November 3, 2022
Day 14
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Synergy Maintenance Conditions Failed
The Bastion Of Immutability has fallen under the control of Neha Sharma of the Jafrabad Settlement. You no longer meet the conditions necessary for the maintenance of synergy. You have a grace period within which you can attempt to satisfy those conditions, failing which you will lose the synergy and will be locked out from establishing another synergy for 365 days, or till the upgrade of your presence, whichever is sooner.
00:59:37 till the grace period ends.
Ivan saw the notification the instant he surrendered his bastion, and had been waiting ever since.
First, he had waited for Neha to get teleported here. Then, he waited for Rahul's reunion with his sister to end. Finally, he had to wait for all the business with Shahid and the boat to end.
Just as he had started to move toward Neha, Ivan found himself faced with a strange notification, asking if he would consent to participate in a game Maya had invited him to.
There was no option to reject the notification, he could either accept it or wait for it to time out.
On accepting, Ivan had been teleported to a strange game world, with a massive chess board where the humans were superimposed with chess pieces, and he himself was a rook. However, none of that stood out to Ivan.
He could sense that time was passing differently here, and simply by staying in that environment, Ivan was rapidly accumulating time intent.
After five minutes, the intent accumulation hit 4, and Ivan felt invincible. He tried to signal to Maya that he could wipe the entire opposition by himself, 100% bonus or not, but the system wouldn't let him speak, and Maya wasn't paying attention to his hand gestures.
By the time his turn came, Ivan was standing with 5 Intent Points, and even after unleashing hell upon his enemy, there was barely a dent in his accumulated time intent.
To his surprise, Kelly conceded the match after that battle, and Ivan was transported back to the Bastion.
The moment he was back, Ivan noticed that his notification had been altered.
Synergy Maintenance Conditions Failed
The Bastion Of Immutability has fallen under the control of Neha Sharma of the Jafrabad Bastion. You no longer meet the conditions necessary for the maintenance of synergy. You have a grace period within which you can attempt to satisfy those conditions, failing which you will lose the synergy and will be locked out from establishing another synergy for 365 days, or till the upgrade of your presence, whichever is sooner.
Warning: An attempt to tamper with the countdown mechanism was detected. The timer has been reset to one minute. Any further tampering will be punished with an instant end to the time limit and an extended synergy lock period.
00:00:59 till the grace period ends.
Fuck!
Was the only thought in Ivan's mind as he now ran to Neha, afraid of using intent to boost his speed lest the system takes it as a violation of its rules. As he ran, Ivan thought of the words he would say.
There's no time for questions and answers. I need to give her all the necessary information to take the decision.
With 33 seconds to go, Ivan reached Neha and started speaking.
"Hi Neha, I'm Ivan, Rahul's friend and the previous representative of Laysan. When I surrendered the settlement to Jafrabad, it messed something up something very very important. You have less than 20 seconds to rectify that, can you please trust me and make me part of the settlement council? I promise I'll explain all the details later."
Ivan stopped speaking, doing his best to look earnest, desperate and sincere in equal parts.
Neha thought for only a second before shouting to Rahul, who was talking to Maya.
"Do you trust him?"
Despite the distance between them, Rahul heard her, and shouted his agreement, which Ivan could barely hear but Neha apparently could.
Some skill?
Ivan wondered.
Then, with ten seconds to go, the Maintenance condition was met and the timer stopped. Ivan breathed a sigh of relief and poured all 5 of the steadily decaying Intent Points into the dungeon.
Then, he thought of the dungeon stats, and a screen appeared.
Dungeon Overview
Dungeon Name
Dungeon Of Immutability
Dungeon Category
Tiered Dungeon
Bastion
Laysan Bastion
Dungeon bonuses (titles)
Premiere Dungeon I, Premier Special Dungeon III
Synergy Effects
Name Time Dilation Status Active Effect Upto 30x time dilation Dilation limit Upto 120 hours in the dungeon Chronomatic Fuel 5 intent points Number of charges (at maximum available time dilation multiplier and for the maximum duration) 6
The first thing that Ivan noticed was that, unlike the Bastion, the dungeon had been silently renamed during the synergy.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Maybe it's because we had never named the dungeon in the first place.
The second and more important thing that Ivan noticed was that time dilation effect was now active, and that the time intent stored in the dungeon was enough to allow 6 teams to experience 30x time dilation for 5 days in the dungeon.
Before Ivan could ponder any further, Neha interrupted his thoughts.
"I'm sorry for doubting you. Rahul had mentioned you more than once in our conversations, and that should have been enough. But with the arrival of the system, my faith in people has been..."
The young girl in front of Ivan seemed to be at a loss for words, so Ivan helped her out of it.
"You don't have to explain. You won't believe it, but there has already been a Coup d'état by one of the groups that came here from the World Congress."
Looking up from the chair in which she was currently seated, Neha replied.
"I can believe it. You all had blanked out for a few seconds, and then sixteen people abruptly fell unconscious, while Rahul and your friends all crowded around Maya. The Hundred, or what's left of them, are already rounding some people up. A Coup d'état explains everything."
Ivan nodded. Shahid's elites were already methodologically finding out everyone who was part of Kelly's entourage and rounding them up.
Neha was speaking again.
"They'll take care of it. I had a question for you."
Ivan nodded, indicating for Neha to go ahead.
"When you surrendered your settlement to us, it counted as a defeat of your settlement, and I got a notification asking whether or not to terminate the services of Martin, your steward. Usually, when a settlement ends, its steward is put to sleep until the next integration. However, when a settlement is subsumed into another, then the stewards can be retained. So, I wanted to know if Martin is any good, or if I should let him go."
Ivan took in the information, and instead of answering the question, asked something in return.
"Is there any cost to keeping him around? I mean, we can just retain the steward and if there's any problem, we can choose not to summon him."
Neha replied.
"No, there is no cost to keeping him around, and I see what you mean. Let me rephrase my question. Is your steward trustworthy? Can he become a liability and leverage the information he has about you for his own benefit? He certainly earned some favors when he revealed your identities to other stewards. That said, he did not reveal your levels, and what he leaked was likely to bring people to your aid."
Understanding dawned on Ivan.
"He has been a mixed bag so far, but we only have one steward and no point of reference to compare him to. Whether we can trust him or not? I can't say. How long before you have to make a decision?"
Neha thought for a second before replying.
"I don't see any deadline, but we can't summon him before retaining him first."
Ivan sighed.
"Well, let's make this decision with everyone else present. For now, I believe we should all sit together and have a long discussion. There is much that we don't know, and it won't be worthwhile to waste our one hour with a steward when we can easily share that information among ourselves. We'll start with this thing Shahid mentioned, about buying three weeks of safety by razing eight bastions."
Neha smiled.
"Alright, let's assemble in the castle hall. And don't worry about time with stewards. We have enough stewards and settlement points to host an entire roundtable of them at all times. Of course, that'll be a waste of resources, but I think it'll be fine to summon one for our discussion. There is one I trust more than the others, and he'll be present for critical meetings, while the rest will get information only on a need-to-know basis."
Need-to-know basis.
Ivan mused, recalling how often he had seen that term used in the office, and wondering whether it was corporate parlance that had found its way to everyday vernacular, or the other way around.
Then, he looked at Neha's chair and considered if he should offer assistance.
Reading Ivan's thoughts, Neha boastfully spoke.
"I am a level 25 Administrator. That comes with certain perks."
With that, Maya disappeared, though her chair was left behind. Ivan guessed that she was already in the hall, and probably purchasing some new furniture for the castle.
That prompted Ivan to look at the settlement details.
Settlement Details
Settlement Name
Jafrabad
Settlement population
7592/1000
Bastion
Bastion of Immutability
Unique bastion bonus
Allows any humans within the domain of the colocated settlement to drink salt water without any adverse effects
Settlement bonuses
Expanded settlement domain III, Amphibious IV
Settlement domain highlights
Dungeon of Immutability, unnamed inland hypersaline lake, unnamed cavern, unnamed coral reef formation
Other bastions within settlement domain
N/A
Leadership Bonus
N/A
Council Bonuses
N/A
Settlement points
1,042,511
Buildings
Castle (Lvl 1), Dock (Lvl 1)
Terraforming projects
Unnamed cavern expansion (completed)
Active Settlement Quests
Conquer the Dungeon
As Ivan saw the settlement points, he corrected his earlier thought.
Neha is most certainly purchasing some new furniture for the castle.
Hadn't Shahid mentioned something about not having SPs left after purchasing all those tokens? Just how many SPs did these guys have?
Other than the name and population of the settlement, not much had changed. The titles, highlights, and bonuses were all still the same. Before he closed the settlement overview, Ivan had one last thought.
I should talk to Rahul and see if we could restore the name of the settlement to Laysan. I have grown quite fond of our little island.
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Rahul, Daniel, Ivan, Maya, and Matt were sitting on very comfortable chairs and listening to Neha narrate the post-integration events from her perspective.
Neha had started with the mayhem on the night of the arrival of the system and then talked about the day-to-day events as well as the various leveling and grinding strategies they had instituted. She followed up with the sudden announcement on day 5 about what happens after the tutorial, and the steward Zendyr explained the events from his perspective, giving insights on the steward council.
Then she related to them how the settlement had prepared for invasions, and how none of those preparations mattered when a level 29 Shahid came in with about 200,000 refugees and changed the entire trajectory of the settlement.
Even though they had spent less than an hour with the eccentric and insanely powerful individual, the five members of the Laysan Bastion couldn't help but empathize every time Neha narrated some crazy and outlandish event revolving around Shahid.
"He is a maniac, but a well-meaning one. And I believe he behaves this way because someone has to. If we are all soft..."
Neha let her words hang.
The narration continued, and before long, the mood in the hall turned very somber. The daily casualties were massive, but after the first few days, the numbers that Neha had dutifully memorized were becoming just statistics.
But Neha had much more to tell, and some of those things hit much harder than others.
"The continuous deaths escalated to a point that three individuals with the Gatherer class ended up getting an Undertaker specialization in addition to the Miner and Prospector we were training them for."
After a pause, Neha continued.
"The three had been digging graves all week, and to ease the pressure on the other two, one of them ended up taking the class. He did not come back with us when we teleported, instead promising to keep laying to rest everyone who died in the most recent onslaught. Burying the Muslims and cremating the Hindus, at least until the bastion is attacked again and he too finds himself in need of an undertaker."
There were tears in everyone's eyes, but Neha kept speaking, and finally, she spoke of the biggest tragedy of Jafrabad.
"You've already met the elites. The Hundred were instituted two days after Shahid came here, and consisted of a fighting squad of 100 women, and a feeder squad that was originally almost 60,000 strong. After tens of thousands of women and children had been killed in the first waves of attacks, every able-bodied woman had volunteered to train in bowmanship under Shahid. As they kept fighting, the women started to lose their identities. And as their young children were taken away from them to be hidden among the college students, they all became nothing more than the squads they represented."
"You can still see it, in their names. There are 53 left, and only a few of them speak anymore. The feeder squads all perished during the world congress. That's why you see only students and young children among the people who teleported here."
Neha continued narrating, tying in the missing pieces, while Zendyr occasionally chimed in with any piece of information he felt was relevant.
Soon, everyone was on the same page, and Neha spoke again.
"I think this is all. Before we do any more talking, I want to expand the island and build some fortifications. I was holding off on choosing a specialization, but given the limited settlement points, I can't afford to miss any cost modifiers that even an average specialization would give..."
Before Neha could finish, three men suddenly manifested on what had been completely empty chairs near the roundtable.
The first was a short bald man with a protruding belly.
The second was a lanky Arabic man.
The third was a solidly built dark-skinned man.
"There is no cause for haste."
The first said.
"There is no cause for alarm."
The second added.
"There is every cause for joy."
The third man finished.
Then the three spoke together.
"For you have been deemed worthy."