Nick would have kept searching for a familiar face in the crowd. But at that very moment, his pod began to move, a rapid acceleration that pressed him firmly against the conveyance’s curvature. Before long, he was circumnavigating the globe at an incredible rate, the defenders of Earth flying alongside him.

The emerald planet turned beneath his boots, great waterways flashing in the sunlight as his pod made a measured descent, heading toward the surface far below. The growth was so tall and intermeshed that he had trouble identifying features of the landscape from this height, so he sat back and enjoyed the ride until he was a bit closer to the ground.

When the layer of force mana forming his pod began to glow, he realized that he was entering the upper atmosphere, the friction of his meteoric arrival coaxing the air to simmer and burn.

First, a faint aura of flame flickered to life, which quickly brightened to an electric cherry red. A roar arose to fill Nick’s ears, soft at first, like an engine arriving from far away. The reverberations intensified with every beat of his heart, the pod howling as the atmosphere thickened, creating considerable drag. By now, he was certain that his destination was over on the far side of Drezen, judging by his vector and velocity.

He could sense that his ride was slowing as it rounded the globe, surprised that he felt no turbulence or heat. That his acceleration and subsequent deceleration were not subjecting his body to immense g-forces.

It was clearly the work of powerful magic at play, displaying a degree of sophistication far beyond Nick’s comprehension. It must be an advanced type of force magic creating the buffer, something different from the spell generating the surface of the pod. He cast his nascent energetic senses into the weaves of mana forming his conveyance, searching for inspiration that could fuel his future development.

That was when the tower came into view, driving all other thoughts from his head.

At first, Nick didn’t know what he was looking at, his brain processing the immense onyx spire cresting the horizon as some kind of optical illusion or exotic atmospheric effect, rather than an actual physical structure.

His mind simply wasn’t prepared to accept the enormity of what he saw. The Tower of Rizzen was so out of scale to any human structure, dwarfing even the tallest mountains on Earth, that it took his synapses several minutes to decode what his retinas were reporting. He had been hoping that the tower would be big enough to serve as a landmark, but he could never have imagined anything like this.

The black tower was not merely visible from space, it connected the ground below and the heavens above. An endless black pillar, piercing the sky like a spear of the gods. A staggeringly colossal construction that made the penthouse saferoom Nick had left behind look like a dollhouse by comparison.

I have to climb… that? For a long, disheartening moment, he despaired of the impossibility of the task, before remembering that his party only had to climb three floors before emerging onto the roof, surely the result of intricate and powerful magic far beyond his experience.

Nick stared at the tower for a good ten minutes before the world turned white, his view of the planet obscured by a diffuse mass of clouds. By now, his ride had decelerated enough that the pod no longer screamed as it tore through the atmosphere, dialing down the intensity of the experience by a notch and helping him to focus on his thoughts and plans.

My first goal is to identify anything between my landing point and the tower that will be visible from the surface. They will help keep me from getting lost once I’m out on the bog. I’ll figure the rest out as I go.

When Nick broke through the bottom of the cloud bank, he was much closer to the ground. He was soaring at an altitude comparable to the passenger jets he had ridden back in his old life, albeit with a vastly superior view.

Before turning his attention to the local geography, Nick made a final inspection of his ultimate destination, the impossibly tall figure of Darkstone Tower looming in the distance. It blew him away that someone had created something so impossibly large. Nick wondered who Rizzen was and what he had been hoping to accomplish as he took out his spyglass to get a better view.

By now, the tower was growing close, or at least a great deal closer than it had been before. It was likely still hundreds of miles away, the impression of drawing near an illusion created by its immense stature. The top of the tower was now hidden by countless clouds floating across the sky, which appeared to be more common on this side of the planet.

Regardless of the actual distance, the tower was big enough for Nick to make out additional details. Nothing as fine as its entrances or adornments, but enough for him to discern that the edifice was more than a simple length of stone, metal, or whatever alien materials could bear the titanic weight of the floors above.

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Some of the levels featured considerable extensions, bulging and branching out from the structure’s base in a vast array of forms. Some segments had what appeared to be huge holes in the walls, leaving the interior of the tower exposed to the outside air. Some areas were hazy and faint, shimmering in and out of focus as if they existed only partially within this dimension.

Others were rimed in thick bands of ice or warped the air around them, as if the space inside was hotter than an oven. Nick took in the sight of racing electricity, the glints of metal and even more exotic substances, reflecting and refracting from surfaces forged from a thousand different materials.

The unusual arrangement gave the tower an aura of impenetrable mystery and untold power. It drove home the realization that Nick was gazing upon a genuine artifact of an alien civilization. Of a people who had long-since become accustomed to the magical multiverse and the strange laws that governed it.

Gazing upon the Tower of Rizzen was awe-inspiring and deeply frightening. A portent of what they were up against during the tumultuous days ahead. These were the powers that humanity had to contend with if they wanted to survive. The new reality to which they must struggle and adapt.

What was by far the strangest sight of all was also the most terrifying. Moving along the exterior of the tower were colossal… somethings, hanging from the core by impossibly long arms. Going about inscrutable tasks that he couldn’t even begin to imagine. From this distance he couldn’t tell if the clinging giants were monsters or beasts. Machines or constructs animated by fey and fantastical magic.

What he did know was that they were big. Immense on a scale that completely boggled his brain. Calm down Nick. Deep breaths. Let’s hope that the guardian on the roof is somewhat… smaller than those behemoths.

Nick let out a fearful chuckle, praying that the nature of this challenge was scaled to at least be theoretically possible for the contestants of Earth to overcome. It was a standard he had sensed that the System adhered to, although anything sponsored by the Mad God was likely to be as lethal as the System would allow. He still couldn’t guess at the nature of the relationship between them, although he was certain that they were rivals if not bitter enemies.

Nick would have to ponder the bizarre symbiosis/war between the two incomprehensibly powerful entities later. Right now, he needed to focus and learn more about the lay of the land below his boots while he still could.

After shaking his head to clear his mind, Nick turned to a fresh page in his journal, then started sketching the tower. He wanted to diagram the layout of the stranger sections, in case the information would be useful once he was inside and started climbing.

When he was done, he moved on to drawing the land stretching out around the base of the structure, focusing on landmarks that would let him chart a course once he was standing on the surface. Now that he knew that he could use the tower itself as a primary point of reference, he was most interested in mapping features that would help him judge his progress en route.

He lowered his eyes to examine the ground, now able to make out fine details as his pod began its final descent. He frowned at the image that met his gaze, because the entire region was dominated by incredibly massive trees, on the scale of the giant that Nick had climbed back on the Searing Isle.

In that moment, he was deeply worried that the entire surface would be covered by such monstrous growth. It would be nearly impenetrable for a creature of Nick’s size, especially one not native to this environment, slowing his progress to a crawl and leaving him vulnerable to attack from all sides.

But then he remembered that there wasn’t enough water here for this biome to be considered a bog. Thus, the primeval forest was unlikely to be his final destination. Sure enough, just before his pod reached the level of the treetops, the canopy cut off abruptly, revealing a gorgeous vista of sprawling rivers and mirrored pools, set within a massive basin that stretched on for hundreds of miles.

It seemed that a meteor the size of a city had crashed into the planet long ago, rendering the surface concave and creating a bowl-shaped depression that collected runoff from Drezen’s surface, creating a vast marshland. That must be Blackmist Bog.

The vegetation was short and sparse by comparison, patches of rose and orange colored foliage interspersed amongst the greenery. Here and there, Nick caught sight of crumbling buildings that had been half-devoured by the overgrowth, as well as the shattered expanse of what had once been a major highway, well into the process of being reclaimed by the wilderness.

He began sketching as fast as he could, using his remaining seconds before landing to record the lay of the land, especially the stretch running between his location and Darkstone Tower. Unfortunately, a glimpse was all that he was able to obtain from this elevation. He only had enough time to chart the major waterways and the orientation of the roadway.

But that brief view was enough for Nick to tell that something was strange about the marshlands contained within the massive crater. In addition to plants and waterways, he had caught sight of dark patches sliding along the surface of the bog, like someone had spilled a gigantic bottle of ink, and it was running along land. He got a bad feeling just looking at them, and he had a hunch that he would discover their nature sooner rather than later.

He wanted to study the phenomena and learn more about it, but he had run out of time and his view of the bog was cut off by the rim of the crater as his pod began to land.

Ten seconds later, his ride came to a halt, hovering a hundred feet in the air. A few heartbeats after it stopped, the pod dropped straight down, heading toward an open clearing ringing the periphery of the massive crater containing Blackmist Bog and the Tower of Rizzen.

Nick’s heart began to race as he drifted toward the ground. He was ready for his next adventure, which would begin the moment that his boots hit the soil.