Chapter 391: Chapter 328 Hanna Could Be Considered My Daughter

Ash left the gaming pod, his vision a bit blurred, and it was only after rubbing his eyes that he realized he had been crying.

What a miserable day, he had actually been reduced to tears.

Though he had acquired a high-level account, he lacked the experience to command high-difficulty raid parties, let alone having battled in one, so he wanted to see how others led their teams.

With his character’s full achievements and current version’s maxed-out gear, Ash easily slipped into an Extreme Dungeon raid party.

In “Epic,” the game he was playing, high-difficulty dungeons were categorized into Extreme, Illusionary, and Absolute. Extreme was the limit for the average player, Illusionary could only possibly be cleared by professional players immersed in the game for years, and Absolute could only be conquered by Mages.

Ash thought that even if he couldn’t tackle an Absolute dungeon right away, an Extreme dungeon shouldn’t be a problem, right? Moreover, he had specifically studied the guides, checked his character’s combat tasks, and planned to clear the Extreme Dungeon within a day before leading a squad to pioneer the Illusionary one.

But instead, he had had his fill of Evangelist profanity in just one day.

In terms of profanity, Evangelism and Blood Moon each had its own unique flair. After all, the Kingdom of Blood Moon had no parents to speak of, and the Blood Moonians usually resorted to precise, intersecting discriminations based on race, gender, and education. Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Gospel was full of people who had both parents, so Evangelists preferred to hurl insults that revolved around maternal relatives, often involving ancestral shaming across eighteen generations.

Interestingly enough, perhaps because the Gospel commanded a level of reverence akin to a belief system in society, it often became the subject of the insults. Although it didn’t bother Ash, an Evangelist might be broken by phrases like “You’ve been decreed by the Gospel to be the scum of the earth” or “The Gospel has doomed you to a repulsive partner for life.”

In summary, Ash not only failed to clear the Extreme Dungeon today, but he also got thrashed by both the dungeon and his teammates.

The virtual games of Evangelism were indeed fun, but also incredibly difficult. With players immersively controlling their characters within the game, they had to execute tactical movements personally, such as actively avoiding damage zones, looking away to avoid line-of-sight damage, or moving to the correct positions to share mechanic damage while continuing to output damage.

In the old era of Light Screen games, these maneuvers would only be considered slightly challenging; all complex moves could ultimately be done with just a mouse and keyboard.

But within the new era of immersive consciousness gaming, these operations were downright excruciatingly difficult–Ash was either too focused on dealing damage to notice the enemy’s status, or too busy handling dungeon mechanics to monitor his teammates’ well-being.

Every second required full limb movement, and if a foot hit an uneven surface on the ground leading to a stumble, it could directly signal a party wipe.

Not to mention, since everything happened from a first-person perspective, the limited field of vision meant players couldn’t gather all the necessary information and might even collide with teammates, resulting in both going down–Ash had been the direct cause of such painful team defeats several times that afternoon.

Yet, with this masochistic level of difficulty, Ash realized… the enemies in these high-difficulty dungeons seemed a lot like the knowledge creatures from the Void Realm!

Or to put it another way, the skills, traits, and combat styles of the high-difficulty dungeon enemies almost entirely reflected the knowledge creatures from the Void Realm, like the “Extreme Cutting Carp Tyrant Supreme” he faced that afternoon, which was clearly a powered-up version of the Fish-Slicing Dragon.

Though Ash and his teammates had long been able to bat around the Fish-Slicing Dragon like a ball, after the deep and difficult experience with the Extreme Cutting Carp, Ash felt that their strategy for slaughtering the Fish Dragon could still be optimized.

Moreover, since the creatures of knowledge from the Void Realm were varied and diverse, there was theoretically no single solution that would work for all. However, the team response strategies summarized for the “Epic” high-difficulty dungeons were applicable in all situations: scattering, grouping, turning away, taunting, luring… Compared with the mature and detailed team combat system in “Epic,” Ash’s trio might as well have been primitive hunters from the prehistoric era, reliant totally on tacit understanding, and their communication limited to rudimentary signals like “I’ll handle it,” “Don’t move,” and “You go.”

Ash quickly realized that the high-difficulty dungeons indeed provided significant benefits to his command abilities. However, he also felt puzzled: Why did other people play these self-abusive high-difficulty dungeons when they couldn’t team up in the Void Realm?

And then it dawned on Ash: Of course, it was precisely because they couldn’t form teams that after getting severely beaten by the creatures of knowledge in the Void Realm, they wanted revenge in reality!

They trampled on you today, you rally seven brothers to dance on their graves today!

The reason why game enemies took after the Void Realm’s creatures of knowledge was twofold: it was easy to copy and these foes didn’t need any buildup to provoke the Mages’ fury! The underlying rationale might be similar to having fly graphics in urinals.

However, “Epic” was not some Mage education game. At most, Mages could get a rough idea of the attack patterns of knowledge creatures from the game, but combat experience from the raids was almost useless–firstly, in any realm, production Mages far outnumbered Combat Mages, and their own combat power was nothing compared to that of game characters; secondly, raid strategies were based on teamwork, while they were unquestionably loners in the Void Realm, with no chance for connection in the big examination hall of the Void.

It was exactly people like Ash, who could form illegal teams, that could extract meaningful cheating experience from these high-difficulty raid dungeons.

It’s just that this game costs a lot of tears. Just because I was a bit unskilled and caused over a dozen party wipes, which led to the team failing to pass even the first phase of the Extreme Cutting Carp all afternoon, was it necessary to curse that viciously…