Dropping off the supplies was simple enough. And, since they didn't know just how much extra stuff the soldiers had been carrying, I was easily able to keep about half of it without it being obvious. That should be enough to keep my entire group fed for much longer then when the next round was supposed to start. When I left them with all the stuff they were so focused on the small pile that they didn't seem to even care when I headed into the bunker.

The interior of the building looked startlingly different than it had before. The walls and floor and roof looked completely untouched, as though nothing had happened; but everything else that had been there was scrap. The remains of the benches and tables that had been in the common room had been scrapped and piled in an empty room, with plenty of burn marks showing at the places where they had been broken. The rooms were just as open as before, lacking any sort of real doors, though the nomadic aliens seemed just as happy camping out in the main part of the room. They also didn't spare me more than a passing glance as the obvious civilians focused on making a place to rest for their entire group.

From there I began to ask my questions to the robot. Its answers were, strangely enough, robotic. It tried to give answers as short as possible with no more information than was specifically requested. Simple questions were easy enough. The next round would start in a week, minus the over a dozen hours that this last round had taken. The enemies would be elite adventurers. The primary grading criteria was survival through the round with the secondary being contribution involved in success at the primary goal. Experience was based solely on those two factors. Credits were more complicated and included, "combat and upgrade use, especially in adversarial displays of competence." End quote. My question of if there was anything more I needed to know about the grading criteria got me an unhelpful "yes" response. My question on what more I needed to know about grading caused the robot to ask me what I wanted to know, and repeating the question only got me a repeated answer. Open ended questions weren't going to work. I could swear, however, that the robot tried adding extra information in to try to derail me on several occasions.

So from there I prioritized my time narrowing down the most important specifics about my earlier questions. I used a bit of paper to keep notes and to let me jump around topics so that I could narrow the answers down on multiple topics without being stuck on only one. I knew I didn't have an unlimited amount of time and so I was quick about getting down to business. A few of the aliens seemed curious enough to try to listen in but my frequent subject changes caused them to drift away and leave me to my insanity. It turned out I got over a couple hours of questioning in before I was pulled away, better than I had really expected.

This is what I found out: Survival really was the name of the game, since how long you kept going was the primary criteria if passing the round was off the table. The enemies, however, had been instructed to eliminate everyone. For them "passing" was all about how quickly and efficiently they could do it. So apparently we weren't the only ones being tested here? It wasn't important enough a rabbit trail for me to follow. As for elite enemies, they would be over level two hundred and there would be six of them. If my earlier calculations were correct than the first round guy who had taken on our entire group solo was only half as powerful. A quick few questions to confirm let me know that no, they were more than twice as powerful than their level would suggest. As for why, I didn't have time to ask. The important part was that killing them was effectively impossible and that we would need to run and delay our demise for as long as possible.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I did find some other interesting things though. Apparently the XP weirdness, in that it only came from quest completion and only in proportion to your contribution on that quest, was common to the rest of the game. I got confirmation that levels were easier to get in the Tutorial, or the "Testing" as The Game called it, but couldn't easily untangle why. And it wasn't something simple like that it was just a rule added to this area. Nothing else went into this calculation and it wasn't something so simple as infinite power through self generated quests. Something made Game recognized quests different than just personal goals.

I was surprised to find that there were hidden failure criteria, like leaving the "universe". Apparently going into the Market counted. Other failure conditions included breaking the "universe", as though that was a real concern, and direct interaction with anyone involved in another Test. Yeah, apparently there were other groups a day's travel out in most any direction and we should avoid them. Even so much as touching them with any upgrade's effect was an immediate failure. Also there was a rule against performance enhancing alchemy that was not self sourced. There was another rule against using political connections against your opponents, though nothing against using it against those on your same side. There were a good number more, like "utilizing celestial forces to trivialize the personal nature of the confrontations", but all in all the list seemed like the type of rules added to patch up instances where someone found a way to cheat. I might have gotten myself distracted a bit by this line of questioning.

Money, or credits actually, were much more straightforward. And yes, apparently there was a difference. Money was much less valuable and also less standardized. It made me wonder if the Market had been ripping me off. I'm sure there was more to it but I didn't have time to figure it out. As for credits, those were attainable from any decisive confrontation with a person or monster. Defeat wasn't enough, killing was required. And, while use of these credits was limited by one's level so that it wasn't a path to infinite power, that still gave a lot of reason for someone to go on a killing spree. It also explained why I got so many credits after the last round. Fortunately there were some stopgaps built in to keep high level players from farming lower level people or monsters for credits, though I didn't get a chance to ask about that either.

Donnie had arrived with a deeply distressed Veronica in tow. It was time to go save our healer.