Interlude 1

BONUS CHAPTER!

This is an interlude chapter I am adding to book 1 as I prep for release. You guys get to see it as a special perk for being part of my Patrreon. I'll be sharing a couple more bonus chapters, 1 per week. This interlude will be placed near the beginning, right after Lucas gets his tier-1 evolution.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

A flashing icon on one corner of a data feed notified Malric that he had a visitor. With a flick of webbed fingers and a pulse of water mana, he spun from the two dozen data feeds displayed on the curved wall of his opulent office. The space was flooded with clear, chilled water, the perfect density for a Zinth to focus.

Situated at the very top of the underwater office complex floating untethered in the Crown current of the Azure Mantle, the office enjoyed enormous windows in every other wall. They offered unobstructed views of the endless emerald seas that produced the vast wealth that had elevated his company to greatness.

Faint ripples of coral within his teal-colored skin pulsed slightly with annoyance at the interruption of his work. That only annoyed him further. One could not rise to his position without strict control over their visible emotions.

Selyra Venn, his personal assistant, the First Pearl of Neptrel Core Holdings, swam through the entrance. Dressed in a charcoal suit that flattered her amphibious humanoid figure in understated elegance, she crossed the huge office with her normal precise but fluid grace. Her jade-colored skin only rippled slightly with the tiniest eddies of aquamarine, confirming she was not worried, so she was not bringing word of any urgent emergency.

Her wide, reflective silver eyes contained blue-gold eddies that circled her large, black pupils. Few could meet his gaze directly, but Selyra never flinched. She was also one of the few people who ever used his first name, although never in public.

“Malric, I apologize for disturbing you, but the contestant monitoring pod found an eddy worth considering.”

“Already? The game barely started. Did Bravess authorize such a quick report?” The Undertide of the Crowned Hunt, was as methodical as he was risk averse.

“He is still awaiting the tertiary review team’s analysis and recommendations report,” Selyra said, her eyes flashing with amusement. “The tidekeeper of that pod forwarded the draft to me directly.”

Not surprising. Selyra’s network of unofficial informants probably extended even farther than the official intelligence-gathering networks she managed for him. “It’s that good?”

“I think you’ll want to see this,” she said, lifting a tiny spiral data shell. With a precise pulse of her mana, it activated and the other data feeds on his wall flowed aside to allow the new feed to take the central position.

It was one of the video feeds of the game world. Specifically, it showcased one of the Earth humans. He was inside a large cave, surrounded by ethereal monsters.

“Essence Wights,” Selyra supplied before he asked, then described them in brief, concise detail.

Malric studied the human with interest. Despite the enormous risk Malric had taken leveraging both his world-spanning corporation and most of his personal wealth to ensure Earth was chosen for the game, he knew little of the species living on the world.

That planet was a beautiful gem, with more water than 90% of their best-producing planets. Once inducted, it would generate staggering amounts of riches that he intended to oversee.

Humans were common enough across the multiverse. They bred well with an astonishing number of other races, helping them spread between worlds. They were extremely versatile, but often proved inadequate when competing against the sheer power of more specialized races. Still, humans were the tools he needed to deal with, but why would Selyra interrupt so early with a vid feed of one of the baby humans about to be killed?

He forced down his annoyance. Selyra never wasted her time, let alone his. This had to be important. So he watched as the man fought to escape the trap of the Wights. The man’s obvious courage pulled Malric into the contest, despite himself.

Clever. Resourceful. Daring. All traits he needed to find among the humans. Maybe . . . Except he could not imagine how the man could escape.

And yet, somehow, the man not only miraculously survived, but defeated all of the wights. Fascinating, and it suggested potential, but that was still not enough so early in the game. His attention started to wander again as the man reviewed his admittedly-excellent loot and explored the empty cave. He was about to chide Selyra, but the words died in his throat.

There!

The feed glitched in a way he’d never seen. One second, the man was stepping toward the rear wall of the cave, then the entire feed blinked to black, and he was stepping the other way. It was like they’d lost a couple seconds in which the man had spun around.

Malric leaned closer, his interest piqued at the unexpected pair of high-tiered loot boxes that appeared. What were those for?

The loot looked great and included several scrolls, but the audio accompanying the video grew garbled, making it impossible to hear what the scrolls said.

“Can’t we clean up the audio?”

“No,” Selyra said, huge, silver eyes glued to the feed, although she must have watched it at least once already. “Watch. Even the picture glitches a bit again.”

Indeed it did. Not as bad as before, but the view rippled with odd distortions that made it impossible to see clearly. He leaned closer, annoyed by the poor quality. His team were usually top-rate, even working with raw footage like that. He’d never seen a corrupted feed. Did they just not share those?

Likely. They knew better than to annoy him with sub-par results. He watched as if through a black blizzard as the man collapsed in a pool of sludge, his body oozing filth. The view was so distorted, he almost missed it, and it was so unexpected his mind almost refused to accept what he was seeing. When the truth finally clicked, he gasped.

“How?” he breathed, heart racing as his thoughts accelerated like a spooked school of minnows as he tried to figure out how an evolution could happen so early.

Selyra said with a triumphant smile, “The AI clearly understands how much of an exception this is.”

“Of course. It’s trying to obscure the truth. The glitches were on purpose.”

“I had no idea they were allowed such leeway,” she said.

“I’ve never seen something like this. Such an aberration will likely end in disaster, perhaps even trigger sanctions against the AI. It’s foolish to attempt such a blatant break of protocol, especially so early. It could spell disaster if it drew too much attention, and there’s more scrutiny of the games this time than ever.”

“You don’t think the Severants . . .” She bit off the words before saying more, although even that much of a slip was unusual for her. She shivered, face turning iridescence green, reflecting a spike of fear.

She was one of the few in the company who had ever heard the word severant, let alone understood a bit about the unprecedented danger they represented. Speaking of them was beyond dangerous. Not even he would risk swimming in some dark waters.

“You made the right choice bringing this to me,” he said, still watching with rapt attention as the man arose and cleansed the telltale filth. A tier-1 evolution within hours. What was the AI thinking? It was so reckless.

He’d heard rumors that this one pushed the boundaries more, and that it loved to experiment with much wider variables than usual, but he hadn’t paid the reports much heed. The quirks of the AI didn’t matter, as long as it delivered.

If the AI pushed the limits too far, it could wreck everything he’d staked so much on. Even the hint that such a thing could happen made him shiver. No, it was too much to even consider.

“The monitoring team gives him a 5% chance of surviving stage 1 with the limitations the AI would have been forced to impose,” Selyra said, snapping off the shell and floating a bit higher, back to business.

“That’s the most likely outcome,” Malric agreed, still watching the man, unable to keep from adding softly, “but what if?”

“Indeed,” she said, eyes bright with the possibility. Of everyone in the company, she best understood everything he’d gambled on the current game.

“Have Bravess task a double pod to study everything about this human.”

“He won’t like it. There are other promising candidates,” she said.

“Just make sure he does it. Maybe the man will die, but we need something extraordinary this time, and we cannot ignore even a hint of potential.”

“Understood.” She spun and swam rapidly toward the door, leaving Malric to his private, churning thoughts.

• * * *

Ysara barely suppressed an irritated sigh as she hovered in front of her workstation, high up the wall in the Shard Spinner office complex, deep within Arasha’s innards. She looked like the other fairies, sounded like them, and the feel of her mana would seem unremarkable to any of them. No one could possibly pierce her transformation.

Still, she couldn’t get sloppy. Setting her workstation so high above the others was already odd enough, but then again, Shard Spinners were an odd bunch. Manipulating secret spaces, pocket dimensions, and alternate realities tended to leave a mark.

Sighing might draw attention, though. No Shard Spinner worth their mana would ever complain about the chance to work on a brand new game world. The unrivaled opportunities and almost total lack of oversight meant they could push the limits of their chosen classes with little to no consequences while winning unprecedented experience. Even if a pocket dimension collapsed, no one cared. Not unless a popular contestant got lost in the process.

Pretending to focus on the secret pocket dimension she’d been building and populating with monsters and loot for the past three weeks, she growled to herself. “I should be home.”

The Tenth Horizon would be meeting soon, and that was where the real work would be taking place. With mana levels reaching optimal saturation, maybe the factions could finally unite behind their over-arching goal in a way they hadn’t in four millennia.

She should be there. What had she done to upset Elyndra so badly to deserve the unexpected assignment? She’d wracked her brains ever since getting shipped off to Arasha on her clandestine mission four months ago, but still couldn’t figure it out.

With an actual sigh that time, Ysara forced herself to focus. Babysitting Arasha might be a stupid waste of time, but she did love the work. Any other cycle, and she would have leaped at the chance for a little relaxed time to focus on her first passion.

Now it just rankled. No one had ever found corruption on a game world, so why bother? Trace amounts of corruption had been found on two newly-inducted planets in the past millennium, but of course those planets had been totally purged after the induction game before they could spread the taint.

So again, it was a waste of time.

All of a sudden, a secondary screen popped up on her main display, flashing an urgent yellow, visible only to her. Instantly, her surly thoughts vanished and she leaned forward, fairy wings beating faster as her heart rate accelerated.

Someone had breached the barrier and stepped into the inner world. Briefly, but any breach was unusual.

It probably meant nothing, but she pulled up a few additional screens, checking logs on the public worker feeds. Any breach should have triggered a dozen alerts, announcements, and notices, but the deeper she searched, the more puzzling the situation became.

Nothing. Not a single alert. If not for the custom rune sniffer she’d installed into the system, she never would have heard about the breach. If it really had happened, all information about it was being suppressed.

“Now isn’t that interesting,” she muttered to herself. Her mood lifted as she got to work. She would sniff out the truth and ensure the purity of the game remained unspoiled, even if it had to be cleansed by fire.