Chapter 808: Three Days Until...

The announcement came at dawn, and it came to everyone at once.

Not to kingdoms. Not to leaders. To every single living thing in the Realm of Kings and Puppets, from the Six Empires at the top of the layer down to the smallest settlement that had never fielded a fighter in its life.

Almond was standing in the kitchen garden behind Ainen’s restaurant when it landed, and he knew from the way the light changed that this was not an ordinary posting.

[World-Ending Event: The Ascension Convergence.]

[Difficulty classification: Beyond all prior records.]

[Victory condition: The ten highest-contributing Kingdoms and Empires will be elevated to Tier-100. The ceiling of this layer will be broken for the first time in recorded history.]

[Failure condition: This layer will be reset.]

[Clarification, provided by request of the Six: a reset removes all life currently present in the Realm of Kings and Puppets. There is no partial outcome. There is no survival on failure.]

[Event begins in three days.]

Almond stood very still in a garden full of ordinary vegetables and read it four times.

Ainen came out the back door about a minute later, still holding a knife he’d clearly forgotten he was holding.

"Tell me you’re reading the same thing I am."

"I’m reading it."

"Because I read the bottom line and my hands stopped working." Ainen looked down at the knife, seemed to notice it for the first time, and set it on the step. "Everyone. Not the participants. Everyone."

"Everyone," Almond agreed.

"There are people on this layer who have never held a weapon. There are children. There are whole settlements that don’t even know what a contribution ranking is."

"I know."

"And if we lose, they all just stop existing."

Almond didn’t answer that, because there was nothing to say to it that would make it smaller.

The layer reacted the way any world reacts to being told it might end in three days.

Reports came in over the following hours from everywhere. Some kingdoms broke apart entirely, their people scattering toward places they imagined might be safer, not understanding that there was no such place. Some fortified, pointlessly. A few simply stopped, whole cities going quiet as people went home to be with whoever they loved.

And a great many of them did the opposite. Volunteers arrived at kingdom gates in numbers nobody had planned for, people with no training and no decks and no realistic chance of contributing anything, offering themselves anyway because sitting still was worse.

Ananta Regalon turned none of them away. Marcus organized them into support roles within six hours, because Marcus had spent thirty-seven years getting very good at finding a use for everyone who showed up.

"We’ve got eleven thousand civilians who want to help," he reported that evening. "Most of them can’t fight. All of them can carry, cook, build, or run messages."

"Then they help," Big D said.

The Six posted a joint statement that afternoon, which had happened perhaps four times in the layer’s recorded history.

It was short.

[The Six Empires will hold the six primary convergence points. We will not be requesting assistance at those positions. Every other position on this world is open, and every contribution counts.]

[We have no assurances to offer you. We have never faced this either.]

John read it aloud at the family’s table that night and then sat back with an expression nobody at the table had seen on him before.

"That last line," he said. "In thirty-seven years I have never once seen the Six admit they don’t know something."

"Do you believe them?" Lily asked.

"I believe that’s the first honest thing they’ve said publicly in a century," John said. "Which frightens me considerably more than a lie would have."

The family spent most of the second day preparing, and the preparation looked different than it ever had before.

Rudra and Marcus worked the deployment map until midnight. Ananta Regalon would hold a position called the Sundered Shelf, and PeakWicked had been assigned the ground directly adjacent, which meant that for the first time in thirty-seven years the two kingdoms would be fighting shoulder to shoulder rather than in separate sectors.

"Eighth and ninth," John said, looking at it. "Side by side. Corvin’s going to be unbearable about this."

"Corvin’s holding a convergence point," Rudra said. "He’s going to be busy."

"He’ll find time. He always finds time."

Silvester and Hiroshi drilled the army. Natalia’s group ran their own patterns. Kayla and Ainen spent the whole day building what amounted to a mobile hospital and kitchen combined, the thing they’d realized thirty-seven years ago they should have built together from the start.

And all four of them, Almond and Lily and Rudra and Ainen, spent the evening doing the thing they had not needed to do in a very long time.

They checked their decks.

Thirty-seven years of rebuilds sat in all four of them now. Not one of them carried a single deck they’d walked out of the first Exceed Cave with. Almond’s Crucible had become something he’d never once used at full strength, because there had never been a fight that required it. Lily had rebuilt her Dreadlings twice and still wasn’t certain she’d got it right.

"Any of it might not work the way we think," Rudra said. "Half of these have never been properly tested."

"Then we test them in three days," Almond said.

Lily found Almond on the roof of their house that night, which was where he went when he wanted to think without being interrupted and where she always found him anyway.

She sat down beside him without asking.

"We should talk about it," she said.

He didn’t pretend not to know what she meant.

They had talked about it before. Several times, across the decades. The first time had been about twenty years ago, and it had been a short conversation, both of them deciding without much difficulty that the timing was wrong.

The second time had been harder. The third time, about six years back, they had actually gotten as far as discussing names before something had stopped them both, and neither of them had ever quite been able to say out loud what it was.

"I know what it was," Lily said now. "I’ve known for a while. I just didn’t want to say it."

"Say it."

"We kept not doing it because we couldn’t promise them anything." She was looking at the sky rather than at him. "We’ve spent our entire lives climbing toward a ceiling nobody has ever gotten past, and neither of us could stand the idea of bringing someone into that without knowing what was on the other side of it."

Almond was quiet for a long moment.

"Yes," he said. "That’s it exactly."

"And now we might find out in four days."

"Or we might all stop existing in four days."

"Yes." Lily finally looked over at him. "So here’s what I want. If we come out the other side of this, whatever’s over there, whatever Tier-100 actually is, we stop waiting. No more good reasons. No more timing."

"After."

"After," Lily agreed.

Almond reached over and took her hand, which he did not do often, and they sat on the roof for a long time without needing to say anything else about it.

The third day was quiet.

Nobody drilled. Rudra called it off himself, over Silvester’s objections, on the grounds that anyone who wasn’t ready by now was not going to become ready in a single day and everyone else would be better served by resting.

So the pocket world rested.

Ainen cooked all day and charged nobody. The restaurant stayed open from dawn until well past dark, and the whole city came through it at some point, and he fed every single one of them personally because he had decided at some point during the night that this was what he wanted to be doing with the last day.

Rudra took the Chainbreaker out on the little inland sea and did not go anywhere in particular.

Natalia and the Grim Breakers spent the afternoon somewhere none of the rest of them followed, nine people who had destroyed everything they owned together a long time ago and had never quite stopped being a unit apart from the rest.

And in the evening, everyone came back to the gathering ground, the way they always did.

Big D spoke last, which was also the way it always went.

"I’ve been alive a long time," he said. "Longer than any of you. And all of it, until this lot came along, was spent down in the bottom world."

The fire cracked. Nobody interrupted him, because he did not talk about this often.

"Then they showed up." He tipped his head toward Almond and the others. "And I climbed out with them. Same road. Same starting line. Every layer since, I’ve been seeing it for the first time right alongside you."

He looked around the fire, at four hundred faces and eleven thousand volunteers and a city that hadn’t existed forty years ago.

"So I don’t know what’s past that ceiling any better than the youngest one sitting here. I’ve never stood this high. None of us have."

"Are you scared?" someone asked.

"A little," Big D said, honestly. "But I’ve spent more years standing still than anyone here has been alive. I’m done with it. Whatever’s on the other side, I’d rather find out with you lot than go back to not finding out at all."

Nobody said anything for a while after that.

The fire burned down. People drifted off in ones and twos to sleep, or to sit with each other, or to do whatever a person does on the last night before the only thing that has ever mattered.

The Ascension Convergence began at dawn.