31: If You Want Peace...

I could tell Anna was stifling a smile. “That’s sweet of you to say, I guess,” she said, “but forgive me if I’m not feeling that kind of team spirit. I joined this team in order to do something extremely in the public eye. It was a trade-off I negotiated with Clatenis.

For Shumba to provide not just a member to this team, but the team’s healer, that’ll give a big boost to even their clout. In exchange, they have to basically forget about treating me like a slave in day-to-day dealings, since with me in public so much, it’d be easy for someone to discover my ‘unusual situation.’ That’s the only reason I joined you people.

Besides...nothing has really changed. My family always treated me like nothing more than a tool to gain more prestige and influence with. All they did was take it to a logical extreme.”

We were silent for several seconds. “And I’ve been bitching about my home life,” said Arvallei, shaking his head.

“Between being suddenly plucked from my peaceful life on my normal, mana and energy-less world, and thrown into a new world of magic, monsters, hostile Floor aliens, corrupt and capitalistic bureaucrats, and deadly peril,” said Mewi, “and being ready for the Tower but being born into a family like that, I’ll take being a New Summoned, thanks.”

Anna really did smile now, for just a second. “I told you all before, I don’t need pity.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, careful to keep my tone tender—my tone of voice was something I had trouble managing sometimes. “you’re a strong independent woman who don’t need no bla bla bla bla.” To further emphasize it was just a ribbing, I made sure to smile as I said it. Fortunately, it got across. Her own smile stuck this time—and she poked me with her elbow.

“And don’t you forget it, Lheticus.”

We began to fight as a team. With the addition of the triple-statted magic staff to my build, the sheer damage I was able to bring to bear easily outstripped everyone else on the team, even Bruzigan, who had the highest stats, and Ril’egh, the other damage dealer who admittedly brought the hurt pretty well too. And his swordsmanship was incredible.

Over the next few nights in the virtual realm, we formed a well-oiled fighting machine. Bruzigan would keep the worst attacks off us, blocking adversaries where he could and retaliating when he could, Anna would heal and protect us, Mewi and Arvallei would prevent them from evading or fleeing, and Ril’egh and I would cut and burn them down respectively.

It didn’t take long to figure out what Bruzigan was talking about in regard to Mewi’s battle sense. He turned out to be amazingly good at keeping track of everything going on at once. Whenever I briefly lost track of what enemy to target next, or someone slipped through his and Arvallei’s suppression, or the overall situation shifted, it always seemed to be Mewi who alerted us. Traditionally this kind of thing was done by the leader, but Bruzigan was acting as our tank, so he wasn’t able to view the whole battle as much as Mewi did.

During the day, I continued spell and profession leveling. After roughly 2 weeks, Bruzigan announced a change in our night training program. We’d go to an anti-rust regimen for floor and ground combat, and starting now, all of us would start running separate simulations on combat in the Void.

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My eyes got stars in them when he said that each of us would be receiving our own battleship from the Federation for this purpose. We would be nominally in command, but in practice, that only extended to being able to choose where to go in Area 1 when not being assigned to a mission by the Federation, and a limited ability to give orders when not under battlefield conditions.

But I’d be called captain. It would still be my ship. I’d never even owned my own car on Earth.

Bruzigan was an exception. He had come to the team as a direct member of the Federation military force. He was fully qualified to command not just a battleship, but a fleet.

Battles in space—the “void” as outer space in Area 1 was called, were highly unusual, and in my opinion highly gamified affairs. The Tower provided precisely 0 means for ships to blow each other out of the sky. Instead, ships could only be outfitted with energy weapons that would damage and eventually dissipate an enemy ship’s shielding, but wash against a ship’s hull as if it was nothing but a light show. This was the case for the Federation’s ships, fighting ships owned by factions, and even the Kinetice’s ships, which were otherwise very different from the former two.

A ship’s shields going down meant three things. First, its weapons would be disabled, making it unable to shoot back. Second, it would be unable to make planetfall until they were restored, which took anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours depending on the class of vessel.

I didn’t mean it literally couldn’t, like the Tower prevented it. But it’d burn up in atmosphere if anyone was dumb enough to try it.

Finally, it meant the ship could be boarded. This was how ships were destroyed. There were two methods for a boarder to destroy a ship. First, if everyone who hadn’t boarded it was killed, the ship core would detect that and self-destruct.

Alternatively, boarders could fight their way to the ship’s core and attack it. When I did so in simulation, it even had HP when I Identified it. Seconds after a core was destroyed, a catastrophic chain reaction would spread through the ship, causing it to explode. Either way, once a ship would be destroyed, all boarders would automatically teleport back to their own ship, instantly.

The simulations put me up against both Kinetice ships and ships of the anti-Federation factions. Sometimes, the latter case would involve certain known figures in those factions.

I expected to be bothered by the idea of killing other challengers, even in simulation. I couldn’t just write them off as NPCs, after all. But I felt nothing. Maybe Mewi was on to something when he said the Tower changes people in that way.

At least, I hoped he was.

At last, between the “real-world” experience over nearly a month, and a much greater amount of careful instruction in the virtual realm at nights, I became a Grade 2 Chef and got my day off. I spent most of it either working with Geneve to build a good library of games, or playing them. Unfortunately, Mewi was well into drilling on the Second Floor’s scenario, and therefore couldn’t join me.

The very next day, Mewi entered the Second Floor, and I was once again graciously allowed to accompany Bruzigan and Geneve to wait for him at the Pantheon.

His mission would be to reach the next round with the highest number of merits accumulated among the contestants in his group. There was, as far as it was known, no chance of him receiving an in-game mission, but there could be special roles in his group, rarely including an Assassin that he would have to survive if they showed up.

I once again sighed with relief as Mewi appeared, this time in the Very High exit room on the Pantheon’s 2nd level. He even gave me a thumbs-up.

“3.6,” he said once we were on the way back, “it upgraded to White.”

I gave a small fist-pump at the news. Mewi had drawn a completely uneventful instance of the Second Floor—one that contained no special roles at all. He had a bit more trouble with the audience events than I did, but he cleared the mission by a wide margin. Although, he didn’t get anything from the rewards that he was particularly invested in keeping.

Three days later, all hell broke loose over the entire Area.