The Hunt: A Series of Unfortunate Events

A Missed Opportunity

Hunting is usually about timing.

Finding an unbubbled castle is only half the battle.

You also need to be able to reach it.

Earlier that afternoon, I found exactly the kind of target every hunter hopes for.

[AIA] Bumblebee.

Unbubbled, K10 - only one scroll needed to jump and...

around 7 million T4 troops.

I prepared everything.

Activated my 50% army size increase.

Switched to my PvP preset.

Dumped roughly a billion resources into our local bank.

Found a suitable location to jump from.

Then I clicked the button.

Nothing happened.

Instead, the game gave me a simple message:

Moving between servers is not allowed during Champion City Siege.

Perfect.

The target was sitting there.

The troops were there.

I was ready.

But the game had other plans.

I changed my equipment back to gathering gear and went back to collecting resources.

Only later did I discover something important.

Cross-server jumping didn't become available at server reset.

It became available when the final CCS match ended.

At 7 PM GMT.

I found that out around 2 PM.

Five hours later, I checked K10 again.

Bumblebee was bubbled.

Of course.

I stopped looking.

It was getting late, and I had to get up at 5 AM.

The hunt was over.

Or so I thought.

One Last Target

Shortly before I was about to shut down my computer, a message appeared from my friend x Angelick x.

Not the first time this happened, so I wasn't surprised.

She had found a target.

[IlI] Nik Aleks.

A 1.8 billion power account on server 289.

She was willing to attack it herself, but there was a problem.

She believed the castle was Cavalry.

Angelick's main lineup was Infantry.

Mine was Spearmen.

So if the target really was Cavalry...

this was exactly the kind of job I wanted.

However, I was just about to exit the game and go to bed.

But I also had a few beers.

Which, in hindsight, would become increasingly relevant.

Blame the alcohol, it didn't take Angelick much time to convince me.

A 1.8 billion power castle was far too large for me to believe it would contain no army at all.

So I didn't bother scouting before jumping.

I hid the troops I didn't need, kept only what I planned to use for the attack, and finally sent a scout.

The report came back.

Millions of Cavalry.

T5, T4, T3 - millions of merit just sitting in the castle, waiting for me.

And then...

something I didn't properly notice that would come into play later.

The Worst Attack of the Night

The battle was over immediately.

My entire attacking army was annihilated.

1,208,715 troops.

Gone.

There wasn't even enough left to properly show me the battle report.

Only the numbers.

543,923 crushed.

543,922 wounded.

120,870 survivors.

The survivors weren't even really survivors.

They had actually been saved by the enemy's Reroute skill, which redirects 10% of the attacking troops.

I stared at the report.

Then I looked at the scouting report again.

And finally noticed what I had missed.

More than 20 million T3 Cavalry.

Not two million.

Twenty.

I had attacked an army containing enough troops to make my mistake look almost impressive.

I couldn't stop laughing.

I sent the report to our Discord group.

My explanation was simple.

"I'm drunk and tired."

Nobody was particularly surprised.

But the laughter didn't last very long.

Because P4RTYST4RTER saw the report.

And unlike me...

he saw an opportunity.

A Rescue Mission

My Lord had been captured.

But that didn't necessarily mean the hunt was over.

If we could kill enough of the troops inside the castle, we could potentially rescue him while taking an enormous amount of merit in the process.

P4RTYStoppa logged in.

For anyone unfamiliar with the account, P4RTYStoppa is one of the very best accounts when it comes to hunting and merit.

But even P4RTY knew this wasn't a job for a solo attack.

There were simply too many troops.

A rally was needed.

Aryana joined almost immediately.

I sent what troops I had available.

Around 850,000 T4 Spearmen remained for the rally, along with some of my Cavalry that stayed in shelter in case of a counter-attack.

The Rescue Works

The first rally hit with around 3.8 million Spearmen.

The result was brutal.

Nearly 9 million enemy troops disappeared.

And more importantly...

my Lord was freed.

The rescue mission had worked.

P4RTY prepared another rally.

Then another.

Each attack destroyed millions more troops.

By this point, the castle was being emptied at an absurd rate.

The hunt had completely changed.

What started as Angelick finding a 1.8 billion power target had become a coordinated operation involving several of our strongest players.

And it was working.

Too well, perhaps.

Because while P4RTY was preparing the next rally...

we all missed something.

The Castle Had a New Guest

Somewhere during the chaos, [IlI] CERBERUS35 had entered the castle as a garrison.

Nobody noticed.

Not me.

Not Party.

Not Aryana.

Not Angelick.

We were too busy - Angelick and I were chatting.

P4RTY admitted he was on Instagram.

Aryana was barely keeping herself from falling asleep.

Something we all ended up laughing about later that night.

The next rally set out.

This time, the battle report looked very different.

P4RTY's troops were wiped out.

His Lord was captured.

At first, we didn't understand what had happened.

Then CERBERUS attacked Aryana.

Revealing his stats.

The castle wasn't simply occupied by the original target anymore.

It was heavily garrisoned by someone else.

And the person defending it had a completely different kind of account.

A premium account.

Powerful female synergy.

One of the strongest lineups currently dominating the game.

There was no point continuing.

Our fervor would eventually expire.

We hid what troops we had left, moved around the map and waited.

CERBERUS found us anyway.

But our troops were already safe.

Unfortunately... only the troops.

One Last Problem

At that point, the hunt was over.

We had already rescued my Lord.

We had destroyed tens of millions of troops.

We had discovered that the castle was far more dangerous than it initially appeared.

And we had lost P4RTY's Lord in the process.

There was nothing left to do except wait for our fervor to expire, bubble up and go to sleep.

Except...

there was one small problem.

When hiding my troops, I forgot to hide my Lord.

The very Lord we had just spent the entire evening rescuing...

had been rescued...

and then captured again by CERBERUS.

I couldn't even be annoyed.

I just laughed.

Because somehow, the hunt that had started with me misreading 20 million troops as 2 million had ended with the exact same Lord being captured twice.

At that point, there was only one reasonable conclusion.

Some Lords simply don't want to be rescued.