When I’d first learned about just what the nature of the 7th Floor was, I was pretty incredulous at first. But I didn’t have to think about it for long before I realized that it actually made sense. A sadness inducing, twisted kind of sense, but sense nonetheless. After all, it wasn’t that different from how basically every video game ever made on Earth was quickly analyzed and optimized to death.

On paper, the 7th Floor was basically a giant treasure hunt. In the Tower backstory presented at its start, challengers are debtors, sent to a dangerous but incredibly resource-rich jungle region. Everyone is given one year to extract enough such resources to extract and sell to make enough of the Floor’s currency to clear their mission. The higher the difficulty selected, the more in-Floor money the team would need to make. The more money a team needed to make, the more dangerous the part of the Floor would be that they’d have to gain resources from to have a prayer of meeting the amount by the deadline.

Very straightforward. In practice, though, it got a lot more complicated. This was because that since it was by far the richest source of resources out of all of Area 1’s Floors, it had long ago become little more than a Floor-world sized cake with hundreds of slices of varying size that were bought and sold like properties on a Monopoly board, sometimes several times a day, by Area 1’s numerous factions.

Challengers who could no longer put off entering the 7th Floor simply could not avoid dealing with the factions in at least some capacity. Those who, for one reason or another, still refused to actually join one, or who had joined a faction that was some combination of too small, weak, and/or poor to have an established territory in the 7th Floor were more or less forced to become Leeches for various periods of time, in exchange for that faction actually giving them the opportunity to clear their mission.

Most challengers, all but those who were determined to quickly reach Area 2, generally, stayed on as 7th Floor Leeches long past their initial contract. After all, the paychecks they were getting even during that mandatory period weren’t small, even from the smaller players among the occupying factions. This meant that the concentration of Leeches on the 7th Floor absolutely dwarfed those challengers who actually needed to clear the Floor for the first time. It was for this reason that this Floor was commonly referred to as “the Leech Farm.”

We entered the 7th Floor Landing just a few minutes after the turn of the hour. Here, challengers were streaming in quickly and constantly. It was still rare that this Landing reached capacity, it had that in common with the others, but it still made for a far larger crowd than we’d seen on the previous two Landings.

It was like this absolutely every hour of every day, I’d been told. The 7th Floor challenge was manned around the clock by as many Leeches as its controlling factions could manage to bring into it. In theory, absolutely everyone here, and who was still arriving, ourselves included, had been meticulously planned out in advance to “work this shift,” allocated to it and recorded by our various factions. Each faction always had a strong challenger to verify all their own faction’s personnel.

Entering the 7th Floor when your name wasn’t on the docket, or trespassing into another faction’s area, was one of the surest ways to die in Area 1, and that was very much saying something.

Another thing to note was that while time on the Floor lasted a year, everyone’s lifespan still only advanced by the hour that passed in Area 1. There were plenty of folks who spent more time, effectively, on the 7th Floor than off it.

Evidently, before the Rainbow Mage had started his New Game Plus, Mewi and I had even joined their ranks for quite some time. At least we’d been working for Shumba, who controlled one of the largest slices of the 7th Floor’s cake. I’d looked into it somewhat idly, and eventually had confirmed that even a High difficulty challenger team wasn’t guaranteed to be accepted for such a post, Shumba taking a somewhat dim view of such teams who had not already joined up with them by that point.

The war hadn’t changed things as much as one might expect, either. Of course, the antifed factions possessed at least some territory rights in the 7th Floor prior to becoming the AFL, but they’d gotten as far as they had with the uprising mainly by taking advantage of how reduced the attention that the Federation was able to give them was due to the Kinetice crisis. If they tried to disrupt operations on the 7th Floor, the Federation would definitely shift their priorities back toward dealing with them directly.

So, an understanding similar to, though more unwritten and tacit than the one on Satslik, had been reached. The AFL would continue to not bother the Federation on the 7th Floor, and the Federation would do the same. The status quo would be preserved.

All this meant that the atmosphere of the 7th Floor Landing was once again very much in contrast to all the previous Landings. From the sheer panic of the Tutorial, to the quiet determination of the 5th and suspicious tension of the 6th, here more or less everyone was genuinely relaxed. Either they had done this before—most of them plenty of times—or they would have the guidance of their faction comrades who had. Instead of being about to enter a killing ground, these people were starting a day at the office.

Well, a year at the office, but you get it.

Not that things were what you’d call totally safe. This was still a Floor of the Tower, after all, and carelessness and complacency would certainly lead to your joining the very much existent death toll regardless of how much your fellow faction members could assist you. But even with the byzantine faction politics, this was still going to be way simpler than the tangled mess of armies that the 6th Floor had been, at least.

Our experience in the 7th Floor wasn’t going to be the typical one, though. The further inland you went, the better the items you could find, or in some cases grow, were. Naturally, the monsters and other dangers increased the further you went as well.

The far reaches of the region, near a boundary delineated by impassable cliffs, held by far the most incredible items, ingredients, crafting materials, and monsters with the highest value parts that the Tower would recognize as items. Going that far was incredibly dangerous, though. To gather enough of value to reach the Extreme mission’s goal of 10,000,000 “G”, a team would need to not only reach the furthest parts accessible by challengers, they would need to be able to survive there for sustained periods.

On the bright side, those areas were also mostly free of faction politicking, since there were simply too few challengers who were capable enough to get at their riches with a high chance of success. As for how hard it’d be for us, only time would tell.