> We’ve found Eldest’s client! She made it through her hidden duodenary and was witnessed taking down one of the new Threats.

> – Radio transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

Predictably, less than 24 hours into a new twelveday, my Novelty was already at the maximum.

I’d expected that, but initially I’d thought I’d protected my kids, by sending them away before the treezilla fight. Unfortunately, I’d underestimated my intergalactic fame.

After we returned to Fort Autumn, max Novelty spread out from me as I walked. It was spotty, with some people’s not budging and other people shooting from zero to 144 in seconds, I guess depending on whether anyone watching their streams recognized me.

Maybe the extra eyes were a mistake. I have to imagine all humans look mostly alike, but I’ve given myself a very distinguishing feature.

It might not have helped as much as I would have hoped. It seemed like all of Fort Autumn was in the spotlight. The effect was the worst around Priya and I - the two most recognizable humans who’d interacted with Fluffy - but eventually the fort itself started raising people’s Novelty, even if Priya and I weren’t around.

People out there were interested in us.

A lot of people.

Crushingly, my kids weren’t exempt from the omnipresent focus, not even Cassie. We’d all be going to the next Challenge.

All the Turners.

All the Morettis.

All of Fort Autumn.

Was I worried? Hell yes. I could only pray they’d keep sending us in with the people physically proximate to us. If not… well… I’d prepare my kids the best I could, I guess? I tried not to think about it.

Everyone was pretty weirded out by the situation. It was one thing to know that aliens were generally watching these death games, and another thing entirely to know that your community was under some kind of magnifying glass. Alexandra had sent several troubled-looking people to talk to Pointy, asking how to write the words “Privacy please” in galactic script, so they could make signs to hang around our bathrooms and bedrooms.

It was a good enough idea that I hired someone to use an ability to dye the same pattern into our bedsheets. If anyone kept watching, at least they’d know they were a cultural-taboo-violating asshole.

I was getting better at that, just hiring people to do any little thing I could to make our life better or easier. I was apocalypse rich. It was hard to dent my Money pile with personal purchases.

At Pointy’s suggestion, I’d zoomed out enough in my shop that I could start purchasing “land” in the Mediterranean. It wouldn’t accelerate the end of the Maffiyir, but chatter we’d picked up from the space lawyers had made it clear that the land we claimed was ours to keep at the end of the contest. I'd kind of expected that, but the news had definitely made me zoom out and try to start purchasing land around national landmarks. I'd been cheered to see that most were already claimed, although I was pretty sure I was now the proud owner of Morning Glory Pool and a small chunk of the Grand Prismatic Springs in Yellowstone. It was really hard to tell from the purchase interface without labels, but I definitely owned a small pond and part of a much larger one.

Fun and silliness aside, the revelation that we retained control of the land we'd bought had nasty implications for land we hadn't claimed. Ending the game while not owning any of the world’s oceans would make the future pretty rough for our species.

Buying up the water surface of our planet seemed prudent. I was trying to spell out useful messages in big blocky letters that used Pointy’s minimum-cost pattern. I had my own concerns about that, since buying things at the lowest cost meant I had to leave gaps rather than buying vast unbroken stretches... but I figured it was still our best bet. The Soundless likely wouldn't be able to do much with the tiny isolated chunks of land and water either, so hopefully the cost of buying them back wouldn't be too bad.

Even buying each hex at the minimum cost, each letter cost thousands and thousands of system Money. I could have done it more cheaply by not making the letters blocky, but making them big had two purposes. First, we hoped it would make them easier to notice. Second, it communicated the information about the most effective purchase pattern to anyone who did notice, on top of the actual message I was writing. I’d gotten as far as “Alien Radio” and “Team human = b & w stripes” when I’d noticed a little grid of purchases appear off to the side of my own. Someone was listening and wanted to let me know, even if they didn’t have enough Money to write back yet.

I wanted to tell people how to kill the treezillas, but I was struggling to come up with a succinct and understandable way to communicate what was necessary. “Kill tree: bracelet, insult. Danger!” was the best I’d sorted out… and it wasn’t that great, even assuming the person who saw it could read English.

Pointy’s suggestion had been passed to the Arsenal as well, and I knew they were writing similar messages in coastal waters and major rivers around the world. Hopefully someone would come up with a better phrasing and get it back to me, or we’d come up with a better way to communicate with faraway people.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

It seemed like it wasn’t going to be via any prize from the treezilla. There didn’t seem to be any reward for killing it beyond Points and the remnants of the treezilla itself.

The little treewalkers had vanished immediately after death, as expected, but the massive treezilla corpse showed no signs of dissipating even though more than 24 hours had passed. We’d tentatively decided that it might be here to stay, and tasked people with studying it to see if it might be useful. So far, we knew it wasn’t edible.

“It has a lot of features that might make for a good shelter,” Colonel Zwerinski said. “Strong walls that are still porous to air. We’ve found where it lets the little birds and rodents out, and it seems like those openings get sealed back over, so it should be paraslug-proof, aside from any human-made openings. That’s not an idea I recommend moving on, however.”

I shook my head. “No kidding! What if it resurrects?”

“What if another appears? It is right beside the pylon,” Alexandra added.

Colonel Zwerinski laughed. “Exactly. Too many unknowns. We were damn lucky you knew what you did to that Z-Rex and survived to get the word out about it. The Arsenal had something in their pocket to try right away when they ran into issues. Even now… we know the one near Toney’s gotten about five feet taller over the course of ten hours, but do all of them grow at the same speed? Will that one grow at a constant speed? How big can they get? Is it true that people dying nearby makes them larger, and if so, by how much? That last one’s not exactly something we can test, but it’s worrying me not to know.”

“I’m sure we’ll find out eventually,” I said. Immediately, I regretted my words, watching Alexandra look away and the colonel’s eyebrows tighten. I struggled to change the subject. “At least the things the treewalkers left gave fairly clear instructions. Things could have taken a lot longer if it’d been possible to mistake the Shards for Titan Hearts.”

During the fight, I’d already known what to do and hadn’t bothered to read the distracting message that had popped up when I’d grabbed the Shard, but my newly-perfect memory had made it easy to review after the fact. The amber tear had announced itself as a “Shard of strength (Temporary): Quickly return this to the parent to reduce the Threat.” The language was a little oblique, but it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what was meant by “parent” or “return” and it had only taken one careful test by the Arsenal to determine that “quickly” meant 432 seconds, or a bit over seven minutes. All in all, it was an almost-kind inclusion by our evil overlords.

I was pretty sure we had Fluffy and their people to thank. No way would the sadists in charge of this do something so kind if they hadn’t been forced to by some previous generation of space lawyers.

“So,” Alexandra said. “Returning to the topic… we are not using the treezilla remnants as shelters directly, at least for now.”

“No,” said Zwerinski. “We are getting samples to try some manipulation abilities on, maybe see if we can make some better armor. We can definitely cut some portions off to use as strong walls for the field bunkers we’re trying to build.”

“That seems like a better plan,” I said. “Have we cut deep enough to see if the pylon is still intact?”

“It is,” Zwerinski said. “Not even central in the trunk, actually. It’s barely within the bark on the southern edge.”

Another treezilla appeared in our neighborhood in the early hours of the following morning. It appeared slightly to the side of the first one, but it partially shattered the remains of its predecessor’s corpse as it emerged.

I blanched when I heard that, and hoped no one elsewhere had been foolish or desperate enough to use a treezilla’s corpse as a shelter.

I'd been on standby, but wasn't dispatched with the kill group. My bracelet had returned to its usual brightness a few hours previously, but I was off the hook this time since I’d dealt with the last one. We should only need two Challengers to go, but we’d sent four of us out, just to be safe.

The fact that we’d needed two of us instead of one hadn’t been lost on anyone, and the Arsenal had started to patrol the countryside, trying to locate the trees and end them before the problems they caused escalated.

“Escalating” seemed to be exactly what the trees did if left alone, growing in size and reach and requiring more and more Shards to put down. We’d also found that you could kill them without a bracelet - or, as the military was calling them now, an “Intensifier.” Simply killing enough of the little rodents and birds under the treezilla’s branches would eventually cause a treewalker to spawn. Of course, if the resultant Shard wasn’t enough to end the treezilla’s life, you couldn’t back off and let the behemoth recover. You’d have to stand there, risking your life in combat until you could get a second treewalker to spawn, or a third.

Nasty.

Worse, as I’d predicted, we did prove that nearby deaths empowered the treezillas. If there was any mercy, it was that the empowerment wasn’t instant… but I wasn’t sure how much of a mercy it was. Each death seemed to improve the rate of a treezilla’s growth. It was hard to nail down exact numbers, but it seemed that if one of these so-called “Threats” killed even one person, they would grow at least 50% faster than otherwise, and the one treezilla the Arsenal had found that had killed three people seemed to be growing at an absurd rate. We could tell that it wasn't a 50% improvement in growth for each kill, but we hadn't left it alive long enough to get a precise read. The scientists and the security people got into a bit of an argument about that one, but the tree was put down before we could get a definitive answer.

I think we all would have appreciated the data, but the ratio of “Intensifiers” to “Threats” wasn’t that generous. There were more than enough of us to put down all the threats the “easy” way if we piled on top of them promptly, but given our uncertainties about the rate of the treezillas' growth, those margins felt uncomfortably thin. Priya and George and I had been notified that our kids would be kept out of the Intensifier rotation “if at all possible,” a phrase I hated but saw the necessity of. I knew, I just knew, that eventually someone would ask me to take my sons into extreme danger.

It didn’t take me long to be proven right.