My Life Can't Be This Gacha

"Eh whose bright idea was this again ah?" you say, watching the members of ♕Crown♛_Babalon stream out of their guild house. Some of them have the skull-and-bones, but most of them don't. There's a lot of them - a lot of both kinds of characters, ghost and living - but you've grown to expect that sort of thing from the third largest guild on the server. They're just casually fielding the kind of numbers you'd have to take a week to organise in your own guild - even at its best, this scheme won't take out more than maybe twenty members in a guild numbering several thousands.

"Somebody?" replies la_llorona88 evasively.

"You ah?" you say. The ♕Crown♛_Babalon forces are already starting to move; you've already watched them do this raid a few times, so you're comfortable splitting your attention between them and the voice chat. Besides, you're watching them through an observation ward planted by a rogue who went out with an inventory full of invisibility potions and emergency teleport scrolls. (And through the rogue, but xXOwOXx hasn't been talking a lot other than to send a ping whenever ♕Crown♛_Babalon starts making movements.)

"Maybe?"

"Yes it was you," says @green18271 dryly. "Still don't know why we agreed."

"Cos it's better than rotting in base," they say cheekily.

@green18271 says nothing in response to that, and instead says: "They're not teleporting this time. Saving scrolls?"

"Or wards," you say absently, browsing through your phone. Era's back at university already, and is back to her old complaints about the workload. You're busy screenshotting her Instagram at her by way of rebuttal. "At least easy to follow lor." @green18271 and xXOwOXx had spent several hours trying to research a way to track teleportations the first time you attempted to shadow ♕Crown♛_Babalon's movements, only for them to just mass teleport off to nowhere, and then reappear a few minutes later with depleted HP, MP, and living members. xXOwOXx in particular had been fairly salty about it, since he had spent a few hours before that watching the guild. On the other hand, knowing you can't be tracked down if you teleport away is why @green18271 agreed to this at all.

"I think they're just sweeping for anybody roaming out there," says la_llorona88.

"Or they're headed for monkeys123," says @green18271. "That's the only big guild in that direction - not dead yet, either, that's an achievement."

The three of you watch as the ♕Crown♛_Babalon attack force approaches the monkeys123 guild hall, the front lines slowing to a stop while the heavier-armoured, slower characters catch up.

That's your cue. xXOwOXx pops their Greater Invisibility and runs up by the squishy casters while the rest of you pop buffs and a Mass Teleport scroll. You appear in the middle of a bunch of high-level, well-equipped casters, and the mental countdown until the Mass Teleport cooldown runs out starts. The casters can't do much against your group since you're all equipped for magic resistance, while you came prepared to The Slipper them all to death. @green18271 appears and quickly vanishes in a haze of green and purple clouds, and la_llorona88 drops all her nukes while xXOwOXx shanks as many people as he can. Then the second Mass Teleport scroll kicks in, and dumps the five of you in your guild hall.

"Ten seconds," grouses @green18271, checking his inventory, "twenty thousand gold and seven hours of farming."

"Worth it though!" chirps la_llorona88. "That was absolutely textbook perfect." She pauses. "Gonna need another bunch of HP and MP pots, though."

"Can't know," says xXOwOXx. "Didn't have time to set up a ward."

By then, though, @green18271 is calling people over to go in the dungeons with you, and you curse the scruples that prevent you from botting. Still, it's relatively mindless work, which means you can get back to telling Era, with picture proof, how much free time she has if she can go to malls and pose with her beefy boy.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

You log in to find the guild group chat going wild.

what happened? you ask @green18271, except he's offline right at that moment so you ask la_llorona88 instead.

omgomgomg!! they reply. it WILD!!!

Between la_llorona88 and a quick look through the subreddit's top thread, your eyebrows threaten to fly off your face and hit the ceiling, because the top thread's OP appears to be somebody up in ♕Crown♛_Babalon, they posted a video of the surprise attack because of course they would have a screen recording, there's choice screenshots of the attack as it begins and progresses. On its own that would have been very concerning, but by the fact that @green18271 hasn't yet thrown la_llorona88 out of the guild or gone into panic mode...

You read down.

Oh.

They thought you were from Threenity, the other third-largest guild. There's some bragging and posturing, people who claim to be from Threenity coming in, a long string of deleted comments where a mod stepped in to put down a flame war... And then a screen recording, also from the thread OP, of a ♕Crown♛_Babalon attack force landing on a Threenity party. It ends with the ♕Crown♛_Babalon forces victorious, but the next post comes from the Threenity poster - a gif of a character's HP dropping to zero and getting the skull-and-crossbones icon, captioned only "RIP OP".

Ohhhhh.

The rest of the thread doesn't really change in tone, apart from when collateral damage pulls other guilds into the fray: smaller guilds, or allied guilds, all gearing up and beating on each other while you were asleep and unaware. The event leaderboards of surviving guilds have been very severely pruned down.

omg you say to la_llorona88, when you dive back into Omima. tts crazy

IKR!!! they reply, their player character doing an excited hop animation. i m a genius!!

Yeah, don't tell @green18271 that, you think, as you head out to go see who else is online and hanging around - but nobody seems particularly inclined to be doing anything, when ♕Crown♛_Babalon and Threenity are both pulling out the stops on their attacks and counterattacks - to hear people say it, you can hardly go outside without some band or other teleporting onto you to commence slaughter.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

@green18271 appears some time later, but he doesn't seem surprised at all by the news - he's already seen the subreddit thread, checked the Twitter hashtags, and there's even an article on one of the e-zines about it, complete with unattributed screenshot ripped right off the reddit thread OP. It contains a lovely image of your character mid-Slippering another character, though your screen name is slightly obscured.

10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: so what now

His reply takes a while to arrive. @green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: wait for them to die off and go in

...trust @green18271 to choose the turtle option. You roll your eyes. 10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: they not yet die we die first u knw rite

@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: we'll die if we get in between them anyway
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: they're bound to figure out it's us soon n we havnt replenished all our potions frm ytd

That doesn't even make sense. With the state of the fighting as it is, nobody is out there doing any farming anyway, except the ghost players - and if both ♕Crown♛_Babalon and Threenity (plus whatever other guilds are joining in the fun) are using the ghost players as healbots and buffers in the raids, then not even that.

And anyway they haven't figured out that it was @green18271 and la_llorona88 and xXOwOXx and you that got into that initial attack that kicked this whole thing off and if they haven't figured it out in the last... 12 hours or so, they're not likely to.

The mixed blessings of being an obscure-ish mid-sized guild, you guess, plus sheer insane luck in having all your character names obscured by special effects in the screen recording - going off of equipment and skill sets alone, it could be anybody from anywhere.

10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: rly dun think theyre gg to find out its us
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: deres 1000s of ppl on the sub n nobody's pointed it out yet
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: ik
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: ive been checking the sub for our usernames
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: ntg so far
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: told u so
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: so what den
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: wait to die ah

@green18271 is a creature of research and statistics sheets. He turned the dungeons into farms, after all. The 1OODB guild is a lot richer and stronger than its size and leaderboard position would suggest, because of that. You totally appreciate it, sometimes. But there are times you wish you could reach through the screen and throttle him.

@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: no point rushing in to die when they're still strong
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: at least wait for them to be around our size
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: shouldn't take more than another couple days if they keep this up
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: sure anot
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: if we get atked n all die i blame u
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: lol k

And the discussion is tabled, for the moment, though you still feel dissatisfied with it. Still, it's just another day until either Threenity or ♕Crown♛_Babalon (or some other previously-too-large-for-comfort guild) gets whittled down to something more within your reach, and what's the worst that could happen in that time?

The answer comes two hours later.

@green18271 to ALL: everybody get to base!
@green18271 to ALL: babalon incoming!

🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲

10 SPINS AVAILABLE!
UNLOCKED: 10-roll!

10-rolls said:

10-rolls consume 10 spins at a time, and guarantee you a ★★★★ or better outcome!

Click to expand...

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Item tiers said:

★: Low-quality, mundane items. Think a pair of disposable chopsticks, or a ripe banana.
★★: Regular-quality, mundane items. Most regular household items are of this tier.
★★★: High-quality, mundane items. Includes many luxury goods.
★★★★: The pinnacle of mundane quality. These items may have additional special qualities.
★★★★★: ???
★★★★★★: ???

Click to expand...

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🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

♕Crown♛_Babalon is severely weakened by all the fighting they've been doing, but the coming forces are still (probably) enough to overpower the online members available. A good strategy, though, will save you - and weaken them in the process...
[ ] Split the party: half the guild will head outside to hold ♕Crown♛_Babalon off while the other half sets up to nuke anybody who gets into the guild hall.
- [ ] You go outside.
- [ ] You stay inside.
[ ] Everybody out: the entire guild rushes outside, maximising the space you have to attack them.
[ ] Everybody in: the entire guild stays in, attempting to force ♕Crown♛_Babalon to run through the bottleneck.
[ ] Everybody offline: all the living members of the guild log out, only logging back in when it's safe or when you've got a lot more people available to go counterattack. (la_llorona88 suggested this.)
[ ] (Write-in a strategy.)

Quick-Time event! You get a free roll to:
[ ] Improve your defence.
[ ] Improve your attack.

You emerge from the dungeons into the guild hall to see it emptying out in a hurry: people responding to the announcement in maybe the most human way they can, which is to go outside and see for themselves.

@green18271 stands in front of you, and you can almost feel him droop in resigned exasperation. The entire guild rushing outside of the guild hall to meet an oncoming enemy horde, especially one that's most likely a ♕Crown♛_Babalon attempt at striking down enemies before they get too badly outstripped by their rivals, is absolutely not his ideal battle strategy.

Definitely not what he intended by "everybody get to base", in any case.

But, props to him, he doesn't waste any time trying to herd people back inside. Instead he runs outside, too, and you follow him... after a while.

Because, for whatever reason, you just got a free roll that spawned an item in your inventory - ★★★ Grounding Ring - and you equip it. It's hardly even noticeable on your character avatar.

You alt-tab for a moment to look it up on the Omima Online wiki, and that's why you're one of the last few people to get out of the guild hall.

It's a daunting sight, even knowing what the Grounding Ring does: there's the Omima Online members, ghost-players mixed in amongst the living players and busy casting buffs or dropping mines and wards - a thin ring of defenders three or four players deep in some places and just one player deep in others. And then there's the giant wedge of ♕Crown♛_Babalon members visible on the horizon, the main column approaching steadily while small bands of five or six players break off from it, looking to strike from less-protected directions.

The first few splinter bands engage in eye-grabbing flares of CGI special effects as spells, special abilities, and item activations all go off at once. You pop a haste potion, kind of wishing you had more (but you'll never admit it to @green18271), and dive The Slipper-first into the nearest fight.

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The Grounding Ring is an Easter egg from a bunch of patches ago, the end of a very long chain of fetch quests back when Omima Online was very new and the developers hadn't quite got the hang of game balance. The wiki article says it's an inside joke amongst the programmers that got turned into an actual item.

All the Grounding Rings from back then have gotten patched up and gotten renamed Grounded Rings, and the wiki makes a special note of how much salt that incited from the playerbase. Grounded Rings are still powerful, but they're not as game-breakingly powerful as the Grounding Ring.

Which you have.

You crash into battle, The Slippering everybody who even looks vaguely like a caster. Firstly because The Slipper's knockback and mini-stun, when helped along by haste, effectively stunlock the casters, and secondly because you figure the Grounding Ring's effects will be less noticeable against casters than against melee fighters.

Not that you want to hide it, except maybe you sort of want to hide it, maybe? You're not sure how much people are going to notice it.

But you charge into battle anyway and the Grounding Ring activates the moment the enemy wizards and druids notice you The Slippering them. Spells come whizzing in and filling up your screen with flashy effects, and nothing happens to you as you happily piak your way through their ranks.

The Grounding Ring's effect is very simple, in theory: it temporarily makes the game engine treat your player character as ground. For one thing it means your hitbox is one pixel high, but for another it means that anything that doesn't affect terrain, also doesn't affect you. It means you can't be healed, but you don't need healing if you're untargetable.

The Grounding Ring's effect lasts just long enough that by the time spells affect you again, you're already halfway through that little band of wizards and alchemists and they're out of MP and consumables - and once the wizards are down, you turn around and make short work of their meat tanks.

Which coincidentally takes about as long as you need for the Grounding Ring's cooldown to run out, and then you pop a few more potions and wade into the next band down.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

It's a battle of attrition on ♕Crown♛_Babalon's side and desperate defense on your side. The ring of defenders gradually shrinks as players die and turn into ghost-players, and battles coalesce around you and a few others, all looking very much the same: a few live players fighting each other, while ghost-players buff and heal them until one side or the other goes down, at which point they call for more live players to continue the fight.

la_llorona88 is one of your supporters. She is a terrible support because she didn't bother training any of her support skills and focused purely on her nukes. She pops weak shields and weak buffs on you, but most of the time she fills the chat up with complaining about the enemies that got the drop on her and shanked her about half a minute into the fight. You're too busy fighting and not dying to respond (though your Grounding Ring makes that extremely easy for your supports, which you suppose is why la_llorona88 has all that time to rant in chat).

You keep going, though, your concentration of the fight narrowing down to whoever you're busy beating down (the enemy casters learned long ago to try to steer clear of you, while you've already run out of haste potions to stunlock people with) and the active/ cooldown timers on your Grounding Ring.

Then at some point you look for the next enemy to beat down and there isn't one.

Huh?

You look at chat.

la_llorona88 is busy gloating. Most of the ghost-players are starting to log off, which is understandable given it's been a very tiring few minutes and also @green18271 is likely to start checking leaderboards and proposing a new grinding schedule for the newly-ghosted players.

You decide to do the same thing. ♕Crown♛_Babalon is unlikely to commit another bunch of their forces to beat you up right away (you hope). And besides, you're hungry.

You decide to put off jabbing at @green18271 for until after dinner.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲


You don't like calling it your power, because saying that makes your brain auto-complete with "-comes great responsibility!" and you're only 18 and you don't want responsibility.

Plus Pa said not to go out and do things, and while you might have protested at the time, you kind of don't mind being told to veg out for a bit?

But your powers are still real. You somehow glitched or something Omima Online into dropping a game-breaking pre-patch limited-edition equip onto you, which is almost certainly the only reason your character isn't a ghost yet.

You've got a pretty nice scarf and a bottle of fabric softener you don't want to think about.

And now you have a pen that is absolutely the fanciest pen you've ever seen. Like, this is not that RM1 Kilometrico ball-point pen they sell down at the stores, the kind where the ball sticks or the ink leaks or the case cracks if you hold it wrong.

This one has a shiny transparent case and the ink inside just about glitters. It's the kind of pen you see in those fancy artsy videos, the kind that make you wish you had any kind of art ability whatsoever. As it is you struggle to draw a recognisable Doraemon, so it's kind of a waste for you having such a pretty pen. It's also kind of ruined by the tiny basketball sitting on top of it, but you don't see any way to remove it.

Maybe you'll resell it on Carousell or something, you think, as you pick it up -

- nowayjose.

★★★★ Pen said:

A fountain pen with a transparent body, filled with gold-flecked pink ink. There is a little glass basketball on the tip of the case. Once per day, this pen may be used to autograph any sports equipment. The autographer gains peak human proficiency with that equipment while the autograph lasts. Up to five items may be autographed at a time.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

It's not the most useful thing ever, because neither you nor your parents ever really bothered with sports other than your time as a pengawas. But - wait.

Does your mouse count as sports equipment? E-sports is totally a thing, isn't it?

And if not, you can still go shopping later...

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

1 SPIN AVAILABLE!

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

...well, now.

Amanda autographs (pick up to two):
[ ] Her old running shoes. (Gain peak human sprinting speed.)
[ ] Her computer mouse. (Gain peak human actions-per-second.)

The Omima Online event goes on, and surprising events abound! (pick one):
[ ] Somebody approaches you to buy your account - and the Grounding Ring. You'll lose your account and all the contacts/ perks associated with it (plus your chance of winning this event!), but you'll be several thousand ringgit richer.
[ ] ♕Crown♛_Babalon asks you to defect to their guild. You'll have a higher chance of winning the event, but you'll lose contact with @green18271 and the other 1OODB members.
[ ] @green18271 and la_llorona88 come up with A Daring Plan, mostly consisting of what sounds like in-game assassinations. You have no idea how they managed to cooperate on this.
[ ] Omima Online pushes an ill-timed game patch, and both your Slipper and Grounding Ring get nerfed - but @green18271 finds new advantages in it.

It looks like one of the other properties of the fountain pen is that it can sign anything that counts as sports equipment, like the grubby old running shoes that you haven't put on since probably the last time you did kawad kaki( marching exercises) . Not like they're dirty since you always wash them after practice, but they've been (in Carousell terms) "well-loved", and the glittery pink ink really stands out on their side.

It also stands out on your mouse.

On a whim you try and autograph the CPU tower, but the ink just doesn't catch on it at all, even though it's perfectly fine on the mouse. Doesn't even smudge when you rub at it with your thumb.

Your power things are weird.

You deliberately put that thought aside as you make dinner - more leisurely today than usual, since Era FaceTimes you in the middle of it to complain about family drama and you wind up lying on the sofa making sympathetic noises while the soup and rice cook.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

"Aiyo, too much again," you mumble to yourself an hour later. FaceTiming with Era while cooking meant you accidentally cooked about three times as much food as you actually need - which would be a normal portion, if Pa and Ma were still around, but isn't any more. You scrape the rice into a Tupperware for the fridge and reheat the soup so it won't go bad overnight.

You wonder what Pa and Ma are up to. It's been over a week since you last saw them, and since then... nothing at all, except that one phone call.

You frown. Another reminder of these powers you have that you're still not sure what to do with.

Back to Omima Online, then. At least there you kind of know what you're doing.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

Nope, you don't know what you're doing.

Specifically, you don't know how the hell la_llorona88 and @green18271 managed to get together and hash out any sort of agreement at all, let alone an agreement to assassinate guild founders.

There are a lot of exclamation marks and (primarily wink and thumbs-up) emojis flying about until you herd them onto the Discord server for a voice chat.

"What," you begin, "in the hell?"

"It'll be super cool!" gushes la_llorona88. "We totally checked it out. Green says the math checks out!"

"...it mostly checks out," says @green18271, in the tones of somebody who has been completely betrayed by the universe. "Lot of ifs, and we'll have to hope they're not expecting something like this from the last time we ported right onto people and started a giant war." Voice chat doesn't allow for a lot more nuance than text chat, but you can hear him side-eying - side-voicing? - la_llorona88.

"Oh don't worry. It'll be awesome! It works out to, like," and then la_llorona88 is expounding on what you and @green18271 both feel is a very rosy picture of what she thinks will happen.

In the meantime @green18271 is texting you the actual details of it. A lot of it revolves around the Grounding Ring making you impossible to target. It actually sounds doable... with a lot of ifs, yes, but.

"So? So?" says la_llorona88, and you can almost hear her bouncing in her chair.

"Sure," you say, giggling at the strangled noise @green18271 makes. "When do we start?"

la_llorona88 giggles too. "Probably tomorrow," she says. "Gotta get the gang together!"

"You know," says @green18271 dryly, "we still have to find where the targets are and hope they're online."

"Didn't we just camp outside their bases and wait for them to appear last time?" says la_llorona88.

"Not a lot of guilds doing big raids any more," says @green18271, his mood clearly improving now he's found something illustrating the impossibility of the proposed plan. "Makes them harder to find."

"Well, you'll figure something out I'm sure!" says la_llorona88. "Rogue scouting or something!"

@green18271 says "Sure."

la_llorona88 giggles. "I'll go tell them then!" and disappears from the voice chat almost immediately after.

"Tell who what?" you say, having been browsing the Omima Online subreddit while they were talking.

@green18271 makes a noise. "The rogues, of course." He pauses. "Well, might as well go farm while they're doing their thing..."

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@green18271 and la_llorona88 are both correct, sort of, as it turns out. It's true that big raids like the ones you launched against SASUNARU 4EVA, or the last-ditch attack that ♕Crown♛_Babalon launched against you, have largely fallen out of favour, for a variety of reasons. There's a long post about it on the subreddit that your eyes just glaze over.

The remaining guilds (all twenty-plus of them, how the heck did 1OODB manage to live into the last twenty-odd guilds on the server you wonder) are still very active, though these days things seem like they've gotten sneakier. One guild disappears overnight when its guild founder just disbands the entire place and joins up with one of the other guilds, quickly followed by the remaining guild members who aren't snapped up elsewhere. One of the other guilds gets ambushed by three guilds while out farming and barely escapes - but they're weakened enough that they don't last very long after that.

You're kind of vindictively pleased to notice ♕Crown♛_Babalon, along with Threenity, got eliminated at some point.

But eventually one of the rogues stationed near enemy guilds raises the alert: one of your targets has appeared on the map, and alone for whatever reason.

Everybody goes except @green18271, because it would be ridiculous for your guild founder (no matter how ridiculously immortal) to get killed while you're trying to kill somebody else's guild founder.

The teleport spins up, you and your guild members land where the rogue planted the beacon, activate the Grounding Ring - and then everything starts going to hell. Teleport circles appear around you and your allies - it's a trap! - and a bunch of rogues decloak mid-backstabbing your allies, only to get backstabbed themselves by other guild teams decloaking and/or teleporting in.

In no time you find yourself frantically holding off a bunch of enemies, your mouse hand getting tired as you target each one in turn to ministun and knock them back, protecting your allies while they fight their way out. It's a short, vicious battle, and it ends when xXOwOXx runs in with a teleport scroll and pulls the lot of you to safety.

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

"Did we get him?" asks la_llorona88, when all of you are safely back in the guild hall and recovering.

"Check the leaderboards," says @green18271. "But yes, you did. Or somebody did."

"Woo!" says la_llorona88. "I am a genius!"

"Eh," you say. "You almost die okay? Should have put obs wards."

"Almost but didn't!" she says, and you don't begrudge her the good mood. "So who's next?"

"Cannot so fast right," you say. "Nobody will dare to go out alone already."

"He wasn't alone either," she points out. "Still died, 'cos we're awesome and I am a genius!"

@green18271 posts a .gif of a bearded man telling her that the word she keeps using, does not mean what she thinks it means.

"But there was a good idea in there," he admits.

"See," begins la_llorona88.

"...mirror images should trigger the same ambushes from other people, if they also forget to use observation wards to check."

"That'd make your build very different," you note.

"Not that much," he says. "Let me double check something. You guys go farm first."

la_llorona88 logs out almost the moment he says "farm". You do a shrug emote. "Okay."

🎲🎲🎰🎲🎲

As it turns out he hasn't finished double checking whatever it is when you finally log off and go to bed, and you're mostly occupied for the next morning and afternoon with housecleaning.

So when you log back in you see him in a whole different set of equipment.

@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: so this is a lot less immortal, but it'll do for now
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: mirror images last 60 seconds, invisibility and wind walk last 30 seconds each
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: would be easier if i ws a rogue bt this works too
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: din think u wud actually do it
10_mandapanda_01 to @green18271: lorona will b so hp
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: ye
@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: tts y we're doin it b4 she logs in 2dae

You pick your jaw off the tabletop and watch him round up a bunch of people, distributing invisibility potions, and then setting out the strategy.

Then he activates the mirror image and invisibility, walks the mirror image out, and the invisible army follows along behind. One problem with his build, though, is that the mirror image doesn't have a very good movespeed. With people being leery of launching attacks near guild halls where reinforcements could appear at any time, this means the mirror image will nearly run out of time before you're at any decent distance from the guild hall.

...or so you'd think, when a previously-invisible rogue decloaks, backstabs the mirror image into a poofing cloud, and then recloaks before anybody can attack them, leaving the lot of you standing about looking at each other.

@green18271 to 10_mandapanda_01: ...next time we bring obs wards too

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The second time, an hour or so later, works a lot better: @green18271 drops observation wards every now and then, and the real him accompanies the group rather than staying safely back in the guild hall.

It works in two ways: all of you can see the enemy rogues tailing you whenever they get into the range of the observation wards: never for too long, because they know that if they can see you then you can see them, but they can tell it's the real @green18271 in there. There are a few people who want to split off and put down the enemy rogues, but @green18271 tells them to stay back and pretend they don't see the rogues.

There are a few seconds, about a minute and a half's walk out, when all the enemy rogues drop out of range of your ward. That's when @green18271 pulls the switch. It's right on time, because soon the rogues reappear, coming in for another attempted backstab.

You decloak, engaging one of them. Some of the other tanks in the group also appear, blocking their way. So that, as expected, is when teleport circles start appearing, and that is also when people start lobbing death wards, poison clouds, and AoE spells where the enemies are going to appear.

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It doesn't work all that well, either, you have to admit. You're not even sure it worked better than la_llorona88's strategy; sure, 1OODB took less losses this time than from la_llorona88's plot, but this time you weren't fighting the enemy guild leaders either.

And with the size of your guild, "less" losses is still pretty significant. A short tally tells you that your guild's living members are...

...oh dear. There's just five of you left. @green18271, yourself, and three members who don't count since they haven't logged in in four months. Not that they'd be any use even if they came online tomorrow, since they're all low-level players anyway. Which makes it effectively the two of you.

Still in the top twenty! And supported by a whole bunch of people producing potions and stuff for you!

Except there's an announcement: the event closes in two days.

Guess things are going to get real busy...

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A/N: are they still in the MMO arc
Why yes, yes they are >_>;;; but not for much longer!

Aunty 24/7 is probably mostly hard carrying the guild at this point, but then she is literally impossible to attack for a lot of the time...

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6 SPINS AVAILABLE!

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Two days remain! You're going to have to come up with some way to get to within the top 5 on the leaderboards if you want that loot. (You'll still get some loot just for surviving the whole event. Just not as much, and not the hats you really wanted.)

[ ] Turtling will maximise your survival and force them to come fight you on (mostly) your grounds.
● Staying put isn't going to advance you in ranks unless the higher-ranked guilds come knocking on your door - at which point you'll have different problems.

[ ] Be aggressive! Be, be aggressive!
- [ ] ...towards the lower-ranked guilds.
● You're confident you'll be able to take them out without much danger, but this won't advance you very far up the leaderboards.
- [ ] ...towards the higher-ranked guilds.
● Much more dangerous - but much more rewarding.