He turned to face the display to read the details. On the screen was a message rather different from the one Nick had been expecting. Not so much the content, but rather the alien language it was written in. While he could still understand the meaning of the runes, they appeared starkly different from the dialect the System used for its messages. Instead of elegant curves and sweeping geometries, symbols like snakes undulated their way across the screen.
Nick realized that he had seen these runes several times before. Most recently when Taltos and the System had clashed to determine which reward he would receive after completing his battle in the arena. The information provided was similar to quests generated by the System, although the format was a bit different, featuring several new fields, including the conditions and penalty for failure.
Taltos’s challenge: The Fate of Earth.
Location: Blackmist Bog, planet Drezen.
Conditions for victory: Climb to the top of the Tower of Rizzen and defeat the tower’s guardian.
Rewards for victory: All stewardship rights pertaining to the planet: [Earth, 1] will be transferred to its inhabitants in perpetuity. The planet will be preserved in pristine condition until the end of the challenge, with no nonconsensual modifications to its residents or natural resources extracted.
Planet Earth will be relocated to a frontier region of the labyrinth, in a sector appropriate for a fledgling tier one species. Finally, the Earth will receive a shroud of protection, which will endure for a period of one year.
Conditions for failure: The death or surrender of all contestants participating in the challenge event.
Penalty for failure: the Earth will remain in the stewardship of Taltos. All resources on the planet, including the creatures living upon it, will be recycled into raw materials and used to construct new sectors within the labyrinth.
Contestants who surrender during the challenge will become full citizens of the labyrinth, including all rights and protections afforded thereof. After receiving standard cognitive and physical enhancements, they will be offered permanent positions serving Taltos and his senior staff.
That last bit seems like a completely legitimate offer and is no way suspicious as fuck. Nick shuddered as he read between the lines, certain that Taltos intended a fate worse than death for those who surrendered and received his ‘enhancements’.
He wondered why the Mad God was willing to give up the planet at all, although he was certain that it wasn’t out of any sense of altruism. That Taltos’s cruelty was as genuine as his words were hollow. One way or another, Taltos was going to benefit from this arrangement, and there wasn’t anything that Nick could do about it.
All he could do now was fight to save his people and every creature that called the Earth home.
No matter what happened, Nick had to make sure that the Earth passed through the other side of this gauntlet intact. Whatever the future held, plugging the planet into the labyrinth had to be better than the alternative. A future that would only come to pass if enough brave souls volunteered and were able to overcome the Mad God’s challenge.
Committing every word to memory to ponder later, he read on, glad that this quest provided a more in-depth outline than the last.
This event will proceed in three distinct stages.
In the first stage, participants will be transported to random locations along the perimeter of the bog. Starting spots will be placed a considerable distance away from the Tower of Rizzen (commonly referred to as Darkstone Tower), which can be found in the center of the zone. Blackmist Bog is a spacious region containing distinct sub-biomes in addition to the primary terrain, each featuring unique wildlife, ecosystems, and environmental hazards.
Blackmist Bog has been seeded with numerous proximity triggered events, which will offer rewards in proportion to the difficulty of the challenge. Be warned: many of these events cannot be easily left once they have been activated.
The goal of the first stage is to form a party of up to five people, then enter the tower through one of the entrances ringing the base. Participants will be fully healed when entering the tower. This stage has no time limit, but each time that a party enters, it will contribute to a series of escalating dangers. When key thresholds are crossed, global events will be triggered. Many of these events involve new and progressively more dangerous beasts and magical constructs being introduced to the environment, as well as threats assuming other forms.
Each time a global event begins, an update will be sent to all contestants. There will be no additional compensation provided for completing global events, survival is its own reward.
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It’s not just a survival challenge this time, Nick realized. It’s also a mind game. These dynamics are designed to break people down over time. To narrow their focus until they prioritize their own survival over the fate of Earth, no matter how noble their intentions were the moment they volunteered.
What makes the most sense. What will give us the best odds of completing the quest, is to have everyone gather at the base of the tower before anyone heads inside. That way, we can form full parties of five, optimal arrangements based on the capabilities of each individual. Then have everyone enter at the same time, avoiding the entrance penalty so we won’t trigger any global events. While this was the best approach in theory, he was dead certain that everything wouldn’t proceed so smoothly.
For one thing, the survivors of Earth had no way to communicate or coordinate over distances. With no central leadership or a prearranged plan, people would be incentivized to enter the tower as quickly as possible, especially once the first few global events were triggered. While Nick believed that everyone intended to succeed as a team, he was certain that the bog was home to a variety of lethal dangers. With every passing day, the stress of surviving in a harsh land would wear people down, encouraging them to seek refuge within Darkstone Tower or surrender to Taltos outright.
Additionally, the threat of deadlier enemies arriving at any moment, spurred on by the global update messages, would create immense psychological pressure on those waiting outside. Especially as no one knew how much stronger the beasts would become every time a new group entered the tower. On top of everything else, the lure of complete healing would force anyone with critical wounds to either enter the tower early or die, a dilemma that Nick was intimately familiar with thanks to his time in the tutorial dungeon.
The best chance they had was for people to meet up as quickly as possible, then coordinate their entrance before it was too late. There was a real chance that the fate of Earth would be sealed during the first phase of the quest. If only a handful of volunteers survived to climb the tower, he doubted they would have any chance of defeating the guardian waiting at the top.
Nick needed to get to the base of Darkstone Tower as fast as he could. In part, so that he had time to form an ideal party, maximizing his chances of surviving the climb. Even more critically, he intended to do everything in his power to ensure that the vanguard of Earth, those brave women and men who were willing to risk everything for the future of their species, did not fall prey to Taltos’s manipulations. His resolve to participate growing firmer by the heartbeat, he gritted his teeth and read on.
In the second stage of the quest, each party will enter the tower and attempt to climb three floors before exiting onto the rooftop. Each floor of the tower is effectively a separate pocket dimension, although many connect to the outside world in various ways. Due to the presence of spatial partitions, parties will not encounter one another except during special group events. The floors vary wildly in both content and the nature of their challenge, and each features its own rules, which will be revealed upon entering the preceding safe room.
The difficulty of each floor will be greater than the one before, and completing a floor will grant rewards corresponding to its challenge. After exiting a level, parties will be granted a six-hour period of rest before proceeding to the next. Once entered, a floor can only be cleared by completing its unique victory conditions. Or put another way, you can only climb up, not head back down. Occasionally, branching options may be presented, where the party will be able to choose between two or more floors.
This was the most game-like convention that Nick had encountered since the System had entered his life. After reading the prompt for a second time, he decided that he liked these rules a great deal more than the mindfuck involved in stage one.
Rather than setting the survivors of Earth up for a cascading disaster, this phase was relatively straightforward. Arrive on a floor, overcome its challenge, then proceed to the next. A guaranteed reward for completing each level was a welcome windfall, as was the possibility of a choice between floors.
Having any measure of control would offer Nick’s team a chance to increase their odds of survival, once he had a better understanding of the dynamics involved in climbing the Tower of Rizzen at any rate. Fortunately, learning the rules of a brand-new game while he was in the middle of playing it was one of his specialties. A skill that he hoped would translate to Taltos’s challenge to at least some extent.
He did, however, have mixed feelings about being forced to join up with others and form a party. On the one hand, having allies that he could rely on was a deeply comforting prospect. He had been forced to grapple with the fate of his planet and species in isolation for an entire month while stranded on the tutorial island, and it had been a lonely and frightening experience.
But the last time that Nick had been part of a team, two people had lost their lives, and the battle in the arena had almost ended in the obliteration of his entire party. He was scared of watching more good people die in front of his eyes, and even more afraid of being responsible for the wellbeing of others, lives and futures that were infinitely precious.
He took a deep breath and strengthened his resolve, reminding himself that everyone who would be taking part in Taltos’s challenge had chosen to be there. Brave souls who were willing to put their lives on the line for the fate of the Earth and every creature that called her home.
With an effort of will, he put his misgivings aside, eager to face the dark days ahead with friends at his side. He would form a party and climb Darkstone Tower, risking pain and loss once again. His decision made, Nick moved on to the next page, reading the description of the quest’s final stage.
In the third and final stage of the quest, the surviving contestants will participate in a decisive battle for the fate of the Earth, pitting them against the guardian of the tower and its elite minions.
Be advised: while the difficulty of this encounter will scale to some extent to the number of contestants, arriving with insufficient forces will place the challengers at a significant disadvantage.
With the successful completion of this phase, the Earth will be returned to its inhabitants. In addition, each contestant will be granted a personalized reward based on their performance. An additional reward package will be granted to the entire team based on aggregate performance.