Black Dragon Force?

I whispered to Razor: "Ask them if that Black Dragon Marine has anything to do with them. "

"Is the Black Dragon Marine under you guild?" Razor said.

"Yeah! Guess what, I’m a team leader!" The thug looks really proud.

"Ohh! You should told me earlier! Okay my friend, just pay what you can. But this is only for you! Make sure to be gentle with the girls. And of course, remember to introduce me to your other members! It’ll be best if I can get to know your guild master too."

"Sure, sure!" He quickly passed Razor all money he brought, then he walked to me with a wicked grin.

Razor sent me a signal from behind him. "Take him to the bush in the woods and knock him out."

I dragged the thug to the said location with the best smile I can gather. When I’m sure no one can see us, I immediately covered his mouth and punched at his temple, sending him to the ground.

Good. He's still alive. If I kill him now he will respawn in the city and send alarm. I sent a message to tell Razor that I'm done.

"Stay there. I'll try to draw information from his men. Keep your eyes on that guy, knock him again if he ever wakes up. I'll leave this channel open so you can hear us too." (*)

As he said, I'm now hearing one of the minions speaking to Razor.

"Where did you find all these gear buddy?"

"I hired people to search all over the land! But of course this is nothing compared to your guild. You know, I saw your fleet this morning. I hope I can be there someday!"

"You bet! We aren’t called the number one guild in Japan for nothin’!"

The man began to boast about his guild, and this means a perfect chance for Razor to get what we want to hear.

"I heard that your guild has many of those powerful crystal cannons. However do you get them? I’m trying to get a ship and have some fun over the China seas, I can do better if I had one!"

The thug hesitated a bit. "Uh, I can tell you but don’t tell anyone else! This is our secret."

"Of course, of course!"

"Do you know about city upgrades?"

"No?"

"Listen buddy, when a guild has their own city the guild master can appoint a mayor for it. This will be the master himself by default. The mayor can access the city management page where he’ll see the city attributes. They include ‘Development’ and ‘Strategic Importance’. Development depends on the city's tax income, and Strategic Importance is based on warfares. It increases as you defeat other players attacking your city, or when your guild attacks other cities."

"What exactly do they do? Tell me please!" He isn’t getting to the point and I'm becoming inpatient.

"Why the hurry? We have all the time." The thug took out a bottle and sipped it.

"Alright...where was I again?"

Shoot.

I just noticed the thug leader groaning, so I vented my anxiousness by punching his nose.

Oops...I think I broke it.

"The city attributes?" Razor reminded him.

"Oh right, that one. The city levels up once the two numbers reach a certain limit. When that happens the attributes will drop back and increase from the start again, until the next level. You can check how much you need from the management page...I can't remember them. A city starts from level 0 settlement. From there it goes all the way to level 19 settlement, then it's level 0 village, next is hamlet, town, then main city. A level 19 main city will then become level 0 metropolis. There are only 10 levels for this. When the metropolis becomes level 9, you choose to upgrade it to one of these: Fortress, Commercial Center, Traffic Hub, Religion Ground, Magic Center, Hall of Knowledge, Monster Hive."

"That sounds...complicated. But you didn’t tell me how you armed your ships."

"Patience!"

Man, the guy is enjoying this.

"These different structures have their own unique buildings. I'm not sure what exactly though. Last time I heard, there are only 3 cities that made this far in the entire game. One in Japan, one in China, and one in...Germany I think? Both China and Germany turned the city into Religion Ground, we Black Dragon Force owns the third one, the Hira City. The place is a Hall of Knowledge now."

I asked Red Mon in our team channel: "There is only one player city in China now right?"

"Yeah, that Present Town you seized for us. We built it into Religion Ground. This gave us a huge buff to our healing skills, our Priests and Priestesses can learn a lot more new skills than other people too. But this is only limited to our guild members. The skills will disappear when someone quits."

The thug is still speaking. "The unique structure in our city is called the Tower of Truth. There is only one thing inside the tower, the Door of Truth. You walk to the door, make a wish and enter it, then you’ll be taken to a special place. The door can only be opened once everyday. We used it like 40 times or so, and every time it leads to a different place. Sometimes in the middle of monsters, maybe inside a maze, or get dumped into a tidal wave, volcano, flood or all kinds of troubles. Anyway, if you can get past the trial you will be rewarded with the knowledge you wished for. Things said, the result is always a little different than your actual wish but, it's still really helpful ."

"That sounds really great my friend!" Razor flattered. And apparently it worked.

"You know what, I’ve been in there twice! It’s really dangerous too. Our guild gathers hundreds of good men each time but only a few can return alive! Killing monsters is the easiest task among all, and is the only task that we passed every time."

I instructed Razor: "Ask about the location about that door. Let's see if we can steal it. Or at least we can tear it down."

Razor: "Woah you must be a really strong player then! Where is this Tower of Truth? I want to have a look!"

"What, you never been to the Hira City before? You don’t have to go inside the city to see the tower. That thing's huge! But you can’t get into the tower mind you. We always have four guards at the gate, hour shift. You must get our master's approval to enter."

"Sorry man, as you can see I’m new in this game so I don’t know much yet."

Razor has been leveling up with us in China, and there's no ninja equipment drops there so he's still wearing the same setup last time he was in Japan. They surely look like noob gear.

I heard someone huffing behind me. That someone grasped me before I can turn around.

"You got a lot of nerves! Now DIE, BI*CH!"

The other thugs all heard this. Can't hide anymore I guess. I reached around my shoulder and stuck my fingers into the man's eye sockets. I also asked Razor about the pronunciation of a Japanese sentence I'm going to use soon.

When I’m ready, I turned off my translation service, sliced the thug's head off using my claw blade and tossed it towards his team members.

(In Japanese) "He didn’t drop the loot! Let's get out of here!"

The other thugs are frozen in place when they saw their leader's head flying out. My team vanished quickly as I already told them about the plan beforehand. I’m not sure if my speech sounded right but it doesn’t seem the thugs will question about our nationality for now.

We ran for a while until we reached a cave to hide in. It's 6 in the evening, this means 7 in Japan. Most players have gone off to eat.

"Did I say that out right?" I asked Razor.

"Pretty good. I haven't heard real Japanese in Nanjing accent for a while."

"God damn. I think I did fine since I only had so much time to react."

"Did you seriously try to sell us for prostitution back there??" Coin asked him.

"Yeah!" I also had to ask this. "Why the heck did you count ME as one of them too? And--ow! Stop kicking me! Ahh! I mean--I'm sorry!"

I earned a good beating from the girls.

"Aww..So what do we do about that...door?"

"The Door of Truth." Coin continued. "Let's just steal it out. It's made of pure gold right? Then it will sell at least 100,000 crystals as is."

"It sounds like a teleport gate to me. I’m afraid it can't be moved." Merciless shook his head.

"True. Besides how do we get past the guards?"

"Just kill them!" Coin isn’t using her brain again.

"Oh come on. Suppose we can kill them, what will happen when they respawn? If they call for help in their guild then tons of people will come at us." I explained.

"Not quite." Red Moon spoke. "I think we can try it."

"Are you serious?"

"Listen, surely we're strong enough to kill four guards before they can react? We can even try to stun them, so we get the time to get in the tower and do whatever we want. We only kill them if we can’t get them under control. They need 2 minutes to respawn back at the resurrection point, that’s enough for us to break down a single door."

"God. I wish we took Yuri with us." I looked down. "She can use her flute to restrain those guards, which makes this a lot easier."

"But...can’t your mermaid charm people with her song?" Coin suggested.

"...I forgot! " I quickly summoned her. "Aldeina, can you put people to sleep without alarming them?"

"Yes, as long as they don’t have anything to protect their spirit."

"I'm not sure about it. Can you tell me what kind of people use that kind of protection?"

"Advanced Oracles, Paladins wielding holy spells, all Archangels and high rank Divine Demons. Some items can also do this but they're very scarce."

"Let’s try it out then." Zirai said. "I don’t believe some gate guards possess rare items. We can do it if we don’t see those mentioned classes."

"Alright!" I made my decision. "Everyone log off and eat something. Let’s move in the night."

The darkness is the best ally for my Dark Dragon Lord outfit.

Rose is already awake outside. "How's the infiltration going?"

"Good. We already know how they invented all the stuff. Tonight I'll take Red Moon to check out that thing, we either take it back, or destroy it if we can’t. Either way they won’t be seeing it tomorrow."

"Be careful then."

"I'm always careful. Tell Hawk to stall the Japanese ships these days. Run if you encounter any big ones. The more ships you can attract, the less force they can send after us."

"Got it. I already called the room service, take a break."

"Sure!"

---------------

I quickly satisfied my stomach and returned to the game. And it seems everyone is eager to do this.

First, Razor took us into a nearby city. I felt really nervous watching all the players running around me.

Wait, I'm a thief now! Guess I should.

It took some time for us to find the teleport station since we didn’t ask anyone for the location to be safe. Our surroundings only got more crowded when we reached the Hira City. Most players have a "Black Dragon Force" indicator before their names. More than half of what we see here belong to that guild. I don’t think we can get out of here alive if they send every member to catch us!

We walked to the Tower of Truth slowly and carefully. As the thug said, it's so tall that people miles away from the city can see it. The tower is entirely gilded with gold and decorated with a lot of paper figures and sheets. Must be charms they use to repel evil spirits.

They didn’t put the tower at the center of the city, which is good. The buildings nearby aren’t big but are enough to block the tower gate, giving us more cover to do our job.

I first approached the tower with my Phantom Cape on, and call the others over when I make sure there’s no one around to see us. We managed to sneak onto the ceiling of a house just beside the tower.

Four guards are in our sight below us, all human ninjas. I summoned Aldeina to perform her song.

The dim melody lasted for a minute before the four guards slumped to the ground like soft noodles.

We jumped down from our hiding spot. The others ran straight inside the tower, while I carefully placed the four sleeping ninjas into a leaning position against the wall. Even if someone saw them across the street they won’t notice that they've fallen asleep.

"How long can it last?" I asked Aldeina when I finished placing the last guard.

"About 20 minutes."

"Do it again if they wake up."

"I can’t. I can only use the skill once a day."

"Oh, then stay watch. Tell us when it's about time."

"Will do."

I walked backwards into the tower while looking around to make sure no one saw us, then slowly closed the door.

When I turned around though, my legs nearly gave out when I saw the room about 5 square meters wide packed with people. My team went in here before me but they are all blocked near the entrance. So we came here just when the enemy guild is going to do a quest together!

"What's going on?" I asked in the team channel. "Are we discovered already?"

Razor replied:" I think it’s just a coincidence. See, they're all looking at the door in the middle."

I tiptoed a little and saw that golden door standing not far from us. It's half-open too.

"So they just finished a quest? Shit. Why now?"

"I think they're going IN actually. The door wasn't open just now, they must be still waiting to start the quest." Red Moon said.

"Now this is trouble." I looked around the room and estimated at least 800 people in here. We only have seven...we'd never win this by force even with all of our companions’ help.

"Any idea?" Coin asked.

"I do." Blue Wind spoke. "The question is if you guys want to risk it."

"Just tell us. We're cooked anyway."

"Let’s find a chance and run into the door before they can stop us. That man said the door leads to somewhere really dangerous, which means they won't have an easy time tracking us down."

"Let's give it a try then!"

------------------

Well, bugs aren’t rare in this novel anyway.