Society Standard Year 558, Month 1
The Multiversal Assessment was the most important time for the Society. This is how it works: At the start of each year, everyone’s Tier reset sto H. And I mean everyone’s, not just Society players—Sol Prime’s cluster, and all the other colonies connected to the Game, started their own Multiversal Assessments at the start of their standard years as well. From that moment, until the end of Month 1, most of the usual activities in the Game, and a few special methods, awarded Assessment Points.
Territory Holders were exempt from Assessment, and you weren’t eligible to earn AP if your character wasn’t at least Level 50. At the stroke of Month 2, the Assessment ends, and everyone’s AP gets tallied and compared to the points gathered by everyone else in their Greater Cluster. Players who end with 0 TP remain at Tier H after Assessment. Everyone else gets ranked according to percentile, and each Tier’s requirement is harder to reach than the last.
On most colonies, and of course on Sol Prime, your Tier in Masters of the Multiverse was nothing more than a bragging right. In the Multiverse Society, it, augmented by the Society Merits gained through Vocations, formed the irrevocable pecking order. And even Society Merits, the special Tier upgrades awarded for significant contributions to the Society, could not raise your standing in that pecking order, your Adjusted Tier, beyond A—the S Tiers were reserved for Territory Holders. This year, I was aiming to raise my Unadjusted Tier to D, but that would be no easy task, as I’d need to finish in the top 50% of every participant in the Society.
Many formal competitions take place during Assessment, with low level events taking place throughout, and high level Championships for which qualifiers were held over the previous half-year kicking off weekly. The most prestigious of these was the Masters of the Multiverse Arena Championships, with the MS Championships a close second. Then there were competitions in the various other “sub-games,” some of which had been created for Masters of the Multiverse, but most of which had been subsumed by it when the Game became the primary form of entertainment for Humanity. For all of these Championships, District/Planetary level came first, then events to decide the best in all the Society, otherwise known as Cluster level, took place nearer the end of Assessment. There was a higher level than that, but even qualifying for it granted you the maximum amount of AP possible from a Championship, and that event only took place once every four years.
As for the event I had qualified for, the MS Griyag Planet Championship, the cards would start flying for myself and the other 511 people to qualify at the Griyag’and MS Dome Main Floor at noon at the start of the second week of Assessment. Meanwhile, the Arena Championships would kick off from the very first day, since even those who hadn’t made it in through qualifiers would be able to participate in the Last Chance Rounds, to enter into the main tournament starting a week into Assessment.
I didn’t usually like to view vidfeeds while I was logged in to the Game, or browse the planetary internet either with how badly it broke the immersion of the magical worlds without futuristic powered armor or guns. Even server transfers, traveling between the Worlds of the Game, were flavored as using magical means, although you could say they were more magitek. The closest thing to real-world technology in the Game, and not just some fantastic equivalent, were robotic monsters. But this time around, I wanted to watch the Arena competition, particularly the Duel Divisions, because of some funny rumors that had surfaced after the Last Chance Qualifiers had been decided.
I was just about to turn in one of the special Assessment quests when the match came on. The opening rounds were crazy, intense Battle Royales between about 20 players at once. And after the first minute, there was a clear front runner. A character had used what seemed to be more skills than should have been possible in such a short time while somehow vaulting all over the arena so that it almost seemed like he was in multiple places at once. He’d lopped off a massive amount of health from about half a dozen other competitors in the opening sortie, and now he was hanging back near the fringe, letting the others tear each other apart while he effortlessly counterattacked and escaped from anyone who tried to come at him.
All of the people in that ring had either qualified through tournaments earlier in the year, or they had got through the grueling Last Chance Rounds. But this guy was making them look like idiots. The match was over in less than five minutes, and they had by far more HP and Power left than any of the other three players moving into the Bracket Rounds. And with the field cleared that much, I could finally clearly make out the avatar name displayed on them. It really was him, right there in the arena. The living legend that had disbanded an entire griefer clan single handed, who continued to fight against griefers and anyone else who picked on the weak not just in my District, but all over the Society Cluster, including in the Central Cluster and even Magaleria Planet, the Capitale of the entire Society colony that had an intense professional PvP scene.
He was more mysterious than I was, by a wide margin. Only people who had followed the lore of his exploits for years, like I had, would have remembered that he originated in Griyag District, though even I had forgotten he still lived here, which he clearly did since he entered the Arena Championships on Griyag Planet. Nobody had even the slightest inkling of his real-world identity. The user of the incredibly powerful, rare, and absurdly difficult to obtain (though still relatively well known and far from unheard of) Secret Advanced Class, Elemental Grandmaster. The Legendary Player Killer Killer, Egelgard. He had never shown the slightest interest in Arena PvP before, in spite of his immense skills in Wild PvP. After all this time, why was the Legendary PKer Killer participating in the Championships?
Well, one thing was for sure. Even if it meant the difference between me reaching D Tier this year or staying at E, there was no way I was gonna miss this. I needed to head to Griyag’and sooner or later anyway, so I fast-traveled there as soon as I turned in the quest. Since I wasn’t getting the ticket for the District Finals well in advance, I had to drop 50 Crystals to avoid the nosebleed section. Between that and the Crystals I had already turned in to gain TP (the “TP Shop” started at 100 gold Aurings, then each successive purchase required a Crystal of a more potent color) my ready liquid cash was down to about 300 Crystals.
But before the Finals were the Middle Rounds, which took place at around the same time as the MS District Championships. And, perhaps because I’d been so inspired by a particularly exciting Assessment, I was totally in the zone. I honestly hadn’t thought I’d make Day 2, which the top 128 players from Day 1 would move onto. I not only reached that round, I made it into the middle of the starting rankings, only losing one match the whole day. On Day 2, I pulled an even win/loss record. One of the losses was to PsychoPenguin, in the 2nd match. He said my deck was “tricky.” It was now official that I was one of the top 100 MS players in the District. Even though I hadn’t made the Final Day or the Society Championships on Magaleria Planet, I went to bed elated. With a result this huge, I’d probably make D Tier even if I slacked off. I had scored 500 Crystals and a whopping 10,000 Tier Points, having come in just outside of the Top 64.
Two days later, the Middle Rounds began. PsychoPenguin had himself a very busy schedule. I decided to watch them on the TV instead of while multitasking in the game, this time—making Day 2 of an Assessment Tournament had gotten me some major TP, enough to spare a few hours or more. If Egelgard had seemed badass before, he was only more impressive in the actual 1-on-1 bouts. Often, his opponent wouldn’t even last 30 seconds. PsychoPenguin did very well too, but it was clear that he had put more practice effort into the Team Battle event. All five of the members of Soaring Minds in the entry put together might have stood a chance against Egelgard, though I wouldn’t guarantee it. Only in the Arena, though, where everyone was limited down to Level 100. In the wild zones where PvP could be downright savage, years of battling griefers and winning had raised his level into the 140s, and combined with his prodigious fighting skill, he was basically untouchable by all but the most veteran and dedicated players.
That thought made me pretty envious, actually. That kind of power and skill would enable him to participate in content in the game, particularly places in the Central Cluster that were too dangerous for ordinary strong players, that few before him had ever experienced. He had Made It, and he’d made it much, much further than most players ever went. I wanted to be him, and I was far from alone in that regard. And at the rate I was grinding during this Assessment, I could easily reach Level 90 before the next one. And for the ten years that Veralix was my character, I’d had great success in acquiring resources, currency, and equipment so far. There was just one little problem:
I was absolutely terrible at arena PvP. As a Sorcerer class, nearly all of my combat moves that were worth anything required Power. I had a Cantrip attack that didn’t, but other players commonly used protection to enough of an extent that it would take way too long to wear them down that way. I might be able to win one fight, but going the distance in more than one fight, or in a long Team Battle, was all about judicious use of your Power abilities in conjunction with skills and the like that didn’t require Power. And that was something I couldn’t do, and I had invested way too much into Veralix to make a new character now. I had gone from wanting not much at all to do with PvP when I first made him to only recently viewing it as a necessary skill—but one I wasn’t going to be able to acquire.
Not that I wasn’t going to enjoy my audience view of the Finals. There were a lot more events than just the ones PsychoPenguin and Egelgard had entered. Egelgard was only in the L100 Duel Division, while PsychoPenguin was in that event and the L100 Full Team Division. The L30 and L50 divisions took place in the middle of the week, but the L80 divisions would take place just before the main events. L80 was the division that I’d theoretically try to reach, so I tried to pay attention to those fights. Even if my character wasn’t suited for it, I could at least study the theory of PvP. And team tactics were very fun to watch when they were done right.
Finally, it was time for the L100 Main Events. The Teams event would take place first. Sixteen squads of 5 would enter the ring. Four would advance to the Society Championship, but would still battle it out with each other to determine the Division Champion team, who would receive higher seeding in the Cluster Championship and better prizes from this tournament. The ruling Clan led by our Planetary Emperor, the District Governor of Griyag, was heavily favored. They were known as Bountiful, and the name was far from show—they had so many members that they had fielded 6 teams, each one of which reached this stage. The Mayoral team of Agin from Gaia’s Hand also made it. But I could tell that PsychoPenguin’s team had a real chance of taking the top spot. The two Bountiful teams they faced in the first two rounds were good, but each time, the Soaring Minds team would switch up their strategy from what they’d started the battle with, and the Bountiful teams were slow to adapt.
That was a danger of being a Territory Holder team in a dominant clan like that; it was very easy to become complacent and get out of practice. But now this was getting interesting. Only two teams from Bountiful had made it into the semifinals. They would face each other after the Gaia’s Hand and Soaring Minds team went up against each other. Among those two teams was their most elite force, and from what I’d seen from them so far, they definitely weren’t out of practice like the others.
The battle against Gaia’s Hand was a complete rout, which led me to believe P.P.’s team had specifically trained for that matchup. So then, it was down to Soaring Minds against the best Bountiful team. Most Bountiful teams used by-the-book role layouts: a trio of damage dealers supported by a healer and a tank. Their SSS team, Team Demeter, however, was slightly different, mostly due to the team leader, Sakiyo4444—the Planetary Emperor and Council Chairman of Griyag District. She was Level 129, the highest most players of the Game, Multiverse Society or otherwise, ever got. And she’d mastered one of the more versatile and difficult classes in the game—the Advanced Class Shrine Priestess. It combined divine-sourced and arcane-sourced magic, allowing for destructive arcane magic up to Circle Six and recovery, buffing, and anti-Infernal holy magic all the way to Circle Nine—the most potent spells anyone short of a Grandmaster pure caster class could use. And it had more abilities even besides that, mostly involving special talismans the class could create, the limits of which I was unsure of.
In other words, she could act as any one of the three classical combat roles—tank, healer, or damage dealer, at any time depending on the situation. Directly in front of her as they entered the ring in a V formation were what looked like a more typical healer and blaster-caster, the former human, the latter elven. And in front of them was a Minotaur Juggernaut, widely considered to be one of the best tank builds in the Game, opposite someone with a massive bow on their back, too covered by their ensemble of armor to identify their race other than as being bipedal, but probably of the Assassin or Sniper classes, or something similar. I hadn’t seen them use anything fancy in the earlier rounds, just standard-looking high damage distance and AOE attacks that were always on point, so I couldn’t pin it down exactly.
The Soaring Minds team, P.P.’s team, also entered in a V formation, but with PsychoPenguin at the fore of it, not the rear. The rear was occupied in part by his clan vice-chief, the Shaman Mathezar. He was of an even more atypical race than his boss—a lamia. There were NPCs and even monsters in the game that could be considered “snake people.” It was possible to have sub-variants, but as a whole they were divided into two major Races—Nagas for the ones with human skin in their torsos and human hair and eyes, and Lamias for snake people with reptilian features that varied in serpentine sub-species—cobra people, adder people, python people and so on. Mathezar’s character was one of the more distinctive varieties, his coils colored in thick bands of red and black with thin bands of yellow separating them. They ended at a lithe scaled torso, a lizard-like head, and corded scaly arms with manicured claws. In his right hand was a jet-black rod topped with a sickly green orb.
Next to him was a player with light purple skin and half the size of anyone else in the arena who looked incredibly out of place in a cowboy hat and poncho, and two pistols in holsters at his hip, though what looked like a gaudy belt buckle I recognized as a powerful custom magical accessory with a Deflection Gem and a Gem of Absorb Magic worked in. Gunslinger was a class you saw about as often as Shrine Priestess. Guns in the Game weren’t nearly as effectual as ones in real life, and ammunition was not available in most standard shops. A starting Gunslinger would have a huge advantage in PvE up to a point, but guns had much less capacity to be enchanted than less modern weapons, which put a low ceiling on their combat power that that became inefficient around the 70 levels. But this Gunslinger, I’d seen in previous matches, had taken the Infuser subclass.
Infuser was a subclass that was basically a lesser form of Elementalist. They imbued magic, elemental properties, and status ailments into weapons, armor, and ammunition. This included bullets, and it was certainly a viable potential way to keep the Gunslinger class relevant at higher levels. They were an absolutely vital occupation in the Game. Assuming this guy had become more skilled at Infusing than the usual NPC shops, if he wanted to he could probably make more of a killing with an enchanting shop than I made with Leyline. He also had an ability that I hadn’t previously heard of. Unlike the normal infusing process, he was able to infuse elements into bullets that he hadn’t enchanted previously right before firing them, so he could have any element he wanted at any time, instead of having to take great pains to enchant his arsenal ahead of time. Unless he missed his guess as to what his target was vulnerable to, which hadn’t happened often in previous matches, he reached a more than respectable damage output for Arena PvP.
In front of them were the tank and healer for the group, then PsychoPenguin himself. He was in leather armor for mobility, but only a fool would think it was even his main protection in spite of how obviously enchanted it was, giving off an unnatural light. I personally knew for a fact he had an amulet underneath that gave him considerable protection from magic, and several rings and a few other unusual accoutrements to protect from the worst status ailments and reduce his elemental weaknesses. A fencing sabre sat in a gleaming hilt on his right hip. As for dealing with physical damage, he relied on high speed and higher evasion on top of his armor's enchantments. His class was known as Sky Fencer, and it was fairly popular among players who chose avian races, but as a very high level MS player, he brought his own twist to the skillset. The automated announcement from the arena’s PA sounded over even the loudest cheers of the crowd. “Teams confirmed. All combatants, proceed to your designated starting areas.”
As soon as they were in position, the space inside the arena shifted. A layer of desert sands coated the floor, and ruins sprang up out of the ground— sunken pillars and pieces of buildings, but no intact doorways to shelter in. A massive statue dominated the center of the ring. Arena type randomization had dealt the teams a hand that wouldn’t be hugely advantageous to either side—P.P. could get around some instances of cover present, but not all of them and he’d make himself more vulnerable to others doing so. The Arena AI spoke again. “3…2…1…fight!”
Immediately a shining card appeared in P.P.’s hand. I changed my view type to the Arena’s battle interface, which displayed P.P.’s name and the words “Power Invocation: The Titan.” What’s he playing at? What will that even do? Anyone who had gained success at MS was able to access a special subclass known as the True Psygazer class. This class gave you the ability to equip a limited number of MS cards for use as combat items. And the number of cards you could equip this way at once depended on how much you had progressed the subclass. Anyone who played MS could technically access True Psygazer I, where you could use a single card outside of the game of MS itself once per Full Rest. Before this year’s Assessment, having qualified for the Agin Championship before, I had True Psygazer II, which allowed for 5 cards—the number of cards in your hand during a game of MS. But since I had made Top 16 in a Kingdom Championship, I’d recently unlocked True Psygazer III, which expanded my “Combat Deck” to 10 cards.
P.P. had long been one rank higher still, having made Top 16 in the Griyag Planetary Championship multiple times—not to mention his current 3-year consecutive 1st place streak. Above that were 3 more levels, for a Top 16 in the Society Championship, a Top 16 in the Pan-Cluster MS Championship, and the highest rank, for winning that event and being named the greatest MS player in All Humanity, was known as True Power. P.P.’s subclass, True Psygazer IV, let him equip 20 cards in his Combat Deck.
The thing was, very few people who got far in the True Psygazer class made heavy use of it. In fact, it was extremely rare for players to have it as their Active Subclass at all. At the lower versions, you couldn’t equip enough cards for it to be effective, and by the time you reached the higher ones, all your strategic effort was going toward the card game just to get that far. Sure, you could retire from it after earning one of the better versions, but even then the Combat Deck usually became a glorified bag of tricks. Every spell on every single MS card had an effect in battle which was usually only vaguely indicated by its name and effect in the game of MS. And there was no flavor text for True Psygazers, no anything, to outright tell you what that effect was. So, with a few exceptions that made up the most common MS cards used in battle and thus having publicly documented effects, you simply didn’t know what individual cards did, let alone ways to combine them into a synergistic strategy. You had to experiment, and that took lots of time and effort. You had to love not just MS, but the overall Game itself in equal measure to get very far.
But PsychoPenguin had that kind of passion. And a moment later, it became fully apparent just what the effect of The Titan’s Power was. “Spell Invocation: Shadow Snare” appeared mere moments after P.P.’s last move. Usually, MS cards had single-target effects in battle unless they had wide effects in the card game. Shadow Snare should have affected only one target, but instead, a field of shadow engulfed the entire Bountiful team. The minotaur and the sniper had enough immunity to shrug it off, but the healer, the blaster-caster, and indeed Sakiyo herself were not so lucky and were immobilized. Sakiyo surely had immunities as well, but they’d been nullified for this attack because it had 100% Resonance with Darkness Element, and Sakiyo's defensive Light Resonance was the full 200%. Usually that strong Elemental Resonance greatly enhanced her attack and defense, but P.P. had found an obscure way to use it against her.
The Titan had upgraded the single-target card Shadow Snare to an AoE. What would it do to an AoE card or? I was really curious, but his next card was a Shadowstrike, which manifested as an AoE centered on Sakiyo. The minotaur was supposed to intercept attacks against her, but that would only work against single-target attacks. All it meant for the AoE Shadowstrike was that he’d take damage from it along with her. However, it was very little damage—the minotaur probably had some Darkness Resonance himself.
By the time P.P. had used another Shadowstrike, the gnome Gunslinger was harassing the enemy Sniper, keeping him from concentrating a barrage on anyone, and just as the initial stun wore off, Mathezar finished casting yet another Darkness AoE spell centered on Sakiyo—the more conventional spell Demonic Grasp. In less than 20 seconds, Sakiyo had been Zeroed Out, or ZOed. I should mention that this did not mean she was dead; even on the rare occasions that permadeath was possible in the Arena, having 0 HP only meant you were powerless to do anything to fight off a finishing blow, which would need to be applied in order to keep Team Demeter’s other healer from bringing her back into the fray with a Life spell. Then, P.P.’s team changed their pattern. P.P. dove straight at the minotaur and beat his wings furiously, creating a gale that pushed the minotaur about 50 feet away from the remaining party. Meanwhile, the gnome Gunslinger broke off from attacking the enemy Sniper and attacked their healer, disrupting his attempts to cast a Revive spell on Sakiyo, though he took more return fire as a result and his Deflection Gem was beginning to dim.
The minotaur was having a rough time of it by then, too. P.P.’s tank was keeping him busy in melee, preventing him from getting back into intercept range of his healer, while Mathezar peppered him with quick-cast Fire spells. He was nearly in critical HP, and the Gunslinger was doing a great job continuing to interrupt their healer’s casts. He could only quick-cast heal the minotaur, and it wasn’t enough. But the Bountiful team was fighting back too—their own blaster-caster was completely unmolested, and had slammed the group attacking the minotaur with successive Earth AoE spells that were devastating P.P. enough that his healer was hard pressed to keep him alive, though the minotaur wasn’t having much luck tagging him. The minotaur took no damage from those spells himself—minotaurs had natural Earth Resonance, which clearly had been augmented to 100% by equipment.
The minotaur got ZOed before P.P. did, and he and his tank sprang back. Mathezar finished him with one more fireball, and the Gunslinger stopped shooting at the healer for a moment, dashed to Sakiyo’s prone form, and double-tapped it. Now both of them were fully out of the fight, their bodies vanishing to revive outside of the ring, unable to do anything but cheer on those who remained. However, this shift in concentration allowed the enemy Sniper to strike home even more, and after the first couple of shots, the Gunslinger’s Deflection Gem dimmed completely, reduced to a normal shiny rock until he used the relevant Infuser ability to power it up again. With that, his HP finally began to drop.
Now none of the players on the Soaring Minds team were fresh. But as the gnome rejoined the main group, P.P. dug once again into his Combat Deck, invoking one of the cards with a Barrier effect. In the card game, Barriers acted like extensions of your health bar, that an opponent had to deal enough damage to destroy the Barrier, or remove it in some other way, before they could keep hurting you. In combat, they nullified all damage from a certain number of attacks depending on how strong the Barrier’s effect was in the game. And P.P. had used an extremely strong Barrier card, one that even True Psygazer IIs tended to carry if they could. Not only that, but the effect of The Titan was still in play, and barriers formed around not just himself, but every teammate close to him—which at that moment was everyone but Mathezar.
From there, it was a total rout by Soaring Minds. The crowd went absolutely insane, and I admit I was cheering my lungs out too. A Planetary Ruler, a SSS Tier team being defeated so decisively was not something you saw every year. This win would get Soaring Minds into the big-time for sure. Soon they'd be swamped with clan applicants. Of course, this meant P.P. himself would be going into the solo event pretty far removed from full strength. In tournaments where players face multiple fights in succession, between fights you can choose to restore your Power and HP to full, but only a limited number of times depending on the size of the event. And even then, there was no way to restore Combat Decks, and at last count, he’d used 12 of 20 cards, and more of them in the last match than any of the previous. Oh well. I probably cared more about P.P. doing well in the solo event than he did because I really wanted to see him fight Egelgard—I was really curious how he’d stack up.
It didn’t happen. P.P. wound up eliminated in the Round of 16, just before they would have faced off, by an Infernal caster who summoned defensive minions then nailed him with a barrage of gravity-manipulating Null spells. Null was one of the more unusual elements of the Game’s elemental system, encompassing many odd effects that couldn’t easily be segregated into the other fourteen Base Material Elements. Most Cosmic spells that had an effect on time or space had Null Resonance. I knew a few such spells myself, but they were hard to come by—I hadn’t even found all the staples in that vein of magic for my spellbook yet. A Top 16 result still squeaked into the Society Championship, to take place just before the end of Assessment along with the others to make it to the Round of 16. At that level, the tournament left behind straightforward elimination for more glamorous formats to make a real spectacle. Those who did well enough there would qualify for the Pan-Cluster Arena Championships, which took place only once every 4 years.
Gravity manipulation was an immutable weakness of any player who relied on flight. P.P.'s loss was basically a foregone conclusion. Next up was the final match of the Round of 16—Egelgard vs. Sakiyo. This one would be interesting. Sakiyo had won through the first three rounds with a bunch of Talisman attacks, and it seemed to me like she was good enough to keep even the Legendary PK Killer on his toes. The match itself proved me correct, as Sakiyo managed to tag him, reducing his mobility with one of her talismans and landing several damaging moves before it wore off, the first time Egelgard had been dealt significant damage that day. Still, she was under too much pressure to cast any proper healing spells, and her power was depleting much faster than his. Still, when he finally ZOed her, the match had gone easily five times longer than any of his fights prior. She bowed to him when the match result was announced, but she couldn't hide her disappointment that she, the District Chairman of Griyag, had also been bested in the mere Round of 16.
Egelgard went on to beat the mage who bested P.P. easily, and from there, two of the other three semifinalists who had now also qualified for the Interplanetary level to become PvP Duel Champion of Griyag. All in all, it had been a really fun day, and I decided to splurge on dinner somewhere fancy for once. I had made even more money on wagers, betting 25 Crystals on P.P.’s team to win at the very start of the Final Rounds, and since they hadn’t been favored over the Territory Holder teams present, I came out of that one with 200. I’d bet on Egelgard to win too of course, but he was so heavily favored that it was nearly betting Crystals to Aurings.
Just three days before the Assessment was to end, news came that Soaring Minds had become a Territory Holder clan, having snatched the small province of Raligar. The previous Holders were a non-clan affiliated team that had managed to raise a very strong NPC army to prevent surrounding Holders from devouring them—any serious attempt to do so would have left them too vulnerable to their neighbors. P.P. had used the 1st place prize money from the Team Battle event to raise an army capable of challenging theirs, then augmented a special company of Veteran-class War Golems with the hundred scrolls he ordered from me. No wonder he’d been so willing to agree to my price. What was one Yellow Crystal to a Territory? From there, he was able to force the team, older folks who got their kicks making things hard for younger players, into the arena and trounce them. By that very afternoon, the banner of Soaring Minds flew over Raligar Castle, and those who held it previously had little hope of advancing beyond G Tier.
People all over town openly celebrated the coup. And when the Assessment ended, I saw that my new Tier was indeed D. I was already in the top 50% of every single player in the Society, most of which were several times my age or more, and by a nicely comfortable margin I noted. With an Adjusted Tier of B, I could now frequent all but the snootiest places in the District as long as I didn’t mind dodging questions of what I did to gain two Society Merits being so young. I could freely request to travel anywhere in the District by myself, not just a certain number of times like was the case for F through C, but whenever I wanted. I could even travel outside the District routinely if I wanted, or request a domicile change and server transfer to another District and it would be fast-tracked. And I was so flushed with Crystals from the grinding, my prize money, and from betting on Soaring Minds that I thought maybe I’d take a few months once I’d gotten Leyline stocked back up and tour the Society.
Yeah…the future was so bright that I’d probably want to requisition some shades. And of course, it’s exactly that kind of attitude that leaves someone most vulnerable to having everything they built up come crashing down around them.
