Chương 19: Floor Eight

Floor eight opened into stone. Not the raw stone of the lower floors, not the worked corridors of floor seven's submerged architecture. This was dressed stone, cut and fitted and assembled into something that had opinions about itself. The buildings rose on both sides of the entry path in vertical columns and arched windows and facades covered in carved detail that I recognised from the human texts on floor three.

One culture had built in this register, dense and vertical and reaching upward as if the height itself was the point. Another had built in wide horizontal planes with columns at the front. Floor eight had combined both without resolving the tension between them, and the result was an architecture that felt like two civilisations arguing through stone about what grandeur was supposed to look like. I had read about this. The humans called it Gothic. Or Victorian. Or Roman.

The books I had absorbed were not in agreement on the terminology and I had not spent enough time on the distinctions to resolve it. I checked my display before moving further. [NAME: Koalemos] [RACE: Devas] [LEVEL: 16] [CLASS: Mage Apprentice] [RESOURCES] [Health: 310 / 310] [Mana: 198 / 300] [Stamina: 84 / 100] [ATTRIBUTES] [Strength: 28] [Agility: 31] [Vitality: 55] [Intelligence: 104] [Wisdom: 19] [Perception: 16] [Affinity: 101] [PENALTY STATUS: Active. Floor 8 of 8. Final floor. Attribute allocation and skill acquisition suspended.] One floor left on the restriction. Tomorrow, assuming floor eight cooperated, I would have full system access again. The fifty unspent attribute points and the five skill points and the class advancement screen would all become functional simultaneously, and I had been thinking about how to sequence those decisions since the purple forest. The penalty had been an inconvenience across floors six and seven, not a crisis.

The skill set I had entered with was sufficient for both floors and the Pathfinder overlay had made up most of the difference in situations where a newer skill would have been marginally more efficient. But efficient and sufficient were different standards, and I was aware that I had been operating on the lower one for three floors and was about to return to the higher one. I was also aware that things going well was not a stable condition.

Fifty-two thousand runs had given me one consistent lesson above all others, which was that the point at which a run felt most controlled was frequently the point immediately preceding the engagement that ended it. The floor two formation had almost finished me at eleven health. The unknown entity on floor four had taken twenty-eight health in a single contact. The World-Eater had escalated to five simultaneous primaries without warning.

None of those had been predictable from the run's prior trajectory, and all of them had arrived when I had been moving with something approaching confidence. I had learned to treat confidence as a signal to check my resource display, not a signal to relax. The first golem signature came up on the Pathfinder overlay from my left. Then another from the right.

Then two more behind the first, staggered in the entry corridor's side passages, which was a flanking configuration I had not seen on this floor in previous runs. They were moving slowly, which was the golem type's universal constant, but the positioning suggested something had organised them rather than placed them randomly. I did not wait for them to close the distance. I took the left one first, Arcane Burst at thirty feet while it was still committed to its approach vector and unable to adjust.

The discharge hit the mana concentration point the overlay had marked and the golem's structural coherence failed in the upper half. [Experience Gained: 1, 100] [Floor Currency: +55] [Experience Terminated.] The right one was already inside twenty feet. Too close for a ranged burst without the displacement wave pushing back into me.

I stepped into its approach, brought the staff up in a Channel Investment configuration for one second, just one, minimum viable duration, and released it at contact range through the chest cavity where the Pathfinder overlay showed the densest concentration. [Experience Gained: 1, 100] [Floor Currency: +55] [Experience Terminated.] I noticed this was new... I didn't dwell on it. The two in the side passages had reached the main corridor by then.

I put the first one down with a Spellfist contact discharge, stepping inside its reach the same way I had stepped inside the arachnid's leg arc on floor four. The second one swung before I had fully repositioned and the arm caught my left shoulder and pushed me two steps sideways, which reminded me that the golem type did not have a mana concentration in the limbs and the Pathfinder overlay's prediction of its attack timing was less precise than it was on organic targets.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. I corrected my footing and put an Arcane Burst into its core at eight feet. [Experience Gained: 1, 100] [Floor Currency: +55] [Experience Terminated.] [Experience Gained: 1, 100] [Floor Currency: +55] [Experience Terminated.] Four engagements. Approximately four minutes.

My mana had dropped to one hundred and sixty-two from the Channel Investment burst, but Mana Circulation was running and the recovery rate at this point was consistent enough that I could project the reserve forward with reasonable accuracy. I kept moving through the floor's main avenue, between the stone buildings with their carved facades and their arched windows, and cleared three more golem clusters in the next fifteen minutes using the same rotation. Arcane Burst for anything beyond fifteen feet.

Spellfist for contact range. Channel Investment only when neither of those applied, because the mana cost was the highest of the three and the floor eight engagement density did not require it. [Floor Eight: Estimated Collapse in 22 minutes.] Twenty-two minutes and the black entities would come. I had encountered them enough times to have a complete description of what they did and no interest in repeating the experience. The time limit always increased the further up I travelled.

Though there was a cap at one point. They did not engage like enemies. They pulled, specifically they pulled at joints and extremities, and the sensation was less like being attacked and more like being disassembled by something that found the process entirely unremarkable. The most efficient way to deal with them was not to be on the floor when they arrived. I had nineteen minutes to spare by my current pace, which meant I had time. I had never had time on floor eight before.

I turned off the main avenue and into a side passage between two of the larger stone structures, and the passage opened after thirty feet into a forecourt with a set of wide steps leading up to a pair of doors that were larger than anything the lower floors had produced. The doors were open.

Inside, the ceiling went up further than I could resolve clearly in the ambient light, and the space was arranged in long rows of seating facing a raised platform at the far end, and on that platform stood a statue of a figure I did not recognise in a posture I associated with authority, based on the human texts, with one hand raised and the other extended. A church. The humans had called these places churches.

They went there to direct communication toward something they believed was listening, something they attributed agency and intention to, something that existed above the level of their daily experience and concerned itself with their individual circumstances. I had never prayed in any run.

I did not find it useful and I did not find it credible, and if there was something above the level of my experience concerning itself with my individual circumstances, it had spent fifty-two thousand loops expressing that concern in ways I found difficult to interpret as benevolent. I walked down the central aisle anyway, because I had time and the architecture was genuinely interesting up close in a way the exterior had only suggested. The carved detail inside was finer than the exterior.

Figures in procession along the upper walls, narratives I could read now with Arcane Notation Literacy handling the script beneath each image. The humans depicted here had built this place to honour something. The level of labour encoded in the stone was enough to tell me the thing they were honouring had mattered to them considerably. I was looking at the script on the third pillar when I saw it.

On one of the long benches, halfway down the aisle on the left side, sitting upright against the backrest as if someone had placed it there deliberately, was a small stuffed object. Cloth exterior, sewn seams, approximately the size of my forearm. I had not seen anything like it on any previous run, in any floor, in any of the hundreds of item variations the tower had generated across fifty-two thousand loops. I picked it up. It was a toy. The humans made these for their young. I had read about that on floor three.

Small replicas of things, animals or figures, constructed from soft materials so that children could carry them without danger. This one was an animal. I could not identify the species from the design alone, but it had four limbs and a rounded head and the stitching was precise enough that whoever had made it had done so with care rather than efficiency.

'How did this get here?' I thought. Not rhetorically. The tower generated its environmental objects from a set of parameters tied to the floor's thematic architecture. I had never seen a parameter that included a child's toy in the inventory of a floor eight church, and I had visited this floor in over a hundred iterations at various points in various runs. The intelligence allocation was doing something to my curiosity that I had not fully mapped yet.

On previous runs I would have registered the object as anomalous, filed it, and moved on. Right now I was standing in the aisle of a stone church on floor eight holding a stuffed animal and genuinely wanting to understand what it was doing here. I did not have enough time to understand it before the collapse window. I opened my inventory and activated Wormhole, setting the exit coordinate to the floor eight gate threshold.

The yellow aperture opened in front of me, its edges defined and stable at the four-minute reset cooldown. I threw the toy through it. Then I stepped through after it, retrieved it from the gate threshold, put it in my inventory properly, and looked at the gate to floor nine. [Floor Eight Cleared.] [Enemies Defeated: 19] [Level Up: Level 16] [Current Experience: 25, 600 / 28, 000] I sat down on the gate threshold, which was not comfortable, and opened the advancement screen.

The three options were exactly as I had left them. I looked at the second one again. The Foolish Sage. The option that had referenced my name directly and left its full description hidden behind question marks, as if the system was not certain what it was either, or was certain and had decided not to share that certainty with me. A class path named after Koalemos. After me. In a tower where nothing had ever been named after me before. I looked at my experience; it was the same. I sighed...

for the first time without realising it.

'Who put that there?' I thought. The gate to floor nine was in front of me. The secondary archive was on the other side of it. This run was accumulating things that did not fit th