The first few platforms were probably intended for maintenance access to the tower's core; they were a little wider than the ladder I used to climb up to them and they then crossed the full width of the tower before coming to the next ladder. Climbing the first four, I ended up doing a full loop of the tower before coming to the first one extending out from the core. From the damage, this might have been the platform the spider crashed into on its fall. The barrier was bent in the middle like it had been hit by a heavyweight. There was a cable hanging over the side, one end with the plug, that had gotten caught between two of the barrier’s posts. It looked like it should have been run down a cable run on the other side of the platform. My guess was that the spider hooked onto it when it landed and pulled it with it when it went over.

  It didn’t take me long to pull it back up onto the platform, plug in the end into the antenna at the end and then run the rest of the cable back into the central tower cable drop. I re-secured the cable grips and hoped the damage the cable had taken before it was released wasn’t fatal to its functionality.

  I made my way up the tower, finding that most of the problems consisted of similar issues. It was almost therapeutic. There is something really cathartic about laying cable, especially with the light breeze coming from the nearby sea. The higher I got, the better the view of the local land became.

  Further south along the coastal road, I could see smoke rising from a small village. West revealed we were close to the cliffs we had sailed past the day before. I looked out at the handful of ships sailing past. Mostly fishing vessels, but there was one huge ship, three masts, under full sail. What a sight that was.

  I was just finishing up admiring the view when a voice shouted from below, “‘nara!”

  I looked down to see Sam and Voice staring up at me.

  “Eyup!” I hollered back.

  “How is the View?” Voice called out.

  “Amazing! Can you see how many of those cables you can plug in?”

  “Sure.” Voice bent to the task and I climbed up to the next platform.

  The next one had a small dish aimed inland. Cable-wise, it seemed fine, but there was a small panel which opened to reveal a screen. Touching it turned it on and gave me a signal strength meter. I loosened the bolt stopping the dish from moving and started to adjust it. My instincts were right; I needed to position it correctly.

  The sound of weight on the ladder let me know of the arrival of two of my teammates.

  “Cables plugging in?” I called out.

  “Yeah. All secure now, three lights were still red though.”

  “Hopefully two now,” I said, standing up from the dishes readout. I had tweaked it back and forth and got the signal as high as I could make it before carefully tightening the hand screws.

  “Expecting anything from doing this?” Voice asked.

  “Not sure. Might be just seeing things not there, but there has to be a reason for comm stations, right? Maybe it opens up something. Maybe we’ll need to link up different places to unlock things.” I shrugged and headed for the next ladder. “Besides, just look at that view…” I pointed out towards the handful of ships sailing past.

  I left Sam and Voice dealing with the next platform; this one stuck out on both sides and they took one side each. I climbed up to the top and found the alcove the spider had been in. It was a small room with a computer terminal in it. ‘ComNet Manager’ flashed up on the screen as it booted up.

  The screen flashed over a rapidly displayed list. I caught words like memory scan and power check, with a bunch of 100% after them, but couldn’t read the list quickly enough to see more than that.

  The screen then cleared and I had a GUI. A window popped up indicating a failure to connect to the global communication network and asked if I wished to recalibrate the connection. I selected yes.

  Another window popped up showing a loading symbol, and a moment later, I got a long list of satellites with names like ComNet-AB1, ComNet-AB2, MillNet-1.

  There was a button to select ‘recommended’, so I picked that. Four of the devices were highlighted and then the window closed. The loading spiral appeared again. It spun three rotations and was replaced with a window.

  ‘Connection established. Updating protocols…’

  And another busy spinner.

  ‘Protocols updated successfully, reconnecting….’

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  ‘Reconnection complete.’

  ‘Bringing local ComNet online…’

  ‘Remote deposit service now available in this region’

  ‘Local chat, now available’

  ‘Social Chat connections, now available’

  ‘Interesting,’ I thought with a grin. My interpretation of this is that each region will need to be reactivated. Towers might even need to be powered up and repaired a lot more than what we just did.

  I stepped out of the little shelter for the uplink panel and climbed down the stairs to the platform below. I found Sam and Voice grinning at me.

  “Have you checked guild chat?” Voice asked.

  “No,” I responded, “Why?”

  I opened up my HUD as Voice elaborated, “Guild chat requires a connection to the local net, only DMs go anywhere.”

  We had missed a couple of hours’ worth of messages from the others. Largely, Jacobs updating us on their progress with clearing tower floors. Unsurprisingly, they had set records on clears simply from the advantage of them having a competent tank, partnered with a healer who could do more than channel a mildly enhanced HOT spell. Apparently, others were now overtaking them as more people learnt how to cast properly and joined the teams clearing towers.

  They had completed the missions for their rank-one spells and returned to the mage school. All of them had picked up additional spells. Something made me check my titles, and I confirmed I no longer had the ‘Eye of the Storm’ title.

  “Lost the unique title,” I said to Sam and Voice as we started down the tower. “I think it is based on experience with the spells and not just the number of known spells.”

  “That would make sense, the system seems to like rewarding mastering and working towards mastery rather than dipping a little bit into everything,” Sam said. “I’m somewhat surprised you got that one when you did…”

  “Yeah. It would also explain why you didn’t get the Inferno and Arctic titles when you gained those spells.” Voice continued, “Other players who had the opportunity probably went Fire and Ice; you were just the first to go with lightning. Certainly, from the streams, I saw all the first people out of the tutorial and DSW just dismissed it. If we assume, thanks to Sam’s skills, you two were outliers in getting back to town so quickly and other people who did as well in the tutorial are still on their islands…”

  “It is strange, though, how tailor-made that island was for us. The challenge seemed scaled for two players…” Sam said contemplatively. “What are the chances that the pair of us who met and got on in the tutorial should also find ourselves on neighbouring islands and missions which brought us together and got us teaming up?”

  “Thinking about it, there are a lot of people talking about how the content they get pushed towards is suited to their playstyle,” Voice said. “Cosy farmer streamers, finding themselves learning how to set up farms. Combat streamers, being pushed towards the towers. Even the crafting streamers are finding their gameplay is pushing them towards the crafting professions.”

  We got back down into the building and found Daisy and Kelsey exploring one of the terminals.

  “The terminals opened up a lot more options when you got the tower back online. We can open coms with Landing and get the option to see what bounties are presently available.” Daisy said to us as we approached them. “We grabbed some of them to deliver the meat we are carrying to the hunters’ guild. There is even an option to share them with the party.”

  A pop-up appeared in my HUD inviting me to join a hunting party quest to deliver the resources we harvested to the hunters’ guild.

  Kelsey turned her head to look at us. “It’s also giving us the present prices for different resources. I don’t know if the prices are high, but it does say everything is in high demand. That might change with deliveries…”

  “So we should get back and deliver what we have gathered sooner rather than later?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I think that would be a good call,” said Voice, with supporting nods from Sam and Daisy.

  We took the direct road back to Landing, heading north along the coast. It took us past the Central Services building, where we saw several players idling around. Unlike our first approach, we made no attempts to approach the building, so they ignored us as we passed by on the other side of the road.

  Unlike what had been effectively a farm road, this route followed a more established dual carriageway. We passed by a few small business estates, much like the one we had just been to ourselves. We could see groups of players exploring them or signs that someone had done so previously as we got closer to Landing.

  Arriving back in town, we first headed over to the butcher’s quarter. It didn’t take us long to find the people responsible for butchering the cattle, and they pointed us over to an office that handled the collection and distribution of resources from hunters. I dropped off the handful of corpses I’d managed to squirrel away in my inventory before I’d filled it, and left the negotiation of price to Voice. It had been decided to trade most of the meat and hides with the general vendor, keeping the highest quality to sell directly to the tradesman or trade for gear.

  To our collective surprise, though, it was Daisy who stepped up and started negotiating with the fine curly moustached man behind the counter. When he tried to argue about losses in quality due to the skinning, she countered by showing him the expert quality of the hides, the quality of the meat. His attempts to negotiate down because of the time it had taken us to get back were countered by how quickly they went into storage.

  With the trade complete, we stepped back out into the sun, and Daisy shared our takes.

  “This is too much for me,” I said, looking at my share, “I didn’t contribute as much when you were all hunting.”

  “Nah,” Kelsey denied before anyone else said anything. “You also contributed more elsewhere, like with that fireball against the crowd.”

  “I’ve seen how this plays out in other games,” Sam agreed. “If we work together and keep everyone progressing, we make more progress. If we start tit-for-tating and working out the shares based on how one part goes, it starts arguments in other situations where the balance is different.”

  “You’ll make it up, El,” Voice declared. I stared down at the 15 gold in my hand… Well… ok, I’ve just doubled my available spending money…