They weren’t the only ones with the idea, just the best at it. Many other pairs had formed, and some full fighting parties, with tanks, casters, and a healer. Since they didn’t know the way the game’s scaling was balanced yet, letting rotating members get the last hit for the points seemed to be a good way to get everyone powered up.
Many of them had forgotten that the announcer told them that the game rewarded innovation and difficulty more highly, so the gains they were getting by just taking the last hit on a disabled opponent weren’t nearly as high as they would get in a hard fight. The two-person teams were doing better since the fights were more even, but the solo players were getting quite a bit when they could overcome a pair.
Nico and Max working together were making up for the lack of bonus in the pure volume of kills. Every few seconds, one name or the other would light up the screen after they abandoned the edge of the forest to go hunting.
They had just taken down a group of five when suddenly Max felt an incredible pain in his back and realized that he had taken a fatal wound from a distance without noticing. He whistled to let Nico know he was in trouble, and suddenly a blade was flying at his face.
[You have been killed by Blood Goddess].
Of course, she wouldn’t let anyone else get the points for his kill.
The developers burst into laughter at this tactic. There were no teams, so there was no friendly fire damage mitigation, you had to trust your allies if you were going to work together.
Thirty seconds later when he respawned, Max saw Nico in the distance, running towards the starting zone. He jogged over to her and rejoined the battle as the reduced points debuff to make it worthless to spawn kill slowly wore off. Fifteen seconds after a respawn was the protection you got. You still took full damage, but the enemy would only get one single point from killing you, instead of hundreds or thousands.
At the two-hour mark, both Max and Nico had halos above their head, showing how far ahead of the others they were. Max had mastered Magic Arrow, the fastest and easiest spell to cast in the game. He had also learned an Arcane Blast area damage spell that was fairly quick to cast.
Nico had finally given in and upgraded her dagger to a sword that did a large amount of cold damage on hit with a chance to freeze. Neither of them had bought any armor, focusing on their damage output instead. With the advantages gained by more rapid killing, the armor was a waste of points.
Most of the players had realized that fairly quickly, and the developers were making notes for a day zero balancing patch to make the armor more worth taking. The only ones who really went into defense were the barbarians and Clerics, who both had magic damage reduction skills.
By the sixth hour, players were getting exhausted, and Max cleared a group out of a cave where they were waiting to ambush others. It was too obvious of a spot, it had been used many times before.
“Let’s take a break and get some rest. Mental exhaustion in a twelve-hour game is going to get a lot of players.” Max suggested.
“Good thinking. I’ll cover the door, you hide behind the wall for now.” Nico agreed, curling up in a back corner where her filthy, formerly black rags would let her blend in with the wall of the cave.
For over an hour, they rested. Not quite asleep, but recovering the mental fortitude to go again.
It also gave others the chance to catch up, and the Halos for mid-level power started to appear all over the battlefield.
“Let’s see how many of those Halos we can take away,” Max whispered, checking the leaderboard and seeing that their advantage was almost gone after an hour in the cave.
When they started hunting again, the arena suddenly got very lively again. Like the players, the spectators had also been intensely excited for hours on end and had started to wear out.
One after another, Max and Nico wiped out the players with Halos until faint wings started to form on their backs, and they realized they were the prime targets for everyone on the battlefield. Even if it was ten on one, they were so far ahead of the lowest ranked players that a single kill of them would move the lucky player over halfway up the ranks and give them access to all the skills they had been craving but couldn’t get the points to access.
With the two of them dominating first and second places, the real battle was taking place between third and fifth place. It was a delicate balance, both to eliminate powerful enemies and gain enough points to get upgrades to their power, and to avoid the top two so they didn’t get massacred.
The audience didn’t know the background of any of the competitors, so their assumption was that these were simply the most elite among the gamers and they were working together to suppress the competition. While that wasn’t entirely wrong, they both had a distinct advantage in the form of advanced combat training on their side that allowed them to fight effectively without using skills.
The people who looked down on the Street Rat class at the start were starting to warm up to it as more than a gimmick. If you didn’t have the ability to buy skills, you could pump up your stats instead and rely on more skilled movement and combat abilities to overcome the enemies. Max’s rate of casting was beyond most of their comprehension though, even though they could clearly see the spell text progression pop up as he cast.
It did give hope to a few fast-rapping streamers that they could find a niche in this game with the casting classes, using their unique skill to cast spells faster than their opponents. The Data Network linked entire sectors of the galaxy together, but only within a Solar System would the latency be low enough to actually play games like this, meaning that they wouldn’t have to regularly face such monsters as they were seeing today. They could play against locals and stream it with a good chance of success.
The one-hour remaining alarm sounded and the ranks were all but decided. Those at the top had gotten so far from those at the bottom that even their best attack abilities would do very little to harm the leaders. There were still a few more fighting to get into the top ten, but both Max and Nico had emerged as the undisputed victors, and even if they simply stopped for the last hour, nobody could overcome them.
So, that is almost exactly what they did. They sat down on a bench in the spawning area and gave strategy tips to the lower-ranked players who wished to hear them. Most didn’t, since they were all professionals, but a few admired the techniques that the two had come up with, and some wished to edit their skills for the last push to rank up and look better on the final scoreboard.
Not everyone made it to the end though. Some players had been so thoroughly crushed that the death penalty had taken them back to their zero power starting point, and they had simply retired early and left the arena without any fanfare.