Less than an hour remained until the tutorial entered its third and final phase. Nick was standing atop the hillock he had fortified, looking down over the island. He had transported the last of his supplies earlier in the morning, then took a few hours to stretch out and cool off.
He felt good despite the air being so filled with tension that it nearly crackled, which was important, as Nick would need every scrap of his energy, every drop of his stamina and mana, to survive the ordeal ahead. He was fairly certain that he knew what was about to happen, but if he was wrong, this would be a good spot to observe how events played out.
What he thought was going to happen was that the ocean would rise when the phase timer hit zero. Or, more precisely, the island would sink. It had already happened once while he was inside the dungeon, and introducing a clear threat and then magnifying it over time was a common logic for a tutorial to follow.
Shoring up his suspicions, Nick had discovered ample evidence that this had all happened before; that the punctuated submersion and reemergence formed a natural cycle for the island. He had a working theory that the creepers, shrooms, and crabs were native species. Creatures capable of hunkering down and riding out the flood. But the rest of the beasts were foreign to this world, and they would be forced to mass migrate into the highlands when the water rose once more.
At the end of the tutorial’s first phase, the beach had been devoured by the sea. Nick believed that the forest was next, and that even the highlands would be underwater before the tutorial reached its end and the cycle repeated. The timing of the first rise and the warning from the System had led him to believe that each of these stages occurred on a regular cycle.
As most of the komos and lemurs had survived the end of the first phase, he hypothesized that the water would rise over time rather than all at once. If he was wrong, this stage might wind up being easier than he expected, although he would be sad if his lemur friends endured this long only to drown two days before the tutorial’s end.
He cast his gaze out over the ocean, eagerly anticipating the chaos to come. While Nick wasn’t looking forward to the battle itself, he was more than ready to leave the Searing Isle behind him for good. To find out what had happened to the rest of humanity. What the System had in store when the next chapter in Nick’s story began. He scanned the horizon for any sign of an incoming searstorm, breathing out a sigh of relief when nothing but sunny blue skies and puffy white clouds met his gaze.
He waited for the show to start, forcing his breath to remain slow and steady despite the adrenaline flooding his veins. Then he waited some more. Just as he was deciding that he had misjudged the situation completely, he felt the first tremor. The soil beneath his boots began to tremble, then started to buck and writhe, forcing him to wrap both arms around a nearby boulder and hold on for dear life. Five minutes later, the worst of the shaking subsided, although Nick could feel a constant vibration transmitting through the stone and into his fingertips.
The first thing that he noticed when he got back onto his feet was that the water was closer than it had been just a few minutes ago. The shoreline was disappearing with every beat of his heart as the ravenous tide devoured the woodlands inch by inch.
Out in the distance, Nick caught sight of the tip of the obelisk just before it sank beneath the waves, confirming his suspicions that he would have to do without System access for the remainder of the tutorial. He had wanted to stop by and check out his gains one final time. Allocate his free attribute point if he had managed to level again last night. But there simply hadn’t been enough time.
As dramatic as this terrain-altering event was, it wasn’t what he was waiting for. He forced his muscles to unclench and his breath to remain slow and steady. When he found what he was looking for, it was even closer than the shrinking shoreline.
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Nick set his gaze upon the vast clouds of dust billowing up from the forest floor, which had emerged the instant that the shaking subsided. The earth churned by thousands of frantic paws, feet, and claws. The reason why was simple. As they came to understand the nature of the calamity, every creature on the island had begun tearing for the interior of the isle. Sprinting toward the highlands in a deadly race against the rising sea.
By his rough estimate, he had approximately half an hour before the water would begin climbing the foothills below. Long before that, the first wave of beasts would arrive and start streaming into the valleys. As of now, Nick’s plans still had a decent chance of working out, but to enact them, he would have to move fast. He had to hold on to the ground beneath his boots. Claim the southern hillock for himself and the lemur tribe if he was to have any chance of surviving the war between beasts. A conflict that would inevitably follow as the water rose to engulf the final stretch of dry ground.
In short, Nick needed to ensure that the lemurs survived the initial chaos, joining him on the hilltop he had fortified while corralling the komos down in the adjacent valleys. He thought that he could handle the lizards, based on the estimates of their population he had made over the last week, but the other beasts on the island were a deadly threat. The spiders and the lurk could easily slaughter Nick and the tribe, and he might not have cataloged every beast taking part in the tutorial. If he misjudged the next few hours or if the various species failed to move in roughly the direction he hoped, there was a good chance that he was about to embark on his final adventure.
Tracking the stampede by following the trail of dust, he climbed halfway down the hill, careful not to take a fall due to haste, although his heart was pounding wildly. The instant his boots hit flat earth, he started to run, moving from his observation point to the defensible swath of ground where he intended to enact the first stage of his plan.
He sprinted as fast as he could, leaping over protruding rocks and grasping brush. Nick needed to be in position before the beasts arrived in the valley below. The first minutes would be crucial, setting into motion the momentum of the battle to come. The sun was high overhead, bright sunlight offsetting the chill in the air.
Nick ran until sweat was pouring down his body, and black specks floated in front of his eyes. With a great gasp of air, he arrived at the fortified section of the hillside and skidded to a stop, catching his breath while staring down at the borderlands running between the woods below and the highlands above.
For a fleeting handful of heartbeats, the region remained peaceful. A pristine panorama, capturing the isle’s rugged natural beauty. But Nick knew that this land would soon run red with rivers of blood. Because he was now certain that the System had forced the beasts on the island into a brutal free-for-all. A fight that would determine who would remain standing above the waterline and who was fated to sink into the depths of oblivion. He used the final seconds at his disposal to review his plan one last time, inspecting his gear to make sure that his tools were ready to use as needed.
After consuming the woodlands, Nick expected the water to stop for a while at the forest’s edge, eliminating any creatures too slow or too stupid to head for high ground while giving the survivors some time to recover from the grueling ordeal.
He knew that the water wouldn’t stop there for long. What would start off as six safe areas—the three hillocks and the valleys running between them—would shrink to three when the island resumed its descent. At that point, only the creatures that had claimed the peaks of the three tallest hillocks would live to see the tutorial’s end. Nick wasn’t sure what would happen next, but he suspected that the survivors would be forced to climb the mountain itself, culminating in some sort of showdown as the final minutes of the tutorial ticked past.
But none of that mattered unless he survived the chaos that would ensue when the beasts came stampeding out of the forest, still mixed in scattered clumps. The southern peak and the two adjacent valleys would become the battleground for the komos, lemurs, and giant spiders. Nick needed those valleys to serve as a buffer between himself and the most powerful creatures on the island—the lurk and whatever beasts were living in the swamp.
Nick couldn’t afford to be kicked off the hilltop. In addition to the risk of being drowned, he had no chance of holding off the komos unless his team was able to defend a fortified position from high ground.
It was time to see if his schemes were sufficient to stack the deck in the war between beasts. A war that was destined to begin only a handful of heartbeats later.