**POV: Jace**
---
It was a room.
That is the first thing, and it took me a second to adjust to it, because I had been braced for weather.
An enclosed hall, big enough that the far end was properly far, with a floor that had a surface to it and walls that went up and stopped.
No wind. No smell of anything at all, which is a thing I have started noticing about System spaces.
And about eighty people in it.
---
Not a Tutorial.
That is what came next and it came hard.
I have spent a day and a night among people who had jobs instead of names, in a city that may never have existed, and every one of them behaved exactly as the story needed them to.
These were Players.
A man about thirty was sitting on the floor with his back to a wall going through a bag, taking things out and putting them back in a different order.
Two women were checking each other’s straps, one at a time, without talking.
Somebody near the middle laughed too loudly at something and then stopped.
There was a group of five in matched gear who had put themselves in a corner with their backs to the wall and were watching everybody else in a rotation, and one of them was looking at the ceiling.
Every single one of them is real. All of them have a Level and a Status and a house somewhere, and every one of them woke up this morning and decided today was the day.
---
> **[FLOOR ONE]**
>
> **[Challengers: 81/100.]**
>
> **[The Floor will commence when 100 eligible Challengers are present.]**
Everybody in here has unlocked Floor One and nobody in here has cleared it.
That is the whole of the eligibility.
The moment you clear, that door shuts behind you and you go to the next one, which means there is no version of this where a Floor Two veteran comes back down to harvest a room full of people at Level Eleven.
Everyone here is on their first attempt at this, or their fourth.
I have not decided yet whether that is comforting.
---
It took about eleven seconds for the room to notice me.
I have got used to a specific sequence and it happened in exactly that order. Somebody sees me. Their eyes go past and then come back.
Then they look at whoever is standing next to them and do not say anything, and then that person looks.
Nobody came over. Nobody said the name out loud.
But the noise level in that hall dropped by a measurable amount and did not entirely come back.
And the five in matched gear stopped rotating and looked at me for about four seconds all together, and then went back to it having clearly reallocated something.
Four weeks ago a stadium watched me light a card on fire, and there has not been one day since where a room has not done this.
I went and read the display instead.
---
> **[Floor One — Last Twenty.]**
>
> **[Participants: 100.]**
>
> **[Clear Condition: Remain among the final twenty active Challengers.]**
>
> **[Challenger combat permitted.]**
>
> **[Monsters inhabit the battlefield.]**
>
> **[Experience may be acquired through valid monster kills and Challenger eliminations.]**
>
> **[Floor Protection is active.]**
>
> **[Fatal damage will result in elimination rather than death.]**
>
> **[Eliminated Challengers fail Floor One.]**
>
> **[The active battlefield will contract throughout the Floor.]**
I did not need to read it. Everybody in this hall could recite it.
A hundred go in. Twenty come out and unlock Floor Two. The other eighty go home and try again another day, and there is a whole industry of people who have failed this four times and are extremely good at telling you why.
That is the part the guides talk about.
The part I stood there and thought about was the seventh line.
---
**Fatal damage will result in elimination rather than death.**
I read that in a bedroom last night and I read it again standing in that hall, and I made myself sit with it properly.
It takes two things away from me at once, and I would rather understand that now than discover it at a bad moment.
Ouroboros needs me to die.
Mimesis needs somebody to kill me.
Neither of those things can happen on this floor.
If a man puts a blade through my chest in there, the Tower catches it before it lands, and I go out in a column of light with a failure against my name, and there is no regression and no card and no twelve hours.
I would just be a Player who failed Floor One.
I have not been in a fight without that underneath me since the day I awakened. Every single time I have gone into something too big, some part of me has known that the worst case was expensive rather than final.
Not here.
I did not test it and I am not going to. There is no version of testing it that does not cost me the floor.
---
I spent the next few minutes watching the room instead, which turned out to be more useful than the display.
There are three groups in here and one of them is not really a group.
The five in matched gear are a guild party and they are behaving like one. They have decided who talks. They have a man watching the door and a man watching the ceiling and they are not spending words.
There is a looser cluster of maybe nine near the middle who clearly did not arrive together and are assembling something on the spot, and I watched two separate people join it in the time I was looking.
And then there is everybody else, standing on their own at various distances from the walls, doing the arithmetic that everybody in here has already done.
Twenty slots.
There is a version of the maths where all fourteen of that middle cluster survive, and it requires eighty other people to be eliminated first, and every single one of those fourteen knows it.
That group is going to work beautifully for about an hour and then it is going to become the worst place on the floor to be standing.
---
Three of them came over about six minutes in.
Two men and a woman, all around my age or a little older, and the one who spoke did it well. He did not open with my name and he did not open with a compliment, which put him ahead of most people.
"You are going in alone."
"I am."
"There are four of us including a man over there with a shield who is better than he looks." He kept his hands where I could see them, which was deliberate and which I noticed.
"We are not asking you to carry us. We are asking whether you would rather have four people watching a direction for you for the first two hours than not."
That is a good offer. I want to be fair to him about that.
Four bodies covering angles is genuinely worth more than one Level Eleven with eight Abilities, for exactly as long as everybody’s interests point the same way, which is until the counter gets down to about twenty-five.
"No," I said. "Thank you."
He waited about a second to see whether anything else was coming.
"Can I ask why?"
"Because I am going somewhere and I would have to explain it."
He looked at me for a moment, and then he did something that raised my opinion of him considerably, which was nod once and leave without arguing.
---
There is a battlefield map on the far wall.
Not a System panel. An actual board, four metres across, which people can stand in front of and point at, and it is generated fresh for each cohort with the current public annotations already on it.
Nine people were in front of it when I got there. By the time I had finished, four of those had gone and three others had arrived.
I stood and looked at it for a long time.
It is the same map that is in Rev. 41 and it is annotated the same way. Territories. Routes that people use. The places where parties tend to end up once the ground starts closing.
Sixty-three years of other people’s marks.
And the region I care about has almost nothing written on it.
---
Not nothing. There are two lines, and both of them are about crossing it rather than being in it.
That is what a place looks like when everybody has walked past it for six decades without stopping.
I put a finger on the board and traced from the deployment markings toward it.
The honest answer is that it is a long way from most of the map and there is no reason on earth for anybody to go there.
Which is exactly why it is still sitting there in the ninth year after a man wrote one clause about it and went home.
I confirmed what I already believed last night, and then I stopped looking at it, because standing in front of a public map staring at one specific corner is how you tell a room full of competitive people where you are going.
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