)+\( Hugo )/+(

The faint scent of active kitchens drifted through the air and tugged at his nostrils - beckoning him to breakfast. Hugo sighed, and placed his hand against the stacked stones before he rose to his feet. The small burial site was nestled between two thickets of trees, its own sanctuary away from the noise and clamor of the tutorial proper. That silent, reflective place faded behind him, replaced by the cacophony of the settlement.

He entered their growing town at a poorly defined boundary, sticks along the ground to denote where a wall should end up going. That gave way to a few simple, tentlike structures whose inhabitants were too zealous - or too stubborn - to sleep in group accommodations until the rest of the shelters were finished. Hugo struggled with his people's desire to build so many individual structures. This place - this tutorial - it was a temporary endeavor. The only thing they would be taking out with them were crafted items they could reasonably have in their possession, and the gains in skills and stats they were able to realize from the space around them. Everything else was but a distraction.

The only reason he had his own residence was that people had demanded it. The nobles rallied for his accommodations from a sense of royal propriety. The common Vuxarinans supported the notion as well - though Hugo saw their reasoning may have partly been due to their discomfort at his insistence that he sleep in the group rooms like everyone else. People just acted differently around him.

He considered making a stop in the kitchens. Norton would be there, he knew. The man had improved, but he was still awkward and rigid whenever he remembered that he was, in fact, speaking to the King of Vuxarina. Gerald fared no better. Brinkha tried harder than the other two, but there was an engrained sense of power distance she had developed during her service as an attendant that made connecting with her now a near impossibility. He would respect their desires as much as possible - and work to gain back the lovely banter and easy relaxation they had all managed to share together. Maybe his own desires on the subject were misguided. He already had enough on his plate as it was.

Hugo vividly recalled an old lesson taught by a good man. He spent a summer shadowing the different roles and levels in one of Vuxarina's primary building material manufacturers. He learned how lumber was processed, and how composite injectors reinforced the wood to make artificially hardened material that preserved old growth forests from logging operations. He quite enjoyed the teams and people he shadowed all the way up the chain of command - and things had truly crystalized when he spoke with the CEO. His office boasted a large glass wall that faced not outdoors, but towards the production lines back within the building. Three different communicators buzzed for his attention on a slightly worn metallic desk, next to a single viewscreen connected to his work terminal. The man had wrinkled, faded skin, and a prominent set of jowls that a young Hugo had been hard pressed to stop staring at - especially when he was talking.

"I started in the resin room," he had jowled happily, "And I worked damn hard. Stained my fingers every day for 6 hours, and went home sore for the first month. Then, I became the team lead when we switched from resin to composites, and I worked even harder. Seven hours a day stuck at the plant, and a good half hour of that I was stuck fixing other people's issues. When we acquired Innorex - company before your time - they made me a manager, and I realized I'd been lucky before. I only had to really worry about myself. But now? I had all the responsibility for my entire composite line - and had to play nice with the raw lumber and the finished materials groups. I came in on off hours to check up on the people just manning the line and doing their 6, that didn't have to care if something went wrong. All that, on my shoulders, and people that worked their wage that I had to keep on track. Nine hours a day, that one. You know what happened when I got bumped up to a Director seat?" He had not waited for a response - and never did with those questions. "I went back to only having to work seven hours a day - overseeing a team of managers. See, kid, sometimes being higher up is easier, because the circle's small. You have this group of more competent people you're working with, and it means - as long as nothing breaks - you do less. That works the other way, too. Your dad has a lot of hard work to do - but his time is made easier because he's surrounded himself with capable and smart nobles who take on the work of everything underneath them. So remember - when it comes down to it, your Barons are probably working harder than your Counts, and your Counts are probably working harder than your Dukes. That's just how it goes."

That talk had instantly colored his worldview when he first heard it, and the lesson stayed with him as he grew and interacted with different levels of nobility. He had personal experience with the phenomenon now. The farther he walked into the settlement, the more well-intentioned citizens he encountered.

They asked for simple, impossible things. Time and attention. Resources and priority. No, they could not redirect a river to run adjacent to the boundary of the settlement, because it was a poor use of the water mages and the earth mages and it would ultimately be a useless act. No, the incredibly talented nutritional mage could not balance every meal just so the hunter gatherer teams could slack off in their work to bring home a more diverse set of ingredients. No, he was not going to write deeds to their temporary homes, or make them landed citizens in this tutorial space.

No, he would not slow down their battle preparations - and yes, they did need to wear their weapons and gear every day.

Hugo had worked ardently, since his return, on the priorities he identified - adjusted slightly to the input of his advisors, or - at last what was left of that group after the traitor purge. The plan involved putting as much effort as possible into helping capable people level and grow. That had seen some success - but ironically, Brinkha, Gerald, and Norton were still amongst the most powerful Vuxarinans here. He allowed the 'wall' to be built, just in case the settlement was transported out with them when they left - but also enforced hard rules on holding possession of tools, weapons, and other items of import. Finally, and most importantly, he and his aides made tactics.

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His work in clearing the invaders from the tutorial gave Hugo plenty of experience in how Belar liked to set up its institutions and installations, and he had no doubts that there would be some nature of structure equipped with their guards waiting for his people once their tutorial was over. As for when the tutorial would end - Hugo could not know. It may have been on a timeline, or related to the beast lords quest - or it could depend on something else entirely. That idea of facing an immediate threat and not knowing quite when that transition would take place meant they had to be vigilant and ready to react to a number of scenarios. He hoped the long hours of plotting, studying, drilling, and organizing rough sets of groups and squads would pay off in the end.

His other project was paying off already.

Hugo had cleared the camps and eliminated everyone in Belar's faction. But - there were splinters from that group because of their 'icebox' protocol, waiting for the end of the tutorial in hiding or on the run. Those cowards had information and storage items that Hugo wanted to see removed, but the work to prepare his people for tutorial exit took precedence. Honestly, he was uncertain if he would have been a help in tracking those people down. His solution was a series of small teams whose system-given skills aligned well with the goal of finding and eliminating such targets. Information returned to him thus far gave an indication that seven of these fools had been taken out.

The notification stopped his trek and his thoughts.

NOTICE: Tutorial End Accelerated. Tutorial will close in 0D 3H 59M. Gather belongings and prepare for group teleportation.

A series of bells, whistles, and noisier magics rang through the air as people followed their roles to alert their fellows. Hugo took a calming breath, and ran his fingers along the bone plate covering his chest.

Breakfast would have to wait.

).-. Beatrice .-.(

The old man's voice continued to drone on in the recording.

"- and, our edict came directly from a Cross-Cosmic Enforcer, which invalidates all of your listed claims and circumstances. That applies to Belar, and Blasdej. So again - remove yourself from Vuxarina and its surrounding space, or you will be removed. We'll follow standard cosmic law with any of your people that are currently in a tutorial space. But anyone left on the surface when we get to outer orbit will be considered a hostile entity. Commander Benson of the Peacekeepers, Out."

The message finished, and Beatrice flopped back into the welcoming folds of her couch cushions with a frustrated harumph. These were dumb, annoying issues. She slapped the couch with one hand, and winced at the creaking noise it made. Everything was so far off plan.

She should have had another two years before her scheduled rise to F grade, which should've been another two years the cushions could withstand her casual assaults. Instead, she'd been forced to evolve early to stay with an irregular planetary grade rise, and now with the goddamn corks on their way, they were on the way to needing E-grade forces, and an e-grade leader. Of all the planets for those potential-capping iditols to pick, why the hell were they coming here? Vuxarina wasn't some treasure-trove of mana crystals, or any other natural resource they'd scanned. It's people and its wildlife were real middle-of-the-road on a cosmic scale, so that couldn't have been it either.

Maybe it was because of how quickly the planet had risen to F grade. Beatrice was still sore about that. She was cautious to not catalyze an increase with her forces' actions, but it happened anyway - and now they were stuck with it. More concerning was that whatever they'd done, there was only half a decade until they would be a proper E-grade world. At that point, the corks would be able to send their stupid peak-E forces to the surface, and things would really get serious.

Maybe it was due to the trade war. Of all the times for their glorious leader to go off the rails, he just had to do it once Bea finally had her own planetary command - and a FRESH awakening world, at that! She'd won her position from hundreds of promising, hopeful G-grades, and she damn sure didn't need the chaos starting to unfold around her. The only semblance of a silver lining was that the corks would be as hostile to any of Blasdej's forces as they would be to her own troops. She had considered just leaving them in orbit as a kind of barrier against the other corporation. When she did relent and request reinforcements to hold their claim, a dismissive denial was all that greeted her. Belar had not gotten a good start in the conflict, and it was showing across all fronts.

She slapped the couch again, and grimaced. The couch didn't need to hold up forever - and it definitely wasn't going to hold up against what she had planned for it. She glanced at one of the timers set against the far wall, and frowned at the readout

There were years left before she would see Travis again. It was an atrociously long wait.

She knew the downsides of her plan, all too well. Her mother, and her mother's mother, and up their family tree had cautioned her about "preserving the company line". But she also knew how things worked. Glory and value were keys to many locks, and she planned to rewrite her own future with the success of Vuxarina. Or, rather, she'd rewrite someone else's past.

Five or six documents were all that stood between Travis being an orphan taken under Belar's wings, and Travis being revealed as a long-lost company child, thought dead from some raid or crash or other small tragedy. Then his command of the most successful and earliest-ended tutorial instance would be seen as not just competence, but proof of heritage. And, what better match could possibly exist on a newly awakened world, with all its inherent restrictions, than a long-lined company woman and a long-lost rising star?

The hardest part of the plan was convincing the man himself. She loved his dedication, but sometimes he could go beyond the rules and lean a bit too far into the 'culture'.

If he had his way, nothing would happen until the two of them were 'compatible' in the eyes of the company.

He was not going to have his way.

But of course, the cosmos - as it tended to do - found an opportunity to disrupt well-made plans. A trade war, and peacekeepers, and planetary evolution.

She ran through the timelines again. Another few months until the corks arrived, followed by a year and a half or so of fighting their lower rungs before the tutorials started to end. Three years after that to use everything the tutorial groups gathered, plus everything the surface forces were able to strip mine from the planet, to power-level their elite forces until they became a relevant threat to the peacekeepers. Then a decisive conflict that would - hopefully - not turn Vuxarina into a tempting prize for Blasdej.

She flinched at an unexpected notification, and broke off one of the couch's arms.

-

NOTICE: PLANETWIDE NOTICE for [VUXARINA] TUTORIAL IN CASCADE DETECTED. PLANETARY CASCADE IMMINENT. WARNING: 0D 3H 59M TO CASCADE

-

She read through the notice twice, slack jawed. Belar had an outrageous level of information on horrendously obscure and unlikely scenarios related to tutorials, but tutorials had not been the focus of her studies.

"What the fuck is a cascade!?"

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