana pools into the environment. The historical records from those years describe forest fires that burned for six weeks, a magnitude-nine earthquake triggered by one Witch who was startled by a snake, and at least two confirmed volcanic eruptions caused by individual panicked mages."

"We are too powerful to be thoughtful about it. So protecting yourself aggressively is protecting the surrounding area."

"During the First Witch Civil War—" Bella said, stepping forward. Her voice dropped into the register she reserved for recounting sacred history.

"—the First Ancestor of our very own Ludwig Bloodline was surrounded on all sides by a coalition of traitors. The false queens pressed in. Thousands against one."

"And she looked upon them and said: They think their numbers can swallow me. Let me show them what dwells inside the dark." Bella's eye gleamed.

"She commanded the earth to open, carved a fortress from raw stone and hatred, and lurked within its depths for an entire month while her enemies bled themselves to exhaustion trying to breach her walls." Rhode waited for the speech to finish.

"The Founding Matriarch got jumped by a rival faction," Rhode said, cleanly and ruthlessly dismantling her own family's 1, 500-year-old mythology, "panicked, cast Transmute Mud to Rock, dug a hole, and hid in it for a month until their alliance collapsed." She paused.

"Highly effective tactical maneuver. When in doubt, dig a bunker." Hathaway looked at the jungle ahead and silently committed this to long-term memory. Bunker. Good. Noted.

"Rule Two." Rhode held up a second finger.

"Absolutely no flying. No brooms, no levitation, no flight spells of any kind."

"No aerial advantage?"

"You think the sky is safer than the ground," Rhode said.

"It isn't. Aerial hunting—chasing down dragons in the open sky and dogfighting them—is a completely different, extreme-difficulty sport. We are not playing that today." Rhode pointed up at the dense green ceiling.

"Down here, below that hundred-meter canopy, taking to the air just makes you a target. You won't just fight one wyvern. You will get swarmed. You'd be forced to split your mana and focus three ways—maintaining a complex flight vector, outputting high-tier destructive spells to punch through their magic resistance, and keeping your shields up against highly agile enemies attacking from a full 360-degree axis."

"Most Witches bleed their mana pools dry trying to multitask in the air and end up dropping like stones. Down here on the ground, you have physical leverage, and you have terrain to cover your blind spots." Rhode looked at her steadily.

"Now, all three of us technically have the Arch-Witch-level mana capacity to waste on being stupid in the air. But this is your first hunt. We stick to the standard, highly lethal, ground-based protocol."

"Stay grounded," Hathaway translated.

"Don't pull 3D aggro, and avoid the mana-burn trap."

"Correct," Rhode said. She turned her back to the safety of the perimeter and walked into the shadows of the ancient trees. Hathaway adjusted her grip on the heavy dark-wood handle of the Gun-Axe. Thud. The thick airlock doors hissed shut behind them, sealing with a heavy, final sound that completely severed the clean, artificial hum of the club's generators. Instantly, the oppressive, rustling, predatory symphony of the primeval jungle swallowed them whole. The tutorial area was officially closed.

The PvE server was live. She took a deep breath of the thick, spore-heavy air and stepped past the boundary line.