Back in the Public Divine Realm, the dust from the shattered granite cliff had barely settled before Laia Hayes' followers swung into action. The massive void lizards hauled the split boulders aside with their jaws, clearing the area with ruthless efficiency, while the dwarven followers stepped forward and upended their burlap sacks across the cleared ground.
To Headmaster Valerius's absolute disbelief, the sacks spilled open to reveal bags of cement, piles of sharpened steel rebar, and coarse river sand.
Valerius stared at the scrying screen, his mouth agape. Fifty years as headmaster of the Imperial Divine Academy, fifty years of running this exact tournament, and he had never once seen a group of followers pull out construction supplies in the opening hour of a survival contest. Most contestants' followers were busy sharpening weapons or hunting for food; these ones were about to build a fortified underground complex like they were laying the foundation for a suburban estate.
What followed only left him more stunned.
The void lizards split off into teams, their claws tearing through the earth like butter, digging wide, even tunnels deep beneath the hillside. The water slimes, herded by a team of elven sprites, waddled down to the nearby river, swelling to the size of barrels with fresh water before trundling back to dump their loads into stone troughs. The massive void apes split into pairs, one mixing cement and water in a hollowed-out boulder, the other laying bricks and smoothing the mortar with precise, practiced movements. The elven kin, meanwhile, drifted through the newly dug tunnels, their glowing hands pressed to the earthen walls, driving enchanted support stakes deep into the bedrock to shore up the tunnels against collapse.
In the span of an hour, the skeleton of a sprawling underground fortress had taken shape. Reinforced barracks, climate-controlled storage vaults, a dedicated cheese aging cellar, a hydroponic growing chamber, and miles of branching scout tunnels spread out beneath the western half of the continent, all hidden from the surface world.
Valerius shook his head, still reeling from what he'd just seen. In the span of a single morning, this ragtag group of "refugees" had built a more defensible settlement than most contestants could manage in a month. He'd been shocked more times in the last two hours by Laia's followers than he had by the rest of the tournament combined. With a sigh, he flipped between the other scrying feeds, curious to see how the rest of the field was faring.
Unsurprisingly, the continent had already split into three dominant alliances, each carving up the land between them.
First was the Tide Pact, led by Finn Marrick, the empire's naval prodigy. His followers had seized total control of the eastern sea, their longboats patrolling every inch of the coastline, blockading any inland settlements that refused to join their alliance. With unchallenged access to the ocean's endless fish and trade routes, he'd attracted nearly twenty smaller contestant groups, forming a powerful coastal coalition that dominated the eastern half of the continent.
Second was the Conquest Legion, led by Lex Thorne, the War God's top disciple. His berserkers had swept across the northern plains, crushing any settlement that refused to bend the knee, seizing their resources and absorbing their followers into his ever-growing army. His alliance was a pure war machine, nearly a hundred thousand strong, with every member a trained warrior, and they'd already begun pushing south toward the fertile grasslands, burning every village that stood in their way.
Third was the Harvest Coalition, led by Seraphina Voss, Elara's older sister. Her followers had turned the southern grasslands into endless fields of grain, fruit orchards, and vegetable farms, producing more food than the rest of the continent combined. For weaker, unaffiliated contestants facing starvation, her alliance was the only safe haven in the wilderness. She'd traded food for loyalty, for protection, for rare resources, and now her coalition boasted over two hundred thousand followers, the largest on the continent, and controlled nearly all the continent's arable land.
Valerius nodded to himself, leaning back in his seat. Two months of in-realm time had passed in the blink of an eye, and the continent had settled into a tense, bloody stalemate. The three great alliances clashed along their borders every day, skirmishes breaking out over resources, over land, over power. The unaffiliated solo contestants had been nearly wiped out entirely, their small settlements crushed, their followers killed or absorbed, unable to stand against the massive alliances.
Nearly all of them. Except for one.
Valerius frowned, flipping back to Laia's feed. For two full months, there had been not a single trace of her followers on the surface. The Conquest Legion had scoured the western mountains twice, the Tide Pact had sent patrols up every river that fed into the sea, and the Harvest Coalition had sent dozens of scouting parties into the western forests—and none of them had found a single footprint, a single wisp of smoke, a single sign that anyone was there at all. It was like Laia's followers had vanished off the face of the realm.
Only when Valerius adjusted the scrying screen to peer beneath the surface did he see it: the entire western half of the continent was honeycombed with tunnels. Thousands of miles of reinforced, warded passageways, connecting massive underground caverns, all hidden from the surface world. And no one, not a single other contestant, had any idea it was there.
---
On the surface, a scouting party of orcs from the Harvest Coalition tramped through the western forest, their boots crunching on fallen crimson leaves. They were part of a foraging team, sent out to track a golden supply meteor that had crashed into the area ten minutes prior—official tournament drops, stuffed to the brim with enchanted weapons, rare seeds, and divine building materials.
The orc captain spun on his second-in-command, slapping him upside the head with a meaty fist. "How many times are you gonna waste our time with this garbage? You said the supply meteor crashed right here! There's nothing here but grass and trees!"
The second-in-command rubbed his head, his eyes wide with frustration. "I swear it, captain! I saw it with my own eyes! A gold meteor, right here! We're only ten minutes out from the outpost! It couldn't have just vanished!"
"Vanished?" The captain spat on the ground. "The sky's full of the coalition's wyvern patrols! Who's gonna sneak in here and steal a supply meteor right under our noses? Next time, you check your facts before you drag us all the way out here! I've got better things to do than chase your ghosts!"
He turned and stormed off, the rest of the scouting party following him, grumbling about wasted time. The second-in-command lingered for a minute, staring at the empty patch of grass where the meteor had landed, before shaking his head and hurrying after them.
As soon as their footsteps faded into the distance, the grass shifted. A hidden trapdoor in the earth swung open silently, and a pair of elven sprites peeked out, snickering, before vanishing back underground. The trapdoor shut behind them, leaving no trace that it had ever been there.
Beneath the surface, in the main command cavern of the underground fortress, Lirael, the Elven King of the Void-Forsaken clans, popped a bright crimson fruit into his mouth and chewed slowly, a look of pure bliss on his face. The fruit was tart at first, then gave way to a sweet, olive-like aftertaste, a rich, lingering finish that made his eyes flutter shut.
"By the Overgod's cheese," he sighed, tossing another fruit into the air and catching it in his mouth. "This is perfect. Tart, sweet, no bitter aftertaste. It's even better fresh than dried. We made the right call digging these up."
Gromm, the Lizard King, rolled his eyes from across the table, where he was sharpening his claws on a block of stone. "You and your stupid fruit. We've got limited storage space in the caverns, and you used half a growing chamber to plant a thousand of these trees. If we didn't have to stay hidden, you'd have dug up the entire forest."
Lirael's head snapped up, and he pointed an accusing finger at the lizard. "Don't act like you didn't help! You were the first one digging them up the second we found the grove! We had a deal—whoever finds the trees keeps them! You dug faster than any of us, then said you 'didn't care about the stupid fruit,' and snuck back that night to dig up half my grove! Hand them over, you overgrown gecko! Free up my storage space!"
Gromm coughed awkwardly, turning his head away and pretending he hadn't heard a word. Like hell he was handing over the trees. What was in his pockets was his, and that was final. He'd rather fight a void stalker barehanded than give up the fruit that made his dried meat taste ten times better.
Across the cavern, Korg, the Void Ape King, sat on a stone throne, sipping hot water from a wooden mug, his expression calm and dismissive. "You two are idiots. Fighting over sour, bitter fruit that no one else in the realm even wants. There are a hundred better things to hoard out here—weapons, ore, supply drops. Chasing after trees is small-minded. Short-sighted. Pathetic."
He'd barely finished speaking when a young ape warrior came sprinting into the cavern, his face pale with panic. "My lord! Bad news! The five crimson fruit trees we seized from the forest edge—they're all dead! Completely withered up, not a single leaf left on them!"
Korg's mug shattered on the stone floor.
He shot to his feet, his face turning bright red with rage, his massive hands clenching into fists. He'd been too slow to grab the main grove, and had only managed to snag five scrawny saplings from the edge of the forest. He hadn't gotten a single fruit from them yet, had been forced to sit and watch Lirael and Gromm eat their fill at every meal, and now the damn things were dead?
"Where is the fool who was tending to the trees?" he roared, his voice shaking the cavern walls. "I need a new sparring partner for tonight! Bring him to me!"
Lirael and Gromm stared at each other, then looked away, snickering into their hands.
The rest of the cavern was a hive of activity. The tunnels stretched for miles in every direction, and the smaller side caverns had been turned into breeding pens for the water slimes. Without the Overgod's realm rules to keep their numbers in check, the slimes had multiplied exponentially, their numbers swelling into the millions. They filled the tunnels, squelching and plopping as they split into new slimes, a sound that had become constant background noise for the followers, so familiar they barely heard it anymore. The slimes acted as sentries, as water carriers, as emergency food stores, as a living alarm system for the entire underground network.
In the center of the command cavern, Lirael spread a massive map of the continent across the stone table, marking off locations with a piece of charcoal. Five bright red marks were already scrawled across the western half of the map—every supply meteor that had fallen in the area, all stolen before any other contestant could even get close. The cavern's storage vaults were overflowing with the loot: enchanted weapons and armor, rare divine seeds, building materials, healing potions, even a crate of high-quality aging cheese that had been in one of the drops.
They'd never fought a war this easy. Never had this much wealth, this much security, this much freedom. All while the three great alliances on the surface were tearing each other apart over scraps of land and tiny supply caches.
Lirael tapped a new spot on the map, a valley deep in the northern mountains, right on the edge of the Conquest Legion's territory. "The next supply drop is here, at dawn tomorrow. The Legion has already sent a patrol to secure it. Think we can get there first, Gromm?"
Gromm grinned, his sharp teeth glinting in the torchlight. "My lizards can dig there in three hours. We'll have the supply drop cleaned out before the Legion's patrol even wakes up. They'll be staring at an empty crater, wondering where the hell it went."
Lirael laughed, marking the spot with a fresh red mark. The other clans cheered, raising their mugs of ale in a toast.
The surface alliances could fight over their thrones and their borders. They could burn each other's villages, slaughter each other's followers, scream about glory and conquest.
Down here, in the dark, they were getting rich. They were building a home for their Overgod, one tunnel, one supply drop, one fruit tree at a time.
And no one even knew they were there.