On Day 3, I went alone to gather treasure from the four Yellow spots. Each one had at least a dozen monsters nearby, and they were harder than before. Somehow, rather than being harder on them, the extra cold from the blizzard was actually powering them up. No wonder the security device was needed to keep them away at night.
I figured the chances of running into other players this early were pretty slim, but even so, I took the precaution of ruining ambushes by Road Runnering out of each cave once I’d collected the treasure. On the fourth one, it turned out to be a good idea that I’d done this. Our anti-cold suits were basically also anti-camouflage—jet black in a world of white—so when I spotted the three startled Throskarts as I exploded out of the cave, I put up a Fiery Deflection and wasted no time bombarding them with a rain of various fire spells.
They were dead in almost no time. I’d used my growing skill with my Psych stat, plus a pinch of Power of Imagination, to ensure they’d each been hit in the same exact spot over and over. Then, I stripped them of their anti-cold suits and left them as corpsicles.
Whatever outpost they’d come from was completely screwed now. Even the gel to repair an anti-cold suit was at least 10,000 points. An entire replacement suit was double that. You could also buy up to two suits so that your outpost had more than 3, but the 4th cost 100,000 and the 5th was 250,000.
Much, much easier to steal and repair someone else’s. The sixth damaged suit would automatically be sold off overnight for a gain of 5,000 once placed in the storage vault, but the other two would stay.
The Yellow chests contained between 10 and 15,000 each, and I also hit the known Orange. While I was out getting them, Barnett and Caleb had gone to gather from the known Red chests again. This time, I bought a set of four Yellow Grade mapping devices, currently the highest grade available for 1,500 points each, that would show other life-forms as well as nearby treasure deposits within 2km. I debated getting 3 instead of 4, but I would actually need the life-form thing myself for a later part of my plan, and its price would go up tomorrow. I also bought enough ration packs to ensure everyone could be fully fed through the entire game. I went ahead and bought the repairing gel too. I spent 2,000 on the Grade Yellow upgrade for the Scanner. Finally, I bought one more, absolutely vital item that wasn’t there yesterday for another 10,000 points:
[Outpost Access Multitool: 10,000 (EARLY BIRD SPECIAL!)]
[For the discerning explorer who has what it takes to eliminate the competition. Simply attach to the entrance to a rival’s outpost or any door within, and within 30 seconds it will override the biometric access security and unlock the door. Plunder and kill your enemies! Comes with a special accessory cable to attach to an outpost’s Central Control Terminal. When attached, it will override the ownership of the outpost to your team! Comes with unlimited battery, and durable enough to easily withstand the harsh blizzards of the Frozen World! Limit 1 per outpost. If you don’t get one, your neighbors might, so act ASAP! Currently on a 50% off sale one day only!]
Even with all that, the end-of-day balance was more than 35,000. Certainly a healthy amount...but not nearly enough. Enough wouldn’t happen until we took over Outpost 1 of this grid.
This time, a new message appeared after I sent the daily report.
[A Standings Update will be released to all remaining players tomorrow morning. As Outpost Captain, you are permitted to choose a team name.]
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[Enter Team Name:]
Well, it worked before, so...
[Confirm Team Name: Team
[Thank you for your registration: Team
The next morning, right after the wake-up alarm, a computer voice sounded through the outpost.
[3 days have passed. From now on, the game standings are available for viewing, and will be updated every three days. As some of you have already noticed, a certain special item has been added to the shop to make the game more exciting. Happy hunting!]
On my game screen, there was now an option to display both the leaderboard for the group of 50 outposts, and the overall leaderboard. On the former, Team Firebrand was listed as one of the top 5:
[1st: Outpost #1, Team MacIlister: 1,010,520]
[2nd: Outpost #49, Team Magicka: 126,807]
[3rd: Outpost #22, Team Crusher: 60,512]
[4th: Outpost #17, Team Firebrand: 35,603]
[5th: Outpost #6, Team Rotten Luck: 14,229]
The 10 teams at the bottom of the group either had scores of 0, or in the case of the bottom 3, “ELIMINATED” appearing instead. Eight teams above them had less than 1,000 points. Below Team Rotten Luck, the point gaps between teams decreased dramatically. Team MacIlister’s score was so outrageous because they were the ones near the sole Blue chest cave in the area. It gave them at least a quarter million points a day.
No doubt MacIlister was a family or something high in Throskart society who had sponsored that team. At this stage of the game, basically all of the teams “randomly selected” as the Outpost #1s of their groups were teams that had been prearranged like that as far back as the start of the previous round, some by corporate sponsors, some by politicians, some by the showrunners themselves. In the game “All Are Equal,” there were many who were more equal than others.
And then of course, there was the team who had access to the 1,000,000 point-per-day Purple treasure cave, the team who, on High difficulty or greater, acted as the “final boss” of the overall, four Floor survival game scenario. A team of experimental child super-soldiers who had been ordained to take the top spot in the entire game from its beginning as their graduation test, who zealously tried to kill the challenger on the 4th Floor no matter how much they’d reduced the hate from the overall Throskart race that they’d started with. On Medium or lower, they just ignored the challenger and won the game.
I was pretty glad I wouldn’t be running into them yet. Although, if the 3rd Floor had a hidden piece, the Purple treasure cave would be the place to find it. Not that any method of reaching that cave was known.
Then, there was the overall leaderboard. This one only listed team names, with Team Firebrand at #687.
Just as I closed my game screen, an alert popup appeared.
[Misfortune Event! Signal Interference!]
[Your Scanner is inoperable today.]
Heh, better now than later, I thought. Audience members could only crowd fund a single Fortune and Misfortune Event per 3-day period. Of course, they weren’t about to buy any of the Fortune events for me. If I hadn’t gotten AzurePrincess to back off, she would have—but thanks to Bruzigan I knew that carried negative consequences for this Floor’s rating.
I really needed to get a 3.5 or higher, because that would upgrade my Class Evolver to Bronze. I’d need to discuss with Mewi whether to keep evolving it or just get it to him at that point. I needed to swipe Team MacIlister’s dragon hoard of points as soon as I could. Hitting some of the other high-scoring teams and “eliminating” them wouldn’t hurt either.
However, there wasn’t anything I could do today thanks to the Misfortune Event. With no realistic chance to discover any new treasure caves, I hit the four surrounding Yellow spots again while my trio of minions gathered from the rest of the known deposits. I spent 20,000 that night; 10,000 on the Scanner upgrade to Green, and 2,000 each on a set of five remote communicators with a 20 mile range and the ability to contact any of the others, rather than the one way, Red Grade one I’d gotten before.