CHAPTER 11 – COMPETITION POSITIONS
Tom exited the isolation room with what he hoped was a bored expression. He wasn’t sure how convincing it was, even with his efforts to slow himself down – inside, he was filled with energy.
It was awesome. The isolation room had been so much better than he had been imagining. It had been created for people like him. The answers to most of the pressing questions he had been asking had been readily available. They had predicted what he wanted to know and made sure the books with the knowledge were identifiable.
One session had transformed his view of his entire situation. He was both significantly safer and better placed to have explosive growth than he had initially thought.
Then he remembered what he had read, and recalling how humanity had earnt these protections in the first place destroyed his excitement.
His emotions, Tom acknowledged, were all over the place. Fear of the future, dread of failure, anticipation of his impending power… they were yo-yoing everywhere.
The area outside the isolation room was empty until Bir’s doors opened. A moment later, so did Pa’s.
Tom frowned.
Bir looked like how he felt, and her eyes were red. She had tried to wipe away some tears, but had failed to hide the evidence.
His heart broke.
That was the other cost of the protection that he was receiving. Little Ta had been resilient, but occasionally the isolation had gotten to him. Bir and others like her suffered at least once a week.
Pa had been closer to Bir, and his happy face, too, had fallen when he spotted her. He immediately ran over and hugged her.
No words were exchanged; and, truth be told, there was no need for them.
Their session had taken them past dinner time, and, as they trudged toward the gymnasium, Tom let himself interact with the others on autopilot, his conscious thoughts directed internally. He collected his food and started eating without registering the actions.
The cost of the isolation rooms was higher than he had realised. How many other innocent children were like Bir? He frowned. He guessed it didn’t matter - the price had already been paid. It was up to him to make the various sacrifices count, and that was exactly what he was going to do. New questions swirled inside him.
How should he make the most of these resources?
What was the best way to fix his healing?
Was there an opportunity to cut himself under the table?
The extra sharp meat knife that he had grabbed with dinner was clutched in his hands on his lap, ready to be used. Surreptitiously, Tom cased the room. None of the adults were looking at him, because they were still deliberately ignoring everyone who had gone through the ritual and were instead focused exclusively on the older children. At different tables too, he realised. He hadn’t even noticed it, but the four-year-olds had all been funnelled onto a table near the bubble machine. A machine that, as usual, during the evening meal had its active effects switched off. The coloured bubbles did nothing but pop, and, to his surprise create an effective smoke screen. They were materially hidden from the sight of the grownups, and then, as a secondary protection, all the adults and the near adult were pointedly not glancing in their direction.
He licked his lips.
If he slipped the hand clutching the knife under his pants… then a bit of pressure.
“Ta, do you not like?” Bir gestured at a pink vegetable on the side of his plate. He had tasted it and found it to be very similar to a carrot, but channelling his younger self had rejected it.
He made a face and stuck out his tongue to non-verbally show how disgusting it was. The girl promptly speared it with a fork and ate it happily.
Carefully, Tom pulled the hand holding the knife back above the table. The adults might not be able to see him, but he was not protected from the other kids in the same way, and the risk wasn’t worth taking. If he was going to cut himself, it had to be done under his clothes. The bleeding had to be low enough that it wouldn’t soak through the fabric of his top, and it had to be unnoticed by everyone.
There were too many ways for the attempt to go wrong, and it wasn’t worthwhile to take the risk. An hour of distracted training of a healing spell he might end up having to discard was not that valuable a prize.
The question about the pink carrots had pulled him out of his self-reflection at least. Present in the moment, he turned his attention to the chocolate mousse dessert, which was the one good part of his dinner selection. Snotty Ma on the table behind them was complaining about her elixir being spilled. Bir next to him was giggling a little at the expressed outrage, but, thankfully, the other girl didn’t notice.
They escaped dinner without any drama, and the rest of the evening continued in the same vein, but by the time he settled down to sleep he had made some decisions.
For the next week, he would take stock of the reference materials available in the isolation room, and once that was done, he would dedicate the full two hours to reacquiring his spear skills. Outside of the isolation room, his focus would be on building his healing magic up with a two-pronged strategy.
First, he would try to extend the range and ability of his existing spell to facilitate its evolving, and secondly, he would use a free-form magic to directly create a better version of the spell. He figured he would split both his fate and his available time between those two tasks.
He woke in the morning and immediately snuggled deeper into the covers. It was cold outside the blankets, and his memories from Little Ta told him that was always the case. There was a temptation to nap longer in the cozy warmth, but he assessed himself and decided that extra rest would be a luxury rather than a need. While keeping his movements slow and trying to avoid moving the blankets unduly, he grabbed his toy knife and pulled his top up to expose his belly and chest. He shoved the mass of material under his chin and pinned it to prevent it from rolling back down.
Then, without fuss or hesitation, he cut himself.
The knife was bad, and it stung more than such a small slice should have. He ignored his body’s reactions. Fighting for his life almost every day for over forty years and suffering injury after injury as a result meant he had built up an impressive pain tolerance. He could have (and had) fought through shattered bones and minor issues like disembowelment when the situation demanded it. Magic could heal those types of injuries easily enough, but you still needed to kill the monster attacking you before there was time to address anything that wasn’t a, ‘I’m going to die in the next half a second’ issue.
These cuts are nothing, he reminded himself.
They were barely worth paying attention to, but he still felt each one. They all hurt, and felt like being pinched by someone not holding back and using their nails at the same time. The main culprit was the knife. He wished he had easy access to something other than a toy, but he also understood why that particular restriction was put in place.
Children, especially ones as young as the ones in this dorm, could be stupid, and you really didn’t want them playing with combat knives, and especially not the type he was wishing for. Extra sharp enchanted edges were definitely a no-go. That could be… Tom pulled his imagination up. That was not an outcome he wanted to think about.
Slice after slice, he kept going. The injuries he inflicted now would have to last him all the way to the afternoon, if he was to maximise his practice time. There would be no opportunities intraday to reapply the injuries, and so he had to make sufficient cuts that eight hours of healing wouldn’t remove completely. With his mana regenerating fully every six minutes, that was over eighty cuts to heal.
The tip went in and he pulled sideways. Then, between every cut, he tested the slice he had made twenty cuts earlier to ensure it wasn’t too deep. He figured any bleeding caused would have clotted by then. Because it was pitch black under the covers, he checked by running his finger over the cut and then sucking it. Wet blood would get transferred to his finger and dry one wouldn’t.
When he was checking the tenth time, a copper taste filled his mouth, and, with a frown, he applied his healing. He didn’t want his clothes to show blood stains when he left his bed.
Twenty minutes after he had woken, he was finished and rolled out of his alcove with the visible signs of the self-mutilation covered by his top. In the soft lighting of the dorm, he was relieved to see that his covers were spotless. There were no revealing red smears anywhere; not that it mattered. Given what he had learned, he was certain there would be a security process in place to protect him. Probably something like a room wide-channelled clean to make sure any activities like his own weren’t noticed by anything sapient.
As he climbed down from his alcove, his chest and stomach burned like someone had thrown a cup of hot water over them. With an application of willpower, he kept his expression perfectly smooth, not betraying any indication of the agony every slight movement was causing.
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It was pretty funny when he thought about it.
The injuries he had inflicted were the definition of minor, and, while each cut contributed little by itself, a hundred in proximity was more painful than lots of more serious injuries. Examples of the latter ones included the dislocated knee which had hardly troubled him even when running through the trees from a pack of monsters that resembled raptors out of Jurassic Park. The matters were made worse by the fact that whenever he moved, the crusty scabs covering the cut broke and triggered the nerve endings.
Thankfully, there was no one out of bed and active in the room, but he didn’t lower his guard. He couldn’t know how many people were watching from the warmth of their personal alcoves. Tom forced his body to move normally rather than giving into the instinct to hunch over to reduce the effect of his clothes rubbing against his wounds. As usual, he did his business, then went through the cleaning loop that seemed to activate for longer than usual – presumably, it needed more time to remove all the crusted blood that had leaked. The scabs still required to hold the sides of the scratches together would be left untouched. Magic was amazing like that.
Then, with his back forced straight, he faced the day and acted normally - except for secretly applying his heal every six minutes. Half an hour before he was to enter the isolation room, the last of the cuts were fixed and after he went through a cleaning loop it already felt like a distant memory - but one Tom knew he would be repeating every day going forward.
An automation led them to the isolation rooms and, without fuss, Tom went straight into his assigned one. The moment there was a ding to confirm his privacy, he tore off his top and examined himself in the mirror. His chest looked like a normal child’s, except for a couple of faint lines where the cuts had not fully healed. The vast majority of the scratches were completely gone. For such a crappy spell, it had done surprisingly well. Curiously, he checked on its progress.
Spell: Heal Minor Scratches (Tier 0) – Level 3
This spell allows the healing of surface level wounds with poor efficiency.
The level of the spell had jumped up, but given how many times he had cast it, that improvement was not that much of a surprise. Unless it got some incredible threshold bonuses, it was always going to be crappy, but that wasn’t why he was doing it. He was certain that one of the hidden criteria for an evolution was the number of uses.
With a shrug, he seized his slightly too long spear and threw himself into training until sweat was dripping off him. A quarter of an hour later, feeling physically unable to continue, he grabbed a folder he had noticed from the right of the door. It had the words ‘Current Events’ upon its cover.
It was going to have some of the answers that he was after.
He flipped through it, searching for any interesting insights. There were a couple of summaries that immediately caught his attention.
The first was ‘Current and Forecast Ranking Points.’
* Dragons: Current Rank 1 with accumulated points of 310 million and year on year accumulation of 7 million. Additional notes: Peaked at 433 million.
* Insects: Current Rank 2 with accumulated points of 302 million and year on year accumulation of 9 million. Additional notes: Peaked at 420 million.
* Giants: Current Rank 3 with accumulated points of 278 million and year on year accumulation of 4 million. Additional notes: Benefited from an unexplained 20 and 30 million jump in earth years 28 and 34.
Tom’s eyes widened in horror as he saw the next couple of lines.
“Fuck, no,” he swore as anger exploded through him. “No, this isn’t right! They said we were in touch. That’s not being in touch! We’re losing. This is a fucking disaster.”
He stared at the position of the humans.
* Wador: Current Rank 4 with accumulated points of 276 million and year on year accumulation of 4 million.
* Humans: Current Rank 5 with accumulated points of 262 million and year on year accumulation of 3 million. Additional notes: One off gain of 100 million from GOD’s action.
* Inventors: Current Rank 6 with accumulated points of 201 million and year on year accumulation of 5 million. Additional notes: Advances by rapid stops and starts every couple of decades. Over due for an influx of points.
* Chosen: Current Rank 7 with accumulated points of 42 million and year on year accumulation of < 1 million.
In horror, he read and reread what was displayed, but if anything it reinforced his initial reaction.
Humans were losing, and not by a small amount.
They were getting thrashed.
Fourth was a personal disaster for most people, but any lower than that was an extinction level result… and that’s where they were positioned.
When he had overheard Pete and Delilah, he had interpreted their words positively, and if he was honest, the headline numbers had supported some of their optimism. But how could anyone with basic mathematics see this summary and think things were going to be okay was a mystery. Yes, humans had two hundred and sixty-two million points and were only sixteen million behind the third-placed giants. A gap like that was possible to close, but that wasn’t the problem. The issue was that year on year humans were earning only two-thirds of what the two species directly above them were.
The points between them and those ahead were only going to widen.
His need to not only be good but to strive to be the best couldn’t be clearer. Over the next ten years, the gap between them and third place was going to double and grow to over thirty million. To close it, he was going to have to do something huge. His gamble with the trolls was supposed to have been such an attempt, but while given the extra fate he had, it must have partially worked, it clearly wasn’t enough.
On the next page, there were additional summary tables that attempted to explain the consequences for the non-reincarnated of what not getting lower in the rankings meant. He and anyone like him, of course, already knew.
Eight billion humans were currently in stasis. It was a lot of people. They had gone through the same tutorial he had, but had not done as well, because he had made it into the competition, and they hadn’t. Tom didn’t blame them. Most modern people would naturally struggle to fight monsters and that is what Existentia had plenty of, and when the competition ended, they were coming here. The only question was the advantages they would be able to bring with them, and that depended on how the one million champions of humanity performed.
And the unfortunate fact was that the different outcomes were not the difference between a ford and a BMW, or between growing up in third-world slums or first-world luxury. A lack of advantages in Existentia was basically a sentence to be torn apart by a monster. Competition Success was literally the difference between life and death.
The book he was reading did not downplay the situation. It was very candid about what failure meant. It would be horrific, dreadful, and cause untold misery for humanity.
The information was presented across multiple pages with different lenses to make sure it was easily understood.
For example, if you won the competition, everyone from Earth would be gifted a hundred thousand experience, a tailored tier three skill, a random trait, an eligible class plus sixteen levels and the right to spend your contribution points how you wanted.
Contrasting with that, if the champions failed, then everyone coming would get nothing to help them. They would just appear in a random location on Existentia, naked. Whether that was in a jungle, the middle of the ocean, or in a pit of flesh-devouring mice, didn’t matter. With each person coming without levels or items, even a tiny bunny could kill them. Existentia was not Earth - everything was far more lethal, even in low-levelled areas.
No advantages meant exactly that. You could die before you even registered where you had been dropped.
And it wasn’t just personal benefits that were up for grabs. If you ranked first, there were also societal level advantages you would be awarded. Humanity would be split up amongst eight massive kingdoms. All of those would have no threats either in or outside their borders, and an assurance that there would be no terror race within a year’s travel. That was the guarantee of security part, but there would also be less important, but more tangible bonuses. These vast, sprawling kingdoms would come with pre-established buildings to support industry, master level workshops for the crafters and farming infrastructure complete with golems to feed the population for generations. Basically, the advantages were so substantial it would be almost impossible for any of those nations to fail.
However, the lower you dropped, the less you would receive. By the time you were ranked only fourth, then humanity would be spread out into enclaves with only a million people each. That would be a single city-state kind of arrangement, and, if that group got bad luck, they could have a billion strong terror species camped next door. An outcome like that would cause the enslavement or death of the entire population within weeks. Then, if you got last, the result was even worse. Every single person would be dropped into Existentia by themselves. All of them scattered, and each so weak they’d be unable to defend themselves, and if they somehow survived, then it was possible that they could explore their whole life and never meet another human.
Getting last was a delayed death sentence.
The position humanity achieved in the competition was critical, and the summary that best captured that urgency as far as he was concerned was the one dealing with survival chances.
* Position 7: 1 in 100,000 is estimated to survive ten years. No prospect of intergenerational survival.
* Position 6: 1 in 1,000 is estimated to survive ten years. No prospect of survival beyond 10 generations.
* Position 5: 1 in 100 is estimated to survive ten years. Fifty percent chance of one pocket of humans surviving beyond 10 generations.
* Position 4: 25 in 100 is estimated to survive ten years. Survival beyond 10 generations guaranteed.
* Position 3: 65 in 100 is estimated to survive ten years. Intergenerational survival as natives highly likely.
* Position 2: 85 in 100 is estimated to survive ten years. Intergenerational survival as natives guaranteed.
* Position 1: 99 in 100 is estimated to survive ten years. Intergenerational survival as natives guaranteed.
Finishing in the last three positions effectively guaranteed humanity’s extinction, and, while ending up fourth would prevent such an outcome, it would still result in three-quarters of the population dying within ten years.
That was six billion people!
Even third wasn’t that great, but at least humans wouldn’t go extinct if they ranked that high.
That was why their current performance was such a kick in the gut. Unless their trajectory changed, they were going to end up fifth and possibly sixth. Both outcomes were a disaster. Fifth place meant ninety out of a hundred people dying within ten years and only a fifty percent likelihood of any human living beyond ten generations.
Tom couldn’t bring himself to consider what getting sixth would mean, and, if one read between the lines, one could see the inventors had a good chance of passing them.
If the arrangements for him being reincarnated hadn’t included the promise that he could make a difference and that he wouldn’t be here if humanity was doomed, he might have given into despair at this update on how they were performing.
As it was, he drew hope from the incomplete history of other people who had been reincarnated. Apparently, others had achieved amazing feats within thirty years - and that without the benefit of these isolation rooms and resources, not to mention the early fate that he had available to build his abilities.
I will do better than them, Tom promised himself.
He had to do better than them. The giants, wador, and even the insects and dragons might not know it, but the humans were coming, and Tom was going to be at the point of the spear when they did.