Chương 16: Penalty To the Guilty

I checked the display without pulling the screen fully open, reading the edge values. [Health: 11 / 310] [Mana: 0 / 300] [Stamina: 12 / 100] Eleven health. I noted it at the back of my mind, I was twenty-five meters from the gate. The calculation was simple enough. Then the last notification came, and it came differently from the others. Not in the same flat system voice that had been announcing suspensions.

This one carried something I could only describe as authority, a register that was distinct from every system prompt I had encountered across fifty-two thousand runs. [Assassin Class: Locked.] And then, beneath it, in the same authoritative voice: [Initiating Penalty: Koalemos.] [Breach of System Integrity Detected.] I stopped to think about it while breathing out heavily through my nose.

'What breach,' I thought, and the thought was not anxious. It was precise.

'I used a skill set stored in a grimoire I carried into this floor. The grimoire came from the archive. The archive is part of the tower. The system permitted me to acquire the skill through a sanctioned mechanism.' The notification did not respond to that reasoning. It sat in front of me and waited.

I stood eleven health points from whatever the penalty was going to be, twenty meters from the gate to floor six, with the World-Eater's dissolution continuing in the water behind me, and I looked at the system message with an expression I was aware had gone very flat.

'I used what the tower gave me,' I thought.

'The grimoire was on a shelf in a sanctioned floor. The assassin pathway unlocked through a title I accumulated across approved runs. Every tool I used tonight came from inside this system.' The message remained. I had faced system penalties before. Not often, and not for anything I had done deliberately, but the tower had mechanisms for enforcing boundaries that it did not always disclose in advance. The penalty notification was new in its phrasing.

Breach of system integrity was language I had not seen before in any previous run, and the fact that it was using my name rather than a class designation or floor identifier suggested it was addressing me specifically, not a general rule violation. Which meant the system knew exactly who I was.

'Of course it does,' I thought.

'It always has.' I was lighter than I had been before the assassin skills suspended, and not in the way mage class always made me feel lighter, which was the nimble, low-mass quality of a build that prioritised mobility and channel speed over physical density. This was the lightness of a body that had very little left in it, running on eleven points of health and zero mana and a stamina total that was rounding down to nothing. I looked at the penalty notification. I looked at the gate.

I took the twenty meters at a pace I was not going to describe as steady, because it was not steady, and I put my hand on the gate and pushed it open and stepped through to the other side, and the floor five atmosphere closed behind me. The gate sealed with a sound like stone settling. The penalty notification followed me through. [Penalty Active: Koalemos.] [Duration: Floors 6 to 8.] [Effect: System access restricted. Attribute allocation suspended. Skill acquisition blocked.] [Reason: Utilisation of non-sanctioned cross-class awakening sequence outside designated progression windows.]"What a load of bullshit!" I yelled out, the books apparently said that shouting profanities would make humans feel better. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. It did, just a little… I read it twice. Then I read the reason clause again. Non-sanctioned cross-class awakening sequence.

The assassin pathway had not been an approved unlock at this stage of progression. The grimoire had been a sanctioned item. The skill acquisition through it had been within system rules. But the combination, Infinite Reservoir driving assassin-class skills through a mage-class framework at level thirteen, had apparently crossed a line the system had drawn that it had not seen fit to tell me about in advance.

'Three floors,' I thought.

'No attributes. No new skills. Floors six, seven, and eight with what I already have.' I checked what I already had. Spellfist Rank 2. Arcane Burst Rank 2. Channel Investment Rank 1. Mana Circulation. Mana Pathfinding Rank 1. Wormhole. Arcane Notation Literacy. Mana Pathfinding. The World-Eater's Essence, which I had not yet examined. Fifty attribute points unspent, which the penalty had frozen but not removed. Five skill points in the same condition. A Mythic Memory Fragment I did not yet understand.

And one hundred and thirty-three base attribute points that had been allocated before the penalty activated, which meant my current stat line was already built and was going to carry me through three floors without adjustment. I pulled the status screen open and looked at it properly for the first time since the surface engagement.

[NAME: Koalemos] [RACE: Devas] [LEVEL: 16] [CLASS: Mage] [CLASS RANK: Mage Apprentice] [TITLES: The Regressor / Pathfinder / Master of Many Paths / Titan Slayer / The One Who Devoured the Devourer] [RESOURCES] [Health: 11 / 310] [Mana: 0 / 300] [Stamina: 12 / 100] [ATTRIBUTES] [Strength: 28] [Agility: 17] [Vitality: 23] [Intelligence: 104] [Wisdom: 21] [Perception: 16] [Affinity: 77] [PENALTY STATUS: Active. Floors 6 to 8. Attribute allocation and skill acquisition suspended.] I closed the screen and lay on my back. The water around me was shallow enough that it only reached my ears, and the temperature of it was cool against the heat my body had been running at for the last however long the floor five engagement had lasted. It felt genuinely good, and I allowed myself about four seconds of that before I remembered that floor five had a collapse sequence and that what came after the collapse was not something I wanted to meet in my current condition. I sat up anyway.

My body registered the movement with a level of complaint that was disproportionate even by this tower's standards. Every previous run that had ended on floor five had ended with a death, which meant I had never had to deal with the post-engagement state of having actually survived it. Surviving it, it turned out, felt worse than I had expected. My left side had opinions.

My right hand, which had been holding a dagger that the system had refused to classify for the duration of Final Moment, had a fine tremor running through it that I could not immediately stop. My Vitality drain from Infinite Reservoir had taken me down to a number I had not looked at directly yet because I was not sure I wanted to know it. I looked at it. [RESOURCES] [Health: 11 / 310] [Mana: 0 / 300] [Stamina: 12 / 100] Eleven health. Zero mana.

Twelve stamina, which was enough to stand and walk and nothing beyond that. If there was a single ghoul between me and the next gate I was going to have a problem. I summoned the staff from storage and used it the way I had seen depicted in the human texts from the archive floor, as a support implement, leaning my weight through it and pushing to standing.

The staff flickered when it materialised, a brief instability in the channel that I had not seen it do before, and then it solidified, and I transferred my weight through it, and it immediately dissolved and deposited me face-first into the puddle. I lost one health point because of that, and the system made sure to show me that in front of my own two eyes. [RESOURCES] [Health: 10 / 310] [Mana: 0 / 300] [Stamina: 12 / 100] I lay there for a moment.

'That,' I thought, 'was fair.' I groaned into the shallow water and pushed myself up on my hands and got my feet under me without the staff's assistance. The standing-up process took longer than it should have and hurt more than it had any right to. I stayed upright once I achieved it and took one breath, then another, and looked behind me at the floor I was leaving. The pool was still.

The cosmological reflection on its surface had settled back into its undisturbed state, stars and galactic spread reflected in water that now also carried a spreading residue of yellow fluid and the scattered remnants of five primary World-Eater bodies. I gave it one last look, turned away, reached the gate, and pulled it open with my sore body's full cooperation, which was not much. The white staircase received me as I fell onto one of its steps, and I started climbing.

The climb itself was uneventful, which was the only thing about the current situation that qualified as straightforward. My stamina was low enough that I moved slowly, and moving slowly meant I had time to think, which I was not entirely sure was an advantage given what I was thinking about. This run had been unpredictable from the first floor. The ghouls on floor one had noticed me before I had done anything to draw their attention. Not a patrol behaviour, not a standard aggression trigger.