John was looking over a table of Training Hall attendance. While using the Building was fundamentally free for every member of Fusion, people that wanted to join the military were obligated to use it for at least four hours a day in order to reach level 25 in a reasonable timeframe. Failure to do so would lead to expulsion due to weakness. They were also supposed to clock in their hours for proof.

The basic idea was that people wouldn’t be admitted to more than the basic training that most people had to go through unless they were actually more powerful than most people. As for why regular folk had to attend training even though they were non-combatants, John wanted people to know enough about fighting to make smart decisions if shit ever hit the fan.

Aside from checking for attendance, the clocking in allowed John to draw up some statistics about general levelling speed. The Training Hall allowed people to check on their own levels, something else they were supposed to report on their way in and out. Through a basic calculation, John could then check how many levels a person gained per hour. There were some inaccuracies here and there, based on whether or not a person was slacking off, but the aggregate data was good enough to read general trends.

‘Progress falls off pretty rapidly after level 10 and 20,’ he analysed. ‘It will take someone below level 10 only about a week to reach it, plus or minus a day depending on the starting point… that’s pretty amazing already. Level 10 mundane people are incredibly fit after all, so I can probably have a nation of above-average health. 10 to 20 takes… no idea… data points not conclusive. Longer than two months, evidently.’

The Training Hall had only been in active use since the upgrade of the Guild Hall to Tier 3, when the Federation mechanic had kicked in. That had been towards the end of July, on his birthday. That it was difficult for people to even reach level 20 wasn’t overly surprising. Laughable as it was to John, it was still far above the norm. With all of that said, there were a few people who had already reached level 20 and above.

The answer to that phenomenon was quite simply that these must have been the people who had a natural potential above 25, causing them to level quicker. Talent skewed results in such a fashion. ‘The Pareto Principle in action,’ the Gamer thought, scratching his nose. ’20% of the people training are getting 80% of the levels… well, I am not sure it’s skewed that extremely, but the sentiment holds true.’

Leaning back, he considered arranging the data in a distribution curve to see how close to the 80/20 rule the level share actually was among participants. At first, he disregarded the idea, then he reminded himself just exactly how the Pareto Principle worked. ‘If I isolate the top 20% of the top 20%, I get a pretty easy idea who the latently powerful are,’ he pondered. ‘All I need to do with that data then is to seek them out with Observe and see what their potential is. It would be too much work to comb through every single recruit like that, but a chosen few I could find time for.’

The meritocratic process would elevate more capable individuals with or without his influence, but giving the most talented the resources to develop quickly from the start should have a noticeable effect. If nothing else, the preferential treatment would ensure that the most powerful elements of his army were more loyal. Of course, it also meant that John had to throw the regular soldiers a bone here and there so they didn’t grow discontent. He wanted the army to be a well-oiled machine without internal strife.

Before he went to work on re-arranging that data, he took a little break. Reaching under the table, he let his hand glide through Nia’s soft hair. The pariah was currently kissing the left side of his cock. While he had been highly concentrated on his work, she had kept her blowjob fairly constrained. Nibbling, kissing and only occasionally sucking on his cock, she had shown remarkable self-control. With how she could get off through exposure to his magic, not to mention John’s own arsenal of Perks to please women, ‘only’ worshipping his cock in such a fashion was denying herself a fair chunk of pleasure. It wasn’t quite similar to edging, however, since they both got off every now and again regardless.

Now that he was looking down into her blue eyes, Nia knew that she could fully indulge for a few minutes without distracting him from anything important. John had expected her to go crazy the second she realized this; with how much she loved to suck him off, that seemed inevitable. Once she had kissed her way up to the tip of his cock, she took a moment to tell him something first, “You are getting a visitor.”

Then she wrapped her lips around the engorged head and slid down. Greedily tasting his precum, she moaned at the deliciousness and the way his magic tingled on the inside of her throat. At least that was how she had described to John what she loved so much about sucking him off. Groaning, he closed his eyes and let the depths of her throat massage his large cock. He clawed into her hair and held her down while his cum surged and pumped into her stomach. Muffled screams of lust reverberated around his member. An alien aura tickled his senses and made his hairs rise for just a split second before it was gone again.

Once his orgasm was over, John opened his eyes and looked up to find a second pair of blue eyes staring at him. They were as close as the dark-haired pariah could get while bending over the table. “Hello,” Alice said.

“Hello,” John calmly responded. The little warning and the odd moment in the middle of his orgasm had been all the tell he needed to know that the first Maiden of Null had teleported her way into his office. Under normal circumstances, he or Beatrice would have seen her, but he had been indulging and Beatrice was occupied elsewhere, leaving her glass table empty.

If the dark-haired pariah was annoyed with the lack of reaction, she didn’t show it, just straightening up again and then dropping a thin folder onto the table. “I didn’t know you could teleport things along with you,” John remarked, while pulling the folder closer towards him. It was black and sealed with a piece of string, not the most secure way to hold information but enough to keep it from prying eyes on the way. “The way you explained it to me, it sounded like you could only teleport yourself and things that were essentially part of you, like your dress and weapons.”

“If something is small enough, loose and not magical, I can smuggle it along with some difficulty. The world doesn’t like it, though,” Alice reported with a smile. “This is the Death Zone intel you wanted. Aren’t I helpful?”

“I don’t know yet, I half expect to find a blank sheet of paper in here because you went out of your way to bring it to me,” John responded with a light-hearted joke. A joke that could turn out to be true. The folder was basically empty, that much he could gather even before he had undone the cord. His dick was suddenly exposed to the air and then Nia stood right next to him. “Interested?”

“I am a general,” the naked blonde said and wrapped her arms around his head. With regard to his preferences, she kept her stained face and breasts away from him. The Gamer was rather touchy when it came to the possibility of tasting his own sexual fluids. That didn’t stop her from scratching him behind the ear while they looked at the contents of the folder though.

“That’s all Florida could gather,” Alice gave some context for what she had handed them. “We had some intel here and there. You will have to judge how much of it overlaps with what you already know.”

“Well, the very start of it already does,” John hummed, as the first few paragraphs outlined several instances of people vanishing when moving into the area. The Death Zone should have been more accurately called the Vanish Zone since nobody who ever disappeared there got confirmed dead. They just ventured in and didn’t come out.

John continued to read through paragraphs in the hopes of finding something. Because Florida’s western tip bordered this enigmatic area of the map, there was good reason to believe that they had at least a bit more information than he had. Looking at what he had here did diminish his expectations quite a bit. Most of what he read were summaries of people knowing someone that had vanished. A few rare instances were first-hand experiences of people that had skirted around the border of the Death Zone and came back without experiencing anything. The longest anybody had stayed in the border area, at least according to the person’s recollection, had been two hours. They had driven down a road they hadn’t realized led through there until afterwards.

John opened a text document and started to write down similarities between returner stories. The two most frequent ones he found were that people were moving steadily, usually at above mundane running speeds (cars and, rarely, bicycles), and that they didn’t stay for long. Also notable was that, in the one story that included someone being in a call when they vanished, extremely loud interference noises could be heard before the connection broke.

‘Teleportation interference?’ John wrote into the text document and went through all the stories a second, then a third time. While he saw no more useful overlaps between the stories of returners, what the left behind friends and families reported of their final updates showed a few more things of interest. Groups always vanished together. Neither elderly nor children were an exception. In a couple of cases, the wallet and a few other possessions were found in hotel rooms and returned, indicating that only the person and what they were holding vanished.

John rubbed his chin and thought. “It’s more than I had to work with previously,” he hummed, wracking his brain for some more things that could be of interest. After a few moments, he wrote down, ‘Illusion Barrier Status?’

“What do you mean by that?” Nia asked.

“That none of the stories mention whether or not they tried to enter an Illusion Barrier,” John responded. “I think that could be a necessary clue, not only to find out the nature of the Death Zone but also regarding invasion strategies.”

“What is your smart mind reckoning we are dealing with at the moment?” Alice asked.

John hesitated and then prefaced his answer with, “These are purely hypothetical, but with what I got, I see two… no, three different ways the Death Zone could work.” Having said that, he waited for Alice and Nia to nod before he continued. “Theory 1: the entirety of the Death Zone is one gargantuan Trap Barrier,” he stated. “As far as we know, that’s impossible. The largest known Protected Space is Rome and that’s 15 kilometres across. Even Romulus can’t stretch that one further. If I was dealing with a logical situation, I would immediately dismiss this explanation, but since this is something we don’t understand, the impossible has to be considered. Theory 2: the Death Zone is covered entirely by regular sized Trap Barriers. While this makes more sense when it comes to what we understand of making Illusion Barriers, the manpower to uphold, maintain, and take care of whoever gets pulled inside is ludicrous. Someone should have blown a whistle by now. Theory 3: there is only one Protected Space in the Death Zone and everyone in the affected areas gets teleported into it through some kind of large-scale spell. This provides us with the issue of mana cost and I’m not even sure if it’s theoretically possible.”

Alice just smiled her empty smile, while Nia continued to scratch John behind the ear. It was nice and soothing, a steady motion from an expert pat-giver. He enjoyed the pleasant little sensation in the middle of this discussion. Then the blank spoke up, “Why would the Death Zone have that shape, if it was a designed thing?”

“Maybe they were forced to spring their plans before they were fully ready or the shape is deliberately picked to avoid the feeling of intelligent design. Perhaps there are some environmental factors at work. Possible that I’m completely wrong and this is just a very strange natural phenomenon. It bears none of the usual marks of a Natural Barrier growing out of control though.” He stretched his neck a little bit so Nia’s fingers scratched another spot. “The Death Zone just appearing one day also makes me think it’s a created phenomenon. Natural things don’t have a tendency to start suddenly. They grow and change with time. Even volcano eruptions can be known ahead of time, if you know the signs.”

“We could not know the signs?” Nia asked.

“Then why there?” John wondered. “It’s not particularly close to any leylines.”

“Neither is there anything of interest in the area,” the pariah countered.

“Which makes it perfect for some sort of entity that wants to be left alone,” John responded. “Nobody is going through the troubles of investigating a useless area that will likely have you vanish.” He closed the folder. “The main problem right now is that all of this info is recent and tainted through the lens of memory. All of this is just speculation.”

“Speculating is fun,” Alice hummed. “And since we’re already doing it, since you did the ‘how’ and ‘why’ do you have the ‘who’?”

“A latebloomer, a god, demons, the Lorylim, some sort of Kingdom gate, I honestly have no idea,” John responded. “People just disappear. As long as I don’t know why they disappear, I can’t begin to decipher what faction would be most likely to do it.”

“How dull,” Alice sighed. “You need better records then?”

“It would probably help,” John hummed. Because this was intel from Florida, he wasn’t surprised that it had only been gathered once he had requested it. They weren’t in the habit of keeping written records of things. Another faction bordering the Death Zone would have likely been in possession of more detailed documents. Especially if that faction was where the Death Zone had first appeared. “I’ll see if I can get the Gestalt guilds to send me something about this… I’ll probably have to visit in person to get anything good though.”