DAY TWO—EIGHT DAYS UNTIL EXECUTION

System Alert: Good morning Avatar Silas! Please proceed to the launchpad. Any Avatars who fail to proceed to the launchpad within the next fifteen minutes will be docked 1,000 Renown.

You may return to your estate at any time, but may only leave the estate once a day. Thank you very much for your cooperation, and happy hunting!

I sat up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. My Constructor was still hovering overhead, so I tried to speak through the link, but it didn’t activate; Ezzie was still missing.

Her absence was getting a little worrisome. She might not have gotten much farther than I already had, but I would have preferred to learn from her mistakes, rather than make them myself. On that note, I checked on my hunger debuff as I left the lean-to.

{Famished}

All Primary Statistics reduced by 20%.

Experience gains reduced by 40%.

Renown gains reduced by 40%.

Well, shit. I checked the next icon and saw that I’d been awarded the well-rested buff, which took the edge off a little. But a five percent increase to experience and renown gains seemed pretty trivial in the face of a forty percent penalty. Plus a massive stat reduction.

A glowing circle appeared in the middle of my plot, with a low-hanging cloud lingering some twenty feet in the air above. I stepped into the circle and the cloud dropped over me, scooped me up and zoomed off.

This time, I sat down right off the bat, not wanting to be tossed back and forth as the cloud carried me to the grounds. It dropped me off exactly where it’d picked me up before, in the center of the altar with the purple wall shimmering behind me, some two-hundred feet off.

I headed down the hill toward the nearby town, which was considerably larger than Hillcrest, and very obviously under construction.

A wooden wall ran around the town, though there were so many gaps in the fortification as to render it totally useless. The houses were in a similar state, with the only finished homes standing near the center of the village.

After a five-minute walk, I made my way in between one of the gaps in the fence and headed for the town square, hoping to find something to fill my stomach. Instead, I found a mob of people crowding a single rider who looked about ready to fall off his horse.

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The man’s skin was blackened and blistered, his hair peppered with frost, and his right arm hung uselessly at his side, the whole limb rimed in an inch-thick layer of ice. The scene was dead quiet despite all the people, the only sound being the clacking of the man’s chattering teeth.

“Th-th-they’re coming, heading this way,” the man said from atop his mount. He almost slipped off, but two people in the crowd reached up to steady him.

“The ice!” someone said. “Heat some water, he’s half-frozen!”

“That’ll only make it—”

The crowd gasped and stepped back as they seemed to realize that the ice that covered the man’s arm had crept over his shoulder, and was now climbing up his throat.

“Who’s coming?” one of the villagers said. “Speak, man!”

“Th-th-the ice. The ice is—” he cut off as the frost sealed his lips. His eyes bulged, nostrils flared as he sucked a quick series of breaths through his nose. But the frost kept climbing, and soon he stared out from behind a mask of ice, his eyes wide but locked in place.

His chest pumped as he struggled to breathe, but quickly stilled. He slipped from his mount and nobody dared to catch him, the ice not so much as chipping as he impacted the cobbles beneath with a resounding crunch.

System Alert: you’ve triggered a Regional Event: The Creeping Ice.

Description: A rider used his last breath to warn the townsfolk that something is headed their way. Organize the residents of Rivercrest and build up the town’s defenses; you must repel the invading army.

Reward: Experience and Renown (Avatar’s reward scales with their contribution level).

Failure Penalty: -200 Renown for every NPC death, -500 Renown for every building lost, -2000 Renown if you fail to repel the invasion. Contributing nothing to the Invasion will result in severe penalties, including the forfeiture of a life.

Decline Penalty: Quest cannot be declined.

A timer followed the prompt:

Time Until Invasion: 71 hours, 59 minutes.

“What the hell?” I said aloud. Those penalties seemed absolutely enormous.

“Heh,” someone said from nearby. “There’s this week’s newbie.”

I turned to find two people sitting at a table outside a nearby inn, beers in hand, their table littered with empty mugs despite the early hour. A man, and a woman, both gaunt and tired-looking, dressed in rags that looked ready to rot off their bodies.

“Sure enough,” the woman said. “You can see yourself in the kid’s armor. So shiny.”

“Heh. You ready?” the man said. “Gotta get back to the grind.”

“Yeah,” the woman said. She tilted her mug back and drained it.

“Wait,” I said, as I noticed their Constructors. “Are you guys players?”

The woman spat on the ground. “Shove off, tourist. We’re not allowed to tell you anything, so don’t bother asking.”

They headed off without another word, trudging across the town square. It was odd, just how little attention they’d paid to the event unfolding before them. They must have seen it before.

My stomach growled and it seemed like the event was finished for now, so I poked my head into the inn the pair had been sitting in front of. Unfortunately, the common room was so thick with people that I couldn’t bring myself to push my way through them toward the bar. I slipped around the back instead, wondering if there was a rear entrance.

I found a trash bin out back, so I cracked the lid and jumped in, pulling it closed behind me. The food within was moldy, and the bottom layer of the dumpster was coated in two inches of what I hoped was beer, but the stuff on the top of the heap was still a better find than anything I’d ever come across out in the wild. I grabbed a roll that wasn’t too moldy and stuffed it into my mouth while I searched for a second.

Then the lid opened, and a woman shrieked as she realized I was inside, her basket tumbling from her hands. I stared up at her from a crouch, three-quarters of the moldy roll protruding from my mouth.

It was, in hindsight, not a great look.