[Village creation instance (time discrepancy 1000:1)]

“Thank god you are all back safely young masters.” An old guy said as soon as they opened their eyes.

They all looked around and saw what appeared to be an old almost medieval style village which was almost completely broken. Walls were made of rotten wood; houses were collapsed and dead people lied on the ground with no-one cleaning it up.

Mark thought on the spot and talked to the old guy. “yeah sorry we were gone so long is did anything change lately?”. The old man looked troubled yet said “No young master nothing much changed except for the fact that the Sun Bandits came again and are going to collect tax tomorrow at 6 pm.” Jim immediately replied and told the old man to go about his work since they would find a way to pay for it.

“Okay guys so this is the target: get the village back on the road with minimal casualties. So we can choose to somehow make the money, but what I think is easier to achieve is to actually kill all the bandits take all the loot in their HQ and use that for the villagers, what do you think?”

Since they all sounded like they accepted that plan they discussed and made sure that they would all do something to make sure the defence was up and running at the time where the bandits would come to them.

Mark POV (point of view)

I grabbed my journal (the item each player gets to use the first week to make sure they somewhat know what to do) and looked if there was anything mentioned in it. I had no luck since nothing could help me much.

I started looking around the village and building a plan in my head for what I thought was the best thing to do in order to get this village back on track again.

After one hour everyone gathered to discuss their plans for the rest of the night. “Alright guys from what I have seen we need to do multiple things, first we need to rebuild the walls so that there are no rotten parts anymore this would make defending easier. We can also help the pharmacist make some sort of poison which we can spread on the weapons we build for the villagers.”

Luke thought for a bit and said “it’s better if I go and scout how many bandits there are it will help us make a strategy, also I heard from woodcutters that they are about 10 km away from us so I will take about 5 hours to make a full scout trip and if I don’t return after that then I probably have been killed or captured already.”

Jim also listened a bit and followed with “Alright if Rick can go and take some people to repair the walls then I will go with some to check out which houses can be easily converted so that they have a good roof over their heads. I’ll try and see how I can change the current system so people will be happier. That should all help as bonus once we finish the mission.”

Mark went to the pharmacist with a couple of villagers who had gathered herbs before since they would be way faster. After making a deal with the pharmacist he left those villagers to their own devices since he would use the unit of metal he had gotten to make spears. He had chosen spears since they were easy to make and didn’t require massive training to use efficiently.

Soon it was already 3 am so they let everyone get a good night of sleep while they would continue scouting around to see if they could use anything else. Then Luke suddenly came back with a bunch of weird plants in his arms. “Guys we can use these plants, normally these are used in incenses so make sure kids go to sleep so if we make a trench which we can light on fire then the bandits should be sleepy/drowsy once they arrive at the walls which would give the villagers and edge in battle”

“Well done Luke! This is a great idea let’s prepare the trench ourselves we might just need to do only one side of the village.” Mark said.

Soon it became 5 pm and while Mark and the rest were completely exhausted their eyes showed excitement since this would be the first big battle they ever did in the game. Jim checked everything one last time “alright walls done, governing remade, trench build and filled with herbs and firewood, spears build for every villager totalling 200 pieces, bandits scouted with consisted of 150 warriors, 100 slaves and children. Also we collected stones for on top of the wall”

The last thing was thought of by Rick he thought that since the villagers never had any training they would not be strong in a fight so he searched for a bunch of large stone which could kill a bandit if thrown hard enough.

Then they finally saw the bandits Mark remembered the plan they made, first lure in a little group of bandits as if they were going to pay the tribute to them, surround them and kill them all while the rest of the villagers would close the town and defend from the rest of the bandits. This should kill about 20-30 people depending on how large the group is to make the deal with.

 As per usual a little group of around 25 people went to the gate of the village and shouted to open the gates. This time the leader of the group was the second-in-command, he was a sly man but was weaker than Apollo (the leader).

The group went towards the mayor’s house which was in the centre of the village. According to the plan there were around 100 villagers hidden around the plaza and ready to throw the spears which had been slathered in poison which should paralyze any bandits should they survive the first throws.

Rick had been chosen as commander of the battle since he was the best at it and had experience by playing loads of VR games with armies. Then the moment came they all waited for. The deal had just been finished and the bandits were beginning to turn around making their formation temporarily unbalanced, also the mayor (the old guy in the beginning of the chapter) had some time to get back in the house to take shelter. AND THROW! Rick shouted as all 100 villagers got out from the alleys and threw their spears at the 25 bandits. It came as no surprise to see that there were no survivors at all.

Rick immediately went towards the corpses taking a spear and stabbing every single bandit in the face to make sure there were no bandits pretending to be dead. Afterwards he took the remaining militia of the village and made them equip the armour of the bandits so they had a better chance of survival.

Around this time the bandit leader knew something was wrong since normally the taxes didn’t take this long to get. He motioned a part of his army to see what was going on when suddenly the gates of the village closed and most villagers stood on top of the walls with any weaponry or armour they could find added to the 200 spears Mark had made in the day.

Then the 50-ish bandits managed to reach the walls only to be greeted by what looked like an avalanche of rocks killing any in the way. Now the village had an advantage over the bandits. 75 killed and no wounded themselves this made most villagers extremely happy, yet Rick knew that they were not out of problems yet since the bandits were better geared, better trained and more treacherous than simple villagers.

Rick began talking to the rest of the guys and shared his thoughts, Luke thought for a bit and ran towards the village. He gathered a couple of women who started making rope by using clothes, string, plants pretty much anything they could use. Once one was done Luke ran to the walls gave on end of the rope to Rick and said, “when I tell you to pull me up you need to hurry alright?” “sure” said Rick slowly beginning to understand what Luke was going to do.

Luke jumped down the wall (the wall is about 5-6 meters so it’s possible with somewhat of a parkour roll) ran towards the closest bandit corpse stripped him of his armour and shouted to pull him in. This way he would collect the armour and weapons which were better than their own. Rick took the weapons from the second-in-command since he was the best fighter of the four.

Once they had collected about 16 sets Apollo quickly advanced his remaining army so that they couldn’t collect any more. After an hour of fighting costing the bandits another 30 lives. In total the bandits had around 45 people left with Apollo included while the villagers had lost about 10 people and 20 more were wounded.

Mark knew the final charge was about to happen when suddenly he spotted something weird with the leader, he was glowing with a red fire-like glow and once he punched the wall it suddenly lit on fire like it was oil burning down completely in a couple of minutes. Mark shouted to get of the walls since they were all going to collapse now that there was a breach and Rick grabbed his spear and sword (sword was from the second-in-command) rushed towards the leader and started a brawl.

Mark went towards the trench they had filled with herbs and lit it up finally using everything they had. This way the bandits would become slow and sleepy while all the villagers had been given an antidote to counter the effects.

After a couple of minutes most bandits had been killed or captured and only the leader was still fighting while having the herbs dull his mind and reflexes. He could only still be awake enough to fight since he cultivated as was clear from the glow he used while attacking the walls. He should have had a fire type cultivation method and be at least stage 0.4 to release it outside of his body.

Cultivation in Hope was made possible by research from the WG (world government), this meant that once reaching a certain point the real body was also altered and made stronger. They made it like this to make sure that humans could thrive on SUR-110. To cultivate you needed a cultivation scroll which stated exactly how to control, divide and circle your energy to improve. Every scroll had it’s limit, as far as mark knew the highest layer was 7 which meant that the most you could cultivate was stage 7.9. Every stage was divided in 1-3 beginning stage, 4-6 middle stage and 7-9 end stage. This also meant that with a 4 layer scroll the highest you could ever get was 4.9.

Rick was still fighting the 0.4 leader which was incredible of him since a stage 0.4 cultivator had around 40% more strength than the same person at stage 0.0 like Rick. Rick dodged the leader’s sword while stabbing towards his stomach with his spear. This way the leader was forced to break of his attack since the spear would stab him first. Then Rick swung his left hand holding the sword towards the leader’s head making him have to dodge when suddenly Luke appeared behind the leader, he had been lying on the ground the whole time waiting for Rick to lure the leader over.

In the time where the leader had to deal with Luke’s backstab Rick made a gamble, he grabbed his spear differently and threw it as hard as possible towards the leader. Because the leader was busy with Luke’s attack he saw the spear too late and it speared his chest on the right side and while it wasn’t deadly try moving with 2 meter of wood in your body. This made the rest of the fight easy and after another 10 minutes or so Rick finally found the opportunity to kill the leader by beheading him.

Then suddenly the system was heard, [Congratulations on beating the village creating instance with gold rank. Reasons for gold rank are stated below.

First: bandits were killed and tax was not paid thus saving the villagers.

Second: the village’s entire bureaucracy was changed making sure villagers would be happier.

Third: leader of bandits was killed to make sure there wouldn’t be bandits for a couple of years.

The instance is done and you will be transported in 1 minute. Rewards from the instance will be given once relocated in main map]