Beast Faction

Joshua Salmarsk, the actual face behind ZHM, he chose the moniker because he thought it would be funny to be called the Zoo Harem Master when he was 14, the time he started playing R0D, but now he’s 23 and has managed to keep his ranking as the number 7 best player for several years, and has amusingly never gone up against the six players that rank higher than him in the global rankings. His primary avatar is a humanoid wolf with Gold, Platinum, and Umbra fur arranged in an artistic arrangement, the species is known as “Ancient Celestial Canine” and is described as a species that can live for thousands of years after reaching maturity without feeling any of the detrimental effects of aging; he designed his primary advisors to be a white kitsune-type high priestess, Red and Brown anthro otter High General, and sensually built Black deer-like satyr civic advisor; and yes, they’re all well-developed ladies that his character has intimate relationships with as part of his usual routine, he even wrote it into their backstories when he was designing them way back at the start. The base game didn’t really allow for that, at first, you needed to have over a dozen consecutive wins to unlock that feature.

Joshua discovered interesting thing about the Demon Lord skill/ability tree, if you build it in very particular way you unlock a hidden ability that only appears if you build the tree in that specific way, and he did so on accident initially, but has made it the way he builds the Demon Lord tree every time since then; mainly because of how powerfully broken the ability is, the ability is called “Corruptive Transformation,” and it allows him to quite literally change things in what can only be called a population explosion. The way the ability works is that he can corrupt other characters, which is something all the Demon Kings and Demon Queens can do, but his corruption also transforms them into units and the like from his own faction, and if he manages to corrupt all the ruling powers of a nation this way then it automatically causes the same kind of transformation for the entire nation they rule over.

Joshua has a pretty boring life, he’s an office worker that managed to climb the ladder just high enough to get paid well but not quite high enough to have any real control over what happens in the company. Of course, his boring life in which the time he’s playing RoD is his only real solace and comfort gets changed one day when he wakes up in the body of his avatar looking at a glowing sphere with random symbols, numbers, and words from the game is before him and a surprisingly big group of other people that also seem to be in the bodies of their avatars, he can see the number 1 player (the Dragon faction’s best player, Draco Conquistador, his massive dragon colored every chromatic and metallic color in the game’s palette options was dead give away) and number 2 player (the Bug faction’s best player Butterfly Mantis, her towering form that looks like someone hybridized a Mantis, Butterfly, Dragonfly, Centipede, and Spider wasn’t hard to miss), and he noticed almost all the other top player avatars were present as well. The sphere spoke after a few moments of everyone trying to get their bearings and told them they were all the most exemplary figures for each of the factions they commanded up to that point, but the “trial period” was over and all of them would now be sent to the world of RoD, the world known as “Relicarn” to prove who really are the best at what they do, then a statement that after a set time (which was never clarified on) they would be checked in on and whoever was showing the most effectiveness would win a wish that could alter the course of their life and whatever world they chose to live in. After all of that, they were told they would each be picking two special cards that allow them to have additional bonuses as an apology for the hassle everyone was in, with the top 10 in the global rankings each getting an additional two cards because they showed they have the capacity to maintain that kind of power, to the confusion of most of the crowd, and they would be taking their cards in order of ranking from top to bottom.

Looking around, ZHM noticed that representatives of all 21 factions of the game were here, but only the Top 17 seemed to be representing the faction they preferred most, the rest were unfamiliar avatars that ZHM could only vaguely figure out the faction for by process of elimination. He watched as the six above him chose their 4 cards, then were sent on their way in a flash of smoke and light. After the global 6th place player (the top Plant faction player known as Mycelia Arbor-Petal, a player with an avatar that looks like a blend of Mushrooms, Trees, and Flowers in a form that vaguely resembles a mix of Cat and Armadillo) had made her selection it was ZHM's turn.

Joshua, now the actual ZHM of his imagination, didn’t see what the first 6 had chosen, but when it was his turn he saw that the cards themselves were a bit of a surprise, so it was more like playing the game’s gacha for event bonuses than anything else. His first card surprised him, he got access to metallurgy right off the bat, his second draw got him access to the kind of agriculture that usually didn’t appear until the mid-game, his third card gave him access to the first six parts of the build he only seemed to be aware of right from the start (in the exact order they needed to be built too), and his fourth card gave him access to his personally designed advisors along with them all having a bit of an upgrade.

While he was pondering over what this could mean, ZHM was transported in the same flash of light and smoke he had seen the other six before him leave in. The next thing he know, he was in his base of operations with his 3 custom advisors, he hadn't yet gotten to work on the fourth, which meant he wasn't quite up to the total 5 Advisors players could have yet.