Chapter 47: New Era

After this event was announced, the game forums were filled with excitement.

Most players considered the Federation's actions to be unjust and idiotic, considering that they'd caused the game to change completely and the real-world value of GC to plummet. A handful of anti-Federation hashtags circulated online.

#DieFederation

#RevengeNuke

#NoMoreForEver

Of course, the biggest guilds who had been making profits off Era's cities lost out the most.

The nuclear bombing, considering how much income had been generated from taxing NPCs, had literally atomized their business model!

However, the decision of which side these guilds should support in the war was a complicated one.

After all, the Federation clearly had far superior firepower compared to the players. It seemed entirely possible that the Federation could keep the players stunlocked, constantly dying and respawning on Era with no possibility of doing anything in retaliation.

Since the first-rate guilds and SuperGuilds had to report to their shareholders, their situation was extremely complicated.

In the end, most of the big guilds declared neutrality in the way and tried to cushion the financial loss by focusing on dungeons and quests. This, they reasoned, would surely be profitable in the long run.

As an emergency measure, guilds began directing their members not to attack peaceful NPCs. It didn't seem worth it to risk another war like the one they'd just gotten themselves into, a war which had, in a few moments, reduced most of their earnings to ashes.

Moreover, the guilds realized that, if they were to have any success in the future of "Horus," they needed to restore the image of the Eternals! It simply wouldn't do anyone any good to walk around with the label of "genocidal" slapped onto them!

Counter to the decisions of the bigger guilds, many smaller and independent guilds came to a different decision. They agreed that it was necessary to respond to this unforgivable Federation attack in kind!

This community quickly came up with a name for this new initiative: "The Great Riposte!"

While the biggest guilds stayed neutral and many smaller guilds commenced the war against the Federation, there were many individual players who actually decided to 'join' the Federation.

For many, this was the perfect opportunity! The Federation would allow them to challenge the tyrannical guilds who had asked a hundred things from them without giving much in return!

This was the camp Apophis fell into. He decided the most logical choice was to side with the Federation And oppose the Eternals.

In his old life, the Eternals had put up little resistance to the Federation at this stage of the game. Slaughtering the Tyottings was one thing. The Federation was something completely different.

Unlike the people of the Republic of Tyo, the Federation was neither peaceful nor underdeveloped. They were a professional military, equipped with modern weapons and trained in stellar combat.

And, when one thought about it, the difference in technology was obvious! The Tyottings were not only peaceful, and so didn't focus on developing advanced weapons, but their technological level wasn't very high compared to most of the galaxy, anyway!

The players, at that time, were limited to whatever technology they could get their hands on, and Planet Era had little to offer.

In Apophis's old life, the galaxy had been divided into five technological stages.

First: Civilizations which had not yet achieved interstellar travel. The Republic of Tyo was a good example.

Second: Civilizations who 'had' achieved light-speed travel, but had not yet surpassed it. This let them travel to nearby systems in a matter of only a few years, rather than the tens of thousands it would take at sub-light speeds.

Third: Civilizations who had achieved Subliminal Speed, the technology which let them travel from a point to another in the same sector of the galaxy in a brief time. The United Federation of Planets had achieved this stage at this time.

The Fourth: Civilizations who had mastered the use of wormholes, letting them travel anywhere at will. These immense interstellar empires were made up of tens to hundreds of thousands of solar systems! Of course, the Zetark Empire was a perfect example.

Fifth: This level was strictly theoretical in Apophis's old life. Fifth-stage civilizations were theorized to be able to travel from one galaxy to another, but as of his return to the past, no technology had been discovered that would make this possible!

Of course, technological level didn't merely describe how much freedom of movement a civilization had. It was merely a standard which described levels of advancement in many sociological areas, such as military, society, architecture, and broader culture.

In general, this technological level was a shorthand for one particular quality:

Threat level.

At this time, Apophis knew, the Federation's threat level was considerably higher than that of the players who sought to resist them.