The Assembly of the Meteors
Biin’s world, which had been sitting at 600,000 points, had exploded in growth. Military shot up by 700,000, Politics gained several tens of thousands, and the Culture, Mystery, and Faith stats surged thanks to the Sugar Lumps, Nyaltartep, and the rest of the dessert ecosystem.
The total now hovered near 1.5 million points. When you considered that the current baseline for level 7 sat between 68,615 and 144,091, this was ten times the maximum standard score. He had built an eleventh-level world.
Given that each level represented a 2.1-fold gap, the number was downright insane.
And Biin wasn’t the only one. Wahando’s world, which had gained massive population-carrying capacity thanks to Biin, could temporarily push its potential military power close to a million points.
Wahando lost some of the points he had poured into Industry and Politics while converting them to Military, but he didn’t particularly care. In the end, those two stats meant nothing if you couldn’t win the war.
Sesaisa and Mihun, bound to them by an inviolable alliance, drew their connection even tighter this round.
Sesaisa, who had never quite grasped the importance of Culture, used Mihun’s guidance to grant the acorn elephants far stronger magic and elevate them into hero-grade entities. Mihun, in turn, received help in the most fundamental areas—constructing the artificial structure known as the Spiritual Realm and condensing Faith through ordinary flows—completing a monstrous score of roughly 1.5 million points.
At a glance, it looked like no one could stop these four.
But remember this? At the time of the seventh collision, 130 worlds had scored higher than Biin’s.
Now, on the eve of the eighth collision, the number had not shrunk but grown. One hundred and eighty worlds now stood above Biin’s total score.
This wasn’t because Biin’s growth was slow or because Wahando’s consulting had been useless. It had to be understood in a different way.
Factions had begun to form inside the game.
It was an inevitable outcome. Even Biin had already built a group linked to Sesaisa, Mihun, and Wahando. At the very least, both Biin and Wahando were fully aware of that fact.
Other top-rank players were also helping one another in their respective specialties, trading, or—much like Wahando—squeezing out potential far beyond the physical size of their worlds by turning raw-material worlds and industrial worlds into single-product factories and engaging in commerce with other players.
This was exactly the kind of interaction the organizers considered desirable. To them, exchange, not isolation, was the heart of civilization.
Even now, players who avoided or slowed down exchange and simply clung to scores slightly above the baseline still couldn’t understand why their worlds ranked so low.
How are all of them producing more than ten times the standard world size? They simply failed to comprehend the advantages that commerce and exchange brought.
The same was true for the countless players who had collapsed during the exchange process or, unable to claim victory in civilization clashes, fought one another to the brink of mutual destruction.
They were left in a truly lamentable state—unable to even meet the baseline score—somehow keeping their worlds running.
Worlds so weak they would lose to lower ranks, with tiny populations, low Politics that made control impossible, and Faith too low for the people to obey divine commands. Horrifying worlds where civil war erupted even as a world collision loomed on the horizon.
The gods of these so-called “bankrupt” failed worlds now earned few points, could not defeat their opponents, could not quit immediately, and could not fix their worlds either. A complete managerial disaster.
But that was precisely why the angel existed. From two rounds earlier, the angel had already been telling the lowest-ranked players and those who were complacent after barely scraping the baseline:
“Your score is far below average, Mr. Huhal.”
“What? All my levels are 7 right now! The baseline level is 7, isn’t it?”
“That is because the gap between the lower ranks and the upper-middle ranks and above is simply too large. Even the top 45 % now have every level at 8 or higher. In practical terms, their scores are more than double yours.”
Any player who heard those words would feel a chill run down their spine. Of course they had never assumed they were the best out of a billion people, but what exactly were these monsters above level 11 doing?
The thought of fighting them brought no confidence of victory.
In a structure where half the players were eliminated with every collision, they realized anew that their odds of surviving until the next elimination round were only one in four.
For a mid-to-low rank player, there was only one realistic path to survival.
“Cooperate with someone on the same low level as me…”
“Or devour those below me and advance to the next round…”
As a result, the lower ranks began revealing themselves in the community, actively seeking planned collisions with other players.
After all, even if their civilization was in a failed state, maintaining a large enough scale until the next elimination round would still let them scrape together enough points to withdraw.
And so the predators appeared.
“Next opponent. Can I collide with that player who’s looking for an alliance?”
“Unfortunately, another player has already designated them.”
“Hmph. Everyone’s gone hunting, I see.”
The mid-upper ranks held such an overwhelming advantage over the lower ranks that any match was literally a guaranteed win.
They could devour the opponent’s world for free, spend the long maintenance period cultivating it, then absorb it into their own. The prospect was extremely tempting.
On the other hand, there were upper-rank predators who clumsily pretended to be lower-rank, waiting for mid-upper ranks to pounce on them.
After all, upper ranks could crush mid-upper worlds, and mid-upper worlds had far more stable systems than lower ones. Absorbing them promised much higher returns.
This trend had actually existed since before the sixth collision.
It became especially active during the seventh collision when the angels began mentioning average scores and upper-rank benchmarks. Now, at the eighth collision, before the lower ranks could be shaken out in the next elimination round, everyone was frantically searching the community for low-rank players—either to cooperate with them or to devour them.
In other words, the chance that a lower-rank player would accidentally meet another in a world collision had become extremely low.
Even the chance of meeting a mid-rank player was low.
They too had scores far below the true top tier, so they had no choice but to form alliances, loose coalitions, and factions among themselves to raise the overall weight class of their worlds.
Therefore, when a random world collision occurred, it usually fell into one of four categories.
First, worlds already so ruined that no viable strategy remained. Players who could only think of surrendering to the next opponent.
Second, idiots who hadn’t paid attention to the angel’s words and therefore had no grasp of the current community situation.
Third, players who had tried to find someone to devour or ally with but failed.
Fourth, upper-rank players who felt “I won’t lose to anyone” and saw no need to cherry-pick their opponents.
Aside from these few exceptions, it was safe to say that nearly everyone at this stage was actively using the community to select their next collision partner.
Whether through proactive cooperation, loose alliances, outright hunting, or honorable duels—they all moved with purpose.
Biin, Sesaisa, Mihun, and Wahando were the only ones who ignored that trend, simply because they possessed the confidence to crush whoever they met.
The collision mechanism was designed to match worlds with the closest and most harmonious terrain. If you were confident in victory, not choosing an opponent was actually the superior choice.
As a result, these four were highly likely to keep encountering upper-rank worlds from now on.
It wasn’t bad luck. It was simply how the game flowed. With eight million participants, the top 0.1 %—the supreme rankers—numbered eight thousand. That was not a small figure.
They believed that no matter who the opponent was, they could secure at least half the points. Diplomacy first; if that failed, negotiation or surrender would suffice.
And the true ultra top 0.01 % had already formed factions among themselves.
Fewer than a thousand ultra-supremes. Among them, the pinnacle top one hundred.
“Meteors” on the level of Biin, Sesaisa, Mihun, and Wahando. Monsters who could almost certainly shatter the opponent world upon collision, or at the very least drag it into mutual destruction.
Players who had purchased mythic-grade traits in round four, all of them aiming for outright victory.
It was only natural that these individuals—who desired solid alliances or the elimination of even larger forces—would reach out to Biin.
Player ‘Ogolraeot’ has requested a conversation.
It was a message that suddenly arrived while I was managing the ecosystem ahead of the next collision.
Ogolraeot? I had no memory of the name. I had given consulting to quite a few players by now, but he wasn’t among them.
Assuming it was a new consulting request, I accepted the conversation.
……?
Well. It did spark some interest. What was this about?
What exactly did he want me to do with that information?
This didn’t sound bad. Maybe the proposal was worth considering…
What a coward. Since I dreamed of solo victory, I had zero interest in that plan.
Yet Ogolraeot did not seem bothered. With stubborn persistence he sent one last message.
Along with the message he sent a text file. It roughly outlined the conditions and standing for joining the alliance, plus brief explanations about the current members.
The minimum requirement to join their self-proclaimed Mythic Union was possession of a mythic-grade trait. In other words, one had to have acquired it in round four. The bar was set high.
…Come to think of it, Sesaisa, Mihun, and Wahando all possessed mythic-grade traits, didn’t they? I wondered if they had received the same proposal. Now that I thought about it, those three had never exactly kept their consulting activities a secret.
I judged the current flow worth paying attention to, so I sent messages to my three acquaintances.
Time for us meteors to hold a meeting.