Broken Lands

Leo flew away immediately after breakfast the next morning.

Sophia watched him go with a grin; had he already forgotten that he’d jumped through an unstable portal to spend time with the sister he hadn’t seen in years?

It kind of felt like he had, but Sophia found she didn’t mind. In some ways, this was perfect; they’d never been joined at the hip, since they were very different ages with different interests. A few hours spent together in a day, perhaps a meal and a game, were really all they ever did. Well, that and family trips, plus Sophia remembered teaching Leo a bit of swordwork and a little bit about magic when he was younger, not to mention helping him with his studies occasionally.

In a way, that was what she’d done here, too, now that she thought about it. Leo was about at the age where Sophia had been when she first started finding her own groups to delve with, more or less like he’d done here. The roots of the World Tree were, if anything, a bit easier than the first level of most dungeons, which wasn’t a bad thing at all. It ought to be a good experience for Leo.

Sophia was still in a good mood when they reached the door to the next region. It was a lot like the previous door, except that the fiery tornado looked like blue and white lightning and the hawk in front of the moon above the entrance was joined by a pyramid. Sophia still wasn’t sure they’d actually done anything significant on the previous floor, but apparently the World Tree thought it was enough to be worth noting.

A notice from the Guide appeared in front of Sophia’s eyes the moment she stepped through the portal.

Spoiler

Welcome to the Meteor Pillars!

This is a time-limited Event that will begin once enough participants enter the zone. You may abandon the Event and be moved to a normal zone at any time before it begins by announcing your desire to resign. You will not be able to rejoin the event in progress.

Current Participation: 569/4096

Event Participation Requirements:

Arcatiz World Tree Third Branch

Second, Third, or Fourth Upgrade

Minimum Team Size: 4

Recommended Team Size: 12

Maximum Team Size: 20

When the Event begins, gather at one of the visible Pillars with your team and declare that you have formed your team. You will have up to one day to form teams. Participants that have not forfeited or joined a team at the end of this time will be assigned teams.

You may forfeit participation at any time after the Event begins by declaring that you forfeit. Forfeiting will remove you from the Event and you will be unable to join any Events for 128 days.

Killing other Event Participants is prohibited and will result in immediate expulsion from the Event and forfeiture of all possible rewards. Event restrictions will be imposed for double the normal forfeiture time.

Once teams have been chosen, a one-hour timer will be displayed on each Pillar. When this time ends, the first Meteor Fall will begin. Each Meteor Fall consists of a series of meteors that will land scattered throughout the Event Area, disgorging monsters. Defeating all of the monsters prior to the next Meteor Fall will trigger a Reward Round at the end of the Event and will also decrease the time to the next Meteor Fall.

Monsters will always attempt to destroy Pillars and may attack you if you are between them and a Pillar.

The Event ends when all monsters from all Meteor Falls, including Reward Rounds, are defeated or fewer than 256 Pillars remain.

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Sophia read through it twice, then shook her head as she dismissed it to look at her actual surroundings. They weren’t the more or less natural-looking areas of the previous zones. Instead, she stood on a rocky slope that was completely devoid of ground cover. Four pillars with glowing runes written down the center, clearly the ones the Guide meant, rose from the ground in the near distance. The sky was strange, too; instead of a star, the only light in the sky came from something Sophia could only call a dimly glowing nebula. Despite its moonlike appearance, the space near ground level was lit with something like sunlight, far brighter than the top of the pillars.

“So what do you think?” Sophia turned towards the rest of her team. “Should we do the event or leave?”

She knew a little about World Tree Events, but that little mostly boiled down to the fact that they existed and that they could replace the Challenge Chain required to reach the next level. She didn’t know if they were faster or easier than the Challenge Chain; in fact, all she could say at the moment was that this one was going to require killing a lot of monsters.

“Might as well try,” Dav muttered.

“Why don’t we go ask them?” Ci’an pointed to the left of the leftmost pillar.

When Sophia squinted, she could see something moving in that direction that might have been people. If the movement was people, the pillars were even bigger than she thought they were.

Once they were close enough, Sophia found out that her assumptions had led her astray again. The movement was people, but they were Archons and none of them were more than half the height of a human. The pillars were huge but not quite as gigantic as her second guess implied.

“Hey there!” A goose with four wings greeted them with cheerful words instead of the annoying honk Sophia half-expected. “Do you have a full team yet? We’re still trying to fill ours out, we’re the only subteam from our full team that’s made it in yet. One of our teams definitely won’t be, they’re exploring the fourth branch and there’s basically no chance they’ll be able to get back here before the Event’s full. Our other subteam ought to make it, as long as they’re listening for the news that an Event’s happening.”

Sophia blinked at the flood of words, then seized on the goose’s last statement. “News that an Event’s happening? Does the World Tree advertise it somehow?”

The goose pranced in place, waving all four wings eagerly. “Oh, no, well, sort of! You must not have been through a World Tree Event before, I’ve heard some Towers don’t talk well. It’s the opposite: everyone who doesn’t feel like they can take on the Event drops out before it starts so that they’re not barred from other Events and spreads the word. Everybody who thinks they’re ready for the Event will hurry in. It’ll fill up in the next hour or two, shouldn’t take longer than that since it’s morning. Oh, I’m so happy to finally make it into this one! Meteor events are my favorite and this is the first time I’ve seen one on the third branch!”

“Tellix. Stop talking about what you haven’t done already,” a winged badger that looked surprisingly similar to the mother-and-child pair Sophia met while she was learning how to deal with the Lifeweb groused at the goose. “Anyway. You four are what, third upgrade? Tellix isn’t wrong, we do need a third subteam, and as much as I’d prefer people who are fourth upgrade, we probably can’t afford to be picky. Fourth upgrades’ll be double-teaming the pillars, maybe even single-teaming them if they’re feeling lucky. Better odds of completion and more Bonus Rounds that way. As long as you’re not second upgrade; we’d have to take you on as an extra subteam then and I don’t know that we’re prepared for that.”

“We’re third upgrade,” Sophia admitted. “We need some explanations before we commit to anything. We’ve never done an Event, at least not one here. They worked differently back in the Maze; there weren’t any that pulled in lots of different groups and they definitely didn’t have their own … uh, hub page?”

The winged badger laughed. “You’re from a young Tower then, Events are a pretty common upgrade that you should tell your Tower controller to pick up, they’re great. This one’s really pretty simple; we’re placed next to a Pillar that looks like those four, only smaller, and our goal is to keep it standing. There’s a time limit but the end, at least at first, is when the last monster dies; if the first four Meteor Falls don’t end early, it’s almost always a failure. After that, they can, but every time it happens it costs everyone part of their reward so what you’ll find is that once the meteors stop falling, teams that clean out around their Pillar go kill monsters for other Pillars. Some will fall; sometimes people get unlucky and too many monsters Fall near them, other times people overestimate the strength of their team and don’t pick up enough help. It’s a balance; more teams means more Pillars which means more room before failure but it also means more monsters overall and the Pillar teams are weaker.”

“Wouldn’t it be best to aim for the highest possible team size? Fewer monsters with the same number of people should mean a higher chance of success,” Xin’ri proposed with a smile that said she knew something was wrong with what she said but she wasn’t sure what.

“Lower rewards,” the third member of the other team, an ordinary-looking starling, contributed. “More monsters, more money.”

“There’s a per-kill award,” the winged badger expanded. “During the Bonus Rounds. That’s why fourth upgrade teams will reserve a Pillar for themselves; it’s worth it. Third upgrade teams … well, I’ve seen it done, but it’s risky. Certainly not worth it if you’ve never done an Event before.”

Sophia pulled up the Hub page for the Event while Xin’ri and the winged badger kept talking. The winged badger was correct; the number of participants kept increasing, but sometimes it ticked momentarily down. Those were clearly times when groups that didn’t want to participate bailed.

By the time the other “subteam” they expected arrived, dozens of other teams had reached the Pillar. Only a handful had gone ahead and registered for the Event, mostly in smaller groups of four to ten people. Several were also looking for a larger team to join, but they politely moved on when the four-winged goose cheerfully informed them that they’d have to look elsewhere.

Sophia couldn’t see past the other Pillars clearly, but Ci’an could, and she said that people were appearing all over the place at roughly the same distance from the pillars. According to the goose, where you landed was usually related to where you entered, which was why they’d stopped to wait at the closest Pillar. If their teammates hadn’t shown up by the time most of the Participants arrived, they’d have spread out to check the other Pillars as well.

Tellix’s team specialized in wide, powerful strikes designed to handle hordes of weaker enemies. They were great at taking out swarms of creatures but struggled against the singular monsters that Sophia’s team excelled at handling. Tellix maintained that it was the best composition for climbing the World Tree; sure, they suffered a bit when they ran into particularly tough individual monsters, but they could get gear to help with that and they never had to worry about being overrun.

It was a great setup for the Meteor Pillars, as well, though Tellix did admit that three subteams like his joining together would be a bad choice; the other two teams needed to have different specialties. The missing subteam Sophia’s team was going to replace was in many ways the opposite of Tellix’s, specialized in individual fights. Their role was to handle the anchors for each Meteor Fall, so that it would be both leaderless and bereft of the heavy hitters that could punch through Tellix’s team’s area denial. Sophia’s team was easy to slot into their setup, a fact that excited the goose so much that he started actually flying in circles around the three teams.