What Nick witnessed when he set foot on the summit was unlike anything he had imagined or planned for. He hadn’t had enough information to work with, and he needed to refine his strategy as quickly as possible.
The first detail that drew his attention was the glowing silver portal suspended over the crater of the volcano. The radiant tear in space was sitting on a platform connected by three evenly spaced walkways that divided the surface of the summit like a pie graph. Floating above the portal, a countdown clock was ticking down, reading just a bit shy of eleven hours at present.
Each walkway was sealed by a heavy gate that bordered the rim of the crater, which Nick supposed would open around the time that the clock reached zero. Realizing that Bandit had been tugging on his arm for some time now to get his attention, he turned to see what his friend was trying to show him.
When he did, Nick finally understood what the spiders were planning, their efforts far exceeding his expectations. Around each of the gates leading to the walkways sat a bulky, web-woven barricade, similar to the structure that the spiders had spun to defend their hilltop during the battle for the highlands.
For a second, he thought that the spiders intended to claim the entire mountaintop for themselves—in which case Nick and the tribe were well and truly fucked. But then he noticed that the spiders were only occupying one of the fortifications they had woven, the one to Nick’s left. To his right, the Elder and the other members of the lemur tribe who had survived their journey up the mountain were in the process of rearming themselves from a pile of rocks and stout wooden sticks.
The spiders must have prepared this well in advance, he realized. However, the surprises had only just begun. For looming in the middle of the final silk stronghold, much to his astonishment, stood the lurk. The shaggy beast looked absolutely exhausted but was still deadly enough to slaughter Nick a dozen times over. He shook his head in wonder, trying to make sense of it all. Even after accepting all this strangeness, one factor still didn’t add up. Why don’t the spiders just climb over the gates and enter the portal early?
Nick discovered the answer to his question when he went to take a closer look at the interior of the volcano. What he saw when he peered down into the crater could not have been further from his expectations. Instead of a roiling lake of lava, he looked down upon paradise. His gaze ran across a field of lush grass, trees laden with fresh fruit, and a stream providing clear, running water. Amidst the verdant valley, thousands of animals were lounging in the sunlight, seemingly without a care in the world. It’s all the non-beast species on the island, he realized, solving the mystery of their disappearance over the last several days.
The System gave them a way of surviving the tutorial after all. This must be the work of powerful magic. The System is testing us, not them, and it doesn’t want to destroy the isle’s ecosystem in the process. Maybe it wants to use this place as a tutorial again later.
As shocking as this development was, it had nothing to do with why the spiders had fortified the mountaintop or why they hadn’t moved down into the crater themselves. The answer to that riddle was the presence of an invisible forcefield that separated the crater’s interior from the rest of the mountain. An impenetrable barrier that also covered the walkways sticking out from behind the gates.
As Nick pushed against the transparent obstacle, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. At last, he understood the fundamental nature of this challenge, if not the full scope of its intricacies.
In a little less than half a day, the gates leading to the portal would open, and the tutorial would come to an end. Well before that happened, the water would finish climbing the mountainside, presumably stopping before it covered the lip of the summit. The problem was that the force-capped crater took up nearly all the space on the peak. As a result, there wasn’t enough room up here for all the beasts taking part in the tutorial.
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If the spiders had skipped the battle for the highlands, far more beasts would have survived and climbed the mountain, pouring out onto the summit. No matter how well the spiders fortified their own position, they would have been overwhelmed by an avalanche of desperate beasts at that point. Especially as Nick and the tribe would have been slaughtered without the spiders’ aid, replacing what was effectively a friendly force with a selection of the most dangerous predators on the island.
The way that the intelligent arachnids had orchestrated events, a greatly diminished population of beasts had lived to reach the final battleground. By constructing two additional forts, the spiders had guaranteed that whatever moved inside them would have no interest in assaulting their own—not with the end of the tutorial so close at hand.
Better still, the beasts arriving at various points along the summit were forced to divide their attacks between the three web-forts, taking yet more pressure off the spider colony. Nick suspected that the arachnids had originally intended the third bunker to be occupied by the serpent or frogs, as the lurk had laid low during the previous battles and its arrival had surprised them all.
All the beasts that the colony had helped were smart enough to look out for their own interests instead of engaging in mindless aggression, and guarding a fortified position was a better proposition than participating in a wild free-for-all for the last bits of unclaimed space. Not to mention that the beneficiaries would owe the spiders a debt. If their paths crossed again, the survivors of the tutorial would be less inclined to see the colony as enemies.
These thoughts passed through Nick’s head as he followed Bandit over to the lemurs’ fort. Although they had lost another twenty warriors during the climb, he was glad that most of the tribe had survived their latest trial. When he stepped behind the web-woven walls, he had another surprise in store.
Defying his expectations, an obelisk sat beside the sealed gate, which appeared to be a replica of the one on the beach at one tenth of the scale. The lemurs stopped to touch it from time to time, confirming his suspicions that they had something comparable to his own System menus.
While he fought to recover from his fatigue, Nick walked over to the obelisk, glad to discover that its display was full-sized. When he activated the screen, the thickest pack of notifications that he’d seen yet awaited his eager perusal.
Congratulations. You have accumulated enough experience to reach Level [8].
You have one free attribute point awaiting allocation at your discretion.
Through rigorous training, you have conditioned your body, honed your psyche, and improved the following baseline attributes:
Toughness has increased from [6] to [7].
Creativity has increased from [6] to [7].
Mind has increased from [7] to [8].
Through use, you have improved the following skills:
Foraging has increased from [7] to [9].
Size Up has increased from [9] to [10].
Wand has increased from [4] to [5].
Holy shit. Nick grinned, taking in this most welcome surprise. He hadn’t had time to check the obelisk while he was making his final preparations, but it seemed that all the foraging he’d done had paid off. The rest of his gains must have come from the back-to-back battles in the highlands and his climb up the mountain. Another point of Toughness almost made the pain of his injuries worth it, and his Wand skill was steadily improving, though its progression was slowed by the device’s limited charges.
He was thrilled to have finally maxed out Size Up. Nick had really wanted to raise it to ten before he changed classes and lost the opportunity, although he honestly had no idea when that might happen. It was nice to see that his Foraging skill had gone up two points since the last time he looked. Ultimately, he only needed the skill to let him know what was safe to eat and what was poisonous, although the advice on how to gather various resources was nice too.
But the real shocker was that, for the first time, he had discovered a concrete method of raising his baseline Mind and Creativity, which must have resulted from his intense visualization of the battle between the lemurs and komos. He wasn’t sure how to boost them efficiently until he had time to experiment, but it was still a major step forward. Eventually, he wanted to learn how to train all his baseline attributes outside of combat, not only his physical stats.
Nick had already decided to spend his next free point on Magic. He sent his intentions into the display, then sat down and concentrated on the sensation of his energetic core expanding and increasing in potency.