My Players Are So Fierce

A basic spirit technique manual and a Blood Vulture sword arts manual.

These were the young lady’s personal belongings, and were insights she wrote down herself when she was a beginner. It was clear the young lady was truly the “genius” she claimed to be.

Additionally, there was an exquisite small pouch containing twenty sets of Blood Vulture retainer armor made by the best leathersmiths and tailors in Kadman City.

Though they were lighter regular leather armor, they still had considerable decent defenses.

At the very least, they were much better than the worn battle armor used by the Witch Hunters, and most importantly, they looked cool enough with their unified style that the little players would definitely like!

Murphy fully understood their aesthetics.

Weapons had to be big, exaggerated, and cool enough to glow if possible.

Armor had to be edgy and revealing, preferably a bikini with black stockings.

Although he currently lacked the means to satisfy the players’ peculiar tastes, these armor pieces and accompanying weapons were made by skilled artisans and included several masterwork items, which would be enough to arm them.

These items surpassed the level of ordinary retainer armor, clearly prepared in advance by the young lady for the Blood Servants she would recruit in the future.

She casually handed them over without batting an eye, fully demonstrating her wealth.

It seems the Patriarch also understood the path to spoiling his daughter.

Looking at her lavish preparations and then at his own situation, Murphy couldn’t help but feel dejected for a moment. The difference in how capable the elders were was on full display.

The unfortunate vampire sighed in self-pity as he fastened the pouch containing the armor and weapons around his waist under the disdainful gaze of the guard.

“You’re so poor you don’t even have your own spirit pouch?”

The tall, crimson chainmail-clad Midnight Hunter sneered:

“It seems you and your elder are both a disgrace to the clan! A rat in a muddy pit. The wise young lady truly understands how to make the most of things.”

But the thick-skinned Murphy was long used to such taunts. He simply looked the guard up and down, eyeing his cool chainmail, longsword, and coiled whip at his waist.

Murphy stroked his chin, and after the latter finished flaunting his arrogant sense of superiority, he snapped his fingers and said:

“Take it off, I’ll have that outfit.”

“Huh?”

The elite Midnight Hunter’s eyes widened.

He took this as a challenge, but as his hand touched his sword hilt, Murphy said in a hollow voice:

“Your noble young lady just promised me a set of elite armor to save my life. Surely this arrogant sir wouldn’t want to see his esteemed lady go back on her word and act in an unbecoming manner?”

“You can refuse to give it. I’ll just ask someone else.”

“Silence!”

Involving the young lady’s reputation made the arrogant guard immediately clench his fists.

He turned to look at Femis.

The young lady waved dismissively, clearly not caring about this trifling matter.

The guard could only swallow his anger and, under Murphy’s subtle smile, remove his chainmail, padded leather armor, and weapons and toss them to Murphy. He then returned to his mistress with a cold expression amid the muffled laughter of the other vampire elites.

However, Femis clearly had ways to handle this.

She seemed to have anticipated this and casually took off her cloak and draped it over her loyal guard.

However, due to their height difference, the tall guard had to kneel for the noble young lady to perform this act.

In the strict hierarchical vampire system, such bestowal from a superior was the highest display of overt favor, so the guard who had just been humiliated by Murphy immediately became arrogant again.

“What a good dog. It seems our little loli has a knack for training beasts too,” Murphy inwardly sneered.

He didn’t take this incident to heart at all. How could a mature member of society be as petty as these immature vampire brats?

“Maxim!”

He called out to his loyal servant and tossed the chainmail to him.

The latter was flustered.

This was elite armor meant for Midnight Hunters. How was a lowly Blood Servant worthy of it?

Yet Murphy urged him to put it on quickly. He himself had Tris’s Elder armor, durable enough to withstand a Witch Hunter’s Blessed Sacred Blade, so this wasn’t meant for him to wear.

Murphy valued his own life greatly, especially after clashing with Natalie and realizing he couldn’t afford the risks of direct combat right now.

So unless necessary, he’d rather not be so reckless as to charge into battle himself.

He should leave such heroics to someone more suitable.

“Excellent, full of spirit!”

Murphy clapped Maxim on the shoulder.

Clothes really make the man. This white-haired, albino Blood Servant looked formidable and imposing in the badass crimson chainmail. Add a midnight cloak borrowed from the young lady, and he looked every bit the impressive commander.

“From now on, you’ll be my ‘Shadow Warrior.'”

Murphy extended his arm and tapped Maxim’s shoulders left and right, as if bestowing an honor, and said:

“Before we safely return to Kadman City, you must learn to impersonate ‘Murphy’. It’s dangerous, but I believe in you.”

“I understand, Lord Murphy! Leave everything to me! I won’t let you down!”

Maxim loudly thumped his chest in response.

Though foolishly loyal and suffering from the bad vampire habit of zealous worship, he wasn’t stupid. He immediately grasped Murphy’s intent and felt honored instead of afraid.

Murphy had promised to perform the initial Embrace on him after returning, so protecting his elder was only natural as his progeny.

Moreover, Maxim had his own motives.

Overlooked for so long and merely observing Murphy’s victory in Morland Village made him firmly believe that while currently disadvantaged, his lord would surely achieve greatness eventually.

Pledging loyalty now meant he would share in Murphy’s future glory.

For someone yearning to make a name for himself, this risk was nothing to fear. What truly terrified him was continuing to be ignored and living another gloomy, hopeless life.

“Let’s go! Crossed swords!”

Murphy beckoned Maxim over as the two headed towards a desolate area.

He wanted to verify the specific effects of the experience and template upgrade functions he had unlocked, while also taking the remaining three days to practice.

After deciding to implement the “cannon fodder mission” as the fifth phase of the Newbie Guide Quest, Murphy was determined to give his full effort and stage a brilliant ambush with the little players’ help.

Their equipment was settled, and he would summon them into the game tomorrow to discuss tactics. Besides this, he could not let his personal strength stagnate. With the upgrade function unlocked, he had to seize the opportunity to practice and consider the worst-case scenario.

If the players failed, he had to be able to escape on his own.

As long as there were still mountains, he would not lack firewood to burn!

This was not Murphy being cowardly and fearing death.

The main thing was that there was a “Queen of Waste” waiting for him back in Kadman City. If he died, that solitary former vampire Elder Tris with her wretched living habits would likely starve herself to death without him.

Just imagining that was too tragic.

——

Under the pitch-black night, two figures clashed swords back and forth.

Both wielded the standard swift rapiers of the Blood Vulture clan, causing the slender and sharp weapons to make whooshing sounds as they cut through the air, trailing arcs of cold light with each offensive and defensive move of the wielders.

This was the standard one-handed sword fencing style that emphasized speed, accuracy and ferocity.

Striking like a viper, defending like a vulture. Combined with the Blood Vultures’ various ingenious uses of their blood wings, it allowed for a perfect melding of offense and defense.

Now, with the vampires’ preternatural speed bestowed by their supernatural nature augmenting their midnight swiftness, Murphy’s sword strokes were completely untraceable in the night to regular eyes. But Maxim, who was sparring with him, was also quite familiar with the Blood Vulture sword arts, so he didn’t find it too difficult to respond.

Although the Blood Vulture sword arts were practical but not considered a profound skill in the continent’s martial arts circles, and did not incorporate any mysteries of spirit power usage, with a vampire’s preternatural physical abilities enhancing them, Murphy could still spar evenly with a Blood Servant.

This fully demonstrated that while Murphy’s swordsmanship looked very cool, it was actually quite poor.

After all, it was only an “entry-level” level skill, so one couldn’t expect it to be too miraculous.

“Clank!”

After a parry, Murphy’s swift rapier was tapped on his shoulder by Maxim’s viper-like swift blade, signifying another of Murphy’s failures.

The unfortunate vampire sighed, sheathing his sword in a very cool pose, while Maxim looked a bit awkward but still grinned widely at his lord, saying:

“Your swordsmanship has improved again, Lord Murphy.”

“You might as well just say I still have plenty of room for improvement instead. I can take criticism.”

Murphy rolled his eyes and waved Maxim off, signaling his servant to practice while he went to sit under a tree and yawned.

His stubborn human habits still affected him, requiring more time to adapt to the vampires’ peculiar biological clocks.

He glanced at his character card, where the “experience bar” at the bottom had increased during their crossed swords, filling him with a sense of excitement.

This proved that one didn’t just gain experience from killing enemies.

The character card’s explanation of the experience bar was clear.

This “experience bar” simply represented one’s strength in data form for clarity, with two displays for “character level” and “job level”.

The character level truly represented the degree to which Murphy understood and controlled his own power at each level of strength, while the job level represented his mastery of a certain job and its main skills, related to the job change requirements.

The former represented the absolute level of one’s strength, while the latter was tied to its specific manifestation.

Therefore, to “level up”, besides tempering his skills in combat, Murphy also needed a deeper understanding of his own power.

If Tris were around, it would be easy since the former Blood Elder, though retired, could easily guide a novice. But in this situation, Murphy had to find other ways to rapidly level up.

He took out the sword arts manual Femis had given him and began reading it.

The dark night with only moonlight was torture on the eyes for reading, but a vampire’s unique eye structure allowed Murphy to read unhindered by the darkness.

As he flipped through the thin manual, he pondered his current skills in his mind.

No need to dwell on the Blood Vulture sword arts, this was his only close combat skill that he had to work hard at mastering.

From their crossed swords earlier, he could basically tell that Maxim was a decent sparring partner at this stage. This retainer loyal to the Blood Vulture clan for three generations had at least mastered the sword arts.

That arrogant Elder Jed truly failed to recognize talent. He completely overlooked Maxim’s potential in this area and his almost suicidal training intensity.

But this was for the best, as Murphy had at least acquired a treasure.

Besides swordsmanship, Murphy also had some spirit technique skills.

But the issue with this supernatural power was that its improvement was not as straightforward as swordsmanship. It represented the application of knowledge, like how using a ruler to measure a triangle’s perimeter worked, but using the Pythagorean theorem was much faster.

Brute force was the most foolish approach for improving spirit techniques.

In the over one month since his reincarnation, Murphy had organized the foundational knowledge about this world in his mind.

He knew that so-called spirit power was a special force drifting between this world’s heavens and earth, said to originate from the more mysterious spirit realm overlaying the physical world. But some theories stated that spirit power’s true origin lay in the even more dangerous and unknown sub-space beyond the spirit realm.

That was the region outside the outermost spirit realm, which even the most learned spirit masters had very limited understanding of.

Most importantly, this world’s mystical theories had established that a living being’s spirit talent was fixed at birth.

No amount of future practice could raise the upper limit of one’s spirit talent, one could only work hard on technique.

It was like a bucket’s maximum capacity being set when crafted. The only thing affecting its weight was the state of the water inside.

Murphy didn’t know if his own spirit talent was good or bad, but considering his marginal status in the clan, he could probably surmise.

If he were truly a genius, he would never have been consecutively given two cannon fodder missions.

The harsh reality made him feel depressed.

This character was pretty much screwed!

Murphy thought that if not for the little players being his trump card, and Tris the useless waifu lady still waiting to be fed back home, he would have considered just deleting his account and rerolling his character by now.

He shook his head to calm down and carefully reread the thin sword arts manual, not just skimming it but carefully studying the genius young lady’s insights while practicing the sword arts through her elegant writing.

The young lady’s fundamentals were truly solid.

Though the text was not lengthy, her manual did record several key points about the Blood Vulture sword arts and summarized them in straightforward yet profound language.

This just made Murphy feel worse.

Looking at her innate talent, then at his own.

Sigh, maybe he really should just delete and reroll?

As he was thinking this, a prompt suddenly appeared on the translucent character card:

【Through repeatedly reading Femis Cecilia Lessenbra’s sword arts manual, your Blood Vulture sword arts skill proficiency has greatly increased, now at “Proficient” level.

Note:

The writer of this book has mastered the Blood Vulture sword arts to the “Master” level, so by reading this book and practicing, you can raise your own sword skill’s limit to “Master.”】

【Blood Vulture sword arts skill has reached “Proficient”, unlocking the 【One-Handed Weapon Mastery】 talent! Effect grants a slight increase to your attack speed when using one-handed weapons.】

【With Blood Vulture sword arts skill reaching “Proficient”, your primary job “Blood Vulture Apprentice” can change to “Blood Vulture Swordsman”. Change job? Yes/No?】

“?”