The epic scale of the battle before Beze's eyes was matched only by the equally epic struggle in her heart as she watched the fight unfold.
A colossal creature, which could only be described as a Dragon, shook the earth with every flap of its wings. The resulting gale shattered stones and any soldiers who failed to escape its path, scattered the steel-clad behemoths like splinters caught in a hurricane.
Any attempt to shoot a massive ballista bolt to the soaring creature was met with a gust of wind that inevitably deflected the projectile. Even if, by some miracle, a deflected bolt did reach the Dragon's monstrously large body, it would do nothing and shatter against its impenetrable scales, scattering harmlessly across its hide like a feather hitting a concrete wall.
The vast army, composed of a dozen different races, seems to melt away before the Dragon's might. Bolts of lightning that cracked through the skies were useless against the living king of all magic. Attempts to tear the dragon's flesh from within merely drained the mages of all their mana.
An airship, unleashing the full power of steam-tech through primitive pseudo-machine guns and enchanted alchemical fire, was nothing more than a firework display in the face of the apex predator. A predator of the skies, which, a moment later, slammed its massive bulk into the swaying cabin of the airship, causing it to erupt in a crimson flower.
Another moment later, the scene of an entire army's total rout by a single being paused, and the Child's voice murmured a phrase that, unfortunately, the Players had grown accustomed to, though they still disliked hearing it.
“No, no, it wasn't like that at all… Perhaps we should start over?”
In another instant, the paused scene before Beze’s eyes turned gray, then blurred into a dull ripple, and finally, as if being squeezed through a garden hose under pressure, transformed back into the familiar view of a floating island. Seeing Jabberwocky standing before her, whose smile, sent a jolt of irritation through Beze.
“The miracle didn't happen again this time it seems,” Jabberwocky murmured, not as a question, as he already knew perfectly well how Beze's attempt had gone.
“The damn thing is impossible to hurt!” Beze spat on the ground in frustration.
“Time and time again we’ve tried, we have even unlocked like two hundred different types of soldiers, and they're all useless! Last time, I caught it in a [Time Stasis];we chipped away at it for twenty minutes and didn't even pierce an inch of its hide!”
“What did you expect?” Jabberwocky shrugged philosophically. “The Dragon was highly regarded by the Enemy for a reason… Well, it was.”
Taking a couple of steps forward, Beze aborted what she was about to do, that is, re-arranging Jabberwocky’s face, before she let out another forceful exhale as she looked around.
The scene of the [Tempest of Time] was much the same, unchanged no matter how many times she took sight of it. It was a sight that Beze had grown very accustomed to. A swirling storm of every color, as if someone had dumped every color they could imagine, and then some more, into a whirlpool. Here and there, colors would flare slightly as new Players entered their own trials or returned from them, most whistling happily, some with looks of disappointment and focused determination.
A few were sporting the same expression as Beze, having tried their hand once more against another boss and found their skills wanting.
When the Alliance Players had finally dealt with the aftermath of the Infernal raid, mostly through a couple of retaliatory raids and their proper consolidation into an alliance, albeit one not entirely free of behind-the-scenes intrigue.
After all, the Infernals were seen by the Players less as a force of cosmic evil and more like a passing barbarian horde, something you could influence by offering a few ideas for a good raid, or something you could bribe to go away when you didn't have the time or energy to assemble your army yet again.
That was why they turned their attention to the Child once again.
The Child, in turn, responded to this attention with joy, not only handing out entire levels for a two-second question-and-answer game but also sharing the game's lore, and what a story it was. It was a story of a war, of a disruption to the flow of time, and of how the Players, by interrupting the experiment of the Mad Prophet, had accidentally caused numerous problems with the passage of time, tying countless different timelines together.
And since the Players had caused it, it was up to them to untangle it.
Upon hearing this, the Players had initially braced themselves, praying to the Angels—whom one didn't even need faith to believe in, in this game, as believing in something you know exists is rather silly; before preparing for yet another boss battle. But as it turned out, the number of mini-games in this world was off the charts.
Cooking, Smithing, and Sewing were practically mini-games in themselves, hardcore crafting simulators, but the [Tempest of Time] offered something new. A simulation of Strategic Warfare, and one with seemingly infinite flexibility.
The Child knew of the timelines of different worlds intertwining, rendering historic battles meaningless. Armies were composed randomly, commanders who had never met sat at the same table, and adversaries who likely didn't even know of each other's existence were now locked in a pointless battle that never actually happened. Therefore, the Players were offered a method of trial and error to ‘fix’ said mess.
The Child would share a few known facts, like ‘General Aruin possessed the strength of a thousand men’ or ‘elves had heightened senses’, and Players would be forcibly sent to a character editor. There, based on their understanding, they would select character stats, equipment, and abilities and create said units, their creation of which would be entered into a shared database for Players.
After creating these units to the best of their abilities, players would define their combat group composition and battle plan, and then watch the outcome of the simulated battle.
If they were victorious and met a series of mandatory conditions, Players were rewarded with a permanent increase to a relevant stat, skill progression, and sometimes could even extract the equipment they created at an appropriate level – provided they completed all additional objectives of course. If on the other hand they lost their simulated battle, or the Player-created armies didn't meet certain conditions, or if the destined winner unexpectedly lost, the Player would fail.
And then, as if to rub salt in their wounds, they would hear a soon-to-be familiar rejoinder from the Child; “No, no, it wasn't like that at all… Perhaps we should start over?”
They would then return to reality, or well, to the [Tempest of Time], with a small consolation prize for their attempt.
And there were various simulations that a Player could choose to participate in.
Most are small skirmishes, where there were a measly dozen units involved, then there were the large skirmishes, where a hundred units or more could be involved in a single fight. And then there were the most difficult simulations, something akin to ‘boss battles’. Epic clashes between two huge armies, fights between two titanic monsters, or, as in Beze's case, something in between — an army versus something that could only be called divine judgment.
Beze had been hitting her head against the impossible wall again and again, even Jabberwocky had, and despite just how impossible it had seemed, the two kept on doing so. Simply because the reward was just that tempting.
The reward for victories in each of the simulations was unique each time; some received a unique title, some a simple stat increase, others a unique skill, and even a usable ability. One player even managed to score an entire bag of [Adamantite], it was an impressively hard material, capable of being forged into the best weapons or armors… Too bad that at the current level of [Metallurgy] the Players could access, the metal was very much nothing more than a very impressive, and unique door stopper.
Heating the metal for a week without a break didn't even make it warm, that was why, currently, the metal was hidden in some deep vault, until there comes a day when someone could actually make use of it.
Now, if only the Child would be so kind as to make choosing which Boss to face possible. Each and every time a Player entered a ‘Boss Raid’ the simulation that they would face would be unique, making it impossible to ‘grind’ the instances, beating a scenario means that said scenario would never be repeated to the Player that beat them, and any others.
Grinding unique rewards from them wasn't possible.
Of course, with the number of Players challenging the [Tempest of Time], it wasn’t just once or twice that two or more Players would find themselves challenging the same scenario at the same time… But, only one Player would ever get the reward.
It was quite the conundrum, cooperate and risk another Player getting the reward? Or not cooperate and slow through a scenario again and again? Thankfully, solely due to the fact that the reward from completing a scenario being random, the Players have all decided that cooperation would be the smart thing to do.
After all, what if someone got a server-wide buff of five percent to attack power for completing a scenario? For such a hope, it was worth trying to work together.
True, the hope was slim, but the probability that the victorious Player would receive a hundred percent attack buff for all Allied Players, was not zero. Thus, Player cooperation proceeded, even if very sluggishly, causing progress against bosses to stall much more than even with the Raid Boss.
That's why for a week, all Beze did was strategize and put into practice, over and over again, how to defeat an invincible, flying, fire-breathing machine the size of a medium-sized aircraft carrier. One that swatted away any attacks without even seeming to notice them.
“I honestly said I don't know, you can stop glaring at me,” Jabberwocky said, catching Beze's attention once again, it seems that he had taken her continued silence as annoyance. He shrugged, his whole demeanor showing just how uninvolved he was in this matter, crossing his arms over his chest as if to shield himself from the very thought of spending hours trying to come up with a solution to such a convoluted puzzle when he had enough problems of his own.
And problems he did have.
After the players had dealt with the aftereffects of the Infernal attack, they were pleased to discover that in response to their actions, in addition to a whole new game mode, they also got new additions to the standard gameplay; with three new locations the size of the Ruined City added right away, locations that could be accessed using the Portal.
The Empty Sanctuary, where players happily explored every nook and cranny, searching for new spells, and two others.
When the Players journeyed to the Expedition Site, a place the pirates could only shrug at when questioned with the simple reply of ‘well, there must have been some expedition once, we're simple folk, not scholars of history’. There, any unprepared Players received a harsh slap of reality.
Not from the demons, whose numbers and complexity had unexpectedly skyrocketed, which the Players were definitely prepared for, but from the Infernals.
While the Alliance Players had been using the portal that Jabberwocky had made to get to the Ruined City, the Infernals hadn't forgotten their original plan to use the Pirate Ships. And since they had managed to repair one by crushing a Pirate Faction that was unlucky enough to be left behind, and stupid enough not to join with the Alliance, they now had the means to travel between locations without needing to play at Jabberwocky's neutrality.
True, unlike the portals, airship travel took time, but time was something they have plenty of. While the other Players were running around the Ruined City, the Infernals had been systematically spreading across the Expedition Site, a fact that the newly-arriving Players were unaware of.
Moreover, since the Infernals weren't locationally locked by the portals, and the airship, unlike the portal, could move about quite freely, the bulk of the Infernal forces had relocated to the Expedition Site. Where they immediately dug in, much to the displeasure of the Players who wanted to explore the new location, and the joy of those no longer threatened by constant demon-worshiper raids.
So, after lengthy discussions and some scowling, the major representatives of the Alliance wrote off the location as ‘lost’ and left it in the possession of the Infernals.
The next location, however, the Invasion Gate, was a location neither the Infernals nor the Alliance Players were willing to give up so easily. The place where demons first invaded paradise sounded way too lucrative to give up. Who knows what kind of artifacts or lore could be found there?
So, while the Expedition Site was rarely visited by the Alliance, except for some expedition sent by an intrigue-loving faction leader hoping to set the Infernals on a rival, or to bribe their way out of another raid; the Invasion Gate was fully contested by both major player groups.
Right now, by this point, they had progressed from occasional raids and retaliatory strikes to a full-blown semi Cold War, complete with maps, fronts, and even aerial reconnaissance of enemy positions. This, in turn, meant that to avoid being outmatched by the enemy, who had an airship, Jabberwocky decided to force the issue of the Alliance Players having one of their own.
But this meant some Players would have to lose ‘their’ pirate factions for the greater good and hand over spare airship parts to their allies; needless to say, no one was willing to agree to this. It gave Jabberwocky a headache worthy of a real diplomat, forced to juggle the interests of six different factions, whilst working toward lessening the influence of a couple of. Perhaps, even making sure that six becomes five, or even lesser.
Worst, he has to do so in a way that no one would be pointing their fingers at him as the culprit, or remember that no one had actually elected him as leader of the Alliance. And that the neutrality of his land was only guaranteed by a gentlemen's agreement between all factions of the Alliance.
And he has to do this carefully, as Jabberwocky's own combat forces were meager, consisting only of those the factions had agreed to lend him. His own force, his ‘Knights’ and ‘Paladins’ numbered too few to say that he’s a faction in and of himself.
In short, everyone had their hands full, even without preparing for some grand offensive or a new boss battle. So Beze, forced to bang her head against the ‘Great Dragon’ problem again and again, was completely lost in the background.
Juggling these thoughts in her mind several times, Beze sighed, shook her head, and simply shrugged at Jabberwocky. “Okay.”
Jabberwocky, in response, waved a hand, thought for a second, then furrowed his brow.
“Listen, try asking Yersinia… Maybe she'll have some ideas.”
It was a long shot, but at this point, Beze would settle for even being able to see the target.
—
One could say I was on cloud nine, but that would be inaccurate, as the game world had only one sky. For now, perhaps.
The Players were doing what I was basically wanted them to do, but in their own way. In other words, I had achieved a perfect symbiosis with them — what I had long desired had finally come to pass.
The Players had conducted a grand battle across half the game world, between the Infernals and those who chose not to become demon-worshipers. Moreover, the fully established transport artery, from the Portal to the now multiple flying Airships to even just the humble beaten path in between Player bases, also meant that the Players could now move from one camp to the other.
Even the mark of being a Demon-worshiper could be washed away!
One only needed to go to the Child and repent for their misdeeds, and the mark of the demon-worshiper would be lifted. Go and enjoy the game as a normal person, you're free! And if you wanted the opposite, just head to the Infernal camp, where they had found a [Demon Contract], and sign it, and there you go, now you're a demon-worshiper
What contract, you ask? Well, let's just say it wasn't originally at the Expedition Site, but if it was unearthed along with the Infernal’s hunts for treasures, does it really matter? And whether it appeared there during the location's design or at the moment I realized the Infernals were likely to completely take over the area, that's unimportant now.
The main thing is that it fit the logic of the game world and allowed me to establish a proper game function for regular Players to transition into the ranks of the Infernals easily.
It probably would have been even more effective to create a similar [Angelic Contract] to complement the set with the demonic one, one that would allow the Infernals to become normal Players again, rather than locking the function behind the Child. But well, putting such a contract in the Ruined City would be quite worthless, and putting it in the Expedition Site would just result in Ja-Raja to bury the thing.
It's also worth considering that while the concept of a ‘demonic contract’ was a known concept and practically a standard for dealing with demons, at least from the perspective of most fantasy settings, the opposite was not true for angels. They were always more about ‘true good’ and all that ‘self-sacrifice out of free will’. Not exactly the fantasy race that would deal out contracts
So I decided to lean more toward the concept of ‘repentance and forgiveness’, and the fact that some Infernals were sent by Ja-Raja himself to switch to the side of ‘good’ and feed him information… Well, information warfare wasn't invented yesterday, and no leader of the Alliance would be stupid enough to let the ‘repentant’ Infernals near anything important.
Besides, this is a newborn Child, what did you expect from it? An all-knowing divine judgment?!
Speaking of the Child!
When I first created the Child, I threw in a hefty bonus for the Players, whole levels for minimal effort on their part. Just for answering some fundamental question that the Child would process, present to me as a general idea, and then I would greenlight the information transfer to other AIs. The AI's training didn't happen by brute-forcing an inhuman number of GPUs with countless random calculations trying to guess how to churn out fitting answers to half-formed questions, like the Chatbots of the past.
Instead, it fully analyzed information to determine how the person interacting with the child, that is, the Players, would react to a query from the Child, that is, a random question from the Child. In other words, I built a full-fledged neural network where the ‘thinking neurons’ were the Players themselves, eager for extra level gains, which caused the average Player level to skyrocket.
I was prepared for many things to result from these interactions; that the Players would decide to role-play to the max with the Child from the perspective of their ‘character’ rather than normal people. Or that the Child would be locked away in the deepest treasury and only accessible with Jabberwocky's permission. Or that the Infernals would try their hardest to kill the Child or abduct him for their own purposes.
I was ready for it all.
After all, an endless source of experience for everyone, with no one left behind, and a way for Infernals to find their way ‘back’ to the world of regular Players, I was prepared for all possibilities.
What I wasn't prepared for, was the… warmth with which the players would embrace the Child.
And not just for the benefit of ample levels that the Child provided, but also during rare moments of calm when the Child wasn't handing out levels; Players still came to chat with it.
At first, I thought the Players were testing whether the Child would give out rewards despite no quest being given; but after everyone understood that cheating the system and coaxing new levels out of the Child wasn't going to work…
They still continued to talk to the Child.
And while I shut down all attempts to pry any lore bits out of the Child with an iron fist, at best reducing it all to a template of ‘something happened, but I don't remember’; I really didn't know how to react to the fact that the Child was being drawn into full-fledged conversations.
So, after a few days of observation, I began to involve the Child, or well, the AI behind the construct. I weaved into the conversations those questions I had previously told it to save for quests that rewarded Players with experience for coherent answers.… And the Players didn't notice the trick, continuing to respond in much the same way they did when they did it for the Quest rewards.
This, in turn, accelerated the Child's learning process by an order of magnitude, increasing its ‘throughput’ of information. And it ultimately led to the point where practically all the main basic concepts had already been learned by the AI. What is ‘cold’, ‘up’, even emotions like ‘fear’ and what is ‘scary’, all of this has been analyzed by the AI model.
And in the end, I came to a problem I hadn't considered before – what should the Child learn now, after mastering the basic concepts of this world?
Of course, even with basic concepts, the Child's learning wasn't complete, and we were only talking about basic concepts. But how to lead up to the Child asking questions on abstract concepts like ‘is it better to torture a criminal as punishment or show mercy for rehabilitation?’. Or ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?’.
I have no idea.
The Child, after all, was created as a temporary measure to train other AIs and had excelled in its mission, making my army of subordinate AIs operate with abstract concepts like ‘within reasonable limits’ and ‘a little bit more, but not too much’ with an enviable understanding that you don't often find even in humans. But where, and more importantly, how, to guide the Child next was unclear to me.
Should I just let the Child talk to other Players and ask more ‘difficult’ questions? But in that case, I probably needed some kind of divider, some milestone, so that Players didn't just one day come to the Child and get hit with questions of morality and cosmological phenomena.
That would be jarring, to say the least.
They needed to feel and know that the Child had fundamentally changed and be able to clearly link that change to some achievement or event. And figuring out what could serve as that achievement or event, without it feeling like yet another Player lucked into it, was what I had to think about right now.
At least when it came to the [Tempest of Time], I didn't have to worry about the location at all. My other brilliant attempt to offload my work of figuring out how paranormal races should move, fight, and think, dumped onto the Players, and was swallowed with absolute enthusiasm, which I could only envy.
At my own genius, that is.
After all, I knew that map and scenario editors, and even simple modding, extended the life of games and kept Players' interest alive at virtually no cost to the developers. Shifting the workload of professional developers to expand game diversity and content onto the shoulders of free enthusiasts; but knowing it and seeing it from the developer's side were two completely different things.
The Players pounced on the toolset I gave them like a school of piranhas, then dissected and analyzed them to a level that left even me, with all my divine abilities and no less divine technical support from [Titanomachy], blinking stupidly. While I was hoping the Players could somehow determine the specific engagement distance for Elven archers, a huge sub-forum swelled up like an atomic mushroom cloud, where Players were now writing doctoral dissertations on how deep-set orcs' eyes should be to protect their faces from glancing axe blows and whether a full phalanx of heavy dwarven infantry could be sustained with mushroom farms or if they needed to have developed cave animal husbandry.
I provided the Players with a set of tools that I had initially wanted to restrict as much as possible, not out of a desire to remain the sole and supreme creator of this world, but because I hadn't even thought about many things. Who needs equipment choice? Let's just throw in a couple dozen options and let the Players choose whether they need a sword or a spear. Then I came to the realization that equipment couldn't be so simplistic.
Even if the [Orcish Scimitar] and the [Dwarven Berdysh] were basically the same model as the [Elven Sword] and the [Dragonid Halberd], I had to run the AIs at full throttle to create new and different models that were essentially the same object, just with different appearances and designs.
Then I realized that if Players ever encountered these objects in reality, they would quickly become disappointed that the [Legionary Gladius] had the exact same reach as the [Pirate Bastard Sword], so I had to start thinking about their weight and length. Then I had to think about what resources players would use to make them. That and many more questions began pounding on the door…
In the end, I cursed in the most dramatic way I could and decided that if the Players were creating this problem for me, then they would solve it themselves. Here are fifty different materials, here's a virtual workshop, and three overworked AIs prepared for you to describe your fantasy weapon production dreams.
You're on your own from here. Go wild.
And go wild they indeed did.
I even felt a bit of resentment that the Players actually figured things out on their own.
Although I was glad they were tackling these problems, at the same time, I was slightly miffed that I wasn't the only one who could create entire locations and storylines out of nothing. But this time, I managed to convince myself that, unlike the Players, I had work to do, and besides, Togra was only half-finished, so I shouldn't get bogged down in details like the design of an [Orcish Scimitar].
Instead, I gradually began to integrate the Player-created designs, distributing them surreptitiously to new Players so that everyone didn't have to reinvent the wheel; tying it to the idea that the Child was ‘remembering’ all these things.
Then I started cramming more and more editors into the Players’ hands.
Here's an armorer's workshop, here's a race editor, here's a hero editor, here's tactics management. A little more, and I was ready to give the players control over geostrategy, which they would also have to create themselves, before stopping.
After all, if I completely offloaded all my work onto the Players, [Titanomachy] might start to wonder if they really needed me and stopped at battle simulations. For which I periodically set conditions, like ‘at least half archers’, ‘unit surrounded’, or ‘Duar Twiceborn has an impenetrable shield’. All to give the Players the idea that I hadn't completely abandoned them but was simply giving them the opportunity to ‘reconstruct’ or ‘recreate’ existing battles.
I don't think all the Players saw it that way, but no one voiced any complaints.
Meanwhile, the AIs, beneath the clouds, were busy with their own affairs. After a new simulation, they would replicate the scene the Players had painted and then start introducing random variables. Here, the terrain was rocky; there, the spears were ten centimeters shorter, elsewhere, a Hero's skill was swapped for another, and they would run new simulations, compiling a massive dataset before presenting it to me.
A dwarven commander should always be on high ground, orcs should protect their necks, and elves with magic resistance are a failed build, so I could add this information to my vast but rather empty data stores.
Repeat this a hundred thousand times, and I started to get a framework of the monsters, NPCs, and historical notes that I hadn't created in a rush, but now had some kind of logical basis, which I now used. Signia, the not-quite-elven ship captain, would now get an improved sense of balance and equilibrium, and since elves have an improved sense of balance, we now know that our elves are good sailors.
And since they are sailors and elves, their ships are living things, not made of sawn-up trees.
They drink the water they travel on, and for fertilizer, well, some will carry special materials, some will be sustained by magic, and some renegade elves might prefer to fertilize their living ships with hapless travelers. And so, a random detail created by a Player trying to figure out how to get his elven archers to shoot while running led to a whole cascade of interesting ideas.
So the Players were fulfilling their function a hundred percent, and even gradually dealing with the new locations I had left for them, pushing each other back and forth, and even getting close to taking on the big bosses of those locations.
And this time, Togra was almost finished. I was ready.
I was ready.
I was ready.
I repeated this mantra, feeling the tension build in my mind.
Can one ever be ready for the Players?
I was ready for anything… Maybe if I repeat that enough, I would believe them.
Alas, reality is always disappointing.
I was ready for everything… Except for the Players scouring the underground, starting to use the explosive potions they got from the floating islands to blast the foundations of caves and rapidly excavate new caverns.
Of course. I had planned the Players' caves as an additional emergency hub for players I would later start stuffing onto the floating islands, the path to which had opened through the [Tempest of Time]. So the floating islands had ceased to be a unique location. All that was left was the hastily created dungeon.
And if the dungeon was the unique location, why wouldn't the Players decide that the future of content development would be there?
So I was ready for anything.
Except for what I was not ready for at all.
Well, what can you do? It's time to deal with a new crisis. You could say it's my main job responsibility in this game world, after all.