Chapter 93: Gamebreaker’s Offer, The System’s New Clothes

Faust dropped his axe as the last knight fell. Then dragged it through the disturb dirt to Nirvana, who had been slashed across the chest and held her up gently. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"Sorry," he said as she winced. "Is it healing?"

"Yeah, but I need more blood."

Faust turned and met Thalia’s eyes. She was busy gathering the armor and weapons of the knights as Faust suggested, but she walked over quickly.

"Okay just pretend we’re hugging," Faust whisper, laying her head against his neck. Thalia covered for them on the other side.

He felt fangs prick his neck softly before they sunk in. The feeling was more pleasant than painful. A predator’s way of fooling its prey in death. Nirvana’s arms tightened around him.

"Is she dying?" A petulant voice asked from in front of him. Faust and Thalia tensed up but didn’t move much.

He raised his head to meet Jason’s eyes and smiled. "Just hurt. The healing potion is doing its thing."

Faust reached for his axe casually and Jason followed his hand and smiled.

"We’re all friends here, aren’t we? Sorry to intrude on an intimate moment with your woman."

Faust was actually pretending to be worried to stop Jason from coming closer. He preferred to keep details of Nirvana’s Schema a mystery since he used the same one a lot.

"What do you want?" Faust asked.

"You’ve been collecting those memory fragments. I wanted to ask how many you have and if you’ll work with me to pool them together."

Two, Jason’s lieutenant, nodded slowly from the side. "You even got lucky and beat their leader. So we’d like to be friendly and shit."

Faust considered breaking the fool’s nose,but just scoffed.

He hadn’t looked into his spatial bag to check the fragments yet, so he didn’t know what they did.

But he had a feeling they knew how it worked.

This is some kind of scam. I guess I’m not the only one getting info from the viewers....

"Let’s meet up later and talk about this," Faust muttered, pretending to glance down at Nirvana worriedly.

"The bitch will live either way," Two said, rolling his eyes. "We don’t have time to—"

Jason held up a hand. "We’ll have a full break before the fifth wave.... Hopefully. But make sure to find us soon. We have a lot of fragments to share too."

Yeah, sure. How many do you have? Five?

Faust had killed twenty four of the fifty knights that came to the western safe zone. Together with the ones he got from before, he had forty memory fragments.

Jason couldn’t brush his leg in terms of loot.

When they left, Nirvana perked up and glanced in that direction. "Was my acting good?"

"Amazing," Thalia said with a thumbs up. "Your clothes are not so amazing right now."

She glanced down at her ruined jacket and shirt and back up at Faust, who was fixated on the skin showing through. He met her frenzied eyes and blinked.

"I saw nothing."

Nirvana bit him again.

◇◇◇

[Congratulations! You have ended the fourth wave and our first Patron event! So many of you losers are still alive. Great! That means i don’t have to use as many resources as projected]

[Our viewers are very pleased with Novice Village #1. You guys are truly number one. **winks**.]

[Anyway, you will receive more rewards from patrons along with invites to one-on-one talks, interviews or special training sessions, but choose wisely. Time is short.]

[I, with the support of my sponsors, have made the decision to only allot three hours before the next wave. To keep viewer retention high.]

[Rewards will come an hour before the final wave.]

[We have also received so many donations from Sponsors that the personal streams will soon be active. I, personally(wink), don’t want to, but I can see it might be useful.]

[With that out of the way, we will be doing a recap for our viewers on our current story!]

Faust sat at the edge of the town square with an exasperated look on his face.

Above him, sitting on the edge of a regenerating building, Spider cringed. "I miss the old system. This guys stinks."

"I think it develops with investments made by sponsors," Nirvana said. She was beside Faust, shoulder to shoulder, chewing on the bread that was handed out. "At least that what Kye implied. Ours is pretty young."

"You mentioned that. And the Aural Council," Thalia hummed, remembering something. "So the more money—or I guess resources—it gets the more sentient it becomes?"

Faust nodded. "I hope the next stack of cash it gets makes it less annoying."

They all agreed on that quietly. Faust drank more of the wine that was passed around and laughed.

"This whole situation is just ridiculous." Having more wine than water, fighting actual game monsters and all the other unique aspects of their new lives.

"It’s barely been two days and we’re talking about this bullshit like its sane," Spider remarked.

Greg, who was eating Thalia’s food for her, shrugged. "Human’s are pretty adaptable. I remember when my dad started training me for football. The first week felt like i would die."

"It hasn’t been a week though," Zen pointed out. "Yet everyone’s worried about leaderboards ranks, people watching them on stream... and funnily enough flirting. So many people that just met yesterday are already in relationships."

Thalia laughed out loud, shocking everybody. "Some—oh my god... Somebody’s husband is on earth watching this stream on his knees."

Faust spat the wine all over his trousers, laughing and covering his mouth at the same time. A long bout of laughter overpowered their somberness as they exchanged jokes about some poor guy’s wife.

Greg cleaned his eyes, chuckling one last time before saying. "Its options."

They all turned to him, raising eyebrows.

"Its all about options. I had other things on my mind beside football. Here you do or die. So the adaptation happens faster i guess."

Faust vibed very well with that. It showed the greatest strength of humanity in its simplest form. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter as much.

The recap began.

Ding!

All the system’s screens opened at once. Faust sat up interestedly; this was a good chance to learn about the other players.