18 Dungeon

JUNE 22, 2100

Alexander's alarm clock went off at 6 a.m.

It was one of the hardest wake-up calls of his life. Yet, if he wanted a chance of succeeding in his quest, he had to get back in the game as soon as possible.

He grabbed some food from the refrigerator downstairs, then returned to his room and put the VRI helmet on his head.

System: Welcome to the Galaxy of Horus!

Server Announcement: (posted 2 hours and 12 minutes ago) Congratulations to the player "Akira" for being the 100th player to reach Level 5 on the continent of Aurora! A public Dungeon has been unearthed at global position 1807056, 45608.

"Shit!" Apophis growled. He'd slept too much, and other players were catching up to him. "I forgot how efficient the top players of the SuperGuilds were from the very beginning. I guess leeching EXP from every single one of your members pays off especially well this early in the game."

And since Apophis didn't have a SuperGuild to give him free EXP and items, he'd just have to make do on his own like the no-lifers who wouldn't even be sleeping.

For now, Apophis's top priority would be clearing that Dungeon that had just appeared. He left the command post, then returned to the surface and found his motorcycle.

Apophis looked at the map, realizing that he was forty minutes away from the Dungeon's location. That was unsurprising, since almost all his travel since joining the game had taken him closer and closer to the continent's most active areas.

He revved up the motorcycle's engine and set off at once as fast as he could.

***

The Dungeon was located in a beautiful valley full of greenery, which was a nice change from the scorching sands which made up most of the Gobi Desert.

Cool winds blew the scents of flowers across Apophis's face, and the sun shining down on the trees and grass of the valley was nowhere near as brutal as the desert sun.

When Apophis arrived, he found that over a thousand other players had beaten him there. After all, he'd arrived three hours after it had appeared, and many other players would have been closer.

The whole area was overwhelmed with players, many of whom were present out of simple curiosity. Only those with professional MMO experience, no-lifers, and SuperGuild stars had reached LvL 5 and unlocked their class by this time… and most people beneath that level understood that they were too weak to try a Dungeon.

Dungeons were designed to be played by parties of five players—ideally, a composition of three DPS characters, one healer, and one tank. There were five levels of Dungeon difficulty: Easy, Normal, Hard, Nightmare, and IronMan.

Apophis remembered that in his first life, most Easy Dungeons had a successful clear rate of about 80%. Normal Dungeons were successfully cleared between 30% and 40% of the time, depending on the individual Dungeon.

Hard Dungeons varied quite a lot in clear rate, because they employed encounters and puzzles which required very specific strengths and knowledge to complete. Depending on the Dungeon, Hard mode had only a 1% to 10% clear rate.

Then there was Nightmare, a difficulty so intense that only between 0.1% and 10% of attempts ever succeeded. This was a unique difficulty increase compared to those before it, because its maximum encounter difficulty was similar to those of Hard Dungeons, but there were many, many more of these encounters per Dungeon.

Therefore, players who could just scrape by in Hard Dungeons would stand no chance in Nightmare Dungeons, but elite players with the skills and equipment to defeat the hardest encounters in Hard Dungeons wouldn't find Nightmare Dungeons to be much more difficult.

It was for this reason that both Hard and Nightmare Dungeons shared the same 10% maximum success rate, because this reflected the same skill cap of the game's players.

Then, of course, there were IronMan Dungeons… and hardly anyone ever attempted those.

Why would they?

In an IronMan Dungeon, dying meant permanently losing your character.

Even professional players stuck to Nightmare difficulty, unwilling to play in a mode where they couldn't resurrect afterward.

In Apophis's former life, he recalled only one team of players who'd ever beaten an IronMan Dungeon. They'd been led by one of the 7 Gods, Lucifer, an Esper who'd mastered psionic Skills to a further extent than any other player.

As everyone had learned once his team succeeded, the rewards for beating an IronMan Dungeon were insanely good. They rewarded Epic and Legendary-rarity items—and had even proved to be the only source of Artifacts, the most powerful items in the entire game.

However, whether an IronMan Dungeon always rewarded an Artifact was a subject of much debate, for even Lucifer had only made one IronMan attempt.

After beating the IronMan Dungeon which multiplied his already-enormous fame, Lucifer was renowned as the only player in the entirety of Horus who possessed an artifact, [The Creator's Armor.]

The fact that Apophis knew so many intricate details about Horus's Dungeon mechanics meant that he would have a huge advantage over most other teams to attempt them!

His next step would be to find a team capable of beating this first Dungeon's Nightmare mode. As in every MMORPG, 90% of players had specced into DPS... along with Apophis. 

Almost all who remained were healers, and only a handful were tanks, since most solo-focused players found it easier to survive by healing themselves than by using tank Skills

Finding a good team would be tricky.