Michael, pretending to be unaware of the abrupt animosity, stepped casually between Tom and Jeffrey. The intervention was sufficient for Tom to release the electricity he had been gathering. There was no point in fighting humans; he reminded himself of that fact.
The head healer, in a friendly manner, slapped Jeffrey’s shoulder. “Nine of us are available for raiding parties. And three to stay back for rapid response.”
Jeffrey forgot about Tom and looked in annoyance at Michael. “What? I’ve organised eleven teams.” Jeffrey told him. “That means I need eleven healers, not nine. Before I made that decision, I counted to ensure there were enough of you guys. You have eleven. I didn’t count Useless,” Jeffrey stared with casual disdain at Tom. “On account of the lack of decent spells.”
Tom internally rolled his eyes, but this time did not let it show on his face. That sharp flash of violent fury was gone. Jeffrey was a loser, the type of small man with anger control issues as opposed to the more dangerous strategic type. Till he was stronger, Tom decided he would watch his steps around the other man. It was not like Jeffrey’s mental issues were all the other man’s fault; years of isolation would have screwed most of them.
“Nope,” Michael disagreed quietly. “If you want eleven healers, Tom’s one of them. He’s not as bad as you think.”
“One word. Touch Healing.” Jeffrey said, holding up his index finger. Michael blinked at that response and Tom almost laughed when two fingers of Michael’s hand opened before he got hold of himself and shut them. “That’s okay. I’ll break up team eleven, so you need ten.”
Small-minded, quick to anger and petty bully, Tom addressed his opinion all the while avoiding making eye contact.
“Fine. Andros and Tom go as a pair of healers.”
“What? That sounds stupid.”
“It’s for the best, Jeffrey. Together, they’re the best battle healer we’ve got. Alone Andros is a nope, and Tom’s probably one of the stronger healers in terms of output. He just lacks a range spell.”
“How?” Jeffrey looked confused. “He’s weak.”
“But incredibly skilled and efficient. The only reason I don’t rank him higher is I want to see him on the battlefield. I’m concerned that Tom might struggle with battle healing without that ranged heal. Unless a skill level of sixty-four changes that?”
Tom laughed at the question Michael threw his way. “No, unfortunately, I still need physical contact. But at a hundred twenty-eight…”
“Don’t care.” Jeffrey sighed theatrically.
At that point, I’ll be able to channel the heal through an item, Tom finished in his head. It was nice trivia, but getting Touch Heal up that high was decades away.
Jeffrey scratched his head with helpless exasperation. “Why did my team get lopped with the dregs? A bunch of weak healers.” He looked up like he was imploring for the GODs to answer. Then he laughed hollowly. “Not your fault, Doc. We can only deal with what we’ve got. If you say that’s for the best, Doc, we’ll do it. They can join team ten. With two healers, they’re already oversized. I might as well throw a couple of extra in. Bump them up to an eight-man team to shore up the weakness. Then an additional fighter into eight and nine to turn them into six-man teams,” Jeffrey muttered under his breath.
Tom registered what Jeffrey was saying and the way he was discussing the team allocation worried him, especially with everything else Jeffrey had done to date. “Wait? Have you ordered teams by strength? Put the strongest together?”
“How else would you do it? Unfair on the strong to force them to carry the weak. Though we all know why you’d argue otherwise, Useless.”
“We’ve got this,” Michael said hurriedly, using his body to turn to Jeffrey away in a not-so-subtle attempt to ensure that Tom did not provoke things further. The other man did not notice, but Tom did and was quietly amused by it. Michael knew what he was doing. “You’re doing a good job. I’ll make sure they’re all ready.”
Jeffrey went away and Michael immediately turned to face Tom and shook his head with a disappointed expression. “Did you have to?”
Tom grinned and shrugged his head, and then examined the level of activity occurring around them. It was going to be a couple of minutes till everyone got organised. He glanced toward the dome that was looking more transparent than it did previously. In a moment, he decided, but for now he closed his eyes and focused. After spending so long in DEUS’s trial, accessing the system room no longer terrified him as much as it once had.
The instant he wished it, everything altered, and he appeared in an almost empty system room. Tom knew what all the different functions were and all he had to do was to think about them and they would become usable. Not much had changed -- and everything had changed. There were pictograms on the walls to remind him of what was available. A shop, the auction house, the upgrade station and even the shrine. Visually, it was almost identical, but now everything was for real and final.
Those options used properly represented humanity’s future. And they all used the same currency.
Experience.
Well, technically, the auction house worked off credits, but they could be bought with experience. Selling items also generated credits, and that was the way Tom suspected was the only way most people planned to use it. Though personally, if the exchange rate was favourable, he had no moral issue with using experience. After all, strength was strength.
He focused on the auction icon. “Can I buy credits with local currencies?”
“Yes,” Dux’s smooth tones answered him. She was not here and could no longer manifest her physical simulacrum, but her voice invoked memories of the body she had worn. Perfect, but then she cheated, so how could she be anything else?
The auction house functioned using credits which you could get from selling objects or exchanging currency or experience. Given what he had observed during DEUSs trial, Tom was certain that it would be valuable, but he doubted it would be an experience sink. That was not how DEUS operated. She would push for them to use experience to gain levels or skills and what they scavenged, harvested, or earned to be put into the auction house to get credits which could then purchase something useful. A way for humanity to transfer trash into useful items.
Just even thinking about DEUS made the shrine glow.
That was the mechanism he was least comfortable with, and he winced and walked hurriedly away. DEUS was not opposed to bribery or, more likely, the rules put in place supported it as a power system. When or if he had experience to waste, he would pray to her, hoping when he needed it, she would return the favour with a miracle. And also to empower the human cleric class, he reminded himself. They were all one team, and the cleric class could be powerful, but they needed the wider population to fund them with experience donations.
Tom glanced back at the shrine and the number written above it.
It said one.
Tom licked his lips. He was still stunned that had been purchasable. Its presence felt like a straight-out cheat. It would be useful, super important, but not now; and just knowing it was there and available caused so many questions to roil in his brain, wanting to get out and be answered. Jeffrey this, enemies that, but every question he could think of was either a silly indulgence or not strategic enough. He would wait till his questions were needed to drive decisions.
He actively walked away from the shrine to the other wall.
“Time till barrier falls?”
Not a Question with a capital Q. He was asking normal functionality and not attempting to link into divine foresight.
A timer with fifty minutes appeared on the screen. An old-fashioned alarm clock that had not been there a moment before. Asking the questions verbally was not required, but during the trial, this system room was the only place he spoke for months on end. It was nice to hear your own voice sometimes.
Pinkwing.
Tom suppressed that thought. He had even sung to her.
“Any quests?”
Five popped up on the screen.
“Bah,” Tom spat the word out when he saw what they were. They were all milestone based. The freebies and bonuses that came with completion were nice, but they were not something to work for separately. He wanted to reach level four, just like everyone else. Being awarded a hundred auction credits would not inspire him to do it any quicker. Plus, he was sure their competitors were getting the same boost, so it was swings and roundabouts. Lipstick on a pig. A cynical attempt to stimulate pleasure centres in a biological mind to give them extra motivation.
He didn’t need that.
Fifty minutes, however, was useful to know. He exited the system room, and no one was looking at him. When he looked around, five people in his immediate area had blank expressions on their faces. Tom made a mental note not to use his system room in the presence of others. Not only did it leave you vulnerable, it was also obvious to everyone who happened to see you what you were doing.
He kicked the ground just to feel the dirt shift under his feet. His mind subconsciously scanned the surrounding people. He noted who was taking leadership positions, those who were fading into the background; in an annoying number of cases, the low numbers, the ones who had done well in the tutorial were stepping back and not putting up their hands to lead. Was that a symptom of isolation culture shock, or were those who naturally excelled in the DEUS trial just natural loners? Worst, Tom didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing. Did it mean they were going to be led by people who, relatively speaking, had failed in the trial? Or was that a good thing, and those who lasted longer were so psychologically damaged that keeping them away from decision making was best for everyone?
Tom gave up the mental debate after over forty years without talking to another human. He did not have the energy for philosophical questions.
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Instead, he went back to his go-to state: observing the world. There were fewer of the visibly catatonic floating around. The need for action had roused them. Most people had split into small bubbles of conversation and now only about a quarter kept a hand on their weapons. Unsurprisingly, most people were staying in their functional groups. They were continuing to associate with the people they had been forced to meet. His professional eye even noticed that the largest of their groups, the crafters, had a clear divide amongst them.
Tom was not capable of even speculating about what skills the crafter classes actually gained. He had refused to go down the crafter path. Even his fused weapons were created out of necessity and used drop tokens rather than his own abilities. Which was another way of saying Dux or DEUS or maybe the GODs had been the ones who made them from the parts that Tom had supplied.
He kept observing what was happening. Clare had broken away from the healers and was talking in hushed tones with two men, including the man who had arrived second. A mage by who Tom had been impressed, courtesy of the fact that he had not gone for immediate strength.
Tom watched curiously. It was a strange grouping, particularly as all three were early arrivals and they had invested for the long term based on their gear and visible strength. Healer, mage, and melee fighter chatting like old friends. It was possible that you might know someone from your old life just like it was possible to win the lotto. The odds were astronomical and stacked against you. Yet they looked so friendly. It was frankly weird, but probably examples of people with better social skills than him.
Tom wondered at himself, at the changes that all that time alone in the trial had forged. Back in high school and the two years he spent as an apprentice builder, he was always in the centre of the social groups and was usually the leader. Now he was ceding that authority to others.
Later, Tom told himself, he would make more of an effort later. For now, he would just see how things fell out.
Jeffrey was talking animatedly to the ‘leaders’ he had chosen.
Presumably strategizing.
Tom was not sure about him, and if he hadn’t seen Jeffrey intercede with Tiny and the words of encouragement that he seemed to give everyone around him, if it was not for that… Tom would force himself to do something. As it was… Jeffrey caught his eyes and sneered.
Tom sighed.
Maybe he should be more active; the guy was a douche. But outside of Jeffrey being slow and choosing him as the punching bag, the man seemed to be a slight positive in his self-imposed role.
His eyes kept drifting. Beyond the leaders and Clare, the only others who had split from functional grouping were three male aggroers who were having a detailed discussion with two young women from the melee damage group. Hormones, Tom lost interest immediately. After the trial, he was not at all surprised. After years of isolation, even he wanted more human contact, at least if the thought of focusing on anything other than the mission did not fill him with dread.
He scratched his head and looked away from the milling people and studied the wavy blue dome that separated them from Existentia. Whatever Existentia was, he had never bothered to ask whether the physics from earth applied here. As far as he knew, they were on a disk carried by four elephants standing upon a turtle. While not as likely as some other possibilities, it couldn’t be discounted because the GODs might have a sense of humour.
Another mana point was loaded into his crystal. By the time the barrier came down, it would be two-thirds full, which would probably give him more mana than anyone here. At least from a burst perspective, unless someone had bought traits or items or a starting class. Who was he kidding? There were probably half a dozen people out there with more mana than him even when the crystal increased his amount of mana by six times.
Everyone here had ranked high enough to be considered in the top million people from earth. If you got eight thousand humans together, then anybody here would have ranked number one in the group. That was the definition of elite, and it wasn’t a matter of luck.
The trial rewarded smarts as much as persistence or luck. To survive for more than the first year, you needed to maximise your build. Understand exactly how attributes, classes, levels, and traits worked to create a fighting approach that served. There were lots of paths to power. He had chosen a multiplier approach, where the benefit he obtained from every point of experience would be more than anyone else. An equally valid strategy was to promote starting power to let yourself fight stronger monsters immediately and get more experience. Even while his method would let him do more with it, their hope would be that they could earn so much more experience than him that their levels and strength would
skyrocket more than his.
He probably should not have judged those who prioritised instant strength so harshly. As for mana levels, there had been some pretty attractive traits that gave flat boosts to one pool, and if you had the thousands of contribution points which everyone here must have received, if you had the right philosophy, then grabbing those traits would make sense. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that lots of the people here would exceed his mana even when the crystal was full.
Tom kicked the dirt as he walked. Dirt over hard-packed clay. No signs of any life, no small bones or insect carapaces, only dead earth.
All deliberate.
And every human was in a similar situation. Maybe not red clay, but some other form of dirt.
He dug his toes into the clay, scuffing it up. There was a hint of blue, and when he kicked the ground hard, his foot was repelled by a flicker of that light a centimetre under the dirt.
They were in a half dome with the restrictive barrier extending under their feet. The GODs were not giving them an opportunity to build ramparts and defences in advance of the dome coming down. These two hours were purely to give the participants time to bond socially and establish team structures. Part of Tom was surprised that the GODs had not done it in a sterile, giant system room.
Why hadn’t they?
Tom kept walked to the edge of the dome and touched the wavy blue energy. It was spongy, the sort of substance that you could run into full bore and get knocked over with no broken bones, because it gave just enough to absorb the momentum. Tom found himself extraordinarily pleased to see that none of his species were beating against the wall to get through.
At least not here.
Then he felt bad for thinking such uncharitable thoughts about his race. Before he remembered half the guys who had been building Emporium Place with him back on earth and snorted internally.
Someone, somewhere, would try to beat the dome open, assuming that their strength would defeat the GODs.
Tom leaned closer, having noticed something. The wall was not quite opaque; that increasing transparency he had seen was real. He pressed his head against it and could sort of see out. There were some trees a hundred metres out, and then a little closer, there was a type of mound. It was a little taller than a human and as wide as one of those circular trampolines. It reminded him of a termite mound. Hopefully that was all it was, harmless termites.
Tom remembered the tutorial. Termites maybe; harmless, definitely not. Everyone gathered here were babies as far as the world was concerned. What was innocuous to a rank twenty would be too challenging for all of them to fight as a team.
That mound interested him. It was probably insects of some type. He didn’t think mammals or reptiles would build something like that. It reminded him of a hive. Suspiciously so. Just like it was suspicious that the meet and greet had not happened in a system room, and now that he thought about it, that the dome was this transparent.
And you have a question.
Mentally, he shook his head. That would be a waste, but he focused on that mound.
The right type of insects would be very useful to him.
The real question was whether to gamble.
At the moment, that mound was in the middle of nowhere and could contain anything. In a way, it was a Schrodinger’s cat on steroids. Instead of being dead or alive ,that cat could be one of those two states or playing a banjo or be a lizard misidentified as a cat. The insect in that mound could be anything. Termites, bees, wasps, caterpillars, grasshoppers and their strengths and weaknesses could run over an immense spectrum, extending from they are a nice source of protein to humans were the nice of source of protein.
Fate.
That single word.
It was, in some ways, incredibly powerful and in other ways useless. If a metre-wide axe was heading towards your chest, then fate would be helpless, but if used on a random loot box, then even a small dose could have an oversized impact.
That mound was sort of like a loot box.
Of course, if the loot box had already been opened and had multiple people rifling through the contents, then what fate could achieve would be restricted. Even then, there were ways fate could move. For example, it was possible everyone had dismissed an object as unimportant. That they had never cast an identification spell on the most valuable item, assuming it was useless.
Unlikely, but possible.
Or there was a potential for a small ring to lie unnoticed under an ordinary coin so none of the prior people saw it.
Once more questionable, almost implausible but…
If you were the fourth person looking though a loot rift, fate would have to work really hard to get a result.
If you were the first to look, then that small ring didn’t need to be hidden from multiple prying eyes. It could be there in the open and perfectly tailored for your requirements.
In this case, Fate did not have to do much, just make whatever random seed generated loot be a different number to deliver the object you wanted.
That was the thing with fate. The further out you used it, the more opportunity it had to affect the world. Tom studied that mound, but he could perceive nothing specific.
If he hoped to change things favourably, he could not afford to wait.
Once the dome went down and they knew what insects were in the hive, the whole random chance was gone. At that point, if it was something that saw humans as prey, it was too late.
If fate was to shape the enemy they faced, he had to act immediately even if once he used fate it would be twenty-four hours before it fully recharged.
Hours where he would be more susceptible to everything because fate would not be his friend.
Yet, he looked around. No one else was pondering what they could see out the window. Even if they had, it was unlikely they would know what to do. It was not reasonable to assume that everyone had already learnt the hard, hidden truths he had.
They almost certainly hadn’t.
It was on him.
Tom hoped he would not regret this. He focused internally and then on the Schrodinger’s mound. He wanted it to be something useful to him. A way for him to prove his worth in the group and hopefully provide an impetus to get the class he was after. Tom shivered a little at that requirement. He knew what it meant, but if he wanted the class, he really did not have a choice.
What else? Tom guessed he needed to specify the most important aspect. Whatever was in there had to be something their community could survive against.
A stream of invisible energy flowed out of him. The wavy barrier did not restrict it and it rushed into the mound and the outside world.
What would it do?
Well, hopefully it would change whatever insect built the mound into something that his Touch Heal and Spark spell could deal with.
How would it do that?
It was easy to claim it couldn’t. To assume that fate as a concept was ridiculous. However, he was on the planet that was not Earth, looking out through a semitransparent dome that was literally invulnerable to any mortal attack. And fate was not toothless, even if he was not intelligent enough to know how it worked.
Maybe the fate would teleport a different monster to the location. Possibly it went back in time and redirected where they landed so that mound in front of him now contained what he asked for, or some mutation occurred this instant that changed every insect simultaneously in precisely the way it needed to do. Something like boosting physical strength while increasing lighting vulnerability, and then Tom could destroy them easily, but the insects, on average were just as strong as before or maybe even more powerful.
Would his gamble payoff? He wondered.
If his experiences in the trial were accurate, they would; and Dux had promised, when he had asked, that fate acted the same in Existentia as in the trial.
Fate! He knew how potent it was.
With a smile, he remembered the first time he had really abused it. The target had been a dungeon, and he did not know what was in there, but that was for the best because that lack of knowledge meant it could be anything. For a week, he had blasted his fate against the cave. Mentally demanding that it would be filled with something he could beat.
Then, having pushed fate as far as he could and armed with a confirmation from Dux that he could defeat the dungeon he had snuck in and seen the first enemy.
A slug.
One that was twice his rank.
The first thing in the dungeon had more than double his speed and strength.
A differential that was so far beyond his ability to close that all he had thought about was running. But it had seen him to and had blurred towards him.
He dropped his dagger and then…
Zap.
Boom!
It exploded.
Tom remembered staring at the burnt gunk left behind in disbelief. There was almost nothing left. They were so vulnerable to lightning that a single Spark destroyed them. If they were all like that… Tom checked and then he had swept through the cave and experience had rolled in.
Fate used properly was truly humanity’s greatest strength.
“Useless.” He heard Jeffrey shout from the middle of the dome.
Despite himself, he jumped.
“What are you doing daydreaming?” Jeffrey’s snide voice made his hackles rise.