Time slipped away like water through a sieve, and in the blink of an eye, the Public Divine Realm tournament had entered its sixth month—exactly one-sixth of the full three-year contest.
In the academy's central monitoring spire, Headmaster Valerius stared at the wall of scrying screens before him, a look of helpless exasperation etched into his face.
Over these six months, nearly every contesting god had poured their divine senses into the realm, guiding their followers from above. Even with the limited, fragmented view the tournament rules allowed, this god's-eye view had given countless teams a critical edge, helping them avoid deadly beasts, navigate uncharted terrain, and snap up scarce resources.
Nearly every god, that is. Except for one.
On the screen dedicated to Laia Hayes, the girl in question hadn't glanced at the tournament feed even once in six months. She was curled up in her private viewing box, a never-ending spread of ice-cold cola, cream puffs, honey cakes, and cheese sandwiches spread across the table before her. Her mouth had barely stopped moving the entire time; only when she was too full to take another bite would she stand, stretch, flip through a random realm management textbook for a few minutes, then sit back down and resume her feast.
Valerius sighed, rubbing his temples. Six months in the realm was a mere twelve hours in the divine world. For twelve straight hours, this girl had not sent a single command, a single word of guidance, a single wisp of divine power to her followers. Any other god's followers would have crumbled long ago, their faith shattered, their ranks torn apart by infighting and despair. Even he, a fully ascended God-King, dared not leave his own divine realm unmanaged for six months without risking chaos.
Yet what baffled him most was what Laia's followers had done in that time.
They'd gone completely mad with productivity. They'd tunneled so deep and so wide that the entire western half of the continent was hollowed out beneath the surface, a labyrinth of reinforced tunnels, hidden chambers, and booby-trapped passages so complex that even a Rank 5 combat follower would stumble out bloodied and broken if they dared to enter. They'd stripped every inch of land they passed: grass was scraped up by the roots, berry bushes were dug out whole, even nutrient-rich topsoil was hauled back to their underground hydroponic chambers. The second a supply meteor was launched into the realm, they were on it, stripping it clean before anyone else could even get close.
These six months had not been kind to the contestant pool. Of the original 200 participants, over 100 had already been eliminated, their followers wiped out or their divine cores broken by the harsh wilderness. The number of remaining contestants was now well under a hundred, and dropping by the day. Nearly every unaffiliated solo contestant had vanished from the realm—all except for one group of "moles" hiding underground, thriving like no one else.
Valerius frowned, leaning in closer to Laia's feed, his brow furrowed.
He'd built a hidden rule into this tournament, one he'd never shared with a single soul: in the final year of the contest, no more resource packs would be dropped. Only monsters and point tokens would be sent into the realm. Hoarding resources early was the single most critical strategy for long-term survival, a secret only he knew.
He'd never imagined that a group of followers would survive the first six months almost entirely on foraged roots, wild grass, and sour forest berries, barely touching their stockpiled supplies. In the three months since resource drops had begun, he'd launched nearly 1,000 supply packs into the realm—and a full third of them had vanished into Laia's underground fortress. Her followers had stockpiled over 300 unopened supply packs, enough to keep 30,000 followers fed and armed for an entire year.
Valerius had half-convinced himself someone had leaked the hidden rule. But he'd designed the tournament himself, created the realm from scratch, and personally launched every single supply drop. There was no one to leak it.
He shook his head, still unable to wrap his mind around these followers. Gods were proud, and their followers were meant to be proud too. For as long as the divine realm had existed, a god's followers had lived a life of plenty: they offered their faith, and in return, their god granted them endless resources, magic, and glory. Their only purpose was to grow stronger, to fight for their god, to conquer in their name.
In his centuries of life, Valerius had seen nearly 800 different types of divine followers. He'd seen proud dragons, noble elves, fierce berserkers, stoic dwarves. But never in his life had he seen ancient, powerful races like these—void dragons, star elves, runesmith dwarves—bury themselves underground like moles, hoarding every scrap of food they could find, eating anything that could be chewed and swallowed, all without a single word of guidance from their god.
And when he flipped to the close-up feed of the followers themselves? He sighed again, even more bewildered. Every single one of them was glowing with faint golden light, their auras thickening, their power growing by the day. They weren't just surviving—they were thriving.
What in the name of the God-Emperor was this? Was this how the wealthiest hidden noble houses raised their followers? He couldn't understand it. Not in the slightest.
---
On the surface of the realm, the three great alliances had finally started to realize something was very, very wrong.
It had been six months of nonstop frustration. Countless patrols had watched golden supply meteors streak across the sky, only to arrive at the crash site and find nothing but a scorched crater, not a single scrap of supplies left. Scouts swore they'd seen temporary stone outposts on the edges of the forest, only to return minutes later and find nothing but empty grass. Lush, sprawling berry groves that had stood for months would vanish overnight, every bush, every root, even the topsoil stripped away, leaving nothing but bare rock behind.
The unease had boiled over into outright paranoia in the scattered remnants of the solo contestant alliance. In a hidden clearing deep in the southern grasslands, the three remaining leaders of the alliance's followers knelt in a circle, their heads bowed in prayer. Faint golden light swirled around them, and the translucent, flickering forms of their patron gods materialized above them—this was the only form of direct communication the tournament allowed, and it cost a massive amount of divine power, limiting their meeting to just 15 minutes.
The three gods, all Rank 3, stared at each other across the circle, silence hanging heavy in the air.
The first god, a cold-faced man with sharp, angular features, was the first to speak, his voice tight with frustration. "Someone explain what's going on. At first, I thought it was bad luck, but for six months? We haven't found a single intact supply pack. Not one."
The second god, a burly, fierce-looking man with a scar across his cheek, let out a cold, bitter laugh. "You want to ask that? I've been asking the same question for months! As a high-ranking member of this alliance, I haven't seen a single point token in six months! I'm starting to wonder—you two have been working awfully closely lately. Are you hoarding the rewards for yourselves, trying to lock down the first place prize?"
The third god, a sharp-eyed woman named Lydia, spoke up, her voice calm but firm. "That's not fair. My followers haven't found a single point token or supply pack either. It's clear someone else is taking them, not us."
The scarred god threw his head back and laughed, loud and mocking. "Your followers? Please. Your followers do exactly what you tell them to. Whether they found anything or not is just whatever you decide to say. For all I know, you two have been conspiring together, telling your followers to keep their mouths shut while you hoard every resource for yourselves! My followers tell me the entire alliance hasn't found a single supply pack in six months. Does that sound normal to you?"
The cold-faced god's expression darkened, his voice turning icy. "What are you implying? You know the academy forbids us from discussing our backgrounds or contacting each other outside the tournament. How could we possibly conspire? Every search party is shared between our factions. We all see the same empty craters. You know that."
"Rules are dead things. People find ways around them." The scarred god waved a hand dismissively. "It's far too easy to cheat if you know what you're doing."
The cold-faced god's jaw tightened. "If you want to talk about cheating, who's to say you aren't the one conspiring? For all we know, you built this alliance just to leak the supply drop locations to the other great alliances, letting their patrons hoard the points while you get a cut. That way, you can rake in points from two alliances at once, and lock down first place before anyone notices."
The scarred god's face turned bright red with rage, slamming a fist into his palm. "How dare you spit lies like that! I've built my reputation on honor, and I won't stand here and let you slander me!"
The cold-faced god just snorted, crossing his arms, and said nothing more.
Lydia opened her mouth to calm them down, but before she could speak, the golden light around them flickered and faded. Their 15 minutes were up. The three gods vanished without another word, the meeting ending in bitter, angry silence.
Back in the grasslands, Lydia's followers stared at each other, their faces grim. Their patron's expression had said it all. The alliance was broken. It was only a matter of time before it dissolved completely.
Lydia's jaw tightened, her eyes cold with anger. She didn't believe for a second that the other two had taken the supplies. No one could move that fast, that cleanly, without leaving a trace. There had to be a mole, a spy planted in their ranks by the Conquest Legion or the Tide Pact, leaking their search routes to someone else.
She let out a cold, sharp laugh. Whoever was stealing their supplies, hoarding all the points for themselves, was probably laughing right now. But her things weren't that easy to take. She'd find them. And when she did, they'd regret ever crossing her.
---
Beneath the surface, deep in the heart of the underground fortress, Gromm the Lizard King stared down at the round, stone-shelled point token in his claw, his face pulled into a deep, annoyed frown.
Another one of these useless, pretty little tokens. He tossed it over his shoulder with a huff, where it was caught mid-air by a waiting slime and hauled off to the storage vault.
"Damned things," he grumbled. "Can't even use them to buy cheese for the Overgod. Can't they make the resource packs and the tokens different colors? I'm sick of digging these up by mistake."
He turned and stalked back down the tunnel, leaving a sea of slimes in his wake. The slimes had been split into specialized teams, their unique abilities honed to perfection over the last six months. Lightning slimes lined the tunnel walls, their sensitive bodies picking up even the faintest electromagnetic ripple from a falling meteor miles away. Wind slimes drifted through the upper tunnels, their bodies attuned to the slightest shift in air pressure from a meteor streaking through the atmosphere. Together, they fed a constant stream of data back to the command cavern.
Everyone in the realm knew the rules by now. From the moment a supply meteor was launched into the sky, it took exactly ten minutes to hit the ground. For the first six minutes, the streak was visible to anyone on the surface, but its trajectory was too uncertain to pin down. It wasn't until the final minute that most teams could even guess where it would land.
But their Overgod had taught them better.
Laia had rambled to them once, back in the early days of the realm, about something called "parabolas" and "ballistic physics" and "atmospheric drag." She'd said it was "just common sense" for figuring out where something would fall, and had drawn a bunch of numbers and lines on a piece of cheese wrapper to show them. At the time, they'd thought it was another one of her secret, masterful lessons, a hidden test of their ability to apply her wisdom.
Now, that "common sense" had made them the undisputed kings of the supply drops.
With the slimes' sensory data, Lirael the Elven King could plug the numbers into the formulas their Overgod had given them, and calculate the exact landing spot of a meteor within 30 seconds—five full minutes before it hit the ground. They'd have a team of lizards already dug in at the landing site, hidden in a temporary tunnel, waiting. The second the meteor hit, they'd have the supply pack hauled underground, the crater covered up, and every trace of their presence erased in 30 seconds flat.
By the time the surface alliances' patrols arrived, there was nothing left to find.
Gromm stepped into the command cavern, and Lirael looked up from the map spread across the stone table, a grin on his face. He nodded up at the stone ceiling, where a faint golden streak was visible through a thin scrying crystal embedded in the rock.
"Another one coming in," Lirael said, tapping a spot on the map with a charcoal stick. "Calculations are done. It's landing in the western river valley, right on the edge of the Harvest Coalition's territory. ETA four minutes."
Gromm bared his teeth in a sharp, eager grin, his claws clicking against the stone floor.
Perfect. Another supply pack. Another haul for the Overgod.
He turned and bellowed orders to his lizard warriors, who snapped to attention, grabbing their shovels and rushing down the tunnels. As he followed them, he glanced up at the faint streak of light in the sky, and laughed.
Who needed divine guidance? Who needed grand magic?
They'd learned everything they needed to know from their Overgod.
Master math and science, and you could conquer the whole damn world.