[Barnett: Daaaaamn! You’re crazy! I kinda like it!]

[Caleb: In that case, that’s all we can do. You wanna die in a blaze of glory, you’re in the right place for it at least.]

[Darril: ...You’re up to something, I know it. Very well. I’ll build up and wait to find out what it is.]

[Betty: Hmph. Luckily, I’m in a good enough spot that I can defend so well that I’ll survive no matter how stupid you are.]

One by one, the others assented, displaying varying degrees of reluctance.

[Lheticus: It’s settled then. I can also give any of you tips on certain things to do to build up your defenses quickly. Of course, if you don’t trust my advice, you don’t have to ask.]

[Lheticus: That is, ask me once I’m done with the first wave of my attacks. I’m going to strike while most of the other players are still getting used to the game. I’ll let you all know when I’m available to talk.]

As the final part of the Tower’s Throskart storyline, the 4th Floor’s possible missions were varied and unusual. Depending on what missions a challenger took on the previous 3 Floors, they would enter the 4th in one of three possible roles.

If a challenger reset their story after the 3rd Floor, they would enter the 4th Floor game as a “soldier” which was one of the ordinary troops under the command of a finalist. This would happen if their 3rd Floor mission was set to Medium difficulty or below. However, if they reset their story on the 3rd Floor but not the 2nd, they would be an “elite soldier”, a role that had its own benefits and drawbacks compared to the normal soldier role.

You would only be treated as a “finalist” on the 4th Floor if you had actually won through the previous round on the 3rd. And then there were the missions for each difficulty level—below Very High, they were all about survival.

The Basic difficulty mission was to survive the game for 5 days. Low difficulty doubled that time, Medium added another 10 days, and you had to survive the entire game on High. This applied whether you entered as a soldier or finalist.

The missions on Very High and Extreme were different depending on your role. On Very High, soldiers had to survive the entire game while also killing a somewhat random but always large number of enemy soldiers. The Extreme soldier mission was odd; the challenger had to kill their own leading Finalist, which wasn’t possible until and unless their in-game Morale unit stat reached 0, which wasn’t guaranteed to happen—they had to subtly engineer a way for it to happen such as ensuring their side lost battles while still surviving them.

I was glad I didn’t have to worry about something like that, but this was still going to be tough. Fighting hard wasn’t enough—I had to fight smart. Right now, my Nobility Rank was Baron, which meant I could only take 3 territories. If I took 2 more today, I would have enough gold on Day 2 to upgrade to Viscount and be able to take 2 more.

I didn’t expect to hold on to most such gains...not at first, at least. The key to this game was that while conquering and expanding and defending territory was a large part of it, it was still, at its heart, a killing game. That was why Crowns were worth 3 points, and territory Flags were only worth 1.

The key to my winning this game was the very same thing that all along, the Tower’s missions had presented as the greatest obstacle in them: the hatred the Throskarts had for the challenger’s species. Even if I had “overcome my identity as an enemy slave,” even if I’d provided plenty of entertainment...there wasn’t a single other player in this game who would accept the slightest possibility of my actually winning it. Even my teammates were at least partially motivated in their attitudes earlier by this.

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The more headway I made in territory, the more the other players would swarm over me like moths to a flame.

Right where I wanted them.

So, while most of the other finalists spent half of their 100 starting gold to recruit as many additional soldiers as the Baron title would allow, out of fear of their hostile neighbors doing the same, I didn’t recruit a single one, instead upgrading all six of my resource points (food, stone, wood, cloth, metals, and gold) to Level 2 for 10 coins each, putting another 30 into upgrading the gold mine to the current max level of 3, and the final 10 on the first upgrade on the tech tree’s Production branch, Metal Tools, which boosted all resource production by 10.

With everything spent for the day, I set out to attack enemy territory, taking with me just two of my 50 starter pack soldiers, to ensure each territory continued to be occupied. My territory was bordered by no less than 5 members of an enemy team, but far from cowing me into submission, I saw them as an abundance of targets.

I caught the first guy literally with his ass on his throne, still reading the game manual. I gathered from the words he got out before he died that when I had roasted his entire force to a crispy golden brown almost all at once, he’d dismissed it as a game malfunction, which for a moment I thought was actually kind of funny.

The second was more savvy, he tried to ambush me in the throne room when I approached. Fortunately for me, the purchase of troops, upgrades, and defenses was suspended for anyone under attack, so he was unable to stop me from plundering all 100 of his coins too. I upgraded all resource points in both places just like I’d done in my starting Territory, and with the remaining 20 gold, I unlocked the starter upgrades in the remaining Military and Lord branches of the tech tree: Basic Training which improved the soldiers’ attack and defense by 10%, and Lord’s Crest, which gave a 10% Morale bonus to all subjects—both soldiers and workers.

There was nothing left for me personally to do on the first day of the competition, so I spent the rest of the day answering my teammates’ questions about the game. I wasn’t sure if my new gains would be attacked today or tomorrow, so I kept my guard up as I did.

A few hours after dark, at a precise time, the emcee’s voice once again sounded through the planet.

[Attention, finalists! This announcement is to alert everyone that the first turn of the final survival game is now over. Any invading forces that are still in the middle of combat will be forcibly returned to friendly territory, including yourselves.]

[In addition, the Scoreboard can now be accessed from your game menu, so that you can stay informed on how many points your team needs to become a Victor! Do recall that in this game, you must be seated on a throne in territory you control to access the game menu.]

I was a little surprised when I first learned about the game’s end-of-turn mechanic, but it made sense thinking about it. None of the previous games had action going non-stop. The poison on the 1st Floor had stopped the game at night—at least for the most part. The 2nd Floor had only brief periods of gameplay in the first place beyond simply enduring the heat. The deadly sub-arctic conditions on the 3rd Floor had stopped the game at night again. Now, for the finals, they were simply abandoning pretense.

The killing games were, first and foremost, for entertainment. And I was grateful, because it meant that at this stage, I could rest without worrying that the territories I captured would be retaken in the night and deny me the 300 gold I was counting on in the morning.

Before bedding down, in a castle suite that at least gave lip-service to opulence, I went ahead and checked the scoreboard:

The Game of 10,000 Thrones

Leaderboard

1) Team FOXHOUND: 120 pts

2) Team Strongest: 72 pts

3) Team Viral: 72 pts

4) Team Storm: 64 pts

5) Team Doom: 64 pts

6) Team LeFabre: 56 pts

7) Team No: 56 pts

8) Team Mcsweeney: 56 pts

9) Team Rotten Luck: 56 pts

10) Team V or B: 56 pts

I was a little creeped out by the fact that the team name of the final boss could seem to be a reference to something from my world, and double that by how many points they had. “120 points...the max possible on day 1,” I murmured. It was extremely rare for any team to achieve it in the video game version of this, but on the 4th Floor, I guessed that the boss team would be so domineering every time the scenario ran.

Below the top 10, the tie at 56 points stretched on quite a bit. Team Firebrand, currently with 48 points, didn’t even rate the top 1,000. Before long, the massive tie scores would shatter and the bloodbath would really begin.