New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

It had been a little over an hour now since the tournament's first phase had started. Astaroth was still exploring the tropical forest.

He guessed that if there was a hidden zone, this place was the most likely entrance to it. Tropical jungles were renowned for their mysteries and confounding terrain.

So he refused to go into another zone. By now, they had already taken the first hundred players down.

A little under four hundred players were left to kill before phase one ended. At this rate, it would take another four hours or more.

It all depended on how safely the players eventually proceeded. If the players left when there were only one hundred left to eliminate, hid, and extended this, hoping to be last, then this could go on for a long time.

Astaroth was kind of hoping that would be the case though since he wanted to find an Easter egg. As he mused about the possible hidden treasures he would find, Astaroth heard a muffled voice from somewhere near.

He slowed down to discern its direction and heard it from his left. He changed his trajectory, to go see what was happening since the voice was calling for help.

As he got closer to the cries for help, he started discerning a second voice from the same direction, also calling for help. Astaroth quickened his step a bit, curious to see what was happening.

He soon reached a clearing devoid of trees, but with vines slithering across the ground everywhere. Between the vines was moss, covering every inch of ground in the clearing.

When Astaroth stepped into the clearing, he felt the moss squelch under his feet, like it was filled with water. He kept walking towards the source of the voices and found something abnormal.

In the middle of the clearing, the vines crisscrossed each other, forming a kind of thick net, of sorts, in a perfect circle. Next to it, he could see a clear skid mark of ripped moss.

The mark seemed to have been done by something tumbling into the glade from the south and ending right at the vine net. The voices also sounded less muffled, now that he was close to that.

He slowly approached the vine-filled surface, making sure not to trip and fall, lest he also ends in the predicament as the two voices below. As he reached the skid mark, he noticed the vines parted way just in front of it.

It was like something had slid and passed through at that spot, and he immediately understood what had happened. He inched closer to the hole in the vines and saw two silhouettes at the bottom of a hole made of some sort of rock.

"You ok down there?" Astaroth yelled into the vine hole.

"Finally! Someone found us!" He heard a young boyish voice.

"No thanks to your weak voice, salad eater." A still young, but rougher, voice said.

"Alright, no fighting, kids." Astaroth teased.

He could guess they had fallen through while fighting each other, so this was an excellent lesson in combat awareness. He just needed them to think 'I never want to be in this position again!'.

"I'm not a kid!" Both voices shouted at the same time.

Astaroth chuckled a little, before tearing the hole in the vine wider to let more light into the stone hole. He tore the woody appendages until he hit the side of the rock hole.

From there, he widened it further on each side, trying to make a bigger opening, but the vines seemed well rooted the further away he tried going. So he tried using fire magic, but the fire fizzled out on the vines.

"Don't waste your time, mister. I already tried magic on them, but there was no reaction." One boy said.

Now that there was a little more light in the pit, Astaroth could discern their traits better. The one that had warned him, was a slim, light-skinned elf, wearing a cloth robe.

'Probably a druid.' Astaroth guessed.

The other was a small, burly, bearded-looking child, with plate mail covering his body, a big tower shield in his left hand, and a hammer in his right. By the looks of him, he was a dwarf and a pure tank class.

The exact situation that caused the both of them to fall in there still eluded him, but his guess was as good as any.

"Since you tried magic on the vines, did you try anything else, kid?" Astaroth asked the elf.

"I'm not a kid! My name is I'die Ad-Tempus, and I'm seventeen years old!" He responded.

"Sure ki… Young man. Now, can you answer my question?" Astaroth said, catching his 'kid' before he dropped it.

The elf boy huffed but answered still.

"I tried using earth magic to make stairs, too. But it all failed. It's like magic doesn't work down here." I'die said, looking downtrodden.

Astaroth thought about what the boy said and tried something. He lit a small fire in his hands and descended it past the vine cover.

If the zone blocked magic, then his spell would fizzle out, as soon as it passed the limit. But that did not happen.

His small fireball stayed alight as he descended his arm as far as it could go inside, without him falling. Once that confirmed that the zone was not anti-magic, he switched up his spell.

He tried sending it to the middle of the improvised roof, without launching it at the vines. It took him a few tries, but he then kept it steadily centered in the pit.

A notification rang in his ears.

*Ding*

*In your ingenuity, you formed a spell with no prior knowledge. You learned the spell 'Flame Beacon'*

Astaroth maintained the spell, as he looked at his spell list.

Flame Beacon: You create a small ball of fire that you can position in a radius of 50m around you. The ball is 10 centimeters in diameter and projects light. You can widen the ball of fire, in implements of 10 centimeters in diameter, at the cost of increasingly more mana. Mana cost: 10MP. Cost to enlarge: x2 last size cost. Maintaining spell cost's total size mana cost per minute.

The description satisfied him. That meant that as long as he had mana, he would never be in the dark.