Oliver carefully stored the two bodies in his [Otherworld Gates]. Those two deserved far better than what they got. Their deaths were like a truck in the face. While nothing could ever hurt as much as the loss of his mother, these killings were of a different nature. Such powerful people dying unceremoniously. It was a sober reminder of the reality that all had to face, regardless of strength. Sometimes, you just ran into a bigger fish.

Unless you were actually the biggest fish in the multiverse.

Leaving the Wasteland was like a second homecoming. The absolute largest difference was between the Holy Ravine and the outside world, but the Wasteland also felt suffocating in its own way. When they passed its borders into the lands of color, Alistair once again breathed in with elation. Now this, this was truly the best.

Every tree was full of life force, every speck of Mana coursing with energy. The vitality of the world was ineffable and amazing. Living without the Dao in the Holy Ravine was akin to living in black and white. An apt comparison, then.

However, Alistair had no time to reminisce about those sorts of esoteric things. He immediately grilled Alexandra for the current up-to-date information. And he did not like what she had to say.

But, all things being considered, he had been expecting way worse.

“Only 25.2%?” Alistair asked. “That’s lower than I was expecting. I thought I might come back to the Devil Kings having almost won the Global Mayorship.”

“We’re just as confused,” Alexandra said. The four of them used Jesse’s flashes to cycle quickly to the Teleportation Circle. “After George assaulted FavorWood Manor, he completely disappeared. No sightings, no reports, nothing. It’s like he vanished from the world.”

Alistair frowned. That sounded very familiar. At almost the exact same time, he himself had “vanished from the world.” Was that a coincidence?

“I don’t suppose he decided to just die for us,” Alistair said. “That would be too convenient.”

“We considered that possibility,” Alexandra said. “But the Devil Kings aren’t acting as if their leader died. Here, take this report.”

She tossed him a jade slip. “This tells you all that you need to know about the state of the war.”

Alistair digested the information as best he could. They arrived back in Logista, hurrying to the Teleportation Circle. He winked at one of the guards he knocked out with [Draconic Roar] before. This time, they didn’t confuse Oliver’s aura with the enemy.

New Boston was even more impressive than he remembered. The damage it sustained from the lava and earthquakes looked completely repaired. Buildings towered into the skies, which were filled with the airstreams. Thousands of people flew through columns of air and space Mana that crisscrossed all around the city, leading people to their destinations faster than a bullet train.

The sprawling city was clearly larger than Alistair remembered. Workers clad in the standardized uniform of the Northeast Order Freehold worked in unison to expand the city even further. He saw numerous Builder-type Classes at work. One guy with gray skin threw up concrete, which he formed with his bare hands, while on the other side of the street, a woman created three-dimension outlines of Mana that guided the construction workers.

Alistair guessed that it wasn’t all good news. But to confirm his suspicions, he needed a breakdown from more knowledgeable people.

The freehold overview page showed him the changes between the major freeholds. His freehold gained a couple thousand subregions, putting him up to 56,381 out of 159,873. The Devil Kings shot up to over 40,000, taking almost all of that from FavorWood Manor, while the various unaffiliated factions dwindled.

A new system characterization of subregions appeared, one that Alistair hadn’t seen before. “Owned but uncontrolled.” That tied into the second wave. The second wave that Alexandra and Jesse had a palpable fear toward.

Alistair opened up the Quests section of his status screen. He navigated to the old system notifications that were listed there.

Wave 2: The Second Step

FX-14752 has braved the natural disasters of Earth Asunder. Most of the elemental bosses contained within the core of each disaster have been stopped, though 5.13% remain active. Active storms will not disappear naturally and will keep wreaking havoc on the subregions they are localized to. However, they will not spread or grow stronger after this point.

The second wave, aptly named The Second Step, is a The First Step redux. Many on this planet made cherished memories fighting off the monsters provided by the Pathfinder AI. We now give you an opportunity to relive those experiences in The Second Step—this time with dungeons instead of monster waves.

All over the planet, dungeons will appear, marked by the seal of the Final Frontier Empire. Each dungeon’s purview will span thousands of subregions each, the difficulty based on the sum total of the development in its constituent dungeons. This is different than the standard dungeons you have experienced popping up stochastically, where the difficulty was scaled to the entrants.

Each dungeon will be a unique instance consisting of a multitude of difficult trials testing your wits, combat prowess, and willpower. The dungeons are living entities and might evolve over the course of your divings.

A final boss marks the end of each dungeon, similar to previous monster waves. If you do not clear the dungeon within one week of entering, the boss along with the corresponding monster wave will be released from the dungeon and wreak havoc on the world.

Only one group of divers may enter a dungeon at any given time, up to thirteen individuals. The selection of these divers depends on the shareholder who owns the plurality of the subregions within the dungeon’s range. The choices will be at this person’s discretion; they may choose to bring no allies. Be forewarned: this is highly recommended against as the dungeons are meant to be cleared by a well-rounded party of the strongest rankers on FX-14752.

Dungeon divers earn Contribution Points based on their contributions to clearing the dungeon, along with ease, creativity, and style points.

In addition the variety of basic dungeons, there is a small chance each day of a “Grand Dungeon” appearing. The Grand Dungeon is significantly more difficult than the basic dungeons and commands much higher rewards. The Grand Dungeon will appear in multiple instances around the world, so many groups have a chance to join. However, each group will experience their own instantiation of the dungeon, so they will not compete directly against each other.

During this period, the rules for achieving Global Mayor for the Devil Kings still stand, and the methods to acquire subregions by domination, democratic approval, and purchase shall not be abrogated.

Let The Second Step begin!

Alistair checked his Contribution Score. He was #7 on those leaderboards with 127 points despite barely participating in Earth Asunder. He assumed this was because of the points he was getting for the high development of New Boston, which he personally owned. Alexandra was far and away #1 with 480, no doubt from all the storms she cleared in Earth Asunder and the dungeons in The Second Step.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

The “owned but uncontrolled” made sense now. Monsters couldn’t own subregions. But if they wrested control of a subregion from a freehold, a freehold couldn’t still be said to own it, could they? As a result, freeholds didn’t get any Land Store Points or Contribution Points from uncontrolled subregions.

The Devil Kings and the Northeast Order had relatively few uncontrolled regions, but in the other territories, upwards of 25% of their subregions were uncontrolled. Clearly, the other polities had difficulty with the dungeons.

Just how hard are they? Alistair wondered. I’ll have to ask Alexandra.

The four of them arrived at the frosted glass dome that was his new headquarters. In the time he’d been absent, they’d improved the design, adding secondary and tertiary domes, including ones that connected at the top. Alistair thought it looked something like an atomic nuclei and found it hard to fathom how it was structurally sound. Architect-type Classes were something else.

There were four layers of translucent energy they had to go through to enter the building, along with a scan from a reptilian eye that floated above the doors. While intensive, it was seamless and didn’t slow them down much at all.

When Alistair entered his own HQ, he was met with stares and gasps. Dozens of people rushed from corner to corner of the large lobby. They had expanded their array of Teleportation Circles, which formed an enormous circle around the perimeter of the hemisphere.

All the people who worked in the dome had on his official uniform, something that Alistair was quite proud of. Many frantically ran from Teleportation Circle to Teleportation Circle, carrying out critical missions for the good of the freehold. Others worked at a series of desks in the center, most likely those with Classes that improved their brainpower or computational abilities. A man that Alistair didn’t recognize worked with an enormous supercomputer at the very center, visible with all the glass architecture. The computer wasn’t very wide, but it was extremely tall, almost reach the ceiling of the dome.

It wasn’t great for privacy, but the frosted glass, called ambrosic glass, was even stronger than valyrik, the fused black stone they had used previously.

The guy at the center’s computer also served a dual function as a ladder. If you climbed up his workstation, you’d reach the entrance to both the dome above that one, and the second floor of the base dome. There were also dozens of workers on that floor, many of whom were part of a permanent security force that enforced crime and kept order with human-related incidents.

“Wow,” Alistair said. “You’ve really spruced this place up.”

“I wish I could take credit,” Alexandra said. She waded her way through the crowded first floor to the wide ladder system on the supercomputer, Alistair and the others following after. “The idea was John’s after the earthquakes. He thought that we should combine almost all the vital aspects of the Northeast Freehold into one area. Dr. Mehta has his hospital attached here, and we have Blaise’s academy in one of the domes. There are ten total, making this the largest building on Earth right now.”

“But what about—”

“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Alexandra interrupted. “I had the same question too. Wouldn’t that make everything super vulnerable? There was that terrorism incident with a Devil King attacking the United Polities and almost killing Ryder and Marzhan, after all. John gave me a detailed explanation, but this is the most warded place on the planet. By adding everything together, we get some efficiency bonuses and the way the Land Store defenses work in conjunction, the defense is greater than the sum of its parts. We’re so protected, I don’t even think you could break in.”

Alistair felt the various forms of warding with his various senses. Fate-warding, ridiculously hard ambrosic glass, alarms to Mana filled with malicious intent, nue detection, and that’s just what he felt with a cursory glance. There were surely more hidden and nefarious traps. He couldn’t lie—he was pretty impressed.

The only weakness he felt was that there wasn't much attention to Karma, but you couldn't cover every basis. There were barely any Karmic cultivators in the first place, and it was one of the weirded powersets. Also, he just killed the most powerful enemy of that type, so now it became less relevant.

Once, long ago, Alistair could recall every face that worked in his headquarters, if not their names. Well, not his headquarters. They were Sofia’s back then, when it was still out of the Boston City Hall. A wave of nostalgia washed over him, accompanied by a pang of guilt as he remembered his old boss’s death. He had vowed to never let any of his friends die because of his negative Karma again. Based on how he overpowered Oracle, that front was going well.

While his citizens gave him blatant stares, no one stopped their work to approach. Alistair smiled at that. He was lucky that John had instilled such a good work ethic in his subordinates. Though, he had to admit, when death was right around the corner, people tended to work hard no matter who was in charge.

Alexandra led them to the office where the supercomputer was located. It was wider than it looked from afar, with the two-dimensional profile of a kitchen table. A portly man worked with a holographic keyboard and monitor that took up half of the room.

“Hey, Dave,” Alexandra said. “How’s it going?”

The man jumped out of his seat, looking flustered. “Ah! Didn’t see you. Doing just fine, Miss Alexandra.”

“Alistair, this is Dave from IT. He works on monitoring the HQ. He has a knack for seeing details and he makes things run a lot smoother.”

“That’s right!” Dave said, adjusting his glasses. “For example, did you know that a personalized soundtrack increases productivity 6.5%?”

“Nah, I thought it was 5.95%,” Alistair joked.

“Where did you get a number with that precision from? The margins of error are too big for that, if I’m not mistaken.” Dave from IT gave Alistair a funny look.

“Ah, never mind,” Alistair said, scratching his head with a bit of embarrassment, since his joke didn’t land. “Keep up the good work, Dave.”

Dave nodded and got back to manipulating thousands of windows on his screen that Alistair couldn’t even begin to understand. This man had none of the reverence that the others had, even compared to someone like Jesse. It was weird, but also somewhat refreshing.

Jesse had offered to teleport them into the war room directly, but Alistair wanted to experience seeing the insides of the Leading Domes. That was what he had decided on for the building back when he had the first one created. Yes, Alistair was excellent at naming things, just like his genius nom de guerre, Alistair Danger (Dangierre).

The ladder inside of the recently named Leading Domes was wide enough to fit ten people side-by-side, which made sense considering the foot traffic. It consisted of metal rungs soldered into the computer and led up to a revolving glass door in the ceiling.

“After you, dear leader,” Alexandra said. “You’re going to want to see the new room.”

The four of them ascended the ladder like rats scurrying up a gutter pipe. Alistair was reminded of his climb up Mount Goa. This time, however, he had all of his powers. Plus, it was a ladder, not a deadly mountain.

“You’re not supposed to go that fast!” Alexandra called out, but by the time her words reached his ears, he was already at the top.

“Since when were you the fun police?” Alistair asked, as his friends climbed up at a slower pace. Except for Jesse; he teleported to the top like always.

“Since you were gone for a month, leaving me to deal with all this shit.”

“Touché.”

The door wasn’t really a door at all. At the top of the ladder was a large hole covered in an aqueous gel. The ladder continued on the other side, so all they had to do was pass through it.

Alistair looked apprehensively at the semi-transparent gel. It looked like hair gel, to be honest. He didn’t want that stuff sticking all over his body.

“It’s another layer of security,” Oliver explained. “We had it installed after Chameleon almost killed Marzhan and President Ryder. A crafter combined an elixir she earned from a side Quest with a Land Store powder that warded against certain types of Karma. It’s supposed to reveal Karmic intent in any that it washes over, though it doesn’t actually offer any protection. It’s more of a very loud warning that we’ve been infiltrated.”

“Ah, that makes sense,” Alistair said. He was the first one through the gel. It washed over his skin without sticking like he was afraid, and he climbed through the layer of the substance, no more than a few centimeters thick.

The second dome was not really a dome, more of a sphere built on top of the first layer, made from the same ambrosic glass. There were multiple ringed floors that were accessible by a spiral staircase around the edge of the sphere.

The three-dimensional hologram of the planet that he had used in their previous war room centered the dome. It was even larger than before, reminding Alistair of those giant hanging globes in museums. Red dots representing conflicts pulsed every second. It pained Alistair to see all the nested divisions. There were small enclaves of Devil King territory in his lands and vice versa, a product of the constant engagements.

But that wasn’t what drew his attention most. Everyone who could see him in the vast second dome was staring at him. And not in the awestruck good way.

“What’s going on?” Alistair asked.

Alexandra drew out her daggers, while Oliver congealed his space affinity Mana into the beginnings of his [Otherworld Gates].

Alistair looked down, realizing that they were looking at something.

He was on fire.