---Richard---
Richard was a blur of productive effort.
They needed him! They were sitting around in the grass shitting in a big communal hole – barely surviving!
Step one was defence. A thick wall would take too much time and so Richard worked to build a sort of stone fence to keep out the ‘wild animals’. Every two-three feet he’d stab one of his stone hands down and then ‘push’ using his ethereal slots to make a distant connection. That mental jab would drag the connection from his ability deeper until it hit the bedrock.
Once his ability was ‘connected’, Richard would send a burst of aether momentarily boosting his ability for a second and then ‘yank’.
Richard would then squeeze and stretch a cylinder up out of the ground creating a pole that rested just about head height with a diameter roughly twice the width of his arm.
It wasn’t the widest of ‘bars’ but it was ‘fused’ to the bedrock right below them and Richard was more worried about surrounding the area than anything else.
After a few hours of work he’d made a oval-shaped fence roughly 150m in the short axis and 300m in the long axis. 1941 poles that took roughly three hours to make. Near the end he’d gotten up to six poles at a time taking less than half a minute to stretch and shape…but it still wasn’t a fast process. He could make a single pole in a few seconds but multiple poles at once came out ahead, especially after he’d hit the ‘1000’ pole mark and been given six ‘connection’ stats.
Where did connection appear in his body or mind? No clue! They didn’t even show up on his AI so there was clearly something weird about them.
The next step was placing a top-bar and a mid-bar to help support the balusters. Picking a spot by the poop pit, he reached down and sort of flipped a slab of stone over. This cleared off the heavy dirt and grass exposing a wide stretch of yellow marbled with grey. Richard then tried to gather as much stone as possible, dragging it up and lugging it around in a blob as he used it to start filling in his fence.
No one offered to help, although he’d gotten some curious looks when Richard had started this building project.
That was fine. He was the only one who could shape stone like this – rare ability. Very nice. Imax noises – nice cock!
Finishing up his fence, Richard dug the stone pit down a bit more and spent an hour creating a outhouse for it complete with nice roof and walls. He added a smoothed stone seat and thick stone door that could swing in and out. Still needed some paper or a bidet equivalent but the base structure was incredibly solid.
The hinges were…passible. He’d tried a few different setups and settled on a single interlocking hinge that ran all the way from the top to the bottom. Finally done the first sign of civilization, Richard proceeded to test it out while committing a war crime.
You know…breaking the geneva convention’s stance on chemical warfare. It's less funny when you have to explain it – where was James? James would have laughed at Richards joke, probably.
Fence and toilet were all Richard had time for today, the night would show off how well it worked. He could already hear a strange high-pitched whistling – like someone was auto-tuning the sound of nails on glass.
He was ready.
…
Richard…Richard couldn’t believe how arrogant he’d accidentally gotten. He was surprised at how arrogant he’d been and how competent the group who had arrived was.
It was a pleasant surprise but still a surprise – like sure, they’d reached the end of the trial before him…They’d gotten all the way to this point alive. But?
But with the state of things when Richard got here, he kind of thought they just sort of slipped through the cracks or something?
As night arrived, monsters began coming out of the metaphorical woodwork. A pack of wolves that left a trail of grey goo behind them – as soon as anything impacted the trail, the goop would suddenly flash and vanish. It erassed both itself and anything it surounded or touched – a self powered dissolution pulse.
A millipede longer than a bus skittered past – with that many legs it was probably a billipede actually.
A rubix-cube-like creature that moved by shifting blocks about its inner core flipped past – ignoring him. Fucking rude. A swarm of some sort of wasp like creature descended on him from above, then flew away as soon as its poison didn’t work. Uno reverse.
And then night fell for real and Richard’s pathetic fence fell.
A large creature the size of an elephant and shaped like an armadillo with style spikes charged through the camp – the fence on that side barely slowing it down. A crack and then stone spears flew off into the darkness as the fence was headbutt into the air.
A long whip of something darker than night whipped past – slicing a dozen of Richard’s poles in a lazy swipe. Far behind this tentacle whip, an obscured shadow creature stood in the distance licking its lips with a massive massive glowing tongue.
And then most of the delvers in the area got up off their asses and started moving. A man with a messy mop of hair floated up and began blasting everything with a plasma cannon. A woman was suddenly completely covered in a green exosuit as she literally jumped into action. Her hands twisted and grabbed a hammer the size of a cartoon mallet from the ground even as lines of power began humming to life around her body. This woman then leapt across the camp in a single bound, smashing into and through the megadillo with a thunderous swing. To the side, the ‘probably a murderer’ man was drinking a barrel of water while holding a pitch black sphere with a strap that held his hand in place. Around this man, a cloud of sparking grey mist began spreading out.
The dangerous gas billowed and swirled – deceptively dangerous. The mist flowed past Richard’s fence, melting through the bars and then through monster after monster on that entire side of camp. Dangerous!
There was a faint wind keeping the mist blowing in that direction and spreading it further and further out into the night.
The melty mist just kept spreading and spreading – was his sweat really some sort of self fueled dissolution field that kept growing endlessly? How overpowered was that? Would it blow back on them if the wind changed? Dangerous! They should make the aoe bastard work far away from the rest of them – especially as friendly fire was on.
The man who had welcomed Richard to the area, stood on a metallic platform and joined the floating man in shooting bursts of glowing power from high above. A midget was completely covered in metal that rippled like water. He looked like a silver surfing dwarf – the rippling metal man began running about in his suit – controlling spiky whips of metal and standing on metal stilts to keep his core a dozen feet above the grass. The man wasn’t necessarily the most effective monster slaughterer, but he was certainly one of the most visible and impressive – manipulating steel like limbs that morphed into saws and blades and hooks. A different weapon depending on the monster – he had to have his AI feeding him weapon shapes, there was no way he could have all those shapes memorized without a lifetime of practice.
Richard, in comparison, looked at his fence in frustration then got stabbed through the neck by an invisible stabby fucker.
Richard did grab the arm of the void to his senses and put several bullets in its body area…but damn that was embarrassing.
It didn’t even look cool – his monster stayed invisible even after it died and Richard kicked ‘nothing’ a few times without even feeling the satisfaction of knowing he’d connected.
To the side a flappy creature covered in a thousand mouths suddenly screamed – its sonic attack loud enough to burst eardrums. Instead of stopping, the sound began to build – the creature pitchshifting up and down as if trying to resonate on a different frequency.
That seemed like something Richard should counter.
Richard began to run towards the creature – the sound barely bothering him – but before he reached it, the floating pair up above riddled it with bolts of light and cut the scream short.
What this settlement lacked for in infrastructure it more than made up for in combat capability. Fuck – was there even anything for Richard to do?
Richard felt a bit competitive as he ripped up a section of ground and began forming bullets. Most of the delvers were faster than him – there was no point running back and forth like an idiot if people kept kill stealing.
Spotting a patch of goop from the early wolves, Richard tried scooping some of it into his bullets – it seemed like dissolution was the theme for this night and Richard wanted in on the party.
Scoop after scoop failed as his stone triggered whatever impact based trigger let the goop dissolve stuff. Really if it was this trigger happy how were the wolves throwing it onto the grass?
Finally a bullet was made without breaking and Richard loaded it into his cannon.
Aiming carefully at a distant hulking figure Richard pulled the trigger and watched his shot fly from his cannon and melt away in the air.
Fuck.
Tonight really wasn’t his night.
…
Monster attacks continued on through the entire night without a single real break. This was definitely worse than the wilderness of the previous zone – it felt like Richard was in a dungeon. At one point Richard smashed his handheld kinetic propellor and took a break from fighting to form a literal cannon out of stone. Bunch of components, barel he could rotate back and forth with stone manipulation. Embedding in most of the important bits from the gun Richard wired up an athletic capacitor to increase its power at the expense at a longer charge time. Richard then began shooting large spears of stone on a 1 minute timer.
He shot so many spears through a badly optimized set of components – rotating the stone barrel back and forth while absorbing the ‘leaking’ kinetic bent aether – that the stone itself began to change and warp.
Someone actually offered him a spare plasma gun, but Richard was committed to his cannon. Sure after an a hour of use the entire thing was visibly vibrating and covered in cracks that refused to melt back together – but man was it firing well. He’d prove physical projectiles viable yet!
Nothing felt dangerous enough to actually kill him – especially as his defenses grew stronger as the night progressed…but actually doing damage was proving to be difficult and the random nature of the creatures made it hard to get used to the attacks.
Richard promised he’d finally put in the work he’d put off in improving his abilities as soon as he could. Stat manipulation first and proper rapid fire rocket launcher second.
…
And then it was morning. Corpses littered the surroundings – several melting away in the light of dawn.
They were nearly all pseudo matter. If not fake, they were at least unstable – the elements used to create them unable to exist in regular situations. Was there something specific with nighttime that created these monsters? Some sort of influx of different bands of aether? Were they releasing radiation as they decayed?
Were the monsters purposefully created by the system governing the world or a side effect of some process the magic of the world needed to function?
Richard stared around trying to gauge the rest of the colony.
All the people he could see looked exhausted. Richard felt that – his body had stopped needing much sleep as if his stats defended against tiredness…but man nearly all of his effort from yesterday had been wasted. His outhouse had survived although the door had been ripped off…
Finding it and peering down, Richard saw a spike shoot out of the hole. Jumping back he grabbed his boring plasma gun and shot down until the trap was dead.
That was close. If someone was going to attack someone in this midst of a vulnerable shit, Richard wanted it to be on his terms.
So it was something about the darkness as opposed to the time – that monster would have melted away already if not for the hole he’d made to hide it.
Fixing the door, Richard paused as he felt a presence standing behind him.
“Want to put your skills to actual use?”
…
Muhamed was the resident mad scientist. At least that’s the vibe Richard got after traveling with him to the nest area.
Muhamed was a handsome man with a slight beard and clean haircut. He wore a grey coat with hundreds of pockets and had a relaxed, unconcerned look upon his face most of the time.
Like he was interested in everything but didn’t truly care?
The scientist had noticed all of Richard's building and wanted to study his skill in a few experiments before working on a ‘more effective building project’.
If Richard felt like he was being ordered he’d have rebelled but… Muhamed had a way of speaking that made Richard feel like they were partners. That in itself was weird. Usually Richard disliked people that tried to manipulate him but…it felt genuine in a way that was hard to fake.
Richard was great at judging people after all.
Step one happened as soon as Richard revealed he wasn’t actually controlling stone – he was controlling silicone and the bonds those made with surrounding elements.
Combing pure silicone with different materials in trace amounts let them study exactly how his power worked even if creating a material was more expensive than just harvesting the ground. Cement was probably the most useful of materials Richard could make and manipulate - more accurately if given the chance, any combination they made was adjacent to concrete somehow.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Richard had already done a lot of this study, so several experiments were duplicates… but Muhamed had some great ideas for increasing efficiency and it didn’t take long to start discovering new facets of his skill. It only took an hour to find a massive power boost. Step one: create small blocks of pure silicon and begin pumping as much aether through his skill and into the crystal. Step two: wrap it in a rubber insulator and continue pumping aether long after it would leak. Step three: embed the amplifier in his hands, allowing his skill to sink into the hyper infused marble and begin incorporating it.
And that was just one successful test. They also managed to grow carbon nanotubes around molecule thick strands of hyper infused silicone.
“Managed to” – as if that wasn’t a peak of engineering.
First they made wisps of silicone too thin to see with a naked eye and kept the base in a vacume sealed box.
Then they bound pure carbon to infrared light and nuked their box of wires. It was easy enough to twist the box and make sure to hit all sides with carbonic photons – the only reason this was less impressive than the rubber balls was the end result only improved his hands by a small amount after quite a bit more work had gone into them.
Still insulated wires were useful and Richard now had microscopic veins running through each finger and arm in his stone hands.
Muhamed was fun – his main strength was a hyper focused ability to direct and manipulate atheric effects. Not create or manipulate his own effects although he could do that too. Manipulate any effect no matter the source.
This was an esper ability – one much much stronger than the connection arms Richard had made and enhanced half a dozen times with separate breaks. He also had over 400 stats in his mind but who was counting.
Meeting up with the melting mist guy, Muhamed convinced the maybe murderer to M-help.
Turns out murder man’s signature skill was a combination of two distinct abilities. A dissolution skill that was relatively simple and surprisingly weak…just the ability to slowly dissolve stuff he touched with the dissolved power being fed back into the same skill.
The other skill wa the mist ability which was a surpisingly complicated skill with massive utility. The mist skill needed large amounts of infused water – the purer the better – to ‘kick start’ it off. Once made, it could grow indefinitely provided it was actively being channeled by the man and it was fed enough fuel and maintained a connection to him the entire time – aether increased its strength and more liquid increased its propagation speed.
It was kind of like how Richard had combined skills to allow him to manipulate the stone he softened with his first skill. The key difference was instead of a permenant combined upgrade, the two skills were separate. Instead of simply ‘a upgrade’ this man could swap out the ‘effect’ attached to the second skill – switching between different types of mists with dissolution being the most useful.
Richard was starting to believe the man when he said he hadn’t meant to kill someone. He really didn’t feel like the type and Richard was a pretty good judge of character if he did say so himself.
Besides the man was pretty funny when you got to know him – no one with that good a sense of humor could be a bad guy right?
…
Round two of defenses was the difference between someone playing in a sand pit and a construction crew with industrial machinery.
Mist man – his name was Mike adding to Richards ‘M’ pattern matching – drank roughly a liter of distilled water gagging slightly at the taste.
While MMM was chugging, Muhamed held both Richard's stone hand and Mike's back then pulled. In a moment a trickle of aether began to transfer an unstable copy of Richard’s skill towards his new friend. Not exactly the whole skill – the mist wasn’t powerful enough to host Richard’s whole ability, but they could transfer the individual uncombined parts so that’s what they were doing.
Richard could tell he could stop this transfer – Mike couldn’t sneak over to him while he was sleeping and borrow his abilities or anything…but it felt weird handing off the ability to someone else however temporary. At some point Richard reached out with his connections and began actively pushing his ability instead of waiting for Mike to pull it all the way, which helped nearly instantly complete the setup.
After attaching part of Richard's skill to the power tool that was the mist, Mike sent both of them an AI connection and then closed his eyes in concentration.
The three sat for a hot minute before thick bleeched white mist began to spread away from them.
Unlike the dissolution mist which melted grass into green dirt, this flowed harmlessly across the grass. Someone yelled in panic before noticing Muhamed was with them – probably thought this was the void mist even though it was a completely different colour of white – and soon people began walking over to see what was happening.
Mike wordlessly pulled out a long cable – eyes still closed – while sending Richard some instructions to pass on through the ai tunnel.
If anyone wanted to help they could donate aether to help power their efforts. Richard told everyone what they could do to aid them as well as fielded all the questions about what they were doing – it was fun to be the center of attention. Really really fun – Richard loved the way everyone looked to him for answers and happily explained their plan.
After donations of power, the mist rapidly exploded in production speed – at least ten times as powerful after the crowd had helped. It sadly wasn’t as useful as the void mist – that skill fueled itself with what it ate, causing a self sustaining loop to keep it growing – but the stone softening was more useful for their plan.
As soon as the mist reached Richards poles, it sunk down in the ground. The group could actually feel it propagating into the stone below through the skill’s feedback. That's how they knew how much was effected long before the surface of the planet began to wobble like a water bed.
One or two people might have fallen into their quicksand, but no one was hurt – one of the people made it their job to save anyone who fell in – but Richard ignored that.
It did look fun to run across – Richard was a key part of the setup however and couldn’t just abandon them to swim in the planet.
Richard directed his helpers to dig periodic holes every 100m or so along the new wall boundary – each hole becoming a new spot their mist could penetrate.
It was a group effort at the end of the day. Richard's early fence long forgotten as the group slowly but surely created a softened ring exactly three kilometers in diameter.
Go big or go home – and the group was going big.
After two hours of softening, Richard helped Mike swap out the main effect into a mist that could control softened stone. The midget with his metal control ability had a stronger manipulation skill and Mike was able to boost Richard's manipulation with it somewhat in what he claimed was a hard to control combination of the skills. Strong
If anything it was proof Richard could somehow upgrade his stone manipulation to be much stronger on its own. Maybe he could pull off the metal mans silver surfer cosplay with a rocky cosmetic skin.
…stone was weaker than metal he’d probably have a completely different result if he went that route.
The new wave of manipulation mist swirled in strange spiralling patterns as it moved and consumed the softening mist. The swapping of mist types caused most of the initial mist to fade away but a second donation party pushed the manipulation into literal ‘rivers of stone’ levels once again. Richard felt like a cog in a machine helping the group take control of kilometers of stone to stretch it up into a wall.
There was a bit of a problem with ‘holding’ the wall in place before swapping back to a curing mist. The softened stone did slowly ‘dry’ as they held it however and between the helpers and them they managed to keep it stable long enough to suck the effect out of the stone.
Coordination was done through open AI sockets – Richard had to route his control through Mike's ai to get anything done, but he somehow didn’t mind.
Perhaps because of the scale of things? Richard could feel his own skill almost stretching as it was used in the greater working. There was also something satisfying about big things. Like big explosions being cool – it was a guy thing.
Together they pulled the wall up 25m tall and left a moat on the other side from their excavation site.
As they swapped and set the wall it squished down slightly like a line of pudding, creating a bulbous shape…but still for a few hours of work this felt incredibly impressive and the bulge wall was asthetically nice. Especially with the faint marble of different stone types and the dirt that had been mixed into the liquid stone by accident...
At some point someone brought up the idea of hollowing out the ‘great wall of keep out’ and sticking a nest on the inside…but they were shot down when they couldn’t come up with a good reason why they wanted to set that up.
Just because it sounded cool?
By the time night fell, the entire camp along with a massive amount of extra space was completely surrounded by a thick barrier. Every kilometer or so around its edge, a tall tower had been made and 9 of their strongest ranged players took a snipers position above the area.
Crude Aether powered lamps were set up around the entire inner area to reduce monster spawn – this wouldn’t stop monsters that could fly and the walls was just simple stone so some of the biggest monsters could probably smash through or climb over it…but still it was an order of infrastructure greater than yesterday.
They were individually charged up instead of connected to a single grid but worked well for now.
There was a chance the streetlights wouldn’t stop monsters spawning – they hadn’t studied what exactly made the monsters appear. Was it simply based on time the system that governed the world turning on and off monster spawn with a button? Was it ‘light’ that suppressed them or the cocktail of spectrums that was ‘daylight’?
There hadn’t been enough safe space to test this yet, but hopefully tonight Muhamed would narrow in what the current rules for monsters appearing was and together they could secure the entire settlement tomorrow.
Considering they all knew the rules for monster spawns could change it wasn’t some vast secret…but there had to be a reason it worked the way it currently did. Knowing ‘why’ it worked the way it did in the default mode would let them better decide how and why they would change it if they had the chance to.
The wall and streetlamp grid wouldn’t stop monsters that could fly and because it was simple stone, some of the biggest could probably smash through…but the colony was hopeful.
Richard happily began firing cannon balls into the night defending his base. He’d put in enough work to start feeling possessive of it – sure others had helped but this…this was his.
He felt the comradery of the other elites surrounding him and laughed into the night.
This was fun.
He didn’t even realize it had been two days since he slept and all his personal projects had been put on hold.
He was one of the only people who hadn’t slept.
----------------------------------------
---James---
James flew across the ground, running as fast as a jet.
That wasn’t even hyperbole – if James stayed on the ground he could stay above 1000km/hr for an extended period and he could actually triple that in a pure sprint – although only when boosted by his active domain and pushing all his power into a single push.
The hard part was maintaining this run – James needed better endurance. He’d only run just over 5000km and was tired already.
Weak.
Not good enough.
James pushed himself the entire day feeling the way his power interacted with his stats and steadily grew the longer he pushed himself. If all it took was a single day of running to grow stronger he obviously wasn’t pushing himself hard enough!
He needed to keep running till he stopped feeling gains.
Night fell and a sea of obstacles appeared in James’s path but there was nothing worth mentioning – in comparison to the badlands the night terrors here were nothing. Significantly stronger than most of the wildlife in the previous zone but that was it.
James took a break from running for a light snack – a shadow bird thing roasted on the smouldering remains of a walking tree thing – and then went back to running.
As soon as morning hit, he collapsed and fell asleep in the middle of the field. His muscles ached in an incredibly strange way – it felt like all the power he’d channeled through himself for the last twenty or so hours had melted his flesh and crystalized the remains into aching lumps of stiffness.
He couldn’t even move most of his limbs without forcing the concept of movement into them. Stiff and exhausted James slept and consolidated gains.
…
It was noon when James awoke.
He slowly stood and felt the light sunburn that covered his face. His skin defense hadn’t been enough to protect against it – should have tried to get his body to reflect the light automatically.
Even if he’d managed to set it up to stay while sleeping, it might have failed. James had pushed himself harder than he had before. There was just something about flat grass that was easy to run on. Nothing he had to dodge. Good traction. All in all the perfect place to go all out.
Stretching – weird bits of clumped skin falling off his joints, James felt how every part of his body barely responded until he purposfully pushed mana into the area. In exchange, as soon as he began to breath and stretch his limbs responded explosively.
The concious ‘pushing’ became something akin to breathing as james moved and squeezed his body into shape.
Starting off with a light 100km/hr jog, James slowly ramped up the speed partly distracted by his AI’s reading. Altering his momentum to face upwards, James leapt spinning slightly to take in the view.
Green as far as the eye could see.
Empty.
Lonely.
James paused at the thought even as he began to fall.
Focusing for a moment James landed absorbing the majority of his kinetic energy and tossing it into an AI pulse. Checking the return frequency he sighed at the lack of a connection to Richard then checked Maddy’s talaism. With a jolt, it melted. Around him a brief flicker of light disappeared into the distance.
So Maddy had arrived.
Storing the direction in his AI James paused. It was mostly back the way he had come…James kind of wanted to see how far he could go.
Deliberating for a moment and then continuing on, James ran for the second day in the row. It only took a few hours of focused running to reach the edge of the planet.
👣 Achievement get: Walkabout Planet.
Description: Cross the planet using nothing but your own power.
----------------------------------------
Stat: +9 leg muscle speed
Stat: +9 channel power.
…
James breathed. The achievement was incredibly welcome – if stingy in stats – he’d been hoping to get some sort of reward for being the first to cross the planet and his body hungrily bonded with his reward.
Were rarities gone now that they had finished the zones? That achivement totally should have been a 'unique' one. I guess if we don't have a clear at the end of an area there's no point in a rarity being shown?
13,000km. That was the distance from one side of this planet to the other. Give or take a thousand kilometers or so at the very max depending on the angle James had run at.
…channel. That’s the first time the system referred to James’s circulatory system as anything other than his veins.
Momentarily checking inside of himself James paused and stared. His heart was gone.
Blood and aether spun through his body constantly moving – sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but always in motion. At some point his heart had burst and been held upon way too long – and then been healed open, his body adapting to the swirl of tireless power.
He’d healed into his new constant.
James’s body and some of the powers incorporated and embedded in his channels worked in ways he didn’t understand to create something new.
And where his heart had been a foreign mass of…not quite energy was bonded to his flesh. It felt closer to a concept than a hunk of mana. A dense purpose obscured to his senses.
Foreign and yet his…James poked and prodded the lump with his senses feeling the way it sort of…took away a jitter from his mana and added in a calmness? It was smoothing out his mana and yet there was an actual exchange. Instability pulled into it and artificial smoothness pulled out of it.
Oh.
This is where his mantle had moved. The mantle had eaten his heart. That was fine. This was fine. Its job was to help stabilize him and that’s what it was doing. Could James replicate this? Now that he knew what it felt like?
…if James was being honest, he didn’t know where to start so probably not.
James didn’t know how to feel about all the changes. It felt…monumental in a way – as if he’d stopped being human suddenly.
And yet…nothing had really changed if he really considered things? If anything, the moment he could run as fast as a plane he’d stopped being human, this minor change to his circulatory system was secondary to that.
The weirder change was how his twin cores had shifted as if taking over for his heart – their original purpose long twisted into thier new form.
Spent blood still flowed through his lungs to reactivate – James hadn’t yet outgrown the need to breathe although the oxygen had started taking a backseat to his other systems.
Spent aether flowed through his cores…what had they been again? His kidneys? Either way, the spent aether passed through and then was cleaned inside each core before heading out into the rest of his body.
It was like he was reusing the aether instead of simply generating more to refill the spent bits.
Feeling his insides out, James refamiliarized himself with his pathways. He…he could probably do more of this. More restructuring of his body. The muscles around his lungs for example were a roundabout way of getting air into his body – if he used his mana he could start pulling it in directly. Some of his other organs were probably useless now as well…
James shook his head and returned to reality.
What had he been about to consider? Oh yeah, the distance.
Right now the planet was cut in half. The dome James stood beside encompassed the entire tutorial and every previous zone. So…perimeter of the planet was 26,000km ish – at least if he doubled that half perimeter he’d gotten. Quite a bit of surface area – James couldn’t remember how big the earth had been and if this new planet was bigger or smaller…but it felt smaller.
Probably not too much smaller considering gravity felt normal?
How long would that side of the planet be walled off...till everyone completed the training zones? what if one person camped out in it?
There did seem to be systems in place to try and kick people out if they stayed too long. Maybe the sky would start raining blood and nuclear bombs would rain the countryside until everyone was dead or in the new area.
James turned so the barrier was to his side and began to run alongside it. As he began to pick up speed, the blur began to properly think of both his goals and the job he had been given.
R was contractually telling everyone to go to war. He had one shot to stop that - assuming he wasn't lying to James about his real goals of course.
James had to prevent the other earthlings from killing themselves. He hadn’t been chosen for his ability to convince people…
James was chosen to be a common enemy.
A literal demon king if he wanted to roleplay his new job.
If he were to follow the script left by R, he had to become a threat big enough that the two sides could put aside their differences and try to stop him instead.
At least for the year until the planet ranks up? Maybe till it ranks up a second time? Until they figured out how to stabilize both sides at least.
Maybe one of his friends could help him figure out a way of completing his obligations. If nothing else James wanted to eat something tasty and meeting up with friends would help give him motivation to make something good.
James ran effectively.
James thought in-effectively.
...and all across the world more and more earthlings crossed the barrier.