Chương 14: Ascension

[Red Thread of Death: Active. Target connections mapped. Critical pathway highlighted.] A crimson field expanded outward from my position, not a visual effect exactly, more like an overlay that my perception registered as colour, and within it every structural connection in the World-Eater's interior became legible. I could see the thread of its biological logic, where it was most concentrated, where a cut would propagate damage rather than contain it.

"Murderous Art." [Murderous Art: Active. Attack efficiency multiplied. Every strike targets the highest-damage vector automatically.] My muscles felt like they were burning from the inside outward, not painfully but with a heat that suggested they were operating beyond the range the system considered standard. I did not care. I drove the dagger along the pathway the Red Thread had identified and pulled it through the full length of the connection in a single arc.

"Shadow's Verdict." [Shadow's Verdict: Active. Shadow construct deployed. Physical reinforcement applied.] The construct materialised from my outline and moved with me, not separately, as an extension of my own motion, and where I cut the shadow cut the same vector a half-second behind me, doubling the damage propagation along the biological thread. My health was dropping. The Vitality drain from Infinite Reservoir was steady and the stomach acid was beginning to reach the lower edge of my robe.

I had a narrow window and I used it without stopping to evaluate it.

"Death's Blind Spot." [Death's Blind Spot: Active. Single-strike execution line generated.] A line of light extended from the dagger tip outward through the stomach wall, through the interior structure of the creature, and terminated somewhere far above me at a point I understood intuitively as the primary node, the same concentration the Pathfinding overlay had been tracking since the main body surfaced. The line showed me exactly where to send the force. I drove everything through it.

The cut went outward and upward through the stomach wall and the biological thread and the primary connection point, and the World-Eater's interior shuddered around me with the specific quality of something structural failing rather than something wounded. I felt the shudder through my feet and through the hand holding the dagger and through my chest. The stomach wall opened to the outside. Cold air hit me, the same sharp cold of the floor five atmosphere, and I stepped through the gap onto the surface of the pool.

The World-Eater's body was still moving above me but the movement had changed character, less directional and more reactive, the movement of something that had lost its central coordination.

"Gravewalker." [Gravewalker: Active. Movement speed: Maximum. Temporal perception: Slowed.]"Arcane Overflow." [Arcane Overflow: Active. All abilities enhanced by current mana output.] The world slowed around me and I moved through it at a pace that felt completely unreasonable, each step covering ground that should have taken three. The crimson glow of Red Thread was still active and it was showing me something I had not expected. Three more bodies in the water. Not one.

Three, each at roughly the same scale as the one I had just exited, surfacing simultaneously from different points across the pool. I stopped. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

'That has never happened before,' I thought. In every previous run, every attempt across fifty-two thousand deaths, the floor five Titan had presented as one primary body with multiple segments. Three simultaneous primaries were not floor five behaviour. It was not even floor fifteen behaviour. The scale of what I was looking at matched the mid-tier floor forty engagements I had survived twice and failed against more times than I wanted to count.

Then a fifth surfaced from the ground itself, pushing up through the stone at the pool's edge rather than through the water. I stood in the middle of a floor that had apparently decided this run was different, with Gravewalker slowing my perception of everything around me, Infinite Reservoir burning through my Vitality at a rate I needed to track, and an assassin skill set I had not used in thousands of attempts suddenly fully available and running at mage-scale mana output.

'This floor is wrong,' I thought.

'Something changed.' I pushed the observation aside. It did not matter why the floor had changed. What mattered was that I was standing in it with a dagger that the system had refused to classify and a set of skills that had never been combined this way in any previous run, and the thing I had said on the staircase was still true. There was always something that could be done.

I looked at the five bodies orienting toward me across the pool surface and felt the Murderous Art calculating the highest-damage vectors for each one simultaneously, feeding that information to my hands before I had consciously processed it.

'Fine,' I thought, and meant it completely.

"Let us go." The fifth body was still surfacing when I was already moving. I sprinted across the pool surface, my boots hitting the shallow water hard enough to scatter the cosmological reflection in every direction, and launched myself at the nearest worm segment, covering the distance in the air before it had finished orienting toward me. Up close, the scale of it was different from anything floor five had ever presented before. These were not standard segments.

They were primary-class bodies, the same scale as the one I had exited thirty seconds ago, and there were five of them moving with a coordination that individual segments had never demonstrated in any of my previous runs.

'This floor is genuinely wrong,' I thought, and filed it immediately. Wrong or not, it was what I had in front of me. Gravewalker was still running, sharpening every movement into something precise and deliberate, and the Murderous Art was feeding targeting information to my hands faster than I could consciously process it.

I landed on the nearest body's dorsal surface and drove the dagger into the scale joint at the midpoint, the same structural weakness the Red Thread overlay had been highlighting across all five bodies since they surfaced, and felt the Spellfist discharge run through the blade on contact. One from the left closed in while I was still on the first.

I pushed off the body I was standing on and cleared the gap between them in a single jump, coming down on the left one's lateral surface and cutting twice along the thread pathway before it could redirect its mass toward me. The speed at which these things were moving was not floor five speed. It was not floor fifteen speed.

I had fought floor forty entities twice in my run history and survived one of those encounters, and the movement pattern I was reading from these five bodies matched that tier more closely than anything this floor had any right to produce. I needed to change the terms of the engagement.

"Thousandfold Silence." [Thousandfold Silence: Active. Temporal field engaged. All targets: Movement reduced to 4% of base speed. All attacks executed within field duration: Multiplied.] Everything coated in grey stillness. The five bodies slowed from something I had to work to stay ahead of to something I could read three moves in advance, their mass still enormous but their momentum reduced to a crawl that I could navigate around without committing to a single direction.

And every strike I landed inside the field would carry the multiplied output of the skill's attack amplification. I moved through them. The first full slash across the second body's primary node registered at a damage output the system would normally associate with a weapon six tiers above what I was carrying. I did not stop to read the number.

I transitioned to the third body and carried the same motion through its equivalent node, and the Red Thread overlay showed me the damage propagating along the network connection between them, which confirmed what I had suspected when I first activated the skill on the interior: these five bodies were not independent entities. They shared a network. The Red Thread could map it. Then I started bleeding. Not from an external strike.

From the inside, a warm pressure behind my sternum that registered as a system notification before I felt it as a physical sensation. [Warning: Mana Core is sustaining too many simultaneous active skills. Structural stress detected. Health drain initiated.] I ran the inventory of what was currently running: Gravewalker, Thousandfold Silence, Murderous Art, Red Thread of Death, Shadow's Verdict, Spellfist through the dagger, Infinite Reservoir feeding all of it. The system was correct that the load was high.

It was also correct that the health drain was a consequence I was going to have to absorb, because deactivating Red Thread would cost me the network map, and without the network map I was cutting bodies at random instead of targeting the connection point that would collapse all five simultaneously. Shadow's Verdict would offset part of the drain. I redirected mana toward my hands, watched the yellow-gold aura pulse along the dagger in a way that had become almost familiar in the last few minutes, and kept moving.