I opened my messages, turned on message notifications, and immediately saw a series of messages from my sister. I opened them at once.
---
Bethandria Thresher: are you alive?
Bethandria: mom and dad are dead.
Bethandria: i know we haven’t always gotten along, but
Bethandria: please let me know.
Ashlyn Thresher: I’m fine.
Ashlyn: Currently in a safe zone.
Ashlyn: Are you okay?
Ashlyn: Are you in a safe zone?
Ashlyn: Stay alive.
[Ashlyn Thresher transferred 3432 Quanta to Bethandria Thresher]
Ashlyn: I have issues with you, but I don’t want you dead.
Ashlyn: Try to find or make a safe zone as soon as possible.
Ashlyn: Unless you see the popup calling it a safe zone, DO NOT bunker down or barricade yourself in a shelter. MONSTERS WILL ONLY GET STRONGER.
Ashlyn: If you do get to a safe zone, [here], it’s a link to a survival guide that details what’s going down.
Ashlyn: If you can’t find or make a safe zone, finding a portal might be a better bet than staying on earth.
Ashlyn: Most places aren’t very friendly, but the monsters are only landing here.
Ashlyn: But the only reliable way to find one would be through dungeons.
Ashlyn: You should probably get your net stats to 100 before trying to do that.
---
I wished I could’ve sent more help, but she didn’t even live in the same state as me. Even if we were estranged, that was an issue with my parents, not with her. She would always be my little sibling, whether she reciprocated the feeling or not.
Instead, I began working on writing out a guide to basic survival, and the general situation. I also linked to the “No Savior Needed” wiki and discord. I put a disclaimer at the beginning that this was relying on spoilers from “No Savior Needed”, and that if the similarities were a coincidence, then the outcomes might not be the same.
The first priority was explaining how the three meteor monster categories worked. If you planned like Shadowbeasts were the only ones that existed, you’d probably die when the first Sunderer appeared. You needed to know about all three of the major threats before it was learned the hard way, and unlike the majority of No Savior Needed, nobody had really bothered with a detailed guide. The information was out there, of course, but nobody had really bothered to centralize it.
The simplest fact was this: Meteor monsters would, from now until the Shutdown, fall from the sky at a rate of one per hour per person alive in the area.(1) Some days the rate would become worse, such as today, where meteors were falling at four times that rate. Fortunately, the meteors were impossibly light, they wouldn’t damage anything they hit. Within fifteen seconds of hitting the ground, the meteors would hatch into a monster.
Shadowbeasts were the most common category of meteor monsters. They were small fries and swarm monsters. Each looked like an silhouette of an animal, with a handful of tells for other abilities in their coloration. (2)
They were the most aggressive category of monster. Every type of Shadowbeast had their own ranges and protocols, but some things were consistent. Shadowbeasts would always attack exposed people within their range over people behind any kind of shelter. They wouldn’t even cut through a screen door, if another person was vulnerable. They also cheated, and knew where every person was in their range at all times.
They had very minimal tactics, and no natural self-preservation. If you set up so that there was only one clear path to you, wild Shadowbeasts would always attack you through it, no matter how many of their peers had died trying.
They were also the most fragile. Shadowbeasts were, at this point, nearly always weaker than a mindlessly hostile animal of the same species, and so anything that would kill such an animal would kill them. Even as they got stronger, their offense grew alongside their defense. The true danger of Shadowbeasts came in their overwhelming numbers, and the rare ones that had abilities that allowed for it to do more than hurl itself at its targets.
Sunderers were rarer, and had the opposite instincts. Shadowbeasts looked like a natural instance of the animal, only formed from faint shadows, with patches of color among the strongest. Sunderers were obviously abnormal. Some had too many tails, or were bigger than they should’ve been, or smaller. While Shadowbeasts were darkness given shape, Sunderers only had patches of the distinctive darkness. From the wrong angle, they might look like a “normal” mutated animal.
Wild Sunderers wouldn’t fight unless attacked, but they roamed a large range, destroying every shelter people were occupying. This included safe zones, if they could manage it. They didn’t even try to kill people, they just made it impossible to hide from Shadowbeasts. They were much tougher than Shadowbeasts, despite their disinterest in combat. I definitely wouldn’t need to worry about Sunderers for a week. It usually took two or even three weeks for them to first show up, though they arrived earlier the more people survived.
The third type, however, were the worst. Wraiths were a near-identical copy of a real person, generally one who had been killed by a person. Like Shadowbeasts, they were formed of pure darkness, but they looked like the person they embodied. (3) In a way, they were people, if you ripped out every piece of that person that cared, and replaced it all with an obsessive need to kill people. Unlike the other types of monsters, they would play favorites, deliberately seeking out specific targets. They wanted everyone to die, but they cared more about killing those they had loved or hated than strangers. (4)
They also had an instinctive ability to control all Shadowbeasts and Sunderers in their radius. To make matters worse, a single Imprint could absorb an arbitrary number of these monsters, and deploy them all in an instant, surging from the ground in a massive swarm. A clever Wraith would deploy entire armies of Shadowbeasts and Sunderers to overwhelm their targets.
They were, thankfully, the last meteor monster type to appear, but they were hardly harmless. Even Wraiths with no combat abilities in life could be nightmarishly powerful in death, just by bringing a large collection of Shadowbeasts and Sunderers into the fight. Fortunately, the earliest these monsters would ever appear would be the end of week three. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to hunt them down before they gathered a horrific army of monsters. Unlike the other types, they had no compulsion to rush their attack, and most would wait until victory was assured to strike.
The only mercy when it came to Wraiths was that they weren’t flawless copies of the original. In the game, at least, they wouldn’t retain the full power of highly dangerous people. If a survivor NPC was sufficiently powerful, the Wraith would no longer retain the entirety of their power. (5) They also would be more vulnerable to some forms of attack. Of course, to counterbalance this mercy, even the weakest of people’s wraiths would have a handful of special abilities. The most consistent was that Wraiths could combine, creating an even more dangerous one, and most Wraiths would unhesitatingly do so if they could. Fortunately, the ability had limitations, even if they weren’t predictable or consistent.
It was confirmed that, at least in the game, killing people would increase the odds of Wraiths appearing, but evidence suggested that even a zero-fatality area would have to deal with Wraiths.
Once I was done describing those for the guide, I began outlining long-term survival options. In the end, there were three ways to survive the Shutdown, and the Administrator messages only described the broadest strokes of each. Well, ‘survive until the world itself ends three years from now’ wasn’t actually that complicated; it was the other two that were esoteric.
In short, one option was to find an escape vessel. Unfortunately, while the possible sources were fairly predictable, any method of finding one relied largely on chance. There was nothing that you could do to ensure you’d get one. For the most part, only luck would be sufficient. The other option was to destroy one of the other planes that intersected with ours. For example, if I killed Eris and then “the Flame of the Abyss of Corrupted Cruelty”, I would be able to escape, at the price of destroying a small piece of reality, and everything in it. (6)
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Once I’d finished explaining those concepts, I got lazy, and just threw in links to the wikis and other guides. Frankly, the other stuff was better explained there, and a lot of it wasn’t relevant to the average player. Then, with my guide done, I shot a message to K.
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Ashlyn Thresher: Hey, did Mimic give you the details of my spoilers?
K Mandatory: No. What do I need to know?
Ashlyn: They’re secondhand, from a validated source. There might be holes, but I told Mimic things that weren’t public record.
K: What source?
Ashlyn: A game. But it’s lined up with reality so far.
Would you like me to prove it?
K: Try.
Ashlyn: Did it hurt when you fell from Paradise? (7)
Ashlyn: Or when you rose from the Abyss?
Ashlyn: You already know Peter killed you. I doubt you told anyone.
Ashlyn: You had one friend up there, and your stories both ended with you dead of cold.
Ashlyn: Is that enough to prove my source?
K: Is that why you’re hurling yourself into danger?
K: You have no idea what you’re doing.
K: Your spoilers didn’t teach you anything about fighting.
Ashlyn: Are you offering to teach me?
K: No. Not now, and not for free.
K: Is there anything I urgently need to know?
Ashlyn: Your former paradise is going to try to kill you.
Ashlyn: Earliest I’ve seen is a month out.
K: Wonderful. Anything else you want to tell me?
Ashlyn: I wrote a bit on the meteor monsters and the options for survival.
[Here].
K: If you can look them over, pass them on to anyone you think could use them.
K: If the info’s any good, I’ll pass it on.
K: In return: Tell me before you leave the safe zone.
K: I want to know what dangerous nonsense you’re running after.
K: Understood?
K: Ashlyn: It’s a deal.
---
I considered, absently, what I should do next.
If I was playing a normal run, I’d run off alone and grind against the Shadows outside the city. It wasn’t the most lucrative option, but it would let me get stronger. I wasn’t tough enough to solo dungeons yet.
In a normal run, I wouldn’t be playing as a Dreamer. They were stuck making ‘bonds’ to get powers, and friendships were the most accessible way to do that. I absently considered if it might be easier to make a bond by crafting a Nephilim, but that wouldn’t actually be much easier. I didn’t have most of the powers, and it would take a lot of Quanta to buy all the materials. I didn’t want to be stuck with only two combat skills, but making friends was hard.
Yes, I know, being worried about petty stuff like “How will I make friends” when the world is ending is fairly self-centered. Most people are, and at least I wasn’t still in shock. I suspected the class I had chosen, Dreamer, allowed me to recover from mental trauma quicker than usual.
Given the normal circumstances under which a Dreamer was created, they’d have to be fairly mentally resilient. Most of them would be constantly traumatized for quite a while, and those that became Reapers would have to learn to shrug off people dying as well.
The best option would be to try to make friends. I couldn’t handle a dungeon alone, but I made two powerful acquaintances today. Exploring a dungeon with them would definitely help me grow stronger, and probably would be a good way to build a bond with them. It wasn’t like I was going to be able to work alone. [Blood of the Sacrificed] would ultimately be a support skill, once enemies started catching up with the power curve.
I didn’t think I could get them to work with me long-term. K and Mimic would be too invested in the Safezone. When I was doing local stuff we might work together, but they wouldn’t have time or energy to work on side projects like fixing Eris’ mess. They’d be too busy dealing with local issues, like evacuation and Sunderers, to work on the interplanar stuff.
Even so, I could probably get them to explore a dungeon with me, if only for recon purposes.
---
Ashlyn Thresher has started a chat thread with K Mandatory and Mimic Uvev
Ashlyn Thresher: Want to go on a dungeon crawl?
K Mandatory: Where would these dungeons be?
Ashlyn: I don’t know yet, but I can find them. Somewhere in the city, maybe even near the edges of campus.
K: Why would we?
Ashlyn: ‘Gear’ can make a big difference, and right now the only way to get it is dungeons.
Ashlyn: But if that’s not enough, there are rifts in the depths of the dungeons.
Ashlyn: If we know what’s on the other side, we can plan for it.
Ashlyn: Or even make the first move in dealing with it.
Ashlyn: If we don’t, it’ll get to make the first move in dealing with us.
Ashlyn: As a professional Cape, you must know how often the other planes are friendly.
K: Just one dungeon. We have things to do here, but more power wouldn’t hurt.
K: When will you be ready to go?
Ashlyn: Fifteen minutes will be a start. I can do more with longer, but as soon as Mimic is ready to go, I’ll be ready to join you.
---
I wasn’t lying when I said more time would let me do more. I hadn’t ever actually bothered to learn this city, and if I wanted to do this as efficiently as possible, I’d need to go over some maps.
There was a pattern to dungeon locations. If anyone was alive in the building after the tutorial, a dungeon wouldn’t spawn. Dungeons would get relocated if they wound up within a safe zone, which meant there wouldn’t be any on campus. More dungeons appeared in populated areas, and for the first wave of dungeons, that would mean “when the shutdown tutorial ended”.
As a Dreamer, I could sense when my Dream was brushing against a liminal space, like a Dungeon, even across a threshold. It wasn’t a well documented ability. Anyone could sense where the borders of reality shifted, but Dreamers could sense it intuitively in a way that others wouldn’t.
I’d only have K and Mimic’s help for this one dungeon, and so I wanted to find a good one. That meant I was left wracking my head for large buildings that would be abandoned or nearly empty. In “No Savior Needed”, the most valuable dungeons in an area would appear in the largest empty buildings.
Our campus was at the edge of a city, and my ideal dungeon would be in the part of the city with the most skyscrapers, but the reality of the situation was that I couldn’t come up with any buildings that would probably be empty there. (8) After a bit of looking, I gave it up, and moved towards the edges of the city.
There were a lot of warehouses at one edge of the city, which probably would have some that were empty. That was a start, but I wanted to find something better.
After a bit of searching, I found a pair of conference centers. Those would be better, if they were empty. Such large buildings would be picked by some of the most important dungeons in the area, if they were available. There were enough housing units and hotels nearby that it would almost certainly be worth the trouble. If they weren’t, it wouldn’t be too hard to find another dungeon.
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(1) There was a hard floor on the survivor count for an area. Even if you killed everyone in your area, or were unlucky enough to be the sole survivor, the Meteors would continue falling as though a hundred people still remained alive. This had unfortunate consequences for traveling, and meant that the effective numbers an area faced might actually be worse, if they were bordered by dead zones.
(2) There wasn’t a consistent pattern to the abilities unfortunately. A patch of red might mean that it could breathe fire, resist fire, or simply that it would explode into a shower of blood when killed, to name three of the hundreds of possibilities. It always made sense in retrospect, but there wasn’t a way to effectively predict it in advance.
(3) Unlike a Shadowbeast, they looked like absolute darkness. Wraiths were supposed to be “darker than pitch blackness”, though the game couldn’t depict that. Computer screens had limitations, and the game couldn’t subvert them.
(4) There were urban legends within the game that someone who had no ethics, morality or desires would create a Wraith that felt no urge to kill. I doubted this. Wraiths were very clever and ruthless, so it seemed much more likely that it had been a long-term ploy, rather than a genuine lack of desire. While I knew at least one way of nonlethally pacifying them existed, I didn’t think it could happen naturally.
(5) External powers, such as what a Diabolist could do with Eris’ soul also tended to not carry over for Wraiths. Only the power that was truly their own would work.
(6) If you were careful, you might manage to kill as little as a thousand people by doing this, or find a plane where a mercy killing really was a mercy. I personally would never be comfortable with doing this, but I could definitely see the logic. If a plane held nothing but warmongering murderous ghosts who were raiding us regularly, was it really morally wrong to destroy it? I wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t say it was wrong.
(7) This was a reference to K’s backstory in the game. Well, the backstory of the ‘‘Mirror Princess’, but that was K.
(8) The shutdown had triggered during the day, so most of the corporate offices would’ve been occupied at the time, but apartments wouldn’t be likely to be empty either. The real possibility was places where everyone had died, but those wouldn’t be common.