End of the first day

"That was tough. I didn't think we could stomp them so hard in the end!"

With only the two of them out of the entire team of five taking part in the Invasion, Natan had a lot of time to get closer with Blevik. Fifty hours straight of decision making with the responsibility of their entire country lying only on their shoulders was a far better way to bond with someone than your typical outing or shopping spree.

"All is good that ends well. To be honest, I can't wait to see the results. If I'm right, we are in for a long three days..."

With the first month of the game being the most vicious and leading to majority of the teams getting kicked out of the game due their neighbours having bigger balls to consolidate their power in more decisive manner, there was no way to actually socialise with others, to prevent bad blood appearing between what would otherwise be a nice group of potential friends!

I'm actually quite curious as to how they are streaming this entire thing. It's not like we can be the only ones going to war with how many different countries there is at the start..."

Looking in the nearby field filled with the corpses of NPC and players alike dressed in colours of both sides. While it was a pity to lose so many men against the desperate counterattack of their opponent, the horde played their cards masterfully.

Not sparring even a single soldier for this whole conflict through entire fifty hours of the session, they skillfully manipulated cornered kingdom into thinking that the crusade was the only threat they had to be worried about, pushing all of their remaining forces to a pointless struggle aimed only at weakening the Papal army.

While the players would inherently respawn and suffer a minor loss of exp at most, they were just a minority in the entire army strength of any country.

With normal players serving as the gauge of influence and changes applied by the politics to one's country, they acted more like a pinch of salt in the soup of the entire country. Even if it was for the best to tend to their needs, it was the artificial population that brought the actual benefits on a serious scale, despite the players being the deciding factor behind the size and all the other aspects of the NPC's.

RING!

With less than five minutes on the clock constantly visible in the upper, right corner of every player's vision, it was time to wrap things up.

Thanks to the specific way of playing the game, all the armies and players that took part in this event would disappear, moved back to their usual place of being. While they would be summoned back to their previous position and state in the next session, developers decided that the initial stage of the game couldn't affect the entire world of the game right away.

Even if there were plans to turn the sessions into the heated part of the constant struggle taking place in a real-time, it required the whole world to watch those streams with tightened fists and eyes popping out from the number of emotions, not some small cliche of veterans savouring every small detail of the intricacies of the politics of the game!

"I guess this was a rather good start. See you on the other side!"

With the clock swiftly approaching four zeros, Natan waved his war mace to Blevik, before hiding it back into his storage and pressing the logout button.

For the sake of fairness and security at the same time, if someone felt too bad to continue playing, he could log off at any time but would be unable to return back during the session. To avoid misclicks or forced logouts, there was thirty-second cooldown before one could confirm the action.

As the all the colours of the virtual world suddenly combined into a single stream of light before disappearing completely, Natan's vision turned white, only for the blankness to slowly fade away and expose the multicolour structure of the VR googles.

With the technology of full dive being the backbone of the next generation of games, with "The World Universalis" as the prime example, the creators of the hardware decided to stick to the design of the previous generation of virtual reality just because of sentimental reasons. There was something magical in sleeping with those glasses on that appealed to every player around the world.

Taking the headset off, Natan waited for a few moments, for the feeling of his own body to return to his own brain. Full-dive might not be dangerous, but it still caused one's connection to the body to be temporarily suspended. While the process of logging out reversed this process without a fail, almost everyone still required a while to come back to the full control.

Knock, knock.

'He sure is fast.'

There was no doubt who was trying to get inside his room.

With the entire house locked from the outside, only the servants and the players from his team were allowed inside, and there was only one person in his group that was soo excited about the game to talk about it for every second of their free time instead of studying the mechanics of the game shared by the developers.

"Come in."

Sitting on the bed already, Natan could see the small guy bursting into the room with a bottle of recently popularised soda water. Three hours of lying on the bed would normally be leisure, but with the increased activity of the brain, it was better to drink one of those new, specialised drinks aimed to replenish the missing microelements of the body.

"Here, have some drink first, because you are going to spit it out if I start with the big news!"