Chương 13: Arcane Burst

I summoned the arcane staff from my stored equipment and opened the grimoire simultaneously, finding page twenty-six without looking because I had memorised the page position during the staircase transit. With the staff raised and the book open in my off hand, I pushed one hundred and sixty-eight mana points into the casting channel in a single sustained drive.

[Arcane Burst Overflowing with Mana] [Current Output: Level 3 upgraded to Level 16 via Mana Surge] The Arcane Burst that left the staff was not the same technique I had been using on the lower floors. The colour shifted from the standard pale discharge to a deep violet, and the diameter of the beam was wide enough that I felt the heat of its edges as it passed me.

It drove forward and met the plasma beam World-Eater had released head-on, and for two seconds the two forces held against each other in the space between us, neither advancing, the water below the impact point vaporising in a rising column of steam. Then I read the chant from page twenty-six.

"Arcana, heed my command. Burst forth." The beam surged. It did not gradually overwhelm the opposing force. It punched through it, and the remaining energy entered the World-Eater's primary eye node directly, which the Pathfinding overlay had been showing me as the largest mana concentration on the entire entity since the moment the main body surfaced. I dropped to one knee. My mana was at zero. The staff was still in my hand but there was nothing in the channel to run through it.

I had expended everything in one discharge, and my body registered the emptiness as a specific physical sensation, a hollow pressure behind the sternum, and my left side, which had been managing its complaints reasonably well up to this point, submitted a very direct objection to the position I was currently in.

"Damn," I said, to no one. The water settled slowly. What remained on the surface was a spreading pool of yellow fluid, viscous and bright against the cosmological reflection, the biological residue of the segments I had destroyed and the damage the overload had inflicted on the primary body. I stayed on one knee and watched it spread and thought that I might have actually done it. I had not. The water parted again. One segment surfaced.

One, not a cluster, not a formation, just one segment, but it was the kind that I had only seen on three occasions across all my runs, and two of those occasions had ended the attempt. This one was the true primary form, twenty meters of vertical mass rising from the water and straightening until it blocked the star reflection entirely and cast its shadow over the full radius of the pool.

Its mouth was at the apex, open, and when it turned its orientation toward me the Pathfinding overlay showed a mana structure that was denser than anything I had read on this floor or any of the ones below it. I was at zero mana. Thirty-eight health. A dagger in my inventory and a grimoire that required mana to activate.

'Good,' I thought, and I meant it without irony.

'This is exactly what I wanted.' I looked up at the thing. It looked down at me with whatever process it used for sight, and then it lunged. I laid my head back. The water parted as it swallowed me whole, and the floor changed again, and I was somewhere else, and the system announced what had happened in the same flat tone it used for everything. The warmth was the first thing I registered. Not comfortable warmth.

The warmth of something biological and enclosed, a heat that carried with it a smell of methane and digested matter and the specific sourness of an active stomach, I was sliding down the interior of the World-Eater at speed with nothing to grip and twenty meters of slick organic surface between me and what waited at the bottom. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. I had been here before. Not intentionally.

Every previous time I had ended up inside this creature it had been because I had failed to avoid the closing mouth, and the experience had always terminated the same way. The stomach acid did not kill quickly. You felt the exterior layers go first, and if you had not already passed out from the methane concentration you felt what came after that, and I had no interest in cataloguing it further because I had experienced it enough times to have formed a complete picture. This time I had chosen to be here.

'Twenty meters,' I thought, tracking the distance by the change in temperature, which increased as I descended.

'Roughly six seconds at this rate.' I pulled both mana potions from my inventory and drank them in sequence without breaking the slide. [Mana Restored: +80] [Mana Restored: +80] [Current Mana: 160 / 300] One hundred and sixty. Not enough for what I was planning. I was aware of that and continued anyway, because the alternative was arriving at the stomach with nothing in the reserve, and one hundred and sixty was at least a starting point.

I pulled the second grimoire from my pack, the dark-covered one from the archive's eastern stack, and found the relevant page by feel while the interior walls moved past me. Page forty-one. I had read it twice on the staircase between floors. The skill listed there had a prerequisite threshold.

[Required: Intelligence 104 / Wisdom 18] I checked my current attributes against the requirement and confirmed I cleared both by a considerable margin, then focused on the skill description and let the system process the acquisition. The headache hit immediately. Not a gradual pressure but a full-force overload, as if every piece of information I had absorbed across the archive floor had suddenly decided to reorganise itself at once.

My vision went white at the edges and my health started dropping, not from the stomach acid, I had not reached it yet, but from the strain of the acquisition itself. [Vitality Low. Acquisition Stress Detected.] I gritted my teeth. My body felt like it was trying to fold inward, a deep structural weakness that sat below the level of muscle fatigue and closer to something fundamental. And underneath it, pushing back against it with a force I had not expected, something else was running. A second source.

A current that did not belong to any skill I had consciously activated, surging upward through the weakness and holding me upright in a way that was less like strength and more like refusal. [Skill Acquired: Infinite Reservoir (Active)] [Effect: Temporarily removes Mana ceiling. All mana costs draw from an expanding pool. Drawback: Vitality drain active for skill duration.] The stomach acid smell reached my nostrils two seconds before the surface did.

I raised my dagger, wrapped the torn cloth from my robe around my forearm and hand at the grip point, felt the yellow aura of Spellfist run through the blade the moment skin contacted the handle, and screamed the activation loud enough that my lungs registered it as damage.

"Spellfist!" [Spellfist Rank 2: Active.]"Arcane Overload. Infinite Reservoir. Full output." [Arcane Overload: Active.] [Infinite Reservoir: Active.] [Mana Ceiling: Removed. Current draw: Expanding...] What happened to the dagger was not a system notification I had seen before. [Mundane Dagger Level 3 upgrading...] [404 Error.] [404 Error.] [Processing...] The blade went from yellow to something I did not have a colour name for, a luminescence that appeared to be similar to the system.

It felt warm through the cloth wrapping in a way that the Spellfist aura alone had never produced, and the expansion of energy running through it was drawing from the Infinite Reservoir in real time, which meant the ceiling on what I was channelling into a level three mundane dagger was, currently, nothing. Something else activated. Not from a conscious input. [System Notice: Latent Pathway Detected.] [Master of Many Paths: Residual Class Memory Unlocking.] [Assassin Class: Unlocked.] I felt my eyes go wide.

"Master of?" I repeated my voice low. The assassin class. I had not run it in several thousand attempts because the stealth mechanics were functionally useless against non-sentient entities and the World-Eater was not something you could approach from behind. But the skills were not stealth skills. Not all of them. The system listed what had unlocked.

[Thousandfold Silence] [Red Thread of Death] [Whisper of the Grave] [Shadow's Verdict] [Last Breath] [Death's Blind Spot] [Murderous Art] [Gravewalker] [Final Moment] [The Unseen Hand] I had used every one of these before. Not as a mage. Not with Infinite Reservoir running through them. Not with Spellfist channelled through a dagger that the system had apparently decided to stop classifying.

'Oh,' I thought.

'This is going to be something.' I hit the stomach lining and drove the dagger in before the acid could reach my boots.

"Red Thread of Death."