New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

"I\'ll stay with you while you reward our members, but then I have to go. I have a lot of road to cover, and I can\'t teleport to Sunpeak from any nearby Elven city."

Phoenix frowned in confusion.

"Why do you want to go to Sunpeak? Home isn\'t there, is it?"

"No. Sunpeak is just the closest city I know with a teleporter."

Astaroth stopped next to Phoenix. She saw him taping around in his interface, before his map suddenly became visible to her.

On it, she saw he had completely zoomed out on the continent they were. Phoenix coils see practically only the fog of war on it, which wasn\'t much different from her own.

But it showed a few specks of visible map. One speck was here, the Bastion.

Another one was Sunpeak. But from Sunpeak, there was an obvious straight line to another place, and a V-shape from that place to another city.

She didn\'t recognize the name of the city, Tel\'narel, and neither did she know where the other cleared-up space was. But her brain rapidly did the math.

"Are you thinking of going back to your starting village? What do you want to do there?"

"I want to tell them to move out of there. I have a bad feeling about this ten-year time skip, and I fear they might be in danger if they stay there."

Seeing his concern was genuine, Phoenix didn\'t want to keep him here more than necessary. She started walking back toward the entrance of the palace.

Astaroth looked at her walking away, wordlessly, thinking she was mad at him, or maybe even she thought he was crazy. But when she stopped a few steps later, and turned around, it was an urgency he saw on her face.

"Are you coming? The faster I\'m done with rewarding the members, the faster you can leave."

Astaroth\'s serious face bloomed into a smile. He skipped forward, reaching next to Phoenix as she started walking again.

The reward ceremony didn\'t take long, as many of the players had not lost their lives during the trap zone phase, and they didn\'t need to be given Exp back. The only thing that arose was the will from most members to get a physical reward.

Phoenix promised them compensation, but said that they needed to wait until she could confirm they had such compensation to give. This assuaged them, for the time being.

Once this was done, Phoenix quickly gifted the officers in the guild the required amount of Exp for all of them to reach level fifty. When she opened up the leaderboards, she smiled.

Silent Light was currently first on it, followed by Azamus, and then the remaining ten spots in the top ten were their officers. She didn\'t know how long this would be the case, but it satisfied her anyway.

Astaroth looked at the timer before the forced log out, and the remaining time satisfied him. He still had around twenty-two hours.

In twenty-two hours, he could cover a great deal of distance, with his high agility, flight, and even the root travel skill from Luna. Facing Phoenix, she nodded at him.

"See you outside the game," she said, winking at him.

Astaroth nodded at her, melding with Luna. As antlers grew out the side of his head, forming a crown, Astaroth walked over to the wall of the palace tree.

When he touched it, he felt how far the tree\'s roots travelled, and it almost gave him vertigo. Smiling one last time at Phoenix, he melted into the tree, blasting away through the roots.

He could feel the speed at which he was travelling was much faster than before. He attributed this to his higher agility score.

The forest surrounding the bastion was big enough that he didn\'t have to exit the root system until his melding with Luna was almost over. By then, the speed he had accumulated blasted him past the sound barrier on exit.

Astaroth angled his exit from the top of a tree at an upward forty-five-degree angle. He launched upward like a rocket, waiting before he melded with Morpheus.

When he felt his body slowing down and no longer ascending, he melded. With wings sprouting out of his back, Astaroth used the speed he still had to glide forward as long as he could.

The skies were a dangerous place to be in New Eden, so he was only staying in them while he was flying this fast. As soon as his speed reached the norm for his agility score, he plunged, stopping a few hundred feet over the tree canopies.

His previous height had shown him the forest would soon end. He was about to reach a zone that was plains and hills for a while.

By his calculations of the distance he travelled already, plus the burst he could give himself if he used Royal Protection when it came off cooldown the next day, he estimated he could reach his starting village with an hour to spare.

And that was while factoring some rest, since he couldn\'t go all night without eventually sleeping. As he flew over the rest of the forest, he caught sight of several monster hoards.

If he hadn\'t been pressed for time, he would have dived in and reaped some Exp. But he shook his head, disappointed.

\'I will do that when we come back from the update. Plus, the monsters in many places will be stronger.\'

A grin formed on his lips as he imagined himself fighting hordes of corrupted monsters. The possibility of suffering from the corruption himself didn\'t even brush his mind, as his reverie continued.

His daydreaming continued until he saw the timer for his meld flash at the corner of his eyes. He quickly dove to the ground, making sure he wasn\'t hundreds of it in the air when the meld ended.

He was currently over the plains, and he felt something weird. Like someone was watching him.

But the feeling came from all around, and it was disturbing. As he was close to landing, his meld with Morpheus ended, and he melded with White.

He landed in a roll, minimizing the impact and negating the damage. But when he got up, the feeling of being observed suddenly intensified.

The hair on his neck stood as he instinctively threw himself to the side. Something flew where he had been previously, grazing the ground and gouging deep grooves in it.

\'Fuck.\'

That was all he could think of, seeing what was now before him.