[Welcome to Floor 8.]

[You and your team are about to arrive on the prison planet Kurz’kos, where a certain interstellar empire sends many of the people it conquers as well as its own criminals.]

[All who come here, regardless of their background, have two choices: they can remain on Kurz’kos for the rest of their natural lives, or they can try to win their freedom.]

[Whatever choice they make, no “resident” of this world can avoid delving its dungeons. There are tens of thousands scattered across the planet, and only by successfully clearing them can prisoners win resources to make their lives more livable...or indeed stay alive at all.]

[As well, if a dungeon is unattended for too long, its creatures may emerge and threaten the region...]

[Your team’s Mission Difficulty: Extreme]

[Mission Selected]

[Clear the Tower of Freedom within two years.]

The Floor and Mission description this time told a lot, but also held a great deal back. In theory, teams on higher-difficulty mission would have to investigate for themselves what they needed to do to locate and access the Tower of Freedom. On Medium difficulty and below, challengers had no need to go anywhere near it, instead receiving variable missions requiring them to clear a certain number of dungeons or gain a certain amount of the prison planet’s currency.

The lower difficulty time-limits were also more variable than the High or above missions, which were to gain 4 of the pieces of the key to enter the Tower of Freedom on High, to clear its 12th level which marked its halfway point on Very High, or to completely conquer it on Extreme respectively. Each of those missions came with a time limit of 2 years.

Even outside the dungeons, though, this Floor was a great deal more dangerous than the last. Let alone monsters getting loose from them, at any time, even the settlements of Floor natives who were “conquered peoples” like the challengers’ ostensible situation were at risk of being attacked by the empire’s criminals, who received bonuses and perks not just for clearing the dungeons, but for killing the “enemies of the empire.” Nowhere was truly safe.

The one upside to taking on a high level mission was that it was truly difficult to encounter more than a handful of other challengers who would even attempt to steal the clears of high-tier dungeons near you, even considering how many more people were challenging the upper Floors of Area 1 these days, and the natives, criminal or slave, virtually never went for them themselves. For those taking on the easiest three difficulties, the competition for dungeons with both the natives and their fellow challengers would be even more ferocious than the 6th Floor.

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The dungeons themselves had six different classifications, reflected in the naming convention used to label them on maps. Those were, in ascending order of scope and difficulty, Den, Cavern, Temple, Stronghold, Palace, and Trial. Those last two were the ones we’d need to focus on, because only the Trial dungeons rewarded pieces of the key to the entrance of the final dungeon, the Tower of Freedom, of which we’d need 7 in all. And the Trial dungeons were accessed through spatial rifts that only appeared by using a Trial Tuner held by a “King” monster that acted as the boss of a Palace dungeon.

As for the risk of obtaining multiple copies of the same piece of a key, as long as we didn’t clear a Trial dungeon with the exact same name as one we already had, we’d get a piece of the key we didn’t already have. We could ensure that we didn’t get a Trial Tuner for a Trial we’d already cleared by defeating one of the seven types of King monsters that we hadn’t already—which one a Palace held would be indicated in its name.

I had to admit, the progression system was rather well-organized. This all was, after all, for the entertainment of the masses. Every single dungeon was crammed with invisible cameras or something through which the empire citizens lucky enough not to end up there could watch people fight and die in them. There was probably stuff like features for a viewer to track their favorite teams, but unlike in the Throskart storyline on the first four Floors, the showrunning aspect of THIS blood sport took pains not to involve the prisoners with anything behind the curtain.

First, we had to delve a lesser dungeon or two, in order to get enough loot to acquire enough of the world’s currency, known as Deepcoins, to buy a map to the nearest Palace dungeon as well as a regional map to reveal the locations of other settlements in a wide area. These were physical coins, but similarly to the 1st Floor, they vanished when a delver picked them up. In this case, they were added to an “account balance” shared by the delver’s team.

If it had been totally up to me, I might have had us try to search rather far from our starting point, but when it came to uncleared Floor missions, Rule #1 was that efficiency is always the watchword. We’d do our darndest not to kill other challengers unless they attacked us, but if one we found, we happened to swipe from someone else, it was just their bad luck.

The starting point for the Floor was actually on a prison shuttle, already on a descent to one of Kurz’kos’ Landing Cities. These were the most peaceful places on the prison world, which made sense given they were the only locations with prison guards. A great many prevented all entry back into the starports prisoners were admitted to the planet from, but about half as much acted as a peacekeeping force within the city walls. Since guard weapons, ranged and otherwise, were capable of ruining your body’s day on a molecular level, even a team as powerful as Justice would be well-advised not to screw around with them.

Of course, trying to establish and keep permanent residence in a Landing City was a rapacious sink for Deepcoins. Unless your team got the Medium difficulty mission to do so, the Landing Cities weren’t places challengers had many dealings with.

At last, the shuttle landed and our group of roughly 60, a total of ten challenger teams, were escorted out of the starport, our restraints deactivating automatically as we crossed the outer perimeter line.