Chapter 5
The Top Player
"SKILL ON! MULTI-CRESCENT MOON SLASH!"
Curved strips of light flew over our heads and struck all the Ogre Chiefs in the belly. The boss monsters of the fifth area bellowed in pain and stumbled back as a shadow zipped right past us and charged at the monsters.
It was a boy our age who engaged in combat with the ogres alone. He was so fast that I could only catch glimpses of his long, flowing silver-colored gown as it fluttered with his movements and the flash of light against his sword blade as he twirled the weapon in his hand.
After gracefully dancing around the Ogre chiefs, he finally stopped and I could get a good look at his face. Like me, he was Asian with unkempt black hair and dark brown eyes, over which, he wore a pair of slightly dark eyeglasses. There was a cocky grin on his face as he twirled his sword right and left, kind of like how swordsmen danced in my mom’s Chinese wushu TV shows. His sword itself, an elegant straight sword with a silver handle, had a Chinese vibe to it.
After giving his sword one final twirl, he sheathed it, and the monsters all exploded, showering shards of data around him making it look like he was surrounded by tiny, twinkling stars. It was truly a mesmerizing sight.
“O. M. G.,” I said. “That’s SilverKungFuMagicMan! That’s THE SilverKungFuMagicMan!”
Lotus looked at me with a confused look on her face.
“Who?” she asked.
This was her first day in this game, so it was no surprise that she didn’t know who SilverKungFuMagicMan was.
I turned to her and replied,” He’s only one of the most powerful players in the game. He regularly takes on raid monsters solo, is almost always in the top 100 in rank events, and once wiped out a whole squad of players in a PvP event with a single A.O.E attack. In other words, he’s a top player!”
Lotus just looked at me blankly before confessing, “I didn’t understand a word you just said.”
I rolled my eyes and groaned, thinking there was going to be a lot that I had to teach my cousin.
“Basically, he’s really famous and super strong,” I said.
A voice suddenly spoke up behind us and said, “Thank you for that.”
“Whoa!” I cried out. Me and Lotus didn’t hear him walk up to us. Leave it to a top player to have topnotch sneaky skills.
Grinning down at us, SilverKungFuMagicMan said, “I’d love to hear more about how awesome I am, but it looks like we got more company.”
As he spoke more Ogre Chiefs and Arachno Lords started to show up, rising from the ground like zombies. SilverKungFuMagicMan grinned from ear to ear as he drew his sword and pointed it at the enemy.
While his back was turned to us, he said, “One of you guys appears to be a newbie. You’re lucky. You get a chance to see how a veteran does things. Watch and learn.”
He drew his sword with his right hand, raised it to eye level as he bent his knees. After tracing his left-hand fingers across the flat of the blade, he said, “Skill On, Wolf’s Howl”
Upon hearing the pre-recorded wolf howl coming from the top player’s mouth, all the monsters jerked rigidly and froze.
“Skill On, Triple Stack.”
Gold light covered SilverKungFuMagicMan from head to toe. Triple Stack was a skill that multiplies the power of the next skill by three times.
“Skill On, Lunar Glow.”
The gold light covering the top player changed to silvery. Lunar Glow, if I remember right, was a skill given out during an event that celebrated the Chinese Moon Festival. It had the power to boost magic power.
“Skill On, Mind over Matter.”
The skill, Mind over Matter, adds magic power to strength and made gusts of wind burst from the caster's feet as a special effect. Skills just wouldn't be interesting without some kind of special effect. You can learn the skill by visiting a Shaolin Temple where you talk to the head monk who’ll give you some quests to do in return.
So here’s what SilverKungFuMagicMan did: he added a boost three times over to his magic power. After that, he added that magic power to his strength, which affects how much damage he can do with his sword. And what all that means is for a short amount of time, he is one really deadly swordsman.
With each swing of the top player’s sword, a boss monster that normally took several hits from several different people to kill was reduced to a flash of light. He stabbed, sliced and diced the monsters into nothingness with his graceful, acrobatic dancing. And it only took him a minute to clear the area of a horde of monsters I and Lotus had no hope of taking care of on our own. But just as he reduced the monster horde to zero, more monsters appeared to take their place.
As Lotus and I watched SilverKungFuMagicMan decimate the never-ending army of monsters, we heard our names called out from behind us. NovaFlash and LOWW ran towards us.
“There you are,” Nova said. “We looked everywhere for you! What were you doing?”
“And is that SilverKungFuMagicMan, A.K.A. the Silver Storm?” LOWW added.
“What? Where?” Nova cried out, looking left and right. She peered over my shoulder and spotted the top player as he destroyed an Arachno Lord with flying roundhouse kick. “O.M.G! It’s the Silver Storm! Check it out, Lotus! It’s the Silver Storm! He’s one of the best players in the history of the game!”
Although Nova was super excitedly jumping up and down, Lotus just looked at her with a confused look and said, “Silver Storm?”
“It’s a nickname people use for SilverKungFuMagicMan,” I explained.
Lotus asked, “Why do they call him Silver Storm?”
LOWW answered her, “Because one time, he used an A.O.E. attack, a single widespread attack that destroyed every monster on the field. That attack had swords raining down from the sky. It was really dark and cloudy that day, so it looked like the swords had come flying from storm clouds. Combine that with that whole silver theme he’s got going on, and you get the Silver Storm.”
“I remember that day,” I said. “There were a lot of explosive bright lights, big booms, and whooshing sound effects that could split your eardrums. It . . . was . . . awesome.”
“Tell me about it,” LOWW said. He raised his hand for a high-five, and I took it.
Lotus rolled her eyes and then said, “Can we just head back to town? Since I completed the quest, we don’t need to stick around this bugged out place, right?”
But her voice was lost over a loud rumbling in the sky. We all looked up to see what looked like a fiery meteor fall down diagonally towards us.
“Hit the deck!” NovaFlash screamed. She pushed us all to the ground as the meteor came crashing down right next to SilverKungFuMagicMan.
A fiery explosion spread from the impact and blanketed all the monsters in sight. If I hadn’t fiddled with my hearing settings to be low for attack sound effects, the loud bang from the meteor’s landing would have knocked me out cold. When the fire disappeared, so did the monsters.
Standing in the middle of the smoking, scorched earth were two figures. One was, of course, SilverKungFuMagicMan. The other was a large boy around his age with light ebony skin and short, curly, dull black hair. Like SIlverKungFuMagicMan, he wore a gown over a sharp suit, but his gown was orange. His chest was adorned with medals like a decorated military officer in ceremony wear. Stuck to the ground in front of him was a beautiful broad sword, decorated with a gold hilt and red gems. The blade of the sword was orange and polished to a shine.
“Is that . . . who I think that is!?” NovaFlash cried out. She cupped her hands over her eyes and peered through the dust cloud and smoke. And then she shrieked. “It is! It’s Blaze Leo!”
Lotus looked at me, confused, and asked, “Who?”
“Blaze Leo’s another top player,” I explained to her. “He’s about as powerful as SilverKungFuMagicMan and is the leader of the guild both of them belong in.”
Blaze Leo pulled out a star-point wand and pointed it to the sky.
“Skill On, Meteor Shower!”
I don’t really have to tell you what the magic skill, Meteor Shower, does, do I? It basically summons fiery meteorites to rain down from the sky onto the heads of the caster’s enemies. The new batch of monsters had barely been born before they were utterly wiped out in grand fashion. Those explosions were just as big and loud as the ones that SilverKungFuMagicMan did.
As we watched this umpteenth slaughter of monsters, LOWW cut in and said, “I wonder where the other members of the Seven Stars Guild are. It would be awesome of the rest of them showed up now.”
“True that,” I said. And then we did another high-five.
The Seven Stars Guild is the name of the guild that SilverKungFuMagicMan and Blaze Leo were a part of. It was said that each and every member in the guild were equal in terms of level, strength and magic power. Because of that quality of players, they’re said to be the Number One guild in the entire game.
Lotus, however, seemed no longer interested in the flashy spectacle and said, “Whatever. Can we go now? I still have to turn in the quest to the guard.”
I frowned at her in dismay, but then said, “Yeah, we should go. There’s nothing more we can do here.”
And so we left the two top players alone to hold back an army of monsters. At the end of the day, when I took a peek at the rankings list, no surprise, both SilverKungFuMagicMan and Blaze Leo were neck and neck at the top ten with rapidly climbing triple digit numbers. The numbers, of course, measured how much monsters they each defeated.
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