Chương 12: Worm Hole

The gate did not teleport me. It did not summon me anywhere dramatic or drop me into darkness. It opened, and I walked through, and floor five was in front of me the same way it had always been, quiet and immediate and deceptively still. I was standing at the edge of a shallow pool.

The water was clear enough that I could see the bottom, and what reflected on its surface was the ceiling of the floor, which the tower had rendered as something that looked exactly like open sky, a full cosmological spread of stars and galactic formation thrown across a dark expanse above me.

It was genuinely beautiful to look at, and I had learned a long time ago not to look at it for more than two seconds, because the thing that lived beneath the water also lived in that reflection, and watching the surface was how you stopped watching your feet. I shifted position immediately after stepping through, moving left and away from the gate threshold. Standing at an entry point was a fast way to get caught in the opening geometry of whatever the floor had positioned near the door. I checked my resources.

[RESOURCES] [Health: 38 / 110] [Mana: 128 / 300] [Stamina: 82 / 100] The mana vial I had drunk on floor four had partially recovered through Mana Circulation during the staircase transit. Not full, but better than the sixty-eight I had carried through the gate. I noted the health and set it aside. Thirty-eight points was what I had, and no amount of cataloguing the problem would change it. I looked right. Then left. Then I closed my eyes for three seconds and let Pathfinder run without visual input.

The mana signatures that came back were familiar in their distribution but not their magnitude. I remembered everything about this floor now, the pattern returning with the clarity that always came back during active engagement rather than in preparation for it. World-Eater did not sit in one location waiting. It moved beneath the water in a circuit, and the segments surfaced independently, which was what made the encounter feel chaotic on the first several hundred attempts.

Once you understood that the segments operated on a fixed interval and could not materialise simultaneously, the chaos resolved into a rhythm. A tight one, with almost no margin, but a rhythm. A slow grin moved across my face before I had decided to let it.

'I remember everything,' I thought. The water rippled. It started at the centre of the pool, a circular disturbance that spread outward in rings and caught the star reflection on its surface, breaking it into fragments. Then the mouth came up. Oval, ringed with teeth along its entire interior circumference, wide enough that I could have walked into it without ducking.

It rose out of the water and the smell hit me simultaneously, something between raw methane and decaying organic matter, the smell of an interior that had never processed air, wet and thick and carrying the specific weight of something that had been alive for considerably longer than the tower itself. It closed around the space I had been standing in half a second before, and I was already six feet to the left. The floor shook when it closed on nothing. I looked at where I had been standing.

The impact had scattered water and left a compression mark in the stone beneath the pool, and what covered everything in the immediate radius, including me from the displacement wave, was a coating of dark grease, organic residue from the interior of the creature's mouth. I dragged my hand across my forehead and pushed my hair back and kept my attention on the water.

The surface settled into that cosmological reflection again, and beneath it I could see the body, a thick sinuous shape moving in a slow arc under the shallow water, catching the starlight from above and breaking it with its scales. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. I got into stance. Mana Circulation was running.

I let the current of it move through my legs and into the ground contact points, something I had started doing instinctively since floor two without fully registering it as a technique. It kept my weight distributed and my response time marginally faster than standing neutral. The first rule of this floor was movement. The second rule was also movement.

I had learned both of them in the first five hundred attempts, paid for with five hundred deaths that all shared the same cause: I had stopped moving, or I had cornered myself, or I had chosen a firing position and committed to it instead of treating the entire floor as my operational space. This floor was my domain and I had to move like it was.

I pushed off my right foot and shifted position as a slit appeared in the air to my right, no visual warning before it, just a tear in the space above the water's surface, and out of it came a head driving forward at full charge with no angle adjustment, committed entirely to the vector it had launched on. That was the pattern. The segments emerged already committed. They could not course-correct mid-strike.

I stepped inside the arc instead of away from it, the same motion I had used against the arachnid on floor four, and brought my hand up against the side of the emerging head where the Pathfinding overlay showed me the densest mana concentration, a bright node sitting just behind the left eye structure. I did not fire an arcane burst. I used Spellfist, a direct contact discharge, targeted at the node. The impact registered immediately.

[Experience Gained: 1, 000] [Current Experience: 20, 400 / 22, 000] [World-Eater Segment Destroyed: 1] I barely registered the notification. Another slit was already opening six feet ahead of me and I was already moving, pushing left, giving myself the angle to see the entry vector before the head committed to it.

It came through fast and I let it pass, stepping back to give it the clearance it needed to miss me cleanly, then fired a short Arcane Burst at the retreating segment as it pulled back through its entry point. The burst connected with the same node position. [Experience Gained: 1, 000] [Current Experience: 21, 400 / 22, 000] [World-Eater Segment Destroyed: 2] The intervals between emergence were one to two seconds.

I had counted them in earlier runs but had always been too committed to a single position to use the timing well. Moving continuously meant I was never where the next segment expected me to be, and the segments could not communicate targeting information to each other in real time. They launched blind and corrected nothing. I moved through the next four engagements without taking contact, using Spellfist twice more and short-range Arcane Bursts for the segments that gave me range rather than contact opportunity.

The Pathfinding overlay made each hit precise in a way I had never achieved on this floor before. I was not guessing at the node position. I was reading it directly. Then everything stopped. The water went still. The slits in the air closed. The cosmological reflection above settled back into its undisturbed spread of stars and for approximately three seconds the floor was completely quiet. I knew what that meant. The main body surfaced.

It rose from the center of the pool slowly, which was the one thing about it that had always seemed incongruous with its actual capability. It was enormous, twenty meters of coiled organic structure clearing the water in a continuous upward motion, and the ring-shaped mouth at its apex opened wide and oriented toward me.

In its core, where the Pathfinding overlay showed me the primary mana concentration, a singularity was forming, pulling ambient energy into a single point with the specific visual signature I had seen before in the upper floors on charged entities. It was building a beam attack. A full-force plasma discharge that the system had always registered as a one-shot event for anything below a certain health threshold. My health was at thirty-eight points.

I thought about the encounter geometry and made three calculations in approximately one second. First: I could not absorb that beam. Second: I could not outmanoeuvre it at this range because the discharge would cover too wide an arc for lateral movement to be reliable. Third: the grimoire in my inventory had a page I had read three times on the staircase between floors. Page twenty-six. Arcane Overload. It was a grimmoire I have read about during my previous runs that I catalogued at the back of my head.

Since I was not a mage I had no reason to seek it. The singularity in World-Eater's core was almost fully charged. The air around it had taken on a pressure quality I could feel against my face, a specific tension that preceded detonation. I had felt it in the upper floors before and had never had a response that matched it. This run I had something different.