Chương 1: Go forth Koalemos

The cold, wet floor pressed against my cheek. I lay there taking stock of the damage, floor forty nine or three hundred, I could not remember which, and the specifics hardly mattered because a jaw was clamped around my throat and whatever had its teeth in me was not letting go. I could hear the wet tearing sound of muscle separating from bone and feel my arm detach at the shoulder socket with a dull, grinding pop. It was not the first time I had lost that arm. It would not be the last.

'My arm is gone again,' I noted, mostly to myself. The screen appeared, same as always. [Danger, your vitality is too low.] That floating grey rectangle had followed me since I first opened my eyes in this place, appearing without fail whenever I was close enough to dying that it felt the need to comment. I had stopped finding it alarming roughly forty thousand deaths ago. Now it just felt like a coworker delivering bad news in a flat voice, the term coworker is a term that the humans use, it is...

never mind my mind is too hazy to think about this kind of stuff. Blood filled my mouth. My vision went red and then dark around the edges. I could hear the sound of my own ribcage giving way, which was a strange thing to hear clearly, but the rest of the noise in the room had gotten quieter. I focused on my name the way I always did at this part. It was the only thing that stayed with me between loops, and even that was not exactly mine.

'Carlos,' I thought.

'My name is Carlos.' A name I have given myself. I repeated it over and over again, it was a last ditch effort to preserve my sanity and dignity. The jaw at my throat tightened. Something cracked.

"Carlos," I said out loud, or tried to, and what came out was a wet gurgle against a mouthful of blood. [You are dead.] The voice arrived close to my ear, not loud. It was a pleasant voice. That was the strangest part. Clear and unhurried, the kind of voice that belonged to someone reading a sentence from a book they had already finished a thousand times, I have also finished some a thousand times... But I heard it every time and I had never gotten used to how calm it sounded. Everything went quiet.

[Go, Koalemos... Go and conquer the inverted spire.] [You are now on floor zero. You are in a safe zone.] Light came first, grey and ambient, filtering up from somewhere below the roots rather than above them. I lay on my back staring at a canopy so thick it blocked out whatever passed for a sky in this place. The trees were the color of ash, the grass beneath them the same, and the light had no obvious source, just a general pale glow that made everything visible without making anything look warm.

I sat up slowly. My body was intact again. It always was by the time I got here.

"Carlos," I said quietly, just to hear it. I had pulled the name from somewhere on the upper floors, picked it up off a book left behind in an archive, I frequented on the upper floors. My head throbbed at the edges. It always did after a death. Not pain exactly, more like the memory of pain, a pressure that faded within a few minutes if I did not focus on it. I stood and walked toward the pond without needing to look for it. I had made this walk enough times that my feet found the path on their own.

The water was still and grey, same as everything else in this stretch of the tower, and I cupped both hands and drank deeply. The water had no taste. It kept me functional. That was the extent of its personality. I washed my face, sat on the rock I had been sitting on for as long as I could remember, and pulled up the screen. It materialized in front of me, a rectangular shape that hung in the air and caught no light, displaying everything the system believed was worth knowing about me.

"Status." [Status] [Name: Koalemos] I read the name, said nothing, and moved on. [Race: Devas] [Level: 1] [Class: None] [Class Rank: None] [Titles: The Regressor. Pathfinder. Master of Many Paths.] If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

'Looks like I am back to where i started.' But I knew that, it wasn't the truth… I have Mastered almost every path imaginable. My level didn't mean anything, I looked at the status screen once more.

'Titles…' These were not titles I had earned. I had woken up with them. That bothered me more than I had ever found the words to explain, even to myself. The system, or whatever entity was responsible for dropping me at the bottom of this tower and pointing me upward, had at least given me something to work with. Three passive abilities running in the background whether I called on them or not. The Regressor was the one keeping me alive, or more precisely, the one keeping me from staying dead.

I had pieced together what it did across many cycles, watching for patterns, testing the edges of it. I also pieced it together by the word definition when I scoured for word definitions on floor three, where there was an archive of books. To regress means to go back. So I pieced together that every time I died, it returned me here, to floor zero, body reset, memory mostly intact. Mostly. I did not know the upper limit on it, I did not know if there was one.

That uncertainty was not something I thought about at length because there was no practical use in thinking about it. The worst that could happen was dying, which was something I had just finished doing. Pathfinder was the ability I understood best. It gave me something like a secondary vision layered over the first, trails and trajectories made visible before they fully arrived. Weapon arcs, movement paths, hidden routes through floors that looked like solid walls from the wrong angle.

I had first read the word mana in the archives on floor two and gradually connected it to what Pathfinder was actually detecting, the residue of energy that weapons and creatures and certain walls left behind. It was useful in a way that was difficult to overstate and I used it constantly. Master of Many Paths was the one I still had no real answer for. I had spent more time thinking about that ability than I was comfortable admitting.

The name overlapped with Pathfinder in an obvious way but the function was different. It Had to be the word master. This word was doing a specific work, pulling the meaning away from detection toward something else. Accumulation, maybe. Or application. I had called on it deliberately, tried to provoke it into activating, sat still and waited for it to do something I could measure. Nothing I had tried produced a result I could identify with confidence.

"I will figure it out later," I said. That was what I always said and it seemed like I was already on the right track to repeat the same fate like previous tries. There was something almost funny about that, I had read about the word laughter and joy in a book on the third floor, defined it, filed it away at the back of my head, and then watched myself demonstrate it repeatedly without meaning to.

"Looks like I am losing my mind." The joke was not on anyone in particular. It was just to share some hopeful pity against a hopeless situation. I let out a long breath, pushed the thought aside, and looked back at the screen. It shifted in response, spreading outward from its original shape into a wide panel several meters across, filling with portraits. Rows of figures, each one standing in front of a rendered silhouette that suggested what they were. The first row I had seen hundreds of times.

A lone figure with a blade drawn, sword trails spreading behind it in intersecting arcs. Swordsman. A towering figure gripping an axe, a horned silhouette burning behind it. Berserker. A warrior with a spear raised skyward, a warhorse looming behind. Lancer. A hooded figure drawing a bow at nothing visible, an enormous hawk fanning out behind. Archer. A crouched figure with twin daggers, a faceless serpent outlined behind it. Assassin. A still figure, bare hands at its sides, a golden lotus floating at its back.

Monk. I looked at them. They were the warrior group of classes. And I have used every single one of them, the last one being Assassin. I have used more groups beyond this but this— They looked back, as my thoughts began to wander. I moved my head to the right this time and the screen responded, the panel extending to show more. More rows loaded. More figures. More silhouettes promising power of one variety or another. I had tried most of them.

The warrior classes were the ones I'd invested the most time in, over hundreds of runs, learning the mechanics until the movements felt automatic. But still. None of it had been enough. The archer and warrior had gotten me further than most things, the range changed the math on certain floors, but the math on floor five hundred had ended the same way it always did regardless of what weapon I was holding at the time. Floor five hundred was where I had just died. Sometimes I died earlier, sometimes later.

It was never accurate where which class could take me. I have run the archers class hundreds of time and I have died on floor 5 more than anything despite my knowledge and class during early regressions, but the probability of me reaching five hundred was much greater because of it. I haven't done any math since the word math in a book I have read doesn't make much sense. But I feel like it has greater odds. Because… I died less. Maybe it is a strange way of calculating probability.

Floor five hundreds would be worse, as it always was, and floor five hundred after that, and so on until whatever lived at the top of this tower decided it was done with me. I kept scrolling. The screen kept expanding. There were more classes tucked at the edges of the panel, ones with smaller portraits, less visual noise behind the figures. Less confidence in the presentation, if a system screen could be said to project confidence. One of them caught my eye.

The figure in the portrait wore a long robe and stood with both hands at its sides. There was no dramatic silhouette behind it, no looming beast or blazing symbol. Just a faint circular mark in the background that could have been a seal or a sigil or nothing at all. Mage. I read the class stats. They were bad. Across almost every attribute, the numbers were low enough to make floor one a genuine problem, and not the interesting kind. The single outlier was spell affinity, which was rated high.

Unfortunately, spell affinity meant almost nothing before level fifty. Most of the Mage's Titles and abilities were locked behind level requirements, and some of those Titles could be unlocked through other class ranks, such as Archer, at much lower levels. I could eventually make use of it, but I would need to reach level thirty as a Mage first. I was nowhere near that level, and I would not be if I chose the Mage class.

So picking Mage meant committing myself to an entirely separate grind in a completely different direction. It was genuinely a bad choice. I sat with that assessment for a while, looked at the other portraits still on the screen, and then looked back at the mage.

"Every class I have tried has ended the same way," I thought.

"Some of them ended it faster and some of them ended it slower but the endpoint has not changed."

"This one has worse stats for the things that matter early and one good stat I cannot access yet."

"It is the worst option on this screen by any reasonable measure." I selected it. The screen confirmed the choice and folded back into the air without ceremony. I stood up from the rock, stretched my shoulder, and looked up through the grey canopy at the trees above. It just confirmed one of my worst dreads. That I would have to run mage class.