FB: Chapter 42 – Guild Preparation

“Everyone has their general orders, which won’t be changing that much except with a focus on this town going forward. Now we need to discuss the most important topic, the upcoming guild quest,” I said and pulled out the scroll and handed it to Don Anthony first. “There will be increasing monster waves over the next 36 in game days, or 9 real world days.”

“As for the failure to keep the information contained, that is fine for such a large operation. In fact I anticipated it,” I said with a grin. “I will be issuing a quest through the NPCs. One of the benefits of having the Lord title. Anyone who slays monsters around town for the next nine days, will get a small additional monetary reward. The stronger the monster the greater the reward. We will also have our guild members focus only on areas close to town, forcing away weak players.”

“What will that be costing the guild?” Number Crusher asked.

“I will be paying for that personally, since if we defend the town, I will gain the title of Baron and a portion of the tax revenues. Of course the guild building won’t be taxed along with guild members.” One of the ways to encourage non-guild people to leave an area.

“I will also be hiring high level NPCs to protect the town itself. Don’t cause trouble and pass this along to the members as well. How many members do we have right now?” I asked.

“There are currently 1,585 internal members, with only 523 of them being over level 30 across 87 teams. We have 8,512 external members above level 30 across 1,027 teams,” Kill Blade said.

“That is low. Any movement from other guilds?” I looked at Joker Seven.

“No large scale mobilizations, but they have people in town to see what is going to happen and take notes,” Joker Seven explained.

“That is fine. Just pay attention if they mobilize a large amount of their combat power to enter this town. Especially near the end of the quest. That is when they are most likely to make a move to sabotage things. Since that will be when the boss monster arrives. Storm Sword, you and your team will be responsible for distracting the boss monster while I confront it directly. At that time our guild members, both internal and external, will cordon off the area and keep everyone else back. Until then, they are free to kill monsters and earn money along with everyone else. Look at performance and have different teams work together to build up cohesion and work out organizational problems ahead of time,” I said.

“Who will be taking command of our forces during this time period since we don’t have a Combat Officer?” Hex Smith asked.

“Kill Blade will be in charge as the Operations Officer while I retain overall command,” I said.

“Can I hire more staff members to assist?” he asked.

“How many positions do you want?” I asked. He paused to think about that question.

“Ten. Since that will give me flexibility in assigning teams to each person to oversee in more detail and allow for enough operational flexibility,” he said.

“Approved. Arrange for the staff contracts for them. Hiring is up to the Officer in charge of each department. I will not be micro-managing you unless absolutely necessary, only the level of staff that is allocated in order to keep costs under control.”

“How dangerous is this boss?” Storm Sword asked.

“Most likely around level 100. That is why I will be responsible for killing it. But I will need people to distract it. Even human sacrifices or dog piling to draw aggro from the boss monster. I would prefer not to have to tank those kinds of hits while I focusing on killing it. I am the DPS for the fight,” I said, and Storm Sword nodded.

“DPS?” Don Anthony asked.

“Damage per second. I am responsible for stacking on the damage and killing the boss monster. Which means other people need to be in charge of distracting it and providing cover while I act,” I said.

“Should we look at getting help from other guilds?” Isabella asked.

“No. They would ask for payment or something we don’t want to give up. We can handle this ourselves. In the future I might invite other guilds for specific quests. But for now, we need to show that we can win on our own,” I said. The investors were paying attention, and I needed to deliver or there would be huge problems.

“We risk inviting in spies,” Joker Nine said.

“Try and root them out, but that is just something that will happen with large guilds like ours. That is why we have Champions, for top secret maneuvers that need to be done without the information leaking. The remaining members are just to boost our numbers, generate wealth, and have a large recruitment pool to draw from. Enough ants can bring down a lion,” I said.

The discussion continued and the officers opened up more. I had to provide firm directions for them since if I was weak, then they would run amuck, and not know what to do.

“What are our long-term plans?” Isabella asked.

“Keep growing. If there is another large guild mobilization then I will call for it, but until then, it is best that people focus on getting stronger themselves and we don’t micro-manage things. This town will be our primary base of operations for quite a while. There might be more things for Champions to assist me in, but those won’t require a full guild mobilization or to be discussed with everyone beforehand,” I said.

Once we completed this quest and I was a Baron, then I could purchase a Guild Charter for 100 platinum. That would allow the guild to have up to a million members. After that was a Guild Sanction for over a million members along with other requirements. That would be the overall goal of the guild, to become a super guild and have more Champions as part of the guild to form an elite combat force.

That would come with time. My main priority after this guild quest was to focus on my personal strength. I needed to get more special legendary skills. I had Blink, but there were several more than I wanted to really give me an edge in combat. As the Lead Champion of the guild I needed to stay ahead of everyone else in terms of combat ability. With my actual skill being lackluster, that meant using other methods to increase my combat performance.

Then there were key items like the Travel Passport to go after and high level quests that I could take on. A lot of information about special legendary skills was hidden behind quests. I only knew a few of them and my knowledge would soon be running out. I would then have to follow up on rumors and partial information that I had. There was also the risk QAI would change things up, since it was adaptive.

Then there was the Poison title. I had to collect 9 more legendary poisons and have them applied to my character all at the same time. I disliked collection quests. They were incredibly time consuming and annoying. I had paid money to information brokers in the capital for any and all information they could get about these poisons to speed things up and I knew some information previously.

I had leads on possible legendary poisons but getting them without dying was the real challenge. But that was another reason to get the Travel Passport, so I could reach those monsters, since none of them lived inside the Human Empire. Almost all monsters within the border were less than level 120. After level 120 was when things started to get crazy, which was about the time I had come back to the past.

Exponential as a game was quite fair up until that point. Once a person left the Human Empire, then the training wheels came off in terms of combat and skills. There was a very sharp difficulty curve after that point. I had read the reports and seen the videos but had never reached that level to participate myself.

That was why I needed to stack as many advantages as possible while I still had time. The poison title would have to wait, since that was too much of a commitment right now. The champion title chain would take time, since I would have to beat a lot of people. The slayer title was maxed out as far as I was concerned. Even if it wasn’t, there was no way I could find a monster that I could cheese like I had done with the Mega Oozes. The noble title was tied to the guild’s activities.

I would get the special legendary skills I knew about and then focus on leveling them up. I would need to get two copies of each special legendary skill and to max out their experience to get an Artifact level skill. The eighth rank after that, Heirloom just required around 52 million experience. No one had gotten a ninth rank divine skill, and the requirements were unknown, there were guesses but nothing had been confirmed.

My guess it was some kind of special quest or item that was needed, which would be quite annoying to complete to get the final rank of the skill. Supposedly getting the ninth rank would change the skill, similar to how special legendary skills were different from epic skills.

The amount of experience needed meant I would have kill massive hordes of high level monsters very quickly. That was why poison and Luck worked so well together. I also needed to increase my max poison resistance. Having it at 80% was good, but not good enough. I needed to get that to 100% or even beyond. That way I could heal with poison attacks. That way me being poisoned turned into a self heal.

I didn’t know if it was actually possible since it was only theorized last time, but if I managed to reach that point, then it would be a watershed moment. While my enemies lost health, I would gain health. I would just need to last for 100 seconds to deal 100% worth of poison damage to a target with critical attacks since it was percentage based. Higher level monsters had a lot of health. That was where critical hits became even more important to deal percentage-based damage.

Even if critical hits from poison only dealt 1% worth of damage per second at the very most, it would still kill anything eventually. My Luck was already insanely high, since I had invested all my bonus stat points into that one specific stat. My poison crit chance was currently around 16% from Luck and skill shards, which meant that one out of every six poison attacks would either deal double damage or 1% of the target’s health, whichever was greater.

A shame there were no super critical attacks with poison. But that would be way too broken. Only physical or certain magical attacks that hit a target’s body could be super critical based on how there were layers to monsters and people determining damage, like an onion. Poison didn’t target one specific area, which was why super critical attacks weren’t possible. The same with other magic based attacks that hit a wide area or the target as a whole unless they took out the target in a single attack.