By the time the remaining contestants realized something was deeply wrong, it was already too late. Not only had the supply meteor drops been cut in half overnight, but hideous void-spawned monsters had begun to spawn across every corner of the realm.
These monsters were crafted to perfectly simulate a full-scale void invasion. They fed on stray divine energy, multiplying endlessly in the dark, just like the slimes that filled Laia's tunnels, popping up in every shadowed crevice of the continent. The second they appeared, the fragile order of the tournament shattered, and the followers of the great alliances erupted into chaos and infighting.
The first to fall apart was the Conquest Legion, the faction with the largest population and the weakest agricultural ability.
Lex Thorne, the War God's prized disciple, had been born and raised in the lap of luxury, steeped in the divine world's endless plenty. The concept of hoarding resources, of saving for a rainy day, had simply never crossed his mind. It wasn't that he was wasteful, exactly—he'd just never had a reason to stockpile. Why would he, when his godly father could summon mountains of food and weapons with a snap of his fingers?
Now, as the leader of the largest alliance in the tournament, he dug through his faction's storage vaults and found fewer than ten unopened supply packs left. The full weight of his mistake crashed down on him, and his face turned ashen.
Unlike the Tide Pact, who'd fished and farmed the ocean from day one, the Conquest Legion had survived almost entirely on supply drops for the past year. They'd occasionally foraged for wild berries, but that was the extent of their self-sufficiency. Why bother farming when the sky rained down everything they could ever need? Before Rank 5, after all, no god—save for one absurd exception—could develop the kind of technology needed for large-scale, reliable farming. In a proper divine realm, resources were endless, gifted by the patron god. Most gods didn't bother with automated farming enchantments until they hit Mid-Tier, let alone taught their followers to till the soil by hand.
It was almost laughable, how spoiled these followers were. They'd had a year's worth of endless supply drops, and if they'd used them wisely, they'd have barely burned through a third of what they'd been given. Instead, they'd wasted it all on fancy armor, lavish feasts, and weapons they'd never even used.
Down in the underground fortress, Laia's followers barely even noticed the supply drop cut. Her original twelve overlords had survived for eons in the void, scraping by on nothing but what they could scavenge. The three Void-Forsaken clans had lived through the collapse of their own realm, starved and hunted by void beasts. A 50% reduction in free handouts was nothing to them. They'd been self-sufficient for months, their underground farms overflowing, their vaults stuffed to the brim with unopened supply packs.
The only real disruption came from the new void monsters spawning in the dark, winding tunnels. But even that was less a threat and more a mild annoyance. The only complaint the followers had was that the monsters were inedible.
Killing them was trivial. When the shadowy void beasts reared up in the tunnels, they were cut down in seconds by the lizard warriors' claws, the elves' arrows, the apes' fists. The most the monsters ever did was scuff the tunnel walls. Their corpses couldn't be used for fertilizer, couldn't be eaten, couldn't be turned into anything useful—they'd just crumble to ash if left unattended, leaving nothing but a faint wisp of void energy. The only practical use anyone had found for them was kindling for the forges, and even that was a stretch.
"These things are barely Rank 2," Gromm the Lizard King had grumbled, crushing a void beast under his claw without even looking down. "Half of them aren't even Rank 1. If one of our own gets hurt by this garbage, they'll be the laughingstock of the realm for the rest of their lives."
In the command cavern, Korg the Void Ape King stared down at the map spread across the stone table, his brow furrowed with a heavy, solemn weight. He couldn't have cared less about the void monsters skittering through the tunnels. What worried him was the supply drop cut.
Half the usual meteors. That meant half the usual haul to bring back to the Overgod. All those enchanted tools, rare seeds, divine building materials—gone, just like that. And if the academy cut the drops in half once, what was stopping them from cutting them entirely in the third year?
He'd brought hundreds of empty spatial bags and a dozen reinforced carts into the realm, all to fill with supplies for Laia and the realm. The thought of going back with them half-empty was worse than death.
Thankfully, the underground hydroponic farms were thriving. The rice paddies stretched for miles through the caverns, the stalks tall and green, heavy with grain. They'd collected seed samples from every plant on the continent, stored in airtight jars, ready to be transplanted back to the Overgod's realm at a moment's notice. They'd even built a quarantine chamber for the seeds, to stop the spread of plant diseases and blight, just like Laia had rambled about once, over a cheese sandwich. With that, they'd never run out of rice, never go hungry again.
Korg's gaze drifted to the floating rice paddies they'd built, suspended from the cavern ceiling by enchanted ropes, and his brow furrowed again. The Overgod had talked about "vertical farming" once, about stacking growing beds to save space and maximize yield. But the lower paddies weren't getting enough light, even with the glow slimes. He sighed, rubbing his temples. How was he supposed to add another layer of floating paddies without blocking the light from the ones below? It was a crisis.
Up on the surface, in the Conquest Legion's central fortress, a group of burly orc warriors stood in a patch of tilled dirt, holding crude wooden hoes, staring at the barren ground in blank confusion. It had been a month since they'd planted the seeds, and nothing had sprouted. Well, almost nothing. A few scraggly, yellowed weeds poked through the dirt, and that was it.
One orc scratched his head, turning to his companion. "Uh… why ain't it growin'? It's been a whole month. We threw the seeds in the dirt, just like we're s'posed to."
Another orc frowned, prodding the dirt with his hoe. "And what's up with the ones that did grow? They're all weird lookin'. Leaves are all different shapes. Ain't rice s'posed to look the same?"
The third, and dumbest, of the trio puffed out his chest. "Wait, this is rice we planted, right? Ain't rice s'posed to be grown in the ocean? That's why we flooded the field with seawater, right?"
A nearby wood elf, one of the only followers in the entire alliance with even a passing knowledge of agriculture, stared at them, his hand pressed to his forehead, a look of utter despair on his face. He'd been silent for ten minutes, but he finally spoke, his voice tight with frustration.
"So let me get this straight. You flooded the fields with seawater. You haven't pulled a single weed since you planted the seeds. You haven't watered them once since the flood. And you mixed up the rice seeds and wheat seeds when you threw them in the dirt."
The three orcs turned to him in unison, blinking in confusion. "Rice and wheat ain't the same thing? Our home realm's fields just grow on their own! We toss a handful of last year's harvest in the dirt, and the Overgod makes it grow! We don't gotta do nothin'!"
The elf closed his eyes, sighing deeply.
For these followers, life was simple. They prayed to their god for ten minutes a day, and in return, the god granted them endless food, endless wealth, endless comfort. Their only purpose was to fight for their god when called upon. Every race had their own inherited skills, their own divine gifts—but for most warrior races, farming wasn't one of them. The most they'd ever grown was rare medicinal herbs for battle.
Why would they bring farmers, loggers, cooks to this great, glorious battlefield? Those were lowly, inferior races, unfit to fight for their god. In a proper divine realm, there was no hunger, no want. The land flowed with milk and honey, the god was all-knowing and all-powerful, and no follower ever went to bed on an empty stomach.
(From the underground tunnels, Laia's followers, upon hearing this sentiment via a scouting slime, had yelled in unison: Bullshlt!)
The elf stared at the orcs, his heart sinking. In the divine world, a god's oracle could do anything. It could summon houses out of thin air, create fields that harvested themselves and never lost their yield, make every fantasy a follower could dream of into reality. The result? Most followers couldn't tell the difference between edible grain and poisonous weeds. These orcs, with their already limited intelligence, couldn't even tell rice and wheat apart.
The lead orc, unbothered by the elf's despair, reached into his supply pouch, pulled out a glistening, oiled drumstick, and took a huge bite. He chewed twice, made a face, and tossed the rest of the drumstick into the dirt, where it landed in a puddle of mud.
The elf's face darkened. "We're running out of food. Wasting it like this is reckless."
The orc rolled his eyes, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "Relax. The boss drops two small supply packs a day, each with 20 kilos of food. Missing a day or two ain't no big deal."
The elf opened his mouth to argue, but just sighed, turned, and walked away. There was no point. They didn't get it. They didn't understand that the supply drops could vanish at any moment.
This entire scene played out on the scrying feed in Elara Voss's private viewing booth, and she stared at the screen, a strange, twisting feeling in her gut.
She'd joined the Conquest Legion after the solo alliance collapsed, thinking it was the safest bet. But now, watching her followers stare blankly at the barren fields, watching the orcs toss perfectly good food into the mud, she understood exactly why this was happening.
Resource cards were just too cheap.
The academy rarely handed them out, but that was only because they were considered low-level, trivial items. For every god except Laia, who'd been broke since the day she enrolled, a single resource card was the cost of a bottle of fancy wine—enough to feed a mid-sized realm for a decade.
Someone had run the numbers once: for a god of any given rank, even with a follower population far over their realm's capacity, 99.99% of them could provide their followers with basic resources 100 times over what their followers could ever produce themselves.
Resources were cheap. Trivial. Worthless. At least, they were in the real divine world. But here? In this tournament? They were life and death.
Elara's brow furrowed, and she remembered a conversation she'd had with Laia, months ago, before the tournament started. She'd laughed at Laia for making her followers grow their own wheat, for making them build their own houses, for hoarding every scrap of supply they found. Laia had just shrugged, and said, "You can't rely on handouts forever. If you don't teach them to take care of themselves, the second the resources dry up, they'll fall apart. You gotta be strict with resources. No waste. No excess."
At the time, she'd thought Laia was just being her weird, frugal self. Now, a cold, sinking dread settled in her stomach. The Conquest Legion was rotten from the inside out, choked with luxury and complacency. It wasn't going to be the void monsters or the Tide Pact that destroyed them. It was going to be their own wastefulness, their own inability to feed themselves when the handouts stopped.
Elara had no faith that she'd survive if she stayed.
In an instant, she made her decision. She sent a sharp, urgent command to her followers, hidden in the outer edges of the Conquest Legion's territory. Gather your things. Leave no trace. We're abandoning the alliance. Now.
By dusk, her small, disciplined group of elven and dwarven followers had vanished from the fortress, slipping silently into the dense, uncharted forest at the southern edge of the continent, heading for the western mountains. The only place in the realm where the supply drops never went missing, where the void monsters never seemed to venture. The only place that was truly safe.
The home of the moles.
In the monitoring spire, Headmaster Valerius watched Elara's followers vanish into the forest, and shook his head. He'd seen this coming for months. The Conquest Legion was a ticking time bomb, and the supply cut had lit the fuse.
He flipped between the feeds, and the contrast was so stark it was almost funny. On one screen, the Conquest Legion's followers were brawling over the last few supply packs, their fields barren, their fortress on the brink of collapse. On another, the Tide Pact was struggling to fend off void monsters spawning in the deep ocean, their fishing grounds poisoned by void energy.
And on Laia's feed? Her followers were having a meeting about adding a third layer to the floating rice paddies, while a group of young lizard warriors herded a pack of void monsters into a stone chamber to use as target practice for the new recruits.
Valerius sighed, leaning back in his chair. He'd designed this tournament to test the young gods' ability to lead, to adapt, to survive when their divine power was limited. He'd wanted to weed out the gods who relied too heavily on their innate power, who couldn't think for themselves when the handouts stopped.
And the only god who'd passed the test with flying colors? The girl who'd spent the entire tournament eating cream puffs and cheese sandwiches, barely even glancing at the scrying screen.
He glanced over at the live broadcast feed, where the comment section was exploding. The viewers had gone from calling Laia a lazy, uninterested god, to hailing her as a genius, a visionary who'd trained her followers to survive anything.
Valerius smiled to himself, and adjusted the tournament parameters. The void monster spawn rate was about to double.
He wanted to see just how far these moles could go.