Kaius had questions.

All of his senses said there was absolutely nothing in front of him. Truesight gave him nothing, and there was no distinctive scent of magic, nor was there even a nebulous feeling of charged potential beyond whatever lay in front of them. He should have been able to step forward, heading through the twisted branches and banks of leaves to explore the denser ruins he could see just ahead. 

Reaching out, Kaius tapped the invisible barrier with one finger. Scintillating pale-blue light rippled out from the impact, growing fainter and fainter. It looked like a wall, but they’d followed the barrier for long enough that Kenva could confirm it was curving. From how slowly that had happened, the damn thing had to be huge enough to encapsulate the entire centre of the plateau.

He dropped his hand, frowning at the fading light. A sealed competition zone, huh? Obviously it was something to do with the Proving, but they had no way of knowing what. Kaius just didn’t quite understand what made it a gods’ damned Celestine ranked challenge.

Sure, the tops of the plateau had been full of stronger beasts than the jungle below, but he couldn’t sense any of them here. Though, maybe they were just hiding. He wasn’t arrogant enough to think he could sense something two tiers higher than him if it didn’t want to be found.

“This is annoying,” he muttered.

“How? It’s information,” Ianmus said.

“Yeah, but not much of it.”

“We’ve learned there’s ranks and dedicated competition zones,” Kenva pointed out. “That’s useful. If we can find a few rated for our tier, then we don’t need to search for them when the Proving starts, do we?”

Kaius sighed, knowing his friend had a point. It was just frustrating to be cut off at the knees when they’d finally started getting somewhere. He supposed that they’d just need to search the jungle below and hope that they could find something similar. Considering they’d already seen evidence of ruins in the central region of the jungle, they had somewhere to start. With any luck, they’d be a little less ridiculous than a Celestine challenge. 

Crushing power washed over the four of them, freezing them in place. Kaius’s heart hammered in his chest as the foreign Authority sent a spike of cold dread through his veins. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something massive shift through the canopy just beyond the barrier. Between a gap in the leaves, he saw something yellow and ancient. An eye, watching them.

Twin lids snapped closed, blinking. The Authority vanished, and the thing shifted deeper into the challenge zone.

“Maybe we should get the fuck off this plateau,” Ianmus said, his face pale.

Kaius nodded hurriedly, suddenly feeling foolish for wondering what made the challenge so dangerous. There was no guarantee that all of the dangers were inside the impenetrable system barrier.

They retreated from the invisible wall in harried silence, relying on Kenva to guide them back to the same spot on the cliff they had first climbed up. It was a tense hike across the rocky desert, followed by a complex dance through the winding branches as they got closer to the cliff in the hours that followed. None of them had forgotten about the lethal creatures that could phase through the pink crystal beneath their feet. 

They halted at the very edge of the treeline, stopping to rest on a ten-stride wide branch that gave them a good view of the cliff edge and the distant trees below. 

For a moment they just caught their breaths after spending the last few hours all but running through the forest, though Kaius would be lying if he said that he just didn’t feel much like talking after yet another brush with a creature that could flatten him with a thought. It was unnerving, damnit.

Slowly, their lingering curiosity over what they had found returned, and their chatter picked back up. Even if they’d only learned a little about what waited for them in the Proving, that was far more than most people had — which was worth planning around.

“So, competition zones are a thing, I guess,” Kaius said, gazing out over the flat expanse of jungle-giants below. He summoned a sack of jerky, relishing in its plain smokiness after all the excitement of the last few hours.

“I’m a little surprised that it's segregated by rank like that — though maybe it’s tier, considering there's just the one for the fourth tier,” Kenva replied, kicking her legs over the edge of the branch they were sitting on.

Kaius shrugged, it kind of made sense to him. “The System doesn’t pull its punches, but it has its goals. Everything we’ve seen suggests it's trying to nurture talents by any means necessary. Roving Mythril or Celestine threats could well wipe us out through no fault of our own, and there would be little we could do about it. That includes people — we’d be screwed if we had to face off against some millenia-old elf.”

“That still leaves the question of how it’s spread them out, or even how many of these zones there are.”

“I doubt it would be random,” Ianmus replied. “It would be strange for the system to take protective measures and then put Silver and Gold a few leagues away from monstrosities that might turn them into collateral damage by accident.”

Ianmus narrowed his eyes, scanning the distant jungle and the scattered ring of plateaus that seemed to have been plucked right out of the desert by the godly will. 

“Just hedging a guess, here — but if we consider this desert jungle as a single region of the Shardworld, then it's pretty clearly split into zones. Aside from the central region, there are two main rings of plateaus. If this inner ring contains Cellestine challenges, then I wouldn’t be surprised if the outer ring has even more dangerous ones, keeping the real monsters far from those that could be caught up in their battles. If so, then maybe the centre of the jungle has challenges for the second and third tier?”

Kenva raised her brow at the mage. “That’s an awful lot of assumptions to be making. We’d need to travel to another plateau to even check if it has a similarly ranked challenge as this one, and I’m not sure we have the time to spare for that.”

Nodding to concede the point, Ianmus glanced at the next closest plateau. Hazy from the distance, it was weeks of travel away at best. 

“Very true, and even if it has done that, there’s no guarantee that the spread is so neat. With only a few weeks left, we really need to be focusing on our levels and refinement. That said, we should still investigate the central zone of the jungle. Even if we’re mostly looking for fights and Treasures, there are ruins down there. It won’t take us much time to at least check them out.”

“Agreed,” Kaius said. “We need to confirm if all of the ruins have a challenge zone, especially if they are appropriate for our rank. At least the ones that are bigger than single buildings or small compounds.”

His reasoning was simple: if the ruins were the primary focus on the Proving, then they had a rather large advantage over the people who had yet to push this deep into the jungle. It was one they had to take full advantage of while they could. Kaius had no doubt that there would be more people discovering ruins and challenge zones by the day, and as word spread more people would make the effort to reach this region of the jungle.

Given what he knew about the system encouraging challenge and competition, he had a feeling that there would be a scramble to claim whatever prize these zones contained. If the Proving required them to conquer multiple zones, they would need to work fast to move through as many as they could before people could contest them for their claim. The more they found now, the less they would need to search when they were facing off against the slew of delvers and nobles who had made their own way into the desert-jungle. 

“And if we find ruins that aren’t blocked off? Those records we found aren’t nothing,” Kenva asked.

Kaius shrugged. “We can keep our eye out, but like Ianmus said, we don’t really have the time to comb through collapsed buildings and dig through sand.”

As fascinating as it was, they had priorities. It was true that they might learn something about the trials that lay ahead of them — but Kaius wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t stop thinking about that scrawled note they’d found in the leatherworker’s workshop, and the illegible word at the end of it. Would the system really just leave information they weren’t supposed to have just…lying around? If it could turn a chunk of a world into a pocket realm, scrambling a few letters was well within its capabilities. 

At the end of the day, they had to focus on their own progress. Others had the ma power, expertise, and time to trawl through ruins looking for scraps of lost history. Their goal was finishing the integration, specifically to prevent a cataclysm that an Ascendant had warned them would otherwise come. It didn’t matter if this was the fate that otherwise waited their world — what mattered was them getting strong enough to forcibly prevent it, regardless of what happened.

Lying flat across the branch, Porkchop pushed himself up into a sitting position, and shuffled over to avoid poking himself with the spikey leaves above him. 

“You’re all forgetting a much more pressing question.”

Kaius glanced over in surprise, struggling to think of what could be more pressing than a system challenge that might well decide the fate of their world. His brother met his eye, expression serious.

“I’m not sure how to get down the cliff. Climbing down is a lot harder than going up.”

Kaius froze, then sighed. Hells, that was a problem. Rapidly mulling it over, he considered how viable it would be to tie Porkchop to his waist, then burn some ungodly number of Shunts to slow their fall. Then he considered how likely he was to get bitten if he suggested it.

“You could jump?” Kaius suggested, then yelped as a heavy paw swiped him directly off the edge of the branch.

…

Kaius reached out with a flat hand, golden energy radiating out as he touched a flat barrier. It felt like warm glass under his skin, tingling slightly as if there was a faint current to it. Just beyond the system-barrier, tripartite spires of inky-black stone rose out of the desert sands, their shattered crowns standing just thirty strides below the lowest reaches of the canopy. Scattered masonry carved with delicate swirls littered the desert floor, half of them barely more than specks poking above the dunes. 

From the ground, Kaius couldn’t see much more than that, thanks to the ruined wall that surrounded the complex, its lowest points still rising a good eight strides. He knew from spotting the complex from above that there was something beneath the ruin, though. Part of the courtyard had caved in, revealing some sort of underground complex.

Pressing harder against the barrier, the golden light grew brighter in response. There was no other reaction. 

Kaius sighed, pulling back as he glanced at his waiting notification. 

*Ding! You have encountered a Sealed, Gold-rank Competition Zone! Please return when the Proving has commenced!*

It was the fifth ruin they’d found in the central region of the jungle in as many days. Four had been Gold, and one Platinum; yet more evidence that Ianmus’s conjecture about the system segregating its challenge zones was correct.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t learned anything more than that. Not about what the ruins contained, what happened to the people that built them, or even what the Proving held in store for them. Unlike the plateau, they’d found no structures that weren’t sealed in by system barriers. There’d been a few jutting fragments of rock, and a couple of buried foundations just barely visible as straight lines in the sand, but nothing else — and they didn’t have the time to physically excavate those traces, either.

At the very least, they were getting good at finding the challenge zones. They were scattered pretty far, but the jungle-giants left massive swathes of open desert between their trunks, which made it easy to spot the things from leagues and leagues away. Stone masonry stood out starkly against pink sands and giant trees, after all.

In some ways, that was a problem in and of itself. If they had to compete over these challenge zones, teams would be able to converge on ruins from far and wide given how easy they were to find. They just had to hope they could move quickly, and maybe get a little deeper into the zone so they’d have a head start.

“Well?” Kenva asked as he stepped away from the barrier.

Kaius shrugged. “Same as the others. I’m not sure how much more time we can spend focused on this. We should still try to map them out, but we need to shift our focus to our growth and on pushing deeper into this zone. There’s not much more time until the Proving, now.”

Ianmus nodded. “As much as it’s annoying to ignore the history we might be missing, I agree. We have an opportunity, we need to use it.”

They set off, heading towards the centre of the jungle.A/N: B3 is releasing very soon! November 4th for ebook. Audio has unfortunately been delayed again, but this time its just for two weeks. After this, I'm aiming for ~2 published releases a year, so hopefully that should give plenty of time for simultaneous releases going forward.