The second the final hand lifted in assent, a system notification forced itself onto my status screen.

Factionwide Notifice!

A consensus has been reached.

Faction Layton Mischief has decided as a council to forge ahead, in spite of dangerous uncertainty.

Your faction has accepted a scourge trial.

Scourge trials - A trial built to test the resilience of a faction. Your people will be given an objective to complete. As your faction works to complete the objective hostile creatures will funnel into your region, first starting as a weak trickle, but gradually growing until either the objective is completed or your faction is eliminated.

Details: During a scourge trial the faction may not leave their territories, and surrounding factions may not enter. Creatures are unable to spawn within fortifications or directly inside clearly populated areas.

Factions from other planets will still have access to migration purchases within the system interface.

Objective: Construct and use the factionwide teleporter.

Special Circumstances: Certain parts of the region are yet to be claimed. Raids will continue on schedule, however their subsequent regions have been assimilated into your faction prior to completion to allow for tactical purchases. Since the neighboring quarry is a requisite resource to your objective, it and the faction occupying it have been included in the scourge trial.

A scourge trial?

Confused, I scanned the words again in an attempt to wrap my mind around what exactly was happening. Whatever it was, the name alone was enough to convince me that I needed to pay attention. I'd made that mistake before.

"Why did you accept that!"

My eyes shot up.

Gorff, the diminutive little elder gnome was raking a hand through his shoulder length golden hair, eyes bulging.

Wait, was he talking to me?

"Me?" I asked skeptically pointing to my chest.

"Yes! You!" He stood up, pointing at me accusatorily. "You pretend you care about everyone's input with this stupid building, but don't think for one second before you throw your entire faction into a scourge trial!? No one but a fool accepts a scourge trial!!"

"I didn't throw our faction anywhere, and you need to calm down."

"You're the faction leader aren't you? These trials don't just happen, you have to accept them, trials have to be accepted!" He fumed, stepping towards me.

"Listen here you—"

Jared quickly cut me off before I could get out what I wanted to say. "Layton…is there a chance that this has something to do with your situation with the system?"

My situation? What the hell was Jared talking about?

And then it dawned on me. How on earth had I forgotten my stupid curse? But that wasn't how the system failsafe was supposed to work was it? I was still supposed to at least be given an option—wasn't I? Especially for something as dangerous sounding as a "Scourge trial".

"I…" My attention turned to the rest of the council, first to Gorff. His face was pale, and he fidgetted with his mage robe. Harold didn't look much better, his bald head reaching a weird hue of purple. "There was no accept or decline, it was just the system message…"

Whether it was my fault or not, most of the people on this council were aware of me bypassing the system's failsafes. And those that didn't would assume I was lying.

Either way? All the fingers were pointing squarely at me.

Part of me knew that wasn't fair. I should've been given a prompt to accept or decline. Somehow the "are you sure?" had been cut out. It didn't make any sense…something else was at play, I could sense it. But what was I supposed to say? Anything that came out of my mouth would just sound like petty excuses.

Fortunately at least for now, I was spared even trying to explain myself. Loud screams and shouts of panic erupted.

Grateful for the distraction, I sprang into motion, sprinting full speed towards the sound.

The commotion was on the other side of the village, over a mile away. It was a distance I could cover in less than a minute, but in this world a lot of bad could happen in a minute. Possibilities swam through my mind as buildings zipped by.

It wasn't lost on me that if anyone was hurt, or heaven forbid killed, I would hold myself personally responsible.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

As fast as I was, Mischief was faster.

And by the time I reached the north end of our village, villagers were already sweeping through the forest dispatching the last dregs of the disturbance.

Child sized bodies littered the forest.

Seeing the broken corpse, reminded me of dagger teeth sinking into the soft flesh of my ass cheek, and being swarmed nearly to death.

Memories of a different time.

Chaos spawn.

At least a hundred, probably more. Some killed so brutally they were little more than paste. As a precaution I cast healing wave on everyone standing nearby, but from the looks of things it wasn't needed.

"Is anyone hurt?" I called out.

Maddux, one of the original members of Jared's group, loped over carrying his spear at his side. It dripped with deep purple ichor.

"Not even a scratch. The whole group of them was level one." He shook his head. "We could've sneezed on them and they'd die."

"Where did they come from?" I asked as Jared and the others began trickling in behind me.

"Can't really say. The screams and shouts were from some startled builders I wager. Aside from that it looks like that direction." He pointed up the mountain, deeper into the forest. "They must be from the faction announcement, right? The Scourge?"

"Must be. I thought we'd have more time though, or at least a countdown."

That's how things normally seemed to work. There were timers, countdowns, and cooldown windows. Where was the countdown?

"We have to get back to our territory." Harold told the other blue man with him.

"Wait." I turned to stop him. "These are just level one Chaos spawn, your people will be fine for now."

Level one chaos spawn were basically the equivalent to ants at this point. Even if a thousand swarmed us now, all it would take is a single level five to handle the entire wave. This was not a time to panic—yet.

I scratched my head. In fact—if I looked at this the right way…you might even say it was a window of opportunity, and one I had no intention of missing.

"Jared, how many of our faction's fighters are still below level ten, roughly?"

Without missing a beat, an interface emerged from his storage and he began scrolling. My guess was that he probably already had a rough idea, but he had a tendency to be nitpicky.

"Somewhere in the ballpark of nine hundred and seventy, give or take a dozen. Why? What are you thinking?"

I started to pace. "What would you say is the biggest deterrent so far for some of the most underleveled fighters? Like, why aren't they participating in fights to earn levels?"

Jared shrugged, "If I had to guess, I'd say they're scared to face the monsters and factions that challenge our faction…well that or they are traumatized, but we're hearing more and more express interest in earning levels."

I pointed to the forest. "How do you think they might feel about a restart?"

Jared was already writing in his notepad, he began muttering. "This is perfect, we could even put an emphasis on purchasing more migrations from the system. The guildians who we've brought through are always so far behind on levels—this is perfect! We can even use the coins from selling unusable loot to fund it."

Gorff watched the exchange mouth agape, eyes bugging.

"You are both out of your minds." Gorff scolded. "This is a scourge trial. You read the description. This is only the beginning! Everyday, every moment the trial will get harder!"

"And we will get stronger." Alex stated, basically reading my mind. "Kinda sucks that we have to wait a little bit before things get more fun. HEY! Maybe by the time I get to help Damon will have me some armor!"

Gorff craned his neck and gawked at the overgrown teenager.

"This is why you wanted to come to our planet, isn't it?" Ellison reasoned diplomatically.

"I didn't come to be stuck in a scourge trial with a faction full of lunatics. You don't even have access to the stone yet that's needed to build your objective."

Alright. That was a fair point. We really should figure that bit out sooner than later. Well—that and the fact that we'd need to find a way to transport the stones once we harvested them. I hadn't forgotten that we wouldn't be able to teleport them. Dang, there really would be a lot to cover. Which meant more boring meetings…

Was it time to start building a wall again?

My imagination started to get the better of me, and I started thinking of all the progress our weakest fighters were about to get. All the evolutions we were about to see. I literally had to fight the urge to start rubbing my hands together like some kind of mad scientist.

"Jared, make sure that we document any and all titles earned. We need to emphasize those wherever possible. We should make a book or something."

"We should complete the anomalies while we wait for things to get more interesting."

I smiled at Mischief, giving him a small thumbs up. It was a good idea, but before I could commit to that there was a list of things that needed to happen. Part of my mind recognized that we were literally stuck in a life or death trial where there was a real chance our whole faction could be killed. But the even bigger part was just geeking out at all the growth our faction was about to get.

"Will we be expected to defend our own territories?" Enora asked. It was a fair question.

"We can discuss that and everything else. But like I've always said, we will respect your wishes. If you want to try your hand at your own defense, I support that."

That was my answer for now, but I knew it wasn't that easy. She seemed to understand that also, and she pursed her lips but didn't push me, nodding gracefully.

I noticed Harold kept glancing away toward the direction of the teleporters, and Alex was rocking on his heels. People were getting restless, many looking ready to disperse to their personal errands. Which was fine, I wanted to move on also.

I shared a quick look with Ellison and Jared.

"I guess we should start by getting Trasnik and the stone boys brought into the fold."

***

Before anyone was confident taking the two territory trip up to the quarry Jared and I both agreed it would be important to understand how each of the other communities were affected by the trial. So immediately after leaving where the chaos spawn attacked we promptly used the teleporters to travel to each of the towns we had access too.

Starting with the Guildians.

Their homes sat comfortably on the crest of a rolling hill where Jared and his people once started the induction. What I saw surprised me.

It dawned on me that I hadn't even been back to their territory since they joined the faction over a month ago.

I knew we'd lent them builders, but I wasn't expecting this.

Unlike the tightly packed rows of homes in the human village, the cabins were situated on large plots of land. Each with carefully manicured gardens. Rows of berries and herbs replaced the old barricades that once protected the guildians during their raids.

Tree starters lined the customary cobbled roads which had become so common in our faction. Since the Guildian's had none of their own crafters almost every single building was residential.

All the buildings except one.

Right in the center of it all was a quaint farmers market, with high pavilions that sheltered rows of empty bins.

"Ellison, Jamus!" A tall Guildian man met us halfway across the flowing meadow that separated the village from the teleporter we'd used.

"Clarence, how are things here?"

"A group of something called Chaos Spawn." He said pointing a ways off, to where a group of guildians waded through knee high grass. "They appeared out of nowhere, not long after the system notification."

"Was anyone hurt?"

Clarence scoffed. "No, they were nasty little creatures but seemed harmless enough."

"How many?" I asked.

Clarence scratched his antler. "A couple hundred maybe?"

Ellison and I shared a glance. That sounded roughly the same as our main territory, and the attack would've happened about the same time also.

Jamus wandered to the killing field stating he wanted to stay and take stock of what kind of loot the creatures dropped.

Ellison caught Clarence up to speed but there wasn't much else that needed saying after the system notification.

"Do you think it's safe to assume that each of the settlements experienced something similar?" I asked.

"I'd say it's a good bet." Ellison replied, but he seemed distracted. I turned to look in the same direction, where Jamus was speaking animatedly to a group of Guldians. "What do you think that's about?"

Fortunately, we didn't have to wonder for long. Jamus left the group and jogged back to Ellison and myself, waving something in the air.

"They drop coins!"

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