Chương 30: Chapter 28 - A tower in the tower

The stairs spiraled upward in a tight helix, each step carved from dark stone polished smooth by age or magic or whatever passed for maintenance in a dead god's tower. Bookshelves lined the walls between the steps, packed tight with volumes bound in various materials. Ashy bounced up the stairs ahead of us, tail swishing, announcing each safe step with a cheerful "This one's fine!" before hopping to the next. I followed a few steps behind her. Sarah walked behind me, shield up, scanning.

Mina brought up the rear, hands in her pockets, looking like she'd rather be anywhere else.

"This one's fine! This one's fine! This one's—" A panel opened beneath Ashy's foot. Three darts shot from the wall. They punched through her torso in a neat horizontal line, and she burst into pink light. I waited for the automatic resummon. She popped back into existence, mid-skip.

"Oopsie! I totally didn't see that one. My bad! I'll—""Keep going."

"Yay!" Three more steps. Safe, safe, safe. Then a section of wall swung open, and a stone fist on a mechanical arm punched her off the staircase entirely. She sailed over the railing, falling into the void below with a fading "Wheeeee!" before vanishing into pink light. The skill resummoned her next to me. She ran back up the stairs, jump over the traps until she reached a platform She waved down at us.

"I can see so far from up here!" We climbed, stepping over and around the traps Ashy had found for us. The darts, the punching wall, a tripwire connected to a swinging blade, and a step that simply wasn't there, disguised by an illusion over a thirty-foot drop. We reached an alcove. A massive steel picture was etched into the wall. It displayed a man with a scythe hanging over his back. He held a blueprint, and thousands of undead were building a tower. This tower. A single name was etched underneath the picture.

Daelus. Whoever he may be, he built this tower. Mina looked over the edge, upwards.

"Still a lot more to go." Sarah took her side.

"It still feels strange to climb a tower when being inside another tower." Mina snorted.

"They put a tower into the tower so we can climb when we climb." She chuckled. Both Sarah and I observed her with a blank expression, waiting for the punchline.

"Come on." Mina frowned.

"This reference isn't that old. And the joke is great." Uh huh. Sure. I didn't get it at all. By Sarah's expression, neither did she. Mina rolled her eyes, sagging her shoulders, defeated.

"Never mind." Ashy shouted from above.

"Hey! There's a trap set here that I can't go through. It's killed me four times already." I headed after her. Ashy awaited at the edge of a platform. On the other end, stairs led up. In its center stood a stone monolith. Ashy pointed at it.

"That ugly thing in the middle blasts me with a black laser whenever I try to go through. Watch." She skipped onto the platform. Three steps in, the monolith lit up and released a black laser that cut Ashy in half, head to toe. She burst into pink light. All right. Astarielle. In a burst of crimson flame, Astarielle appeared. She looked around with fake glasses on her nose.

"Oh, hi," she waved at Sarah and turned to Mina.

"I'm Astarielle."

"Mina." Sarah grunted.

"Don't make me smite you, spawn of evil."

"Anyway," I said.

"Astarielle, can you blow up that monolith?"

"Yea!" Ashy shouted, already resummoned.

"That thing has killed me like six times already. Blow it up, Astie, pretty please!" Astarielle raised her hands. Crimson motes of power gathered around them. I walked back down the stairs to get out of the blast radius. Sarah withdrew with me.

"You should come too, Mina." With a grunt, she made a couple of steps back. Astarielle gathered three big motes of power around her hands. She flung them forward, and an explosion thundered through the tower. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Yippee!" Ashy shouted, skipping ahead.

"It's safe! You're the best, Astie!" We continued. A few more stairs traps, which Astarielle pointed at, and Ashy jumped into to check, anyway. We made it up to the second alcove. This one had a set of steel paintings. Each one displayed the tower in a different environment. In a city, in a desert, in a jungle, on a barren land, in all sorts of biomes. In each picture, lights flew to the tower. I looked at the plaque underneath. It read, The Path of Harvest.

He moved the tower from one realm to another, gathering souls. And he probably had a really good time, judging by the paintings continuing by the wall up next to the stairs that spiralled upward. We continued on. Things got suspiciously quiet. I walked to the edge of the next platform. Ashy stood on it, frozen in place in a beam of purple light. Ah, a stasis trap.

"Finally," Mina said.

"Quiet." Sarah put her hand on Mina's shoulder.

"I can heal you if you are suffering from a headache."

"It's fine. I'm used to noise." She sighed.

"Then again, I came to the tower for peace and quiet. But it's so noisy. Everywhere." I smiled.

"The Golded Sands area is pretty quiet."

"It stinks." She waved her hand in front of her face.

"Kebab, spices, shishas, incense, it's terrible."

"I can confirm," Astarielle concurred.

"The main hub is much better."

"Too many people there. Where there're people, there's noise." I shrugged. No way to help. I refocused on the trap.

"Do you think it has a limit?"

"Probably," Astarielle said, swaying to my side.

"If I were to guess, there's a focus crystal in the floor, which must have limited capacity." Sarah rubbed her face with a sigh.

"Not again…" Yes, again. I started summoning the tentacle worms. One by one, I directed them on the platform to crawl to the side, away from where we needed to go. One by one, they got caught in the purple stasis light. With a smirk, I kept sending more tentacle worms. The nineteenth one got caught. The twentieth one moved around without getting frozen. I had it crawl to the staircase on the other end. It reached it, waving the tail back. I motioned for it to crawl to the side. Once it did, I unsummoned Ashy.

She vanished into pink light. The purple stasis caught the tentacle worm. I sent the twenty-first worm in. It crossed the platform. I glanced at Astarielle.

"After you."

"Your heroism knows no bounds, oh my almighty master." She stepped forward. She didn't have to put it like that. But she did cross the platform, heels clicking on the floor. I followed her, and after I crossed, so did Sarah and Mina. Once we all got across, I resummoned Ashy to go first and unsummoned all the tentacle worms. Ashy bounced ahead, jumping with both feet at each step. One of them blew her up, but then she reached the next alcove. We followed her there. A single, massive steel picture filled the alcove.

The background, flame, up on it, a man in armor with a white cross on his chest, and a crown of horns stretching from his helmet. In front of him, Daelus falling down, his body cut into two separate parts, together with his scythe, also cut in two. The name read: The Fall. As I realized what I was looking at, my eyes watered. It was a steep picture, with barely any details. But still, it was the first depiction of my father I had ever seen.

There were no photos, no recordings anywhere, no security camera footage I could find. Not even any written records. The name Lucifer was only spoken as a semi-myth, only when my mum got too drunk to realize she was speaking aloud. This wasn't the place where I expected to see the first physical evidence that he lived. Aside from myself and my brother, obviously. Sarah stepped to my side.

"Are you all right?" She even sounded a touch worried.

"Yeah," I whispered.

"It's nothing." Mina stepped to my other side, a smirk on her lips.

"First time?"

"Yes…" I looked up at her.

"Do you know?"

"I do. We knew each other. You're similar. Just ginger." Puzzled, Sarah scanned us both with a long look.

"What're you two talking about?"

"Secrets." Mina smirked.

"It's secret societies. Information isn't ever given. Especially the fun one." She stepped aside.

"Let's move. I'm getting hungry." Yeah, no shit. If the tower didn't have a painting of my father literally killing its original god and burning it down, I would have never found out. Even though everyone from the higher echelons of secret societies must have known. But why tell me shit, right? I headed up. Ashy had already marked the stairs with traps, so we avoided those, reaching another circular platform. She waited by the side.

"This one shoots energy blades. It looks super cool, but it also cuts through me really well. They come out from over there." She pointed at the wall.

"Let me show you." She lay herself down, crawled to the edge of the platform, and touched its edge with one finger. Chakrams of pure energy fired from the wall, buzzing through the air.

"See?" Ashy asked.

"Super cool! But dangerous." I exchanged a glance with Astarielle.

"Just keep pressing it," we both said.

"Sure!" Ashy kept pressing the trigger tile. We watched the energy blades fly through the air. Sarah rubbed her face with her palm.

"This is so dishonorable…" I shrugged. Yeah, I knew. But I wasn't figuring out some implied puzzle when I could just trick it.

"The goal is to get across. Not to get a scout badge for solving the trap with the intended method."

"I know, but still… this is so stupid." Yeah, it was. Soon enough, the platform only clicked emptily, no energy blades left to be launched. I walked across the platform, and the rest of the gang followed. We reached the last alcove before the top. Again, a single steel picture filled the alcove's wall. This one I recognized. It showed the goddess from the tower store gacha animation. Two large wings, a clean face, and simple brown robes. The picture's title read, Salvation's Birth.

"So," Mina said.

"Has this goddess birth thing happened yet or not?" That was the question. I glanced around. Bookshelves, all of which we had been ignoring, rimmed the walls. I stepped to the closest one and motioned Astarielle to do the same. We started searching the books. Mina and Sarah also joined. Ashy went ahead to scout. The books all had a similar theme.

There were a thousand variations on the creation of divinity, on rebirth through sacrifice, on salvation that will be brought through the goddess, and then on the goddess herself. A name repeated through the texts, Mefista. An obvious reference to Mephistopheles. Maybe his daughter or sister or… I didn't know.

"Got anything on the name Mefista?" I asked Astarielle.

"Never heard it until these texts. Mephistopheles is famous in Hell, for obvious reasons, but this doesn't seem to connect to him at all." I raised an eyebrow.

"Can you ask him?"

"No… yes, maybe. I'll try the next time I'm unsummoned." I turned to Sarah and Mina.

"Found anything?"

"It's all blasphemy," Sarah decreed.

"Heresy of the highest order. They want to replace the grace of God with this… Mefista." She spat the word like an insult.

"Could we go?" Mina asked.

"I'm really hungry." Well, all the books aimed toward the goddess not being born yet. That felt conclusive. This last picture was the tower's future. We headed onward. One more step trap awaited ahead, which Ashy had marked. We stepped over it and reached a large gate.

"I go first." Mina stepped to the door.

"You've had enough fun." She pushed the gate open. The boss's room spread in front of us. She walked in.