Chương 11: Rule of Thumb

In this tower, there were things called Titans. They were not regular enemies. They were checkpoint guardians, massive entities positioned at specific intervals throughout the spire, and I had faced three of them across my runs: the fifth floor, the fifteenth, and one on the thirtieth. I had only ever succeeded against the fifth. The other two had ended my runs in ways I did not enjoy remembering. But they had given me something every time. Experience.

Not just in the system sense, though the numbers were considerable. In the practical sense, the kind that only accumulated from fighting something that could genuinely kill you and doing it repeatedly until the pattern became legible. The dark knight on the fifteenth floor was the reason my swordsmanship had reached the level it had. Two thousand deaths against one enemy, and by the end of it I had understood the blade better than I had understood anything else in this tower. The fifth floor Titan was different.

It shared no attack pattern with anything semi-sentient, and that was the problem. I had always preferred opponents with structure, the ghoul on floor one, the army on floor two, things that operated according to internal logic I could read and anticipate. Wild creatures did not offer that. You could hunt one at range more easily than you could face it directly, but confronting one in a corridor with a staff and sixty-eight mana points was a different conversation entirely.

After all, it's easier to hunt a beast rather than confronting it. The staircase between floors gave me time to think. The space between floor four and floor five was something the tower had always allowed, an extended pause in the transitions, a staircase that opened onto what looked like a vast expanse beyond the architecture, something that bent perspective in a way I had stopped trying to fully process after the first few thousand attempts. It gave me a headache if I looked at it too long.

After fifty-two thousand runs, I had learned to look at my inventory instead. I checked my status while I walked. [RESOURCES] [Health: 38 / 110] [Mana: 68 / 300] [Stamina: 78 / 100] It would seem my level cap has increased after successfully clearing floor four. The health number was the real problem. Thirty-eight points out of one hundred and ten, and the issue was not just the number.

I could feel the damage in a physical sense, the kind that the system registered as a statistic but that my body registered as a sustained complaint across my left side where the unknown entity had put me into the wall. Mana Circulation was running and it was doing something for the pain, dampening it to a level that was manageable rather than distracting, but the underlying damage was still there and it was not going anywhere without a health potion, which I did not have. I took inventory of what I did have.

One dagger, retrieved from the lower floors. A grimoire I had pulled from the archive that I had not yet had time to fully process. Mana potions, two remaining but no health potions. Health potions would have been genuinely useful. They were not available to me, so I stopped thinking about them. I said my name once, quietly, to no one.

"Carlos." I repeated it. Then again. I had read something on floor three, in one of the human texts, about the concept of sanity and the vulnerability of the mind as a distinct system from the body. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. The upper floors had psychological attacks, things that targeted cognition and emotional stability rather than health points, and I had built countermeasures into previous runs specifically to address them.

As a warrior I had unlocked resistance skills. Mental Fortitude. As an archer I had carried artifacts that provided passive mental shielding. As a mage, with Mana Circulation running, I had something I had not anticipated. A passive pain management system that the text had not listed as a mental stabiliser but which was clearly functioning as one.

The fact that I was standing in this staircase, reviewing my inventory and thinking clearly, when my health was at thirty-eight and my left side was informing me at regular intervals that it had opinions about the last engagement, suggested the skill was doing more than the description had indicated. Maybe I had neglected this class for too long. I stood there and breathed. I let myself think about it honestly.

Floor one had been uncomfortable in ways it had never been on other builds, and I had expected floor two to be significantly worse given the sustained damage I sustained. Instead, I had killed the formation commander with a low level swords technique that was technically considered a skill. I used it against the main ghoul cluster, and came out with more rewards than I had received on floor two in any previous run.

The Master of Many Paths title was apparently doing something with skill acquisition that I had never been able to see in another class, maybe that's what it meant master of many paths. The swordsmanship I had used on floor two had not come from the mage class tree. It had been transferred. The Spellfist technique I had developed was a fusion product stemmed from the monk class, Arcanist channel investment applied through a combat foundation that the class tree had not provided but had also not prevented.

In truth, arriving at this floor as a pure mage with no prior knowledge would have ended me before floor two was complete. But I was not a pure mage. I was fifty-two thousand runs of accumulated experience wearing the magic class as a framework, and the framework was turning out to fit better than any I had tried. I flexed my fingers. The left hand responded about eighty percent. Acceptable.

The system notification appeared ahead of me, projected against the staircase wall in the way it always did at transition points. [Please Advance to the Next Floor.] I had questioned this system more times than I could count. At some point across the fifty-two thousand runs, I had stopped. It was serving my purposes, or at least not actively working against them, and the energy I had previously spent interrogating its motives was better directed elsewhere. I looked at the gate ahead.

It was smaller than I remembered, and I had a specific memory to compare it against because I had stood in front of this gate a substantial number of times. On the earliest attempts it had looked enormous, which I now understood was partly a function of what I had known at the time and partly a function of what was behind it. The Titan on floor five was called World-Eater in the system registry, which was a name that communicated information about its scale. It was a worm. Not metaphorically.

A worm in the most direct sense, segmented, enormous, connected to a network of similar entities that shared something I had never fully mapped but which functioned like a distributed nervous system. You cut one segment and another emerged from the surrounding air. Physical attacks alone accomplished nothing sustainable against it, which was why warrior-class builds had historically failed here while archer and berserker variants with specific long-range skills had managed it. The eyes were the mechanism.

They appeared to function as the catalytic points of its existence, and a precise hit to one caused immediate localised disintegration and prevented the corresponding segment from respawning. As a berserker I had used a throwing axe skill called Lumberjack that gave me the range and force to target them from a distance. As an archer, Bullseye had done the same work with more precision.

As a swordmaster, the Cleave skill left a trailing arc through the air that could connect at range if the timing was correct, though unlocking that had taken more attempts than I wanted to recall. As a mage running Arcane Burst Level 3, Channel Investment Rank 1, and Spellfist Rank 2, with Mana Pathfinding providing a targeting overlay and Wormhole on a reset cooldown, I was working with a different set of tools than I had used against this thing before. The question was whether they were sufficient.

I thought about the Pathfinding overlay and what it had shown me on floor four. The unknown entity's mana had been concentrated in its core, and targeting that concentration had been what ended the engagement. If World-Eater's eyes were the catalytic points of its existence, and if those eyes functioned as mana nodes, then the Pathfinding overlay would show me exactly where they were regardless of the visual complexity of the encounter. I had not had that on any previous run. I was not certain.

I was not comfortable with the health number I was carrying. I was aware that thirty-eight points left no margin for the kind of mistake I had made against the unknown entity on floor four, and World-Eater was not a ghoul or an arachnid. It was substantially above that. It was a titan But certainty had never been the standard. The standard was always whether there was something that could be done, and there was. I thought about rule two. Never lose hope regardless of the odds.

There was always something that could be done. There was always a line forward, however narrow. Giving up is not an option. Suicide is not an option.

"Always," I said, to no one in particular. I walked toward the gate.