[b]“Does it look like I’m doing anything else?”[/b] the yam-shaped man said in a vaguely mocking tone towards Ames. He regarded the other three in the party with various amounts of indifference, his free hand moving up to stroke his chin. The gunslinger was an odd one, playing with only one arm, but the other two looked like the sort of gamers that Mora-Sho wouldn’t particularly benefit from in the long run…not that he was the type the clan would benefit from either.

Still, wartime was wartime, and work was work.

[b]“Y’all talk big shit for a buncha sub-500s,”[/b] he laughed, [b]“But hey, this is a low-enough value war to get started in anyways, so why the hell not? No initiation test or anything, cause y’all are too weak for any main line defense, so let’s see…”[/b]
He rummaged through the folds of his patchwork cloak, before pulling out a collection of wooden tablets tied together by a braided rope. Flipping through them quickly, the eccentric of a man pulled out three of them and handed it out to Amulak. [b]“Small beans stuff, honestly, but also low liability if you just claim that you’re bandits or something. Don’t call yourselves Gakui-Re if ya don’t wanna be iced though. Keep the boards with ya; I don’t really care which ones you do, but they’ll track what work you ultimately end up do so, like, yeah.”[/b]

He nodded sagely a couple of times.

[b]“Happy hunting. Don’t bitch when you spend more time in respawn than in-game, yeah?”[/b]
[hr]
Klein’s browsing of the clan’s office didn’t reveal as much as he’d have liked. While becoming a member of the Mora-Sho clan did come with some benefits, mainly discounts in clan-affiliated stores and a free pass through the city-state, it appeared that greater benefits only occurred when one became a [i]trusted[/i] member of the clan, something that could only be achieved by endorsements through the Rien leaders. Rather than the MMORPG guilds that he was accustomed to, it looked more like a political party that handed out more violent work for its members, and while mentions of specialized necromancy techniques did pop up in places, the term ‘Dead Soldier’ never showed up in any of the posters that the mountainous man looked through.

It appeared that whatever this Job was, it wasn’t something advertised by the Mora-Sho.
[hr]
After reading through the mission details on each of the wooden boards and engaging in vigorous debate about the pros and cons of each job, ultimately Amulak’s desire for mayhem and brutality was overturned by the near-unanimous decision to attack the supply lines that would connect the main body of the Tato-Ie army back to the city-state they’ve pursued. Weapon durability and the need for potions meant that even fully-stocked item pouches were liable to run out during a campaign, and while [i]Immortals[/i] could certainly afford expensive item pouches that bent the rules of space, getting one for every Rien in an army that numbered to the tens of thousands was a bigger problem.

A problem, naturally, solved by Immortals who did supply runs that allowed them to travel light while carrying inordinate amounts of goods.

That was the party’s main target in this situation: creating a PvP ‘blockade’ in key geographical regions between the Tato-Ie army and their city-state in order to intercept any Immortal couriers before they could off-load supplies onto the army itself. While none of the party possessed any Thief skills that would allow them to actually [i]empty[/i] the contents of an Immortal’s inventory, 20% of all goods within an inventory, including currency, would drop upon death by another player, which meant a tidy profit even when exempting the commission fee they earned for every supplier party they sent back to the Keystone.

The main issue then, was twofold: how to prepare and how to intercept. With superhuman capabilities came superhuman traversal, after all, and the land that stretched from the Jinto Mountain Range to the Plains of Repentance was vast and varied. What would be the best way then, to track down and take down other gamers?