I had to admit: the Oasis was intelligent in ways I hadn't even considered.
And that became clear when Sinfonia began to explain how the black gates worked. I had spent months thinking I understood the system better than most — every loophole, every rule, every hidden gear. But it only took coming back home to discover that there existed an entire layer of the world I had never even touched.
"In the Oasis there are the lucky ones, like me. But there are also the unlucky ones. And for those, the black portal is the only answer the system created. Actually, how it works isn't even that complex. It works like this…"
The explanation was clear.
And the conclusion I arrived at was simple: at the end of the day, that portal was the rope thrown to the few humans who had been unlucky. The difference between sinking alone and having, at least, a chance to stay afloat.
✦ ✦ ✦
The birth of rookies followed a rule.
It was something I had learned firsthand, in my own beginning — each human emerged at a determined, calculated point, within a margin the Oasis controlled. But, like every rule, it had exceptions. And those exceptions were a few unlucky ones who ended up thrown far from the human territory, far from everything that could keep them alive.
Exactly like the rookie who had fallen into the middle of the war between Burmans and Infernals.
The one whose account I had used some time ago, on the battlefield, to explain the ritual to the other Lords. At the time, I had treated his story as useful data, strategic information. Now, listening to Sinfonia, I understood that that rookie was the living proof of a flaw in the system — the small but permanent probability of a human being born in the worst possible place in the universe. And it was for those cases that the portals were created.
They were a way of helping those who lived too far to reach any rescue.
Because distance had a brutal cost. A human thrown far from the market lost the benefit of bartering with other humans — and, worse, lost the capacity to do group missions, which was how the overwhelming majority survived the early times. Alone, without allies, without commerce, without information, a rookie's life expectancy plummeted to almost nothing.
The portal came to fill that vacuum.
It allowed missions from distant places, made available by the Lord of that isolated territory, to be offered to whoever could complete them — in exchange for half the prize. The isolated one gained arms they didn't have. Whoever accepted the mission gained access to rewards they would otherwise never reach. And the Oasis gained what it seemed to want most: humans alive for longer.
It was a win-win.
For the very few who managed, somehow, to survive without the support of other humans, the benefit was enormous. They transformed their own isolation — what should have been a death sentence — into a constant source of income. It was the trade the Oasis allowed. And, like everything in the Oasis, it had an entry price that separated the few capable of paying it from the many who fell along the way.
"Unfortunately, the person needs to survive the entire process. Including the Purge. Only then do they earn the right to make the portal available to other humans."
I nodded in silence.
Because I knew, better than she imagined, what surviving the Purge cost. I knew the price in blood, in creatures, in pieces of oneself that didn't come back. Imagining someone crossing that completely alone, without Colosseum missions, without a market to trade goods, without anyone — was almost impossible to conceive.
"But why did you say it can be a graveyard? I mean, the missions are chosen, aren't they?"
"Yes and no."
She shook her head, and there was something dark in the way she chose the following words.
"Actually, there are missions from races about which we have not the slightest idea how strong they are. The missions end up being difficult precisely because they work with human ignorance. Usually, even the easiest are harder than any mission made available by the central kingdom."
What she said had merit.
Because, if I stopped to think, the greatest advantage of humans had always been knowledge. The intelligence to study the enemy, to measure their strengths and weaknesses, to enter a fight already knowing where to strike. That was how I had won everything until then — not by brute force, which I didn't have, but by always knowing more than the enemy expected me to know.
Participating in a mission against an unknown race was giving up exactly that.
It was entering a fight where the disadvantage of information weighed entirely on the weaker side. And the weaker side, in that kind of confrontation, was almost always the human. Fighting something you don't understand is fighting blindfolded — and the Oasis charged dearly from those who dared to see in the dark.
"In compensation, they're missions that pay very well. And they allow bets. That's why there's a constant incentive for humans to keep trying."
It was impressive how the Oasis had thought of everything so cohesively.
The idea was simple, but the execution had the elegance of something designed by an intelligence that saw all the pieces at the same time. It wouldn't be worth it, for most humans, to participate in such difficult missions if there wasn't a proportional benefit. And the betting system was that benefit — a mechanism that fed itself, rewarding whoever used the portal and whoever bet on it at the same time.
Several layers of incentive, all converging toward the same discreet objective.
To keep humans alive for longer, without ever making survival easy. It was the same philosophy of the carrot and the rabbit I had identified in the betting panel — to give enough so that nobody gave up, but never enough for anyone to relax. A cruel, calculated balance, and — I had to admit — brilliant.
It was a complex system born from a simple intention.
But, as always, none of that meant the challenges would be easy. On the contrary. Each layer of help came wrapped in an equivalent layer of danger.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Come with me."
Sinfonia approached another robotic counter, identical to the previous one.
There, as she taught me, it was possible to refine the search for missions — which ranged from the simplest, level F, to, as incredible as it seemed, level S+ missions. The list was long, and many of the race names that appeared on it I had never even heard of.
"Don't even bother looking at those higher missions. Honestly, most of them have been there for years, stalled, without anyone with the courage to touch them. I wouldn't waste time looking at the prize they give — you don't need that temptation. Know that level S+ missions are things hardly anyone here could clear and live to tell about."
"So you're saying I can refine the prize too?"
"Yes. You can choose a particular item or the nectar stone you want, within what that mission offers."
She taught me that the refining process would have to be done by my own assistant — in my case, Zeus.
In a few minutes, I had already understood how it worked. It was the kind of system that, once the logic was understood, opened up entirely — and I was already beginning to see the possibilities it held. And while I interacted with the interface, absorbing every detail, a sound pulled me from concentration.
It was a voice. Like those at airports, announcing something — and, like at airports, I couldn't understand a single word it said.
When I turned to Sinfonia, she was on her knees on the floor.
"What's happening?"
She looked at me, as though she had, for an instant, completely forgotten my presence.
And when our eyes met, I was shocked. Because on her face there was something rare — something that, at least outside the Oasis, I hadn't expected to find so clearly in someone's expression.
Fear.
Not the abstract fear of someone who dreads an idea. The concrete fear of someone who has already felt firsthand what's about to happen.
"They've arrived. Get down. Now."
Despite the desperation in her voice, I preferred to ignore it.
All of it seemed too strange — and I wasn't the type to kneel before understanding the reason. I had knelt few times in my life, and each of them had been a choice of mine, calculated, with a clear objective. Kneeling from blind fear, without knowing before whom or why, wasn't in my repertoire. What happened next answered part of my question.
One of the largest gates began to move.
Like the surface of a lake after a stone falls, the black liquid rippled — circles spreading from the center — and from inside it came five people. All wore the same armor design, marking them as a group, a unit that had chosen to dress alike, that moved and breathed as a single thing.
At the front, an enormous man carrying a shield that easily passed two meters.
Behind him, a thin man with a bow, with the relaxed posture of someone who had never needed to run from anything. Beside this one, a woman in high heels with teased blonde hair that covered almost her entire face — without any kind of visible weapon, which, somehow, made her more disturbing than all the others combined. An armed person shows what they can do. An unarmed person hides it. And, closing the group, two men who looked like identical twins: one wielding a staff, the other an enormous dagger.
"Brotherrr!"
While I observed the group — which simply ignored the dozens of people kneeling around, as though they were part of the floor's decoration — the purple-haired woman ran to the enormous man with the shield.
"Sister. I'm back. Seems everything went well with your kingdom."
So that was it. The purple-haired woman was the giant's sister.
That explained her posture in the line, in the bath, in the hall — the confidence of someone who never needed to be afraid because she always had someone enormous to be afraid in her place. She wasn't a rookie. She was the family of someone strong. And that changed everything about how I should have read her presence from the beginning.
But, while the two talked, I noticed something else.
The twins were watching me.
With strange, fixed eyes, the kind that evaluates something out of place — that doesn't fit the scene and for that reason bothers them. I was the only one standing in a hall of kneeling people. And before I could completely process what that look meant, the two advanced in my direction.
I felt a tug — Sinfonia trying to pull me down, force me to the floor along with her, hide me in the only place she knew as safe.
I fell.
But I didn't lower my head.
"Well, well, well. Seems our little dwarf doesn't know how to teach rookies to understand where they are."
And then, instead of touching me, they kicked Sinfonia.
She rolled across the floor, her small body folded in a clear feeling of pain. A muffled sound escaped her — the kind a person tries to swallow and can't. And something inside me, something that had been compressed since that voice announced their arrival, began to give way.
Instinctively, I advanced.
One of the twins, who watched the other kick the small one with a smile on his face, shouted at me.
"Who do you think you are, you rookie son of a bitch? You don't know who we are. We're just teaching this retard to explain who's in charge here."
My blood boiled.
Sometimes, I forgot how much I hated humans.
I forgot the capacity they had to be, with no effort, with no need, the biggest sons of bitches in the universe. I had crossed entire races that wanted to kill me — Infernals, Bloodsuckers, Burmans, creatures whose hatred at least had a survival logic behind it. And still it was here, back among my own, before two punks kicking a defenseless woman on the floor for pure sport, that that old hatred came back with full force. The cruel difference was this: the other races hurt to survive. Humans hurt because they could.
Sinfonia had treated me with kindness from the instant I arrived.
She had guided me, taught me, laughed at her own unfunny jokes, gotten embarrassed, worried about protecting me from a ridiculous level exposed on a screen. She was, perhaps, the first person in a long time who had been simply good to me without wanting anything in return. And seeing her huddled on the floor, kicked by cowards who thought themselves gods, erased any calculation of prudence I might make.
In the end, I didn't resist.
"Why?"
I stared at the two of them, without looking away.
"Why don't you two go fuck yourselves"
The silence that fell over the hall was sepulchral.
It was as though the air had been sucked from the entire space all at once. The conversations died. The movements stopped. Even the heavy-breathing voice, which was the only thing that remained in the background, suddenly seemed to have ceased.
The giant in armor — who until that instant simply ignored everything, laughing at something with his sister — hardened his face.
And turned. Slowly.
The way very large things turn when they finally decide to pay attention to something very small.
Around me, I could see the expression stamped on every face. It wasn't fear. It was terror. And, along with the terror, something worse: pity. The silent pity of someone who has already watched that scene repeat too many times and knows, with the certainty of someone who knows the ending by heart, exactly how it ends.
It was at that moment that I realized.
I had done something there was no coming back from.
And, knowing myself, I would do it again.