Agatha The Legendary Guild Master

"Where have you been?"

I was startled by this sudden voice which sharply exploded just beside my left ear. Spontaneously, my spear was lifted, and it went smoothly into the place the sound came from.

The muffled metallic sound came when the spear and the dagger met together, pushing the speaker out of the stealth condition.

"Damn it Rog, I always told you not to speak to me in this way, damn."

"It's your fault for disappearing in this way for so long."

Rog appeared as he was pissed off, even when I returned again, his mood was still off.

"Why are you this angry at me? I told you about my plan already, what is the problem?"

I exploded at him as I told them before I left about my plans, and that was enough to make him not be this mad at me.

"You said it won't take long, it was just a dungeon, that was your words by the letter. Can you tell me why the hell you took three days to finish that dungeon? And now you seemed to come back without gaining anything, plus the castle and the walls are finished and everything is obviously lost.

Rog was furious, mad at me, for reasons I knew he had all the right for, but that didn't explain why he was in this state, this anxious and angry.

"What happened?" I asked directly as I knew all he said were just excuses for his storm of fury at me.

"Everything happened, the castle now controls everything in this layer. No single player can move a step forward without their permission, and guess what? The first and foremost price they chose was us, hunting us down to the last member of our team."

"What?!!!"

I was shocked to the point that my own body trembled, I was angry, so angry right now that I would even destroy this castle brick by brick using my bare hands.

I took long deep breaths one after another, in a failed try to calm myself. Rog had all the right to be angry, I was feeling much more than him right now when I learnt the news.

"Tell me, how bad is it?"

"Very awfully bad, there are only a handful of us alive, and the rest are dead and waiting for your return to revive them."

His words calmed my anxiety for a bit, as I totally forgot that I could return them back to life easily by paying some gold coins.

"How many?" I was stressed.

"Alive? Only ten, me included," he dejectedly replied. The mood was depressing, and right now I felt more pain in my heart.

"What about the players who joined me recently?"

"They either killed, ran away, or shifted gears to the other side."

My eyebrows were raised when I heard this, as this was one of my own secret plans, a plan I improvised in a hurry and performed without any delay.

"I know, I also wondered a lot about how this happened. we may have a mole, or we were tightly watched without our awareness, in the end we lost, badly lost."

I shook my head, as this visit to the sacred lands didn't take the route I planned for. "Don't worry, I will revive them all."

"That's not wise," he said after looking for long at me, "we can't revive them as they will die again. we need to escape, find a way to end this trial for you and leave, or leave even without finishing it."

"Listen," I said before I heard a loud bang coming from far that interrupted me. I turned sharply towards the direction, to see at the distant walls of the castle a large cloud of smoke that rose up after that bang.

It seemed some party wasn't satisfied by this castle and started to take action. Just as I was looking, a second, a third, and a fourth explosions hit the walls in different places.

"Look, they are attacking the castle," one of my surviving players said, pointed out with excitement towards the walls.

"It seems not everyone agrees on the way things are running," I muttered with no feeling of pity or happiness, after all I needed to vent my anger by my own hands, not to let some strangers do it.

"They are just the beginning of the reactions to the new rules," Rog suddenly said.

"New rules?" I muttered.

"Catching you and destroying your strength is considered done by those controlling the castle, so they announced new rules, taxes must be paid as passage fees or else no one would be able to step one foot behind that wall."

"Oh," I muttered as I glanced at Rog, "you still have assassins tracking them."

"Sure, I can't be safe without knowing what they are doing all the time,' he replied with a silly smile like a small boy.

"Great, then we have to…" I just amidst my sentence when a very loud, extremely aggressive bang happened which made the dirt under my feet tremble for quite some time.

That didn't shock me, what really shocked me was what caused this bang, as the walls extending on the horizon started to shift upward, forming a whip-like extension of it, which landed heavily just a moment ago over one of the places where attacks came from.

That being happened, a second, a third, and a fourth more aggressive bangs appeared one after another to turn the place into armageddon.

No one could resist such brutal force, and no one could take a hit like this and live again. I felt gratitude to those who led the first waves against this tyrannic castle, as they made me see how strong this castle was.

I wasn't planning to renege on my intentions, for this show to act in my favor in reality. If the castle was something ordinary, then breaking it wouldn't add anything to my name, and this was the part where what happened was in my best interest.

As I recalled well, one of the conditions to establish a guild in the game was to have branches at other game worlds. this castle, and bringing it down, was the opportunity that presented itself to me, for me to rise in fame and have followers, from different game worlds.

So I just stood my place watching this brutality without even blinking. If I learnt something from the game, then I knew for sure how stubborn the players were, how daring they were towards any risky challenge.

This devastation was nothing, as I was sure many attempts would follow, and that is what really happened.

A second, a third, a fourth, and so on waves appeared one after another, trying to bring this castle with its walls down with no success. No one lived after the attack, and with their sacrifices they couldn't even scratch the outer surface of the walls, or set foot beyond it.

Keeping this for hours, I couldn't stand still anymore. I looked to Rog as I said:

"I want your assassins to be ready."

"What is my princess?"

"When I give the signal, I want them to deliver a message to everyone here."

Rog looked in a weird way as I added:

"A message, or better suited to be a declaration of war."

Rog didn't speak, as he just pointed his index finger towards the walls and the creepy castle behind. I just nodded to his unspoken question, and my answer didn't satisfy his curiosity as he asked:

"How do you plan to do it?"

"I have my own ways, just be ready to spread the news." I wasn't in the mood to explain everything to him, especially the time of my move was drawing near.

The frequency of attacks had reached its climax, which meant in a short time they would decrease until they die out. The moment these attacks ceased, was the moment of my move.

Before that, I must make sure everyone was paying close attention to me. I wasn't even thinking about my odds, as my success was something as guaranteed as day and night. All I needed to do was to control things after breaching the walls.

I had many races trapped inside my prison, and I intended to make them pledge their allegiance to me, however I already had a better substitute.

I intended to ask everyone here to follow my lead once I breach the walls and break down the castle. This would lift me rapidly to the ranks of their leaders, plus making it easier for me to control the castle.

As for owning it, I wasn't fool or intoxicated by my confidence in success. Whoever planned this all would never permit this castle to fall away from his hands, especially if I was the one to receive it next.

I was sure once the castle and walls would be lost, the owner would act rapidly and take them away. This would solve the problem indeed, but for those who didn't know everything they would think of me doing it.

I just hope everything work out the way I plan.