C+4

  Maelstrom watched Alastair walk into the cave. She realized she had forgotten to show him the cats. Maybe that would be useful. It was harder to remember what to focus on. No, that wasn’t it. She could still focus, just felt the lethargy in making decisions and acting on them, but switching to other focus areas was difficult.

  Alastair didn’t seem to have rage issues. That infuriated her greatly. If she was confident that she could win and still figure out a way of this simulation, she would probably kill him out of spite. But he had jumped up in levels and even with weaker equipment he could make good combat decisions and leave her a day behind. Plus she’d lose whatever simple trust he had given her this morning.

  Maelstrom sat on a somewhat shaded rock, thinking through the situation. Today felt so much worse than yesterday, almost as if there had been a drastic rise in the effect of the exhaustion. Each player must have experienced similar effects unless they found ways to counter the daily rise in rage. Mal had never asked any of the other players.

  The point remained, she had expected that this playtest would be over after a week of game time, but to her best guess it had been closer to ten days. But there was no end in sight. Maybe other servers had already finished the game.

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  She knew, at least highly expected, that she had been to every place on this island, and therefore was able to identify glitches and bugs throughout. Or at least inconsistencies. That countered, right? For the $25,000 prize on each server. That amount, even if seemingly frivolous based on the inflation caused by rampant corporate greed, was enough to pay off a good part of her debt. She’d be close to out of the hole for a day of real-world time. But that tradeoff was becoming a worse trade-off with every passing game day.

  Part of her considered that maybe there would even be longer-term consequences from exceeding the time stuck in the game. It’s not like she hadn’t spent hours in games before, but there was a difference when those hours were dilated to days.

  This wasn’t the first time she considered that her efforts in this game had been misinformed. Perhaps if she had realized that there were less competent players along the way, she might have tried to help them along the way rather than trip them up at the beginning. But she couldn’t have expected the difficulty level to rise so exceedingly, or whatever it was that was preventing the other players from moving forward.

  She felt relieved that Nova had trusted her. She was a bit surprised it was him that made it to the Bay first. He had been a weakling every time that she had seen him. His wife, though, had at least the resolve to see something through. Mal knew that it wasn’t Nova that set them on separate paths - except maybe through his cowardice. Maybe Flor would join them along the way. It was something Mal would have to encourage along with pushing Nova through the paces to get ready for an assault on the keep.

  Mal really hoped that would be the end of this simulation.