[Welcome to Floor 2.]

[You are once again transported to the island planet of Yzmar.]

[You have passed the preliminaries, and by entering into an agreement with a member of Throskart high society, you have begun to overcome your identity as an enemy slave, though you remain in thrall to your backer.]

[You have arrived at the second ring of the island.]

[It is known by the natives as the Desert Land.]

[Participate in the Qualifying Round.]

[A deadly game takes place in the desert, where survival itself is a lofty goal.]

[You have passed Floor 1 on a difficulty of or above. Your story will not be reset.]

[Analyzing...]

[You accomplished some impressive feats in the preliminary round. Some members of the audience have begun to consider you too entertaining to want you dead. However, many others are still against you.]

[The game is committed to fairness on the surface, even for a member of the human race.]

[The higher-ups are restricted from acting directly.]

[You are participating in this game for the second time. You have the identity of an ‘enemy.’]

[Please choose your difficulty.]

Obviously, I had to go with

[Please wait patiently for your mission.]

A few seconds later, a card appeared, hovering in the air right in front of me.

“Please turn over the card to receive your special role and mission,” said a robotic voice.

Mission: Expose the , which will cause them to be executed, or otherwise ensure their death. is a special role empowered and required to directly attack one contestant each night and steal their merits on a successful kill while being immune to being voted off. If they fail to kill a target during any night, they fail their mission and you are considered to have succeeded at yours.

Perk: Can any other contestant. When ability is used, the contestant under question is forced to answer a single question truthfully. Can be used up to 3 times. State “Invoke Interrogate”, maintain eye contact with your target, then ask a question to use.

[Mission Selected]

[Expose the Saboteur without resorting to preventing them from killing at night before they kill at least 5 people, then survive the round to qualify.]

I whistled. The Tower was getting even tougher on me this time. It had made brute force impossible to use to find the Saboteur. The only way to survive and win was to figure out legitimately who it was.

I grinned. This might even be actually fun. “Game on.”

As soon as I put the card away, I was teleported to a marked off area of desert, with dozens of Throskarts around me. About a minute later, a booming voice echoed through the desert.

[Helloooooo, dear participants!]

Coming to think of it, the emcee kind of sounded like the Red Guy from that old cartoon show, Cow & Chicken.

[Congratulations to you all on passing our preliminary game, All 1,000,000 of you have now entered the qualifying round on the second ring of the beautiful island planet Yzmar.]

[I do hope our wonderful audience is ready for a very HOT battle, and I mean that quite literally! This desert isn’t what you’d call tourist friendly, it does NOT mess around! If any of you start feeling over-dressed for this, feel free to show it all...hehehe.]

I facepalmed, grinning in spite of myself. Pfft, what a ham.

[The game this time will be . Our million contestants have been placed in separate groups of 100 players each.]

[The goal this time around is completely simple! Just survive for ten days—that's it. And there’s no need for you all to fret over fighting each other either, it’s expressly forbidden! Anyone who thinks to give THIS rule a cheeky little test will immediately be disqualified. And by “disqualified” I of course mean “summarily executed.”]

[Of course, what’s a rule without exceptions, am I right? Some of you will have already noticed that you have an additional mission that you MUST clear in order to pass this round. Fail to do so, and you will also be disqualified.]

[Now, I’m sure we’re all aware of what’s the one thing that’s both most vital to survival, and hardest to come by in a desert, riiiiight? You guessed it, it’s water!]

[We your eminent and magnanimous Game Masters have seen fit to provide all of you with an abundance of it. Every night, there will be four types of structures to give you water: Small water stations, tents, small houses, and of course, a luxurious mansion. However, nothing in life is free, you know!]

[I’m afraid this desert has been infested with *gasp* monsters! So to earn your keep, you’ll need to fight them under the watchful gaze of Yzmar’s sun. The conversion rate couldn’t be simpler: kill one monster, get one merit. Only those who work hard gain wealth in this game! Stealing merits is, of course, completely impossible, but if you don’t mind spreading it around, if there’s anyone you’d like to take pity on, you can exchange two merits to give someone else one.]

[Now, at the end of each day’s fighting, comes the audience’s time to shine! You’ll all be responsible for voting off ten contestants each day. But don’t panic just yet, dear contestants! The merits you earn are good for more than just trading for water, you know. They also protect you from the audience’s votes! For those with 0 merits, one audience member’s vote is worth one point. The more merits you have, the more you reduce how many points a vote is worth.]

[But that’s not all, dear contestants! If you serve with distinction and earn enough merits to be in the top 10% of the group, you’ll win immunity! So work hard!]

The explanations finally wrapped up from there. It was a little hard for me to maintain concentration through the whole thing. Even though I had a helpful class trait “Extreme Temperatures Resistance” that took the edge off both heat and cold, and my suit had a secondary climate control function, I was really uncomfortable. This desert was pretty exaggerated compared to the ones I knew on Earth!

Next would be the hard part. This was one area that I’d had major trouble with in the final week’s drills. But I’d gotten it down well enough in the end...I hoped.

As I got into position, I took stock of the Throskarts in the group. Most seemed pretty aimless, smarting from the heat already, but a number of them who were otherwise milling around nevertheless subtly made their way toward my direction.

Interesting...

Soon, the “combat lanes” began their rise from the desert sands. To my relief, I had managed to position myself pretty well. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite perfect, and I nearly lost out the center lane to a particularly large and muscular Throskart, but I claimed it just in time with a well-timed final spurt of speed as he was matching my pace to posture to me.

I had my work cut out for me...well, that would have been the case if I didn’t specialize in high damage to the point of having multipliers out the wazoo. Still, killing 200 giant spider monsters took me a hot minute even though I only needed 2-3 spells per spider.

Even so, when I’d finished, almost nobody else was, including those poor saps at the outer lanes who only fielded 5 of them. Although, most of those looked pretty close to done. Some of the people in the 50-spider lanes, the 5 each on my left and right, even had to bow out and let someone else in before they were all finished.

The big guy directly on my right, who I’d beaten to the 200 lane, was an exception. Judging by the number of spider corpses in his lane, he’d made it further through than anyone else with 50 by the time I’d finished. In fact, other than me he was the only one to have made at least 20 kills so far. He was even able to spare a moment to notice that I was already done.

With some relief, I took off my Amplifier Helmet as I stepped out of the center lane. It was a great piece of equipment, but it sure didn’t make it any easier to beat the heat.

Still, I was in a pretty good mood. In fact, I was 99% sure this mission was a shoo-in. I might even clear it with style.

After all, I was that sure I knew who the Saboteur was, and for the remaining 1% I had a method that should do what I needed with just two questions.