Chương 9

Despite saying that we would have to pay for our next drink, Bluemont had Mateus serve us all another glass of ice-cold beer. Water and food, also prepared by Mateus, were free, though. Courtesy of the Tutorial. As for the streaming, it was actually just like a reality show. A giant screen appeared in the middle of the inn, and everybody, including Bluemont and Mateus, turned toward it. A timer went down, and we all watched it tick down, mostly in silence, until it hit zero.

"Welcome," a warm male voice said, with a background of vigorous applause.

"Welcome to a new interplanetary war." The audience went crazy, but my eyes were transfixed on the male host. It wasn't a human. It was... His features were still humanoid, but he had long, pointy ears. I turned to Bluemont.

"Is that an elf?"

"Yeah, kid," Bluemont replied.

"Was your planet seeded with the knowledge of elves?"

"Seeded?" I frowned.

"Every planet in the multiverse shares most traits of their cultures with others. You'll be mostly aware of any new race you'll see, apart from humans. Humans are the most populous race in the multiverse, but we're far from the only one. What you're seeing is an elf. They are usually very prominent in the Interuniverse Federation. They are very powerful. Be very careful if you meet any during the tutorial, and even more careful if you were to survive the tutorial and get out." I looked at the elf.

He was sitting at a wooden desk, and the whole setup reminded me of a late-night show. In fact, the host said, "Let's welcome our first guest of the night before we move to the tutorial. Give it up for Skullthrax, General of the Sorvos Empire." The audience cheered quite reluctantly as an extremely tall skeleton in heavy armor — possibly ten or twelve feet tall — walked onto the set.

"Thank you for having me, Lotheriel."

"Thank you, Skullthrax." Lotheriel smiled. He had long, dark hair, smooth and shiny, that went back and over his shoulders. Other than that, he wore a tuxedo, which I found uncanny.

"So, it appears that the Sorvos Empire has selected their new target. You know we're not allowed to talk too much politics, but between friends — have you guys sorted it out?"

"The matters internal to the Sorvos Empire have indeed been settled," the skull said with a weird charisma that I couldn't place. I looked at Bluemont.

"Is that one of the things that we will have to fight in the war?"

"Yeah. The Sorvos Empire is an empire of undead," Bluemont said.

"They also have some demonic creatures in their midst, but it is mostly death knights in the upper echelons. And that guy — that guy has led more interplanetary conquests than I can remember. He was around when I went through the tutorial."

"Shit," I muttered, looking back at Skullthrax.

"Tell us about Earth, Skullthrax. Why did the Sorvos Empire choose this planet specifically? It is a heavily human-populated area, for those who don't know, with a decent amount of natural resources but no mana." The audience gasped when they heard no mana.

"Well, Earth might be very low on mana, but we think that a good number of people will survive their tutorial. We're more interested in the human capital, if you catch my drift." I personally didn't catch the drift. Lucas chimed in.

"If these are undead, and he's mentioning human capital — is the joke that he wants to turn any tutorial survivors into undead?"

"Yes," Bluemont said in disgust. I turned to the television screen. Was this guy openly admitting that he wanted to just murder everybody and turn us into undead? What kind of fucked-up show was this? But the audience seemed thrilled, and they applauded and even shouted.

"Calm down, calm down," Lotheriel said, and turned to Skullthrax.

"So, Skullthrax. General Skullthrax."

"Oh, you can just call me Skullthrax, Lotheriel, don't worry," the undead replied.

"Well, we know that the Sorvos Empire is really good at war. Do you think the Earthers will put up any meaningful resistance?" Skullthrax, with his undead eyes, looked at the ceiling, pensive.

"Well, I believe that they're not very well-equipped for this kind of war." The audience seemed to deflate at that.

"However," the skull said, "I have to give it to the Earthers. They seem like a very motivated kind of human. Their planet has actually been through more wars than the Sorvos Empire, if you can believe that. They were quite the war-hungry people, much more than your average human. So I really hope that they will put up a good fight, in the dungeon and outside, for everybody to witness." The audience clapped. I felt patronized.

I wasn't even sure patronized was the right word when this guy was talking about the eventual slaughter of Earth's inhabitants.

"A little bird told me that we're going to see the Earthers fight some Undead very soon!" Lotheriel added.

"Indeed," General Skullthrax smiled.

"Well, Skullthrax, old friend," Lotheriel smiled, "you know the rules. It's been a pleasure having you here. But now we have to talk about the dungeon, and you guys can't really know about it." Lotheriel winked, and the audience laughed. I turned to Bluemont.

"Is it implied that they will know about the fucking stream this openly?"

"As long as the AI doesn't catch them blatantly breaking the rules, there's nothing that will be done to them," our guide explained.

"This is terrible," Hailey said while the giant undead rose from his seat and waved warmly at the audience.

"This... We'll have to fight that?"

"Don't worry about it for now. It's not coming yet," Bluemont told her. Hailey did not look reassured by that.

"And now, for the stream — we have a supercut of all the most interesting entrance tests!" I leaned in on the table, and I watched as many different scenarios appeared one after another. The reel gave me the shivers. The first one was an Indiana Jones-like escape from a giant rolling boulder. It ended up killing the first group entirely. There were twenty people there, including children.

Five more tests like this got superimposed one over the other, occupying the entire screen, showing five other groups perishing in the same exact way. The production team had added splashing and fart sounds to it, with the audience in the studio laughing. I watched in horror. I looked, full of hate, at the elf. Next, some people were given a bow and were shooting at a target. If they missed the target, the arrow would magically turn in the air and go through them.

They could keep shooting until they hit the target — a scarecrow — three times, or until they were dead. A few dramatically passed this test, with the audience awwing and cheering, and looking quite disappointed when one of the winners actually died, since he had been peppered by too many arrows even after winning. He deflated on the ground of the same yellow prairie we had fallen on. And upon him came some boar-looking creatures that started nibbling at his corpse.

"Holy fuck," I said. One horrendous show after another came on, edited with ridiculous sounds for comedy, or with dramatic music. I was transfixed by all of it. I felt like puking. I felt like smashing the table. I felt like crying at the sheer madness of all of this. The others were all in various states of shock, but something about this stirred a deep sense of injustice that made my entire body tremble. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

I felt Bluemont's hand on my shoulder. But instead of reassurance, he said, "Burn those images in your mind. Never forget." I looked at the middle-aged man, exchanging a glance with him, and then my eyes returned to the television screen. Now it had shifted to the ones who had passed the test in the best of ways. One guy used several rocks to create a ramp that made the giant boulder jump right over him, and then he casually walked to the end of the path, looking around.

He had been the only one to survive his own test. In another test, a woman put three arrows right through the scarecrow's head, then told everybody not to shoot, and, despite being at a great distance from all the other scarecrows, shot arrows at all of them, saving about thirty people. Holy shit. That woman is good. She must be an Olympian or something. One after another, I witnessed people displaying Earth's excellence in its best form. At last, I saw a very familiar scenario.

I felt a knot tie in my throat as I watched myself watch Gina helplessly fall to her death. They had only cut the very beginning, flashing the camera on my hopeless eyes as Gina died. I don't know how, but there were videos of me and Gina chatting on the rest of the screen, faded at the sides while the main trial took place in the middle. It was footage from our office time, before all of this. The audience, which had been mic'd up apparently, awed, and a few were even moved by what they saw.

They cheered for me as I went toward my co-workers, trying to save them.

"Look at us going, Hailey. Look at us going," Tina said. But I looked at the table.

"John?" Hailey got up from her chair and came to me, putting her hands on my back.

"John, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I replied. There was a good chance that all of this was being recorded as well. I didn't wanna give these monsters the satisfaction of seeing me broken. The audience cheered, stunned to see that I had made the cut at the very last second. When I touched the door, the screen went white, and it read: Congratulations, you passed the Entrance Test. The cameras went back to the studio, and Lotheriel was clapping.

"Amazing, amazing," he said.

"Isn't that diver amazing? That's Diver John, for all of you." The audience cheered.

"John, John, John." I did not know how to react. I felt disembodied for a second, as if I were watching myself from the outside.

"Well, that was the last of the divers. We'll be organizing some panels for you guys to hear from them personally. You can start the vote on who you would like to see interviewed next." The audience cheered, and then Lotheriel looked straight at the camera.

"As for you divers, who are probably watching this right now — you will see your streamer panel appear after this broadcast. There, you'll see how many people are following your stream. For now, all other streaming functions have been disabled until you reach the second floor. But remember..." And Lotheriel stopped himself, letting the audience answer for him.

"If you're entertaining, you're surviving," they all chimed. Lotheriel looked very satisfied with that.

"Exactly. If you're entertaining, you're surviving. So give us a good show." The credits rolled, and the broadcast abruptly came to an end.

"There are more transmissions that will start playing soon, with different formats. That was the official one," Bluemont said.

"The guy you just saw is the main host for the streaming service." The streamer panel appeared after the broadcast, like the elf said. There was a follower count, and everything else greyed out until the second floor. I closed it without even looking at the number.

"What the actual fuck?" I said.

"What the fuck was that? This can't be what we're going to live through from now on," I told Bluemont.

"This is insanity."

"Yeah, and that insanity is gonna be with you every day from now on. You were part of the highlight of the opening show, John," Bluemont said seriously.

"All of you, really."

"So you know what that means? We're famous?" Tina asked.

"No." Bluemont shook his head.

"You have a target on your back. All the people shown in the first streaming show become big, live targets for diver killers. So you guys just became prey."

"So not only are we going to have to fight some fucking undead monsters," Lucas swore loudly, "now we also have to worry about the rest of the fucking humans. The rest of the fucking people from our planet." Lucas shook his head.

"Yeah. You will find out that until the tutorial is completed, your biggest enemy is not the Sorvos Empire. It's the people around you. They're more dangerous than monsters. Monsters will always try to kill you — unless you meet NPCs, which will not."

"NPCs?" Tina frowned.

"Non-player characters," I told her.

"But Bluemont — what now? What the fuck are we going to do?"

"Well, you're locked in the tutorial for nine floors, and the tutorial is a place separate from Earth. I didn't tell you this before, but the war will happen on Earth. You don't have to worry about that now. Instead, your main objective is to get stronger. You must spend every single waking moment thinking about how you're gonna get stronger and get ahead." The conversation went on for a while, with us commenting on the people who had appeared on the highlight reel.

Bluemont said that more details about them would appear in time — that the show tried not to overcommit on any specific diver at the beginning, since the chances of those people just dying like dogs in the first days of the tutorial were sky-high. I was struck by what Bluemont had said, that our objective here was to get as strong as we could. And that's when I remembered the reward from the B-Ranked Treasure Chest. The item, the Team Lead Badge, had given me a new tab in my Status.

Now I had a Team Management Panel. I opened it. TEAM MANAGEMENT PANEL Team: [Unnamed] — Members: 5/5 Team Lead: John O'Donnell Group XP Share: ACTIVE — kills are split among all members within 300 feet. I skimmed the names of the others, and I looked for what I was searching for. Synergy Report. The Synergy Report is a document in your Team Management Panel that will fill with advice on how to make sure your team is synergizing the best.

Each member will have a Synergy Score, and you will receive a report on their performance that will be updated as your team faces more challenges. I was curious to see who in the team would get the highest synergy score. Would it be me? Lucas, perhaps? Or Tina? I opened the Synergy Report. Synergy Score Team Lead: John O'Donnell — 11/100 What? My eyes were glued to that number. What the actual fuck? How could it be so low? I looked down.

Lucas Dawkins — 23/100 Tina Martinelli — 32/100 Marcus Jackson — 34/100 Damn it, I thought. These scores were shit. How could they be so low? It made no sense. I imagined that at least Hailey, being the healer, would have a great score. Hailey Marie — 5/100 Holy fuck. Were we doing that poorly? This made no sense. I started reading the actual reports. I read the reports a few times. They were interminably long.

Like, pages worth of comments on each of us, going in the specifics of what we had done wrong during our engagements today. Initially, I had thought that the Team Lead Badge had no business being a B-Ranked Item. It appeared I was wrong. This skill was extremely useful, I decided, but if I tried to do all of this by myself, it was never going to work. Everybody was still at the inn, chatting with each other about the divers we had just seen on the screen. I interrupted them.

"Guys, I got this item that has given me a whole assessment of our group work."

"An assessment?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, so it's like analyzing how we fought," I explained. It shouldn't be a problem that I'm telling them, I thought. If it had been about my skill, or anything else, I would have been more secretive. But there was no point in hiding the reports themselves. So, after a little of fiddling and getting Bluemont's help, I managed to share them with the entire group.

"Wow, this is very in-depth," Tina said.

"And I didn't get the worst score."

"Oh my God, why is my score so low?" Hailey asked.

"This makes no sense."

"Well, I was reading the reports, and it appears that this is mostly a grade on how we're working as a group. It's not really indicative of how we're doing individually. So you should take it as more of an assessment of our— Well, it is an assessment of our synergy."

"Oh, I see," Hailey said, and she started reading. We all started going through them. But I saw that everybody was tired, and we weren't really getting anywhere, even after half an hour. It felt like one of those useless meetings past 8: 00 p. m.

"Guys, if you want, I have some insights into the reports. I think it's late, and reading all this stuff right now is impossible."

"Please," Hailey said, raising her hands.

"My head is killing me."

"So what it's saying, for example, for me, is that despite having so much firepower, I'm just a melee auto-attacker, essentially — to put it in gaming terms. I don't really have any skills, any crowd control, area-of-effect skills. And, despite the fact that, uh, our team..." I was struggling to explain — but our team essentially resembled one of the games I had played the most, and the problem was that we were all doing our own thing.

"If you're up for it, we should try something different tomorrow, at least for what concerns my role." Marcus and Lucas perked up. I think they had a vague idea of where I was going. So I said, "If you have watched The Bear—" I waited, and everybody answered positively.

"So you know how they implement this thing called a French brigade, where everybody sort of has a role, and, you know, they're calling each other 'chef,' and they do all this crap?"

"Yeah," Tina said.

"What about it?"

"So our group really resembles this MOBA game, and if we just divide our roles accordingly, it would be much, much easier to raise our synergy, I believe. Of course, this also depends on whether we can find the right skills to make our group work, which, well — I don't know how to do that."

"Well," Bluemont said, "about that. Alphas drop skill books half of the time. I would usually never advise a group to just hunt alphas randomly. But as your guide, I can tell you: you guys should probably do that. With John's skill able to blow up alphas like that, you should probably focus on hunting alphas only."

"Oh, I see," I said.

"So if we do that, we might get skill books that will help with our synergy as well. It would give us more options compared to other groups."

"Yeah. And your group is small enough that you might get a good number — a good variety when it comes to skills, individually."

"I'm up for it," Marcus said.

"And I'm good with ceding the project manager title to you, John. I think it's the best thing." I felt relieved, because nobody looked like they disagreed. I turned to Hailey.

"And I think that you're the one who's gonna benefit from this the most. Your role as a support — or enchanter, if we wanna call it that — will rely on having sort of a wide arsenal of things. So you will be taking a more active role as we go forward, as long as we find the right skill books for it. It will feel awkward at first, I think, but I'm pretty sure we can make this work."

"Let's do it then." Lucas nodded.

"If you actually manage to do this," Bluemont said, looking at me, "it will also open more Class paths for you all."