CHAPTER 30: THE BOUNTY
The first ambush hit three minutes after I logged in.
Four players—levels 28 to 31, mixed classes, no guild tags—materialized from behind a rock formation in the starting zone. Their positioning was amateur, their coordination nonexistent, but there were four of them and one of me.
I dropped the lead Berserker with a spear thrust before his charge completed, but the Elementalist's ice spell caught Lord Grim mid-transition. The freeze lasted two seconds—enough time for the Cleric to buff the remaining DPS.
The Brawler and Sharpshooter hit simultaneously.
[Lord Grim HP: 100% → 64%.]
I broke the freeze, swapped to gun form, and started kiting. The narrow terrain that had served me against Tyrannical Ambition's squad was useless here—random players didn't hold formation, didn't follow predictable patterns, didn't respond to the same pressure points that guild members did.
The Sharpshooter landed a headshot while I was targeting the Brawler.
[Lord Grim HP: 64% → 41%.]
The PRD can't predict chaos.
These aren't profiled players following guild protocols.
These are random opportunists chasing ten thousand yuan.
And there are hundreds of them.
I killed the Brawler and the Sharpshooter, but the respawned Berserker caught me from behind while I was finishing the Elementalist.
[Lord Grim has been killed by BerserkerFrenzy.]
The death screen flashed. XP loss notification. Equipment durability damage. Respawn timer.
First death of the day.
And it won't be the last.
The pattern repeated for two hours.
Every leveling zone was compromised. Every dungeon entrance was camped. The movement schedule I'd built during the guild suppression era—the careful timing windows and patrol gaps—was completely useless against bounty-motivated randoms.
The guild scouts followed schedules. The bounty hunters followed opportunity.
[Lord Grim deaths: 3. XP loss: ~5% total. Equipment durability: Degrading.]
Three deaths in two hours.
At this rate, I'll hit ten before the day ends.
Chen Yehui doesn't need to beat me himself.
He just needs to make the server do it for him.
The math was brutal. Ten thousand yuan split among successful hunters meant the per-kill reward dropped with volume, but that didn't stop the initial surge. Hundreds of players saw "10,000 yuan" and started hunting—rational calculation would come later, after the feeding frenzy died down.
I need a different strategy.
Can't outmaneuver random chaos with preparation.
Need to make hunting Lord Grim expensive enough that the reward isn't worth the cost.
Party chat pinged.
[Steamed Bun Invasion: LORD GRIM! I heard you were getting BULLIED!]
How does he know?
The bounty notification was server-wide, but Steamed Bun isn't exactly the type to read announcements carefully.
[Lord Grim: How did you find out about the bounty?]
[Steamed Bun Invasion: What bounty? Someone in the wild zone said they were going to kill you ten times! That sounded RUDE so I came to help!]
He didn't even know about the money.
He just heard someone threatening his party leader and showed up.
Loyalty without calculation.
The purest form.
Steamed Bun's Brawler materialized beside Lord Grim five minutes later.
Three bounty hunters had been tracking my position—I could see them on the minimap, circling like wolves waiting for an opening. The arrival of backup made them hesitate.
"HELLO FRIENDS!" Steamed Bun typed in local chat. "IF YOU WANT TO FIGHT LORD GRIM YOU HAVE TO FIGHT ME TOO! I AM VERY GOOD AT FIGHTING!"
The hunters didn't respond to the text, but their formation tightened. Three on two was better odds than three on one.
They engaged.
What happened next defied every tactical principle I'd ever learned.
Steamed Bun's Brawler kit was objectively underpowered—low damage output, limited range, no crowd control worth mentioning. In organized guild combat, Brawlers were liability picks that rarely survived focused fire.
But Steamed Bun didn't play organized combat.
He played chaos.
His Brick hit the lead hunter's Assassin mid-stealth, the timing so impossibly lucky that it had to be instinct rather than calculation. The stagger opened a window for Lord Grim's gun form to shred the exposed DPS.
The second hunter—a Witch—tried to kite, but Steamed Bun's Brawler charged in a direction that made no tactical sense whatsoever. The randomness threw off her positioning calculations. She zigged when she should have zagged, and his Sand Toss blinded her at the worst possible moment.
The third hunter started retreating before the fight was half over.
[Combat Complete: 3v2 engagement won. Lord Grim kills: 1. Steamed Bun Invasion kills: 2.]
[SRM Update: Steamed Bun Invasion — 61% → 63%. Combat synergy: Elevated. Category: Unpredictable Complementary.]
Sixty-three percent.
We fought back-to-back for three minutes and the resonance jumped two points.
The chemistry isn't data anymore.
It's instinct.
Four more bounty hunters arrived over the next hour.
Steamed Bun PKed all of them.
His combat style—if you could call it a style—was the anti-meta. Professional players trained predictability out of their execution because consistency won championships. Steamed Bun had never learned what consistency meant, so he couldn't be predicted.
The hunters expected Lord Grim. They got a Brawler who threw Bricks at angles that shouldn't work, who used Sand Toss as an engagement tool instead of a defensive option, who charged into obviously bad positions and somehow made them work through sheer aggressive refusal to play correctly.
"We should do this every day!" Steamed Bun typed after the fourth kill.
I stared at the message.
He thinks PK defense is a fun activity.
He's not stressed about the bounty.
He's not worried about the numbers.
He's having the time of his life.
[Steamed Bun Invasion: I never knew being hunted was so EXCITING! Can we stay longer?]
The kid's broken in the best possible way.
"Another time. We need to figure out how to make this sustainable."
[Steamed Bun Invasion: What does sustainable mean?]
"It means we can't fight bounty hunters all day every day."
[Steamed Bun Invasion: WHY NOT?!]
Because unlike you, the rest of us need to sleep, eat, and level without constant interruption.
Because the bounty attracts numbers we can't fight indefinitely.
Because Chen Yehui designed this to be a war of attrition, and attrition wars favor the side with more resources.
But Steamed Bun's question nagged at me.
Why not?
What if the answer isn't avoiding the bounty hunters?
What if the answer is making hunting Lord Grim so costly that the bounty becomes a net loss?
The math reconfigured in my head.
Ten thousand yuan total. Divided among hunters who successfully kill me ten times.
But if every attempt to kill me costs the hunter more than they gain...
If we punish attacks so consistently that the expected value goes negative...
The rational players stop trying.
And the irrational ones run out of resources.
I pulled up the PRD and started modeling scenarios. Kill/death ratios. Equipment durability costs. Time investment calculations. The variables were messy, but the principle was sound.
Make hunting Lord Grim more expensive than the reward.
Turn Chen Yehui's attrition warfare back on him.
Party chat pinged.
[Soft Mist: I have an idea. Meet me at the Arena.]
Tang Rou. The coaching deal was barely twelve hours old, but she was already thinking about the bounty problem.
What does she have in mind?
The Arena is the public PvP space—structured duels with spectators.
High visibility. Controlled conditions. Recorded footage.
If we turn the bounty hunt into a spectacle...
If we make every assassination attempt a public humiliation for the attacker...
The cost goes up. The reward stays the same.
Asymmetric warfare.
I logged Lord Grim's location and started moving toward the Arena district.
The bounty hunters would follow.
Good.
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