Chương 2: Embrace Your Role

I stood at the edge of the safe zone and looked at the passage leading up.

'Do I have to?' It was a reasonable question. Floor one waited above me with the same patience it always had, which was the patience of something that did not need to wait because it was not going anywhere. I knew exactly what was up there. The hollowed.

I remembered that floor more clearly than any other because it was the first place I had ever gone, back at whatever passed for the beginning of all this, and I had spent somewhere close to a thousand deaths inside it before I had learned enough to stop dying there regularly. They were shaped like people. That was the part that had taken the longest to stop bothering me.

Upright, two arms, two legs, moving fast enough that the first time I had encountered one I genuinely had not understood what I was seeing before it had already closed the distance. Their eyes were wrong, sunken and dry, and some of them carried weapons, which was the detail that made floor one more of a problem than a simple haunted building should reasonably be. With a sword I could hold ground. With an axe I had occasionally cut through two of them in a single swing, which was satisfying in a way.

The archer build had been the most efficient overall. There were high vantage points throughout the architecture on that floor, old stone structures with elevated ledges and collapsed balconies, and I had learned to use them well, there was a tower next to the graveyard. The main issue was ammunition. Arrows ran out faster than hollowed did, and at some point I always had to descend and finish the remaining ones by hand, which eliminated most of the advantage the height had given me.

Now I was going in with a staff.

'Do I even get spells?' I muttered, not quite loud enough to be talking to anyone, not quite quiet enough to be fully internal. I had no answer for that. The mage portrait had not come with a tutorial. Presumably spells were somewhere in the arrangement, otherwise what was the point of the class, but whether they were accessible at level one or locked behind some threshold I had not yet reached was information I did not have.

I would find out the same way I found out most things in this tower, by going forward and observing the consequences.

'What is the worst that can happen,' I thought.

'I die.' I had read a word for the attitude that sentence implied. Nihilism. Found it in the third or fourth cycle in a book on one of the middle floors, written in thin parchment in handwriting that had clearly belonged to someone who took the act of writing seriously. The same book had described sorrow in a way that had actually landed, and I had sat with that one for a while after reading it, turning the definition over, deciding it was accurate. That was neither here nor there.

The screen materialized before I finished the thought.

"Warning. Safe zone will expire in one minute."

"Right," I said. I called up the class selection with a silent command and the screen expanded in front of me, wider than the status display, the portraits arranged in a clean row. [CLASS SELECTION] Warrior: Mastered. Knight: Mastered. Assassin: Mastered. Archer: Mastered. Berserker: Mastered. Enchanter: Mastered. Samurai: Mastered. Monk: Mastered [Magic Category: Unexplored.] [System Notice: You have exhausted 97% of recorded class paths.] [Recommended Path: Magic User] [Reason: It is the only remaining path capable of accommodating your accumulated knowledge.] [Would you like to begin?] The system had never recommended anything before. It displayed information, confirmed deaths, narrated floor transitions, and otherwise kept its opinions to itself. This was new.

'Accommodating your accumulated knowledge,' I repeated internally. I did not know what that meant exactly. The system was not in the habit of explaining its reasoning, and I had learned not to expect elaboration. But the phrasing suggested something I had not considered, that the mage class was not just the last option on the list but specifically suited to whatever the system thought I had become across fifty-two thousand deaths and eight mastered classes.

That was either genuinely meaningful or the system was doing something equivalent to a shrug and calling it a recommendation. Either way, the answer was yes. I reached forward and pressed my hand through the mage portrait. The figure in the image seemed to drift toward me slightly as I made contact, or maybe that was the usual visual distortion that came with class selection.

There was the familiar rush of mana settling into my body, that specific weightless pressure that always accompanied a new class registration. I had felt it enough times that I recognized it the way I recognized the grey light of floor zero or the sound of the pond. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Something settled into my right hand. I looked down.

A staff, smooth wood, the same grain and surface texture as the bookshelves in the floor three, where the archives humanity was. I knew that texture well. I had spent a significant portion of my time on that floor running my hand along those shelves while I read, and whoever had built the staff had apparently used the same material. That, or wood was just wood and I was connecting things that did not need connecting. A hat settled onto my head. Wide brim, slightly heavier than I expected.

A robe folded itself around my body, long enough to reach my ankles, fitted in a way that suggested it was designed for someone who would not be sprinting anywhere. I stood very still for a moment and assessed. I felt weak, I felt structurally physically poor and with that I knew my physical stats were weak. My arms, under the robe, had the general impression of being less useful than they had been thirty seconds ago. My grip on the staff was fine but everything behind the grip felt reduced.

'This is going to be unpleasant,' I noted. Not new information. I had already decided to do this before I selected the class. The assessment was just confirmation. The safe zone warning pulsed once more. [Safe zone expiring.]'I would be torn apart instantly,' I thought.

'Those ghouls on floor one would not even need to try.' I would be no match for those humans, specially as a mage. A memory resurfaced, a memory so chilling and dark. I tried to think of another thing while shaking my head. Humans... They were the most dangerous thing in this tower, not because of their strength. Some of them were, statistically speaking, far weaker than the Dark Knight of Floor Fifteen. No, they were dangerous because they had no pattern.

Everything I knew about surviving this tower was built on the belief that patterns existed, that every enemy had habits, weaknesses, and rules that could be observed and understood. Humans had none. The first human I ever encountered was also the first time I realized I was not one of them. They were exceptional fighters. Cunning, adaptable, and intelligent. The moment my guard dropped, they were already exploiting it. But that was not the worst part. When I defeat an opponent, I move on.

There is no purpose in lingering over the dead. The dead should remain dead. At the very least, that is the only respect you can offer them. Humans did not share that belief. Even now, I struggled to comprehend what had happened. They had not defeated me, they had butchered me like how one might butcher an animal. They cut away my limbs one by one and placed them into sacks while speaking about their "price," as if I were not a living being, but a rare object to be collected, sold, and admired.

They carved out my eyes. They severed my tongue. And the worst part was not the cruelty itself. It was who carried it out. The ones who appeared the least capable of violence. The ones wearing robes, carrying staffs, calling themselves priestesses of mankind. Those who claimed to represent something divine and righteous had been the ones hiding the ugliest intentions. Even those who appeared holy could have motives buried beneath the surface. The System screen had classified me as Devas.

I had registered the term as nothing more than another classification, a word without meaning because I had no reference for what a Devas was. However, the humans on Floor Thirty gave that word meaning, the moment they saw me, they knew. They looked at me and immediately understood that I was something different from them. Their reaction was instant. Absolute. Until then, I had never considered that my appearance could reveal my nature.

Based on the archive floor's records of human physiology, I had assumed I resembled them closely enough to pass without question. I was wrong. I was never one of them. I tried to think of something else. I knew better. I had learned my lesson. I was no longer the same weak person I had been around the five-hundredth iteration. No, I was thousands of times stronger than that version of myself, despite recently regressing to floor one and picking arguably the worst class. I was still strong, and I myself…

knew it without a shadow of doubt. I forced my thoughts away from the past and focused on something else. The class. The archer class had at least given me something resembling shoulder protection. I could not remember the word for it off the top of my head, some term I had read in a book somewhere on the upper floors. I made a mental note to look it up later, then immediately forgot about it. The mage had none of that.

Standing in those robes with a staff and whatever minimal defence the class offered was roughly equivalent to walking onto Floor One with nothing at all. I had recently read a phrase for that situation, and found it accurate in a way that made me want to laugh despite everything.

"A sitting duck," I thought. It made no sense. I was not a duck, and ducks did not sit, at least not from what I had observed in human civilization. They floated. Still, the term itself was humorous. A sitting duck. It meant to be bare and exposed, with predators waiting for the opportunity to prey upon it. I scratched the thought aside and breathed through my nose. Humans had their ways with words certainly. Armor did not actually matter that much in the long run.

The tower was full of equipment scattered across floors, hidden in rooms I had found before and would find again, stashed behind walls that only Pathfinder let me see. I had carried exceptional gear in previous runs, weapons and armor that changed the math on fights I should have lost. The problem was never the equipment itself. The problem was finding it again each time, and knowing there was probably twice as much still hidden from me even now. But beyond that, armor had a more fundamental flaw as a strategy.

I had run enough classes to understand that durability and equipment weight did not move in the same direction. Some classes with heavy armor and significant defensive stats folded faster than lighter ones because the system built fragility into the base attributes. The monk was the clearest example. I had run that class more than once, wearing the same robes I was looking at now, and discovered that my body felt more resilient in them than the numbers suggested it should.

More resistant to damage in ways that did not show up cleanly on the status screen. But the monk had its own problem, which was that it had no answer for ranged opponents. No distance meant no deflection. A swordsman could work around that with blade technique, and gained a shield by level ten to cover the gap. A berserker could use an axe to close range fast enough that it rarely became an issue. An archer could take cover and return fire.

The monk just absorbed it, which worked until it did not, it needed physical fortitude and much like every class it had its downsides. Also the robes were orange. I did not understand that choice. glanced sideways at the screen still floating beside me as I walked toward the gate, staff in hand, testing the weight of it.