Arc X.1 | Chapter 410: Interlude | Project Piketown Infiltration 12

An opinion piece posted to Roasalia Today’s MemoryBoard, submitted by an anonymous community member the morning after the Piketown raid that included at least half a dozen Division 30 members. Roasalia Today has independently verified their identity, agreeing to withhold it, citing safety concerns.

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To be in a raid with members of Division 30… despite having been present within several myself, it isn’t something easy to explain. Of the publicly known Baalphorian members, few join real-world raids with any regularity. Alaric Mhrina and Cyan Hyrat raid—but, that’s rather expected, as Alaric Mhrina owns shares in his late cousin’s company. Codeth Runsk raids occasionally, as does Mikhail Al’ren—both compulsory school friends of the late Halen Mhrina. Olivier de la Rue, as well as both Annette and Charles Silvers, have made a point to avoid them. Polianna Zernestra spends most of her time in Norvel, and while she has occasionally raided alongside several of the unit’s Free Colony members—Wyren qur Gru of Nur’tha in particular is known for his love of Baalphorian raids and has been known to somehow talk the notoriously prickly woman into joining him—it is rare. Of the other, less famous, publicly known Baalphorian members, a few raid. Most do not. Of course, we all assume that at least a few of the nation’s top heroes are likely non-public Division 30 members—and, well, didn’t we just have the reality of that assumption splattered over us?

The point is, Division 30 members don’t really raid, but those heroes who have ever been caught in a real-world raid with even a single member have made it clear that the raid was… different. In raids where top heroes are present, the raid system automatically raises the difficulty—adds more bosses, etc, etc. Hail doesn’t want the presence of a top hero within a RaidZone to ruin the experience for everyone else. So, everything is slightly more difficult—an adjustment to account for the power of a top hero—and while there are certainly top heroes who still do their upmost to… Well, I wouldn’t exactly say they set out to ruin the raid for everyone else, but a few certainly make it seem that way. Top heroes are as mixed a bag of what humanity has to offer as any collective group. Within their ranks, you will find heroes who will leave the weaker invaders to other heroes, while they themself focus on the extra bosses that have been created by the raid system for their pleasure. You will also find a few heroes who will take out all the weak invaders, then poke at all the other heroes for not even being able to take out all single boss without their aid. Most place themselves more into the middle—they are the top heroes who focus on the bosses, but do not actively avoid the weaker invaders either.

That

—the overwhelm through the RaidZone as a top hero takes out everything in their path—can be appreciated for what it is: a representation of the power of a top hero.

No matter the style of the top hero you’re stuck in a raid with, however, the experience is different—more intense, more explosive, more difficult than the raid you were just in or will experience in a few hours. Raids with Division 30 members, though? They are a million times… more. As Codeth Runsk once put it, the raid system

knows

them—it's based on the training system all Division 30 members devoted countless hours to developing and training within, after all. While the original training system was entirely virtual, the base of it was used by Hail to create their real-world raids. There are rumours that virtual raids

know

Division 30 members as well, shifting around them in ways that can actually give away what they are, if someone knows what to look for. For real-world raids, such knowledge of the late Halen Mhrina’s teammates and friends is not rumour, but fact: when Division 30 members are within a RaidZone, bosses are more common and the raid system is much more resistant to allowing for a raid failure, to say nothing of the

strange raids

it brings up solely for their pleasure and torture. It

knows

what Division 30 members are capable of, and as a result, it refuses to either make the raid too easy for them or to believe that even a single member isn’t enough to defeat virtually any raid, even when they remain the only hero left moving.

A few people have suggested this is due to the environment that the training system was created in: one where no one ever gave up. Of course, this has been viewed as an over exaggeration of Division 30’s nearly unyielding motivation and courage, but it is an idea that comes up often in interviews with members. Codeth Runsk in particular has spoken of his time with the late Halen Mhrina in compulsory schooling, where their class was effectively split in two, each side warring with one another.

“A lot of the skills and functions Halen later put out through Hail were inspired by the pranks that came out of that war,”

he says in an interview marking the twentieth anniversary of his friend’s death at Alliance Ridge.

“We grew up in this vacuum of always pushing against what was expected of us or even what was possible, no matter the potential consequences—and to be fair, mostly we just received a scolding from our parents and guardians or The Black Knot… which yes, I realize should be scary. We grew up alongside clones, though? We were taught how to fight by the clones as well. So, to us, they weren’t scary, and what do you do with kids who aren’t afraid of our nation’s most terrifying organization?”

The answer to that question appears to be: not much, and that is something our continent as a whole should be thankful for. The children who attended school with the late Halen Mhrina include a number of public Division 30 members, and reading between the lines of everything members have ever said, it is easy to guess that many non-public members came from the school as well. The freedom they experienced there seems to have been a deciding factor in how powerful they were from the moment the war began—after all, what other children from pre-war Baalphoria can claim to have already been trained in combat by the Hyrat clones? While students who attended other schools in the Penns alongside young clone pods have admitted they also benefited from their friendships with the clones and were better trained in combat than their peers, even they admit they know their training was likely nothing compared to what

“those kids”

experienced.

All this amounts to an awareness within the raid system that Division 30 members can handle nearly anything it throws at them, regardless of their RaidLevel. Combined with how the late Halen Mhrina’s personality—which has been described by virtually all of his childhood and wartime friends as cheerful and motivated, if also cocky and teasing—continues to be a driving factor in how the raid system operates, the system appears to love messing with those its creator cared for.

Alaric Mhrina, the late Halen Mhrina’s younger cousin, has been known to receive unique challenges while he raids, resulting in some of the silliest creations of the raid chasing him down as he laughs.

“It’s a little part of my cousin, brought to life by the raid system,”

he admitted in a post-raid interview, the raid in question having shifted from a normal raid into a PVP raid wherein every participant was gifted a limited-edition skill that fired glitter bombs at other heroes—the only skill that the raid system allowed to be used within that particular raid. Since then, Alaric Mhrina has regularly found himself hit by glitter bombs while he raids, as the system continues to allow anyone who was present during that raid to hit him with the skill, although said glitter bombs do no damage to the young Mhrina.

Many other Division 30 members have noted similar experiences, and while Hail officially denies that they are either purposefully creating raids designed for their late founder’s teammates and friends or that the raid system retains some amount of Halen Mhrina’s personality within it, many Division 30 members have stated that raiding is a painful pleasure.

“It's like getting a hug from my friend—this message from beyond that somehow, he’s still thinking of us,”

Mikhail Al’ren stated during his own twentieth anniversary interview.

“Who knows if Hail is right when they claim that the raid system simply remembers us and is creating raids that will amuse us, but… I mean, if anyone could return their consciousness after they died, it’d be Halen, you know? Only [one another person in our unit] understood the aether better than him, and [they] had [a lot of time] to learn more about it, after he died. Still… I could see it, you know? I could see him latching on to the training system and leaving a bit of himself behind, his aether simmering within that system, then moving on to the raid system, just so he could give us hugs in his own silly way.”

As a result of the way the raid system treats Division 30 members, raiding alongside them is viewed as either something to fear or cherish. Entire MemoryBoards and AetherealBoards exist to track Division 30 members who raid more often, and when they are sighted within a RaidZone before the raid falls, the area often experiences an influx of heroes hoping to experience a Division 30 raid first hand. For many, due to how sporadically even the more active raiders of Division 30 join raids, it is not an experience most will have often—in fact, those members who raid often, such as Alaric Mhrina, have noted that the raid system is far less likely to create more unique raids for them than it is for those members who rarely raid; instead, the presence of a more active member within a raid tends to simply raise the difficulty of the raid.

For the most part, however, only two or three public Division 30 members have ever been seen raiding together, and although there has been speculation that several people commonly seen raiding alongside several public members are non-public members, this has often remained speculation. Certainly, it helps that the raid system seems aware of which members are public and which are not, with several recently outed Hyrat members stating that “even though it was public knowledge that a number of [the clones] are Division 30 members, the raid system never did anything more than up the difficulty and refuse to fail when those… who are members are present within a raid. Since outing [them]selves, the raid system has been leaving little pranks for [them], but only when [they] aren’t working or undercover.”

The last time three public Division 30 members raided together—a rare moment when Olivier de la Rue was caught within a RaidZone along with his cousin, Axelle de la Cour, and younger brother, Antoine de la Rue, two early Division 30 members—the raid descended into chaos. Despite how late in the season it was, only Axelle de la Cour had a RaidLevel below 100, with Olivier de la Rue having raided “exactly once” that season, as he was away in Norvel for the majority of the season. Combined with Antoine de la Rue’s mid-100s RaidLevel, the trio’s levels were far above average for so late in the season, and were they normal heroes, even a more standard raid would have quickly proven why heroes need to regularly raid, lest they be caught in a late-season raid with too high a RaidLevel: with only a week left in the season, surviving more than a few minutes with a RaidLevel above 50 is considered nearly impossible, and doing well with a RaidLevel above 30 difficult.

Despite this, Hail later stated that the raid the three de la Rue lawyers found themselves within was “by far the most difficult real-world raid the system has ever created outside of a private raid.” The trio still managed to beat it within minutes, sparking through the RaidZone with near perfect accuracy, despite the delay the raid system’s manipulations of the aether cause in sparking attempts. Such is the power of Division 30 members and its sub-30 members—not to mention Olivier de la Rue’s non-dev status.

Three members who barely raid, with RaidLevels far above what any normal hero would consider sustainable so late in the season, were able to summon a monster of a raid from the late Halen Mhrina’s system. It has been several years since this raid took place, and yet, it remains within the public consciousness, spoken of in whispers of the magic of Division 30 and the raid system’s love-hate relationship with their members—certainly, directly following the raid Olivier de la Rue stated quite vehemently that if he “ever [found] out Halen’s ghost [was] residing within the raid system [he would] be having words with it.”

It should, therefore, have been unsurprising to the heroes of Piketown that the sudden presence of at least half a dozen Division 30 members within a raid late last night would cause the raid to quickly devolve into chaos. Somehow, despite how many public members—as well as several suspected members—were present within the raid—which ran far longer than usual due to the quirks of the raid the system created for them—most of the regular heroes trapped alongside them have been filling up the local raiding MemoryBoards with a mixture of confused, amused, and annoyed posts about the raid. Apparently, despite raids with Division 30 members often being considered a coveted experience, “the absolutely nonsensical chaos of that raid”—as one poster put it—has left many Piketown heroes reassessing whether raids with Division 30 members should be sought out or avoided like the plague.

Now, with this morning’s announcement that those same members and many more plan to make a home of Piketown while Olivier de la Rue’s Alver case plays out—an interesting development, given the non-dev lawyer has fought other potentially precedent-setting cases in the decade since the war ended and yet never experienced such support from his unit—one has to wonder: will the end of Piketown’s raiding season become an unending stream of chaotic raids where only Division 30 members and the occasional sub-30 or top hero can hope to survive, or will the raid system relax and begin to treat them like normal heroes? Given Hail’s stance that they have no part in how the raid system treats Division 30 members, only time and the temperament of the raid system will tell.