“We never managed to turn it off completely, by the way,” Cey-Rus suddenly interrupted him. “It’s a horrible story, quite mystical. Even cut off from power and the Net, it kept working. Do you remember how scared we were?”
“How can I forget... Too bad Balabanov didn’t let us break it apart and fill that basement with cement,” Svechkin said, chuckling.
“It wouldn’t have solved anything. It had already uploaded itself into some cloud server online. You know that.”
“At least my soul would be at peace,” Romanova replied quietly. “I would have known that we had done everything we could...”
“HotCat, why do you think we created our digital copies, disguising them as NPCs? Because they’re local, flesh of Sphere’s flesh. The generator doesn’t see us as part of the player-admin faction. The Seven Brothers are outside the playing field, away from the Balance. That is, until we start using our weapons.”
“So today...”
“Forget about it. It doesn’t concern you. First, you’re a player. Second, you identified the sword. Honestly, an elephant in a china shop would have acted more gracefully, but it’s not like it could be fixed — there’s no point in regretting that. The admins, however, are about to get into a whole lot of trouble.”
“We need to hurry,” Cey-Rus spoke up. “If such creatures and factions are showing up in Sphere, it could mean only one thing: the end is close. Let’s focus on gathering the Keys.”
“I agree,” the First Maiden said, nodding. “All signs lead to the Astral Plane. Let’s go there.”
“Searching for the Key will require a lot of resources,” the Gravekeeper remarked, skeptical. “We all know what the Astral Plane is, don’t we? Even with the Compass, it’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“We’ll unlock the faction and use players,” Romanova replied without delay. “The only problem is there’s just one respawn point, and it’s inside the Pandorum fortress.”
“By the way, how did they get their hands on a respawn circle in the first place?” I chimed in. “Isn’t that against the rules?”
“Yes, we didn’t plan for resp points in the Astral Plane. This area wasn’t supposed to be populated by players,” Cey-Rus said, chuckling. “But as you can see, it didn’t work out that way. Basically, the Astral Plane is the dumpsite of Sphere of Worlds. It stores the fragments of dead and destroyed worlds. Look.”
He pulled out a piece of paper and quickly drew a large whirlwind with swirling clouds around it.
“This is the Maelstrom, the hypothetical center of the Astral Plane,” Cey-Rus said. “The nozzle of a vacuum cleaner, so to speak. It spews out Astral Storms that put everything inside the plane into motion.”
He drew a spiral originating from the center and running through the entire picture, added lots of black dots, and continued.
“The Storms create currents, a giant whirlpool that sooner or later sucks all astral objects into the Maelstrom. That’s our cosmogony.”
“What does the resp circle have to do with it?” I asked, skeptically studying the drawing. To be honest, the elf wasn’t the best painter.
“Everything. As I already said, the Astral Plane collects the remnants of dead worlds, including those destroyed by true fire. The respawn circle is indestructible, as it has no durability. It survived and drifted through the plane, and the Pandas found it and towed it to the shard under their castle’s territorial influence. After that, the normal resurrection mechanism kicked in. That’s about it. Got it?”
“So there are other resp points drifting somewhere in the Astral Plane? After all, each world has many of them, one for each territory.”
“That’s right,” Cey-Rus agreed. “But they don’t work without a territory, so they’re inactive. The Astral Plane is really big and is constantly in flux, so the only way you can find them is by accident. The Pandas simply got lucky.”
“I have another question, seeing as you’re in a talkative mood,” I said. “What happens to items that get into the Maelstrom?”
“They’re thrown outside the Sphere of Worlds,” Cey-Rus replied without hesitation. “Into the digital void. Everything disappears there.”
“Did you come up with that?”
“Yes, but the procedural generator implemented the idea, making its own adjustments. Some of them were quite unexpected.”
* * *
As Tao stood on the tallest tower of the Weeping Devil, the castle of PROJECT HELL, he also thought about unpredictable consequences. Through the glowing membrane of the dome, he saw giant pentagrams lit around the castle walls. Seven, eight, nine — they had formed a closed circle around the Weeping Devil. Tao recognized the emblems and the insignia: Ahelmar’s winged sword, Ardehetel’s waning moon, Diamant’s dragon head... They, and many more leaders of the House of Darkness, had come there, attacking the citadel and immediately forcing it into siege mode. The implication was clear: there would be no mercy. He knew what was beckoning them.
Tao, the creator and clan leader of PROJECT HELL, also known as Yoshito Yamato, the head of the new Sphere of Worlds developer team, had been playing the game since its closed beta, which became a big advantage when the investors considered his nomination.
Yoshito’s career was far from smooth sailing; he had achieved everything by himself. Nobody would have employed a noname for a leadership position. Yamato’s immaculate portfolio showed a long and thorny path from an indie developer, a diamond-in-the-rough programmer effortlessly creating virtual environments, to a team leader of high-profile projects, with Siege, the game that won the recognition of thousands of players, becoming the icing on the cake. Ever since childhood, he remained a passionate fan of VRMMOs and became engrossed in Sphere upon his first exposure.
Months before, after starting to work on the project and studying it from within, he hadn’t
