November 1, 2022
Day 12
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The week after the frog invasion on the settlement passed without anything of note happening. There were neither any further attacks nor any other tutorial event.
That did not mean the settlement was idle. There were sweeping changes across the castle as people adjusted to living in a medieval building, and to the realities of life after integration. The biggest change was the introduction of a university-like educational system in the settlement.
Throughout the day, there would be trainings organized focusing on increasing particular stats, mastering certain weapons, and gaining certain skills. People could pick and choose training just like college electives. Rahul and his team took all the fundamental trainings, which is what the stat-focused trainings were called, together. In between the fundamental trainings, everyone was free to go and do their own things.
Rahul’s morning was occupied by three training sessions, all fundamental ones.
First was endurance training which was mostly running and swimming. The participation in this training was quite low since everyone had already inflated their endurance during the attack, and now the returns from training were diminishing. However, slow as the progress was, it hadn't halted, and so Rahul and his team dutifully started their day with endurance training, giving it their best.
The Second was strength and vitality training. While there was a lot of scope for improvement left in the strength and vitality stats, there was a different problem. They had no gym equipment, and progress with only bodyweight exercises was incredibly slow. Since they had burned the entire island as well as the majority of their furniture to ashes, they didn’t have many resources to create gym equipment.
But human ingenuity knew no bounds, and when Rahul went for his strength training on the third morning after the attack ended, he was pleasantly surprised. The training area had been converted into an open-air gym with various pieces of resistance training equipment made from dismantled weapons and armor.
As he paid attention, Rahul realized how they had made some of the equipment. For example, to make weight plates for barbells, they had dismantled plate armor and punched holes into it with spears or swords. Then they had dismantled bows and pushed the curved wood of the bows into the hole in the plate. The bowstrings were used to tie it all up, and the result was a misshapen but fairly solid and heavy barbell. In fact, due to the curved shape of the bow, the barbell looked quite similar to the EZ curl bar Rahul had used in the office gym for training his biceps.
That, along with many other crudely put-together contraptions, made for much more effective training than was possible just a day ago.
Finally, there was dexterity training. Here too, the consequences of their burning down the island could be felt. All the trees on the island were now just ashes, and there wasn’t much left to climb on except for the castle walls. So that’s what they did. The training was simple, climb up and down the castle walls as many times as possible in 1 hour.
The instructors had decided to make a game out of it and kept scores, to keep things interesting and incentivize people to push harder. There was even a leaderboard, though Rahul had a long way to go before he could feature on it. He had focused too much on endurance and lost his edge in dexterity.
After the three fundamental trainings, the team would take a break and go for lunch together, followed by a long period where everyone did their own thing. They would meet up later in the evening for intelligence training, which involved mediating with Anand. The meditation training mainly involved sitting still for an hour while listening to Anand, who guided them towards feeling the mana around them, getting a better feel for it every single day.
By now, Anand and a few others mages were able to feel the ambient mana even outside of meditation. Rahul was halfway there, as he could feel and isolate mana if it were present in high enough concentrations, as he did with fire mana when he was learning to use the Weak Fireball spell.
As far as the free period was concerned, Rahul was occupied with council meetings and weapon mastery sessions. He took short blades, bow and arrow, and fireball mastery sessions every day. He occasionally took swordsmanship training as well, but Seki's lessons were getting more and more advanced and Rahul soon had to admit he had no talents with swords.
As far as the council meetings were concerned, a majority of the time in these meetings was spent on the day-to-day administration of the settlement. These were things Rahul found mundane but were just as important as big decisions.
One standout example was the decision to stockpile arrows. When Mark had first purchased the castle, everyone noticed the equipment racks on the outer walls, on the roof, as well as various places within the castle. The racks were filled with weapons and armor, and everyone had taken whatever equipment they needed and kept it with them in their living quarters. Most of the equipment was still left in the racks, as the castle provided its resources assuming full occupancy of 1000 people.
The next morning, however, even the small fraction of the equipment racks that had been emptied were restocked by the castle. Immediately sensing an opportunity, the council convened and made a decision. They designated a few big rooms in the castle as the armory and cleared out all the equipment racks and emptied their contents into those rooms. When the frogs attacked, they had 3 days' worth of stock of arrows, meant for a fully manned castle with 1000 defenders. In the absence of that massive reserve of arrows, the battle might have gone a lot differently.
Now, in the last week, they had accumulated an even bigger stock of arrows. Anyone attacking the bastion now would be treated to a warm welcome with fireballs, and their sharp retreat would be punctuated by a deluge of arrows.
Many other such decisions were made daily in the council meetings. Maintaining emergency stores of food and water, deciding the optimum frequency and duration of various training sessions, and much more. Based on the lesson they learned from the frog invasion, a new area was set aside specifically to store inflammable items. Rahul found that a bit funny.
Useful as these discussions might be, Rahul never found a way to contribute to them. The managers who formed most of the council were good at handling such things. Their old job needed similar skills and they had gracefully transitioned from managing a company to managing a castle. Eventually, Rahul started joining the council meetings a bit late, to avoid the mundane discussions, and get right to the exciting parts.
This second half of the meetings was a brainstorming session where everyone put together their thoughts on the nature of events in this new world, and form a consistent picture of their situation. The final goal was to come up with a long-term strategy for the growth of the settlement. Over the last week, they had made a lot of progress toward forming a consistent picture, but no agreement could be reached on the strategy front.
Today, Rahul spent some time after his lunch sparring with Ivan. The big guy handily beat him every time, but always followed up by giving him tips on what he should do differently. After receiving his daily thrashing, Rahul was sitting and thinking about the improvements Ivan had suggested, until he realized he was late. He immediately rushed to the 4th floor of the castle where the council met.
When he entered the room, Mark had already started the discussion, and seemed to summarise all their conclusions so far. It was mostly a rehash of what had been discussed over the past week, so Rahul hadn't missed much.
“Based on adroit observations by many of you concerning the events that have happened since the integration, we now have a fairly solid working hypothesis on what is going on. I'll quickly go over the key points.“
Mark raised his index finger and said,
“The first thing we know, perhaps the only one for which we have irrefutable evidence, is that the world outside the earth has progressed way beyond us and our wildest imaginations. Right from the get-go, we’ve had plenty of occasions to glance at that power. The pure intent movement that saved our life. The instant broadcast of messages to everyone on earth, right to our minds. The way castles and docks grow out of the ground as if they were nothing more than saplings. There are many more examples that we all have noticed. Suffice to say, when it comes to the wider universe, or multiverse, we might be no more than cavemen.“
Raising another finger to join the first, Mark continued,
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“The second thing we know is that even if we might be the weakest among all the entities in the multiverse, the system is giving us an opportunity to survive and grow. The basis for this assumption is simple. The tutorial so far has been consistent in its functioning. It has only thrown at us challenges that we could potentially overcome. Some problems have been easy and some have been hard, but nothing has been impossible. So unless something drastic were to change, we can assume that the system's actions are deliberate, and its purpose is to pave for us a road to survival in this new world. The road may be perilous, but we shouldn't be faced with anything ridiculously strong. We should not be in a situation where some entity comes and erases us all out of existence with a mere thought.“
Raising a third finger, Mark said,
“The third and final assumption is based on the first two but is also the least certain of the three assumptions. The world outside is powerful beyond our imagination, yet the system has given us an isolated tutorial where we are faced with challenges of our caliber. Our final assumption is that we would be faced with threats from other beings with whom we share the planet. The system will test our mettle against each other."
"What happened last week was one such example. The frogs were quite oversized, but beyond that, they strongly resembled the frogs we had on Earth pre-integration. Those frogs might have even been indigenous to this island. Our theory stands on flimsy grounds, but it is not completely baseless. As Daniel pointed out yesterday, there is at least one observation that yields credence to this theory. The change in settlement information. The number of shallow water bastions within our settlement domain had reduced from two to one.“
Closing all his raised fingers into a fist, Mark concluded, “The tutorial is pitting one bastion against another. That would explain the behavior of the frogs - why they charged into us and refused to give up until the last one died. I believe that the tutorial will throw more bastions at us to test us. In that case, we need to be ready."
As someone tried to voice their objection, Mark raised one finger and pre-empted it.
"I might be completely wrong and the frog attack might turn out to be a one-time event, and the rest of the tutorial might be comprised of completely unrelated events. For all we know, we might be doing a botany challenge next. But, we can’t wait to verify all our assumptions. We need to create a good enough theory that explains everything so far and run with it.“
And for the 3rd time in as many days, Mark drove the conversation to his actual point. “You all know what I'm getting at here. We need to seize the initiative and attack a bastion. As much as we want it to be untrue, without killing enemies, we are handicapped. We have tried everything from skill practice sessions to mock combat and even proper duels to first blood. We have found ways to increase every stat with practice, but nothing we have done so far has yielded any experience points, and we are all stuck at the same level for the past week.“
Sophie, an engineering manager who has been part of the council from the beginning, had been leading the opposition to Mark’s proposal in the last 3 days. Once again, it was she who spoke. “What we did one week ago was the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of frogs. If they were human beings, what we did would have been termed genocide. But it was not humans, and we acted in self-defense. I don’t blame any of us for what we did, but it was still a gruesome and bloody massacre.“
Taking a deep breath, she continued and made the same argument she had been making the last 3 days. “Killing to save our own lives is a reality I have, with great difficulty, learned to accept in this new world. But what you are proposing is not short of wanton destruction and slaughter of animals, for no reason but our own greed. If we are ready to kill animals just for the sake of increasing levels, where do we draw the line? What will happen after we have killed animals to the point where they don’t give enough experience to level up anymore? Will we start an indiscriminate slaughter of humans next?“
The same argument had taken place again and again over the last 3 days. Even assuming all their hypotheses were true and they were destined to fight nearby bastions in the tutorial, many were utterly disgusted by the idea of proactively going out and wiping out other bastions. Their conscience didn’t allow them to choose to slaughter animals for increasing their strength.
When they were acting in defense, things were different. The tutorial had taken that choice away from them, and that helped assuage their guilt over their actions. Now, they had to repeat the same massacre that happened one week ago, but while exercising their own free will.
This conversation had not moved forward at all over the three days, and Rahul understood why. No matter what argument Mark made, there were many in the council whose values simply could not allow them to make such a decision. The rewards didn’t matter, because consenting to such an action would be against their fundamental ideals and beliefs.
It would shake their own understanding of who they are, who they had been their entire life. It would make them a hypocrite, letting go of their lifelong convictions the moment they proved too inconvenient. Rahul was ready to go on the offensive, but he did understand the hesitation of others.
Sophie, who had been a proud PETA member for the entirety of her adult life, already had difficulty coming to terms with what she had to do a week ago. She was just an extreme example. Most others who supported her weren’t PETA members or vegans, but that didn’t mean they had any experience personally butchering animals and preparing the food that ended up on their plates. Many who had eaten meat their entire lives still shuddered at the thoughts of what happened last week.
What made it worse was the ease with which one could figure out just how many lives they had extinguished. Looking at one’s level, it was easy to calculate how many frogs they had killed, and most here had reached level 7 and killed close to 1000 frogs. And that number didn’t include the frogs that simply died in the fires they spread across the island. The weight of the 1000 lives that he ended just to go from level 7 to level 8 made Rahul a bit queasy. How many more lives would he have taken by the time he reached level 10, or level 25? The thought made him uneasy.
In the meantime, the heated arguments went on. Eventually, it seemed Mark had reached the same conclusion as Rahul.
With a deep sigh, Mark spoke, his tone conveying a little bit of regret, but a strong air of finality. “This conversation is not going anywhere. We have a difference of opinion that we can’t overcome. I understand all your perspectives, and I can’t deny the truth of your statements. But there is one truth that I know that trumps everything else in my mind. By not acting to get stronger, we are condemning ourselves to death.“
Sophie interrupted and emphatically insisted, “We don’t know that.”
But Mark had run out of patience and spoke over her objections.
“Our situation is like the trolley problem, an ethical dilemma. For those who don’t know about it, I will summarise the dilemma.“
Mark started explaining, “There is a trolley that has lost control and is barreling down a railway track. Ahead, on the tracks, there is a family of five, tied to the track and unable to get out of the way. You are standing nearby, at a train yard, and have a lever in front of you. If you pull the lever, the train will change its path to a different track, and the family will be saved. However, in their stead, a single person who is tied unmoving to the other track will die.“
He went on, “In theory, one might think that saving five lives and condemning one to death is for the greater good. But in reality, many people would rather see five people die due to their inaction, rather than sentencing one person to death due to their action. After all, if the five died, one could justify to themselves that it’s not their fault. But if they switched the track and killed that one person, the blood of that person would be squarely on their hands. If you weren't there, he would have lived. You chose to kill him for the greater good, but the person who died would not see it that way. To him, the one who pulled the lever is his killer.“
Finally coming to his point, he said “In our case, the family on the track represents the Layson settlement, this council included. In a sick twist of the original dilemma, this council itself is also the one standing at the train yard. We can pull the lever that determines our own life or death. On the other track are the numerous bastions that lie within our settlement. If we want to live, we must direct the train to run them over. But I understand that many of you don't want to have their blood on your hands. So, I will make this decision on my own. The buck stops here.“
At this point, Sophie was clearly infuriated and did not mince words, “Your whole explanation is bullshit. There is no train here, there is no track, and there is no lever. If we do as you say, it will be us who will be going and laying waste to all the bastions. You have perverted and twisted an old and irrelevant ethical dilemma to fit your agenda."
"The family, the person at the yard, and the train itself represent just one person, you. It is you who will pull the lever to save your own life, the life that is not even in danger for all we know. And then you yourself will become the train that runs over the defenseless animals. This is no ethical dilemma, this is brutality.“
With that, Sophie stormed out.
Mark’s face contorted with anger for a second, before he controlled his expression. His tone still betrayed his frustration. “I cannot please everyone. I won’t risk the lives of the 165 residents of this island just to keep everyone in this council happy. I have already located a nest that I believe signifies the avian bastion on this island. While everything else on the island burnt to a crisp, that nest stood unaffected. Tomorrow morning I will go to that nest and attempt to claim it. I suspect that when I do, all the birds flying above and around the island will attack us.“
Looking at Daniel and Claudie, he continued “Make preparations to mount a defense tomorrow. Our walls will not help us against birds, we will need a new strategy.“
As Daniel and Claudie nodded, Mark looked at everyone else and said "This meeting is over".
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Rahul was completely taken aback by the sudden turn of events. For better or worse, Mark had unilaterally decided to go to war with the Avian bastion. Unless Sophie could stitch together a mutiny, the Layson bastion will have its second battle tomorrow morning. This time, there will be no walls to protect them, and if the birds had grown in size like the frogs, they would pose a much deadlier threat.
Rahul cracked his knuckles in anticipation. He was looking forward to seeing how much he had improved, and to getting the last two levels for class selection.