Chapter 87: Matchmaking: Mayhem Of Warlords

They finished eating without any further interruptions and settled into a quiet corner of a different, chiller cafe afterward, pulling up the forums for Floor 4’s main game together.

"Mayhem of Warlords." Alice scrolled through the game’s own overview first.

The map and content changed with every match, as they always did, but the core gameplay stayed consistent beneath whatever fresh coat of paint the Tower dressed it in. Six hundred players filled the duo bracket for this particular mode, three hundred pairs total scattered across whatever world the match generated for them.

Logan scanned further down the thread. "Match-wide events pop up randomly across the map. Relics as rewards, apparently, with a low chance of Player Grace Fruits appearing. Both draw a crowd, from the sound of it."

"Relics boost your overall power during the match." Alice tapped the relevant post. "And apparently they count toward a better Tier Point conversion if you actually win. Worth chasing, if the timing lines up."

"Yep. I got three Relics in my last match. They were quite useful, and got me a good chunk of Tier Points."

"No Field Bosses this time either." Logan kept reading. "Warlords instead. They lead their own factions, scattered across the map. Beating one gives score and Tower Points while dropping blueprints, gear, consumables. The usual spread."

"And Warlord Badges." Alice’s voice slowed as she read the next line herself. "Convertible to Tier Points at the end. But players won’t drop the Warlord Badges they’re carrying if they surrender and exit. Only if they’re actually killed."

Logan felt something cold settle behind his ribs. "So the system’s outright telling players not to let anyone surrender, if they want more Tier Points out of it."

"Yeah." Alice’s own smile had gone thin. "Cute little incentive."

Neither of them said much else about it. There wasn’t really anything productive to say.

They skimmed the rest of the forum halfheartedly after that. Players had posted about hundreds of different events already, but every match generated its own set at random, which meant none of it would actually apply to whatever they walked into. World Quests worked the same way, always different from one match to the next. Reading through someone else’s experience wouldn’t tell them anything useful about their own.

"Not worth the time." Logan closed the thread. "Let’s just go in and adapt."

They called their parents first, letting them know they were heading into the match, then turned to sorting out their own loadouts.

Logan’s old Mythic gear set had shattered during his training with Elder Rishin, the backlash of his own power tearing straight through it in that final crackling collapse. He bought a fresh Tier-4 Mythic-rank set to replace it, running through the Tower Shop’s current listings until he found something with stats and a set effect that actually complemented his build. Alice did the same beside him, picking out a set suited to her own archer-first approach.

"Combat roster." Logan pulled three cards from his own collection. "Billy, Solveig, Sonic."

Leaving his production units behind on purpose meant more room to gamble on fresh pulls early in the match. He’d built something rare out of a lucky merge line once before, a Tier-1 Uncommon pairing that eventually grew all the way into the Legendary-rank Arcane Cyborg Fairy he’d nicknamed Tinkerbell, workshop and all. If a line like that opened up again this time around, he intended to follow it all the way through, no matter what else the match threw his way, and extract the unit.

Alice picked her own three without much hesitation at all.

Thistlemaw Grovekeeper stood the tallest of the group, a hulking shape built out of ancient bark and river-worn stone, roots trailing thick behind every step it took as it had never fully left the ground it grew from. Emberlynx Sentinel came next, sleek and cat-shaped, fur made of shifting orange flame that never quite settled into one form for long, capable of splitting itself into twin blurs of claw and fire whenever the fight called for it. Skyveil Cantor rounded out the trio, humanoid and slight, wings of translucent wind folded against her back, always trailing a faint constant hum that promised a storm nobody else could quite hear yet.

"My favorite three. The ones you made for me." Alice grinned at them fondly. "Ready to cause some trouble again?"

Thistlemaw rumbled something low that might have been agreement. Emberlynx’s twin forms both flicked their tails in unison. Skyveil just smiled, wind stirring softly around her feet.

Logan and Alice looked at each other once, both grinning now.

"Let’s go."

They entered the duo matchmaking for Mayhem of Warlords together.

---

The match found them within seconds, and the world that resolved around them a moment later was almost entirely blue.

Sea stretched out in every direction, broken only by scattered islands of varying size, and the one they’d actually landed on barely deserved the name at all. A hundred meters of radius, sand and a few stubborn palms, their entire starting territory in full view without needing to take a single step.

```

[ Territory size fixed. Expansion possible only by raiding another player’s island and destroying their Territory Core. Summoning Circle and Healing Area upgradeable with Tower Points. ]

```

So their island will only grow bigger when they destroy another duo’s island.

"No walking to the next island over, then." Alice shielded her eyes, scanning the horizon. "There. Big one, maybe ten kilometers out."

Logan followed her line of sight and spotted it too, a proper landmass rising green and substantial against the waterline. "That’s where the first real fighting’s going to be."

They left Billy and Sonic behind alongside Alice’s own Thistlemaw, Emberlynx, and Skyveil, five Mythics in total holding the little island, then summoned Solveig, his clones splitting off to carry both of them across the open water in a smooth, fast glide.

The big island turned out to be exactly as massive as it had looked from a distance, thick jungle rolling back from the shoreline into hills that climbed higher than either of them could see the top of.

A herd of rabbits met them first, oversized and clearly wrong in a way that had nothing to do with their size alone, teeth a little too sharp, eyes a little too intelligent.

```

[ Frenzied Longtooth Hare ]

Tier-4 | Normal to Uncommon | Level 35

```

Logan glanced at his own status window out of habit. Level 40. Class Level 32. Then at Alice’s, still sitting untouched at Level 10 across the board.

"These are yours." He stepped back, waving a hand at the herd. "You need the levels more than I do right now."

Alice’s grin came fast and sharp, bow already rising. "Don’t mind if I do."

Logan left her to it while he lifted off on one of Solveig’s own clones to sweep the wider treeline, hunting for whatever else this island might be hiding.

...

Two guys had also arrived on the same island just as fast as Logan and Alice, via a Mythic-rank Spacecraft one of them brought in the match, bought it with Tier Points in the shop.

"Scan the perimeters. Let’s see if there are any players around."

The spacecraft did a 10-kilometre radius deep scan, instantly discovering two high-energy targets, who were none other than Alice and Logan.