Chương 23: Mimir!

The structure gave way under the second statue's fall. The base cracked, the floor cracked with it, and I dropped before I had decided to drop, grabbing the wing of the first statue as it went past me on the way down, using the momentum to swing rather than fall straight, and landed on compressed earth in a chamber I had not known existed beneath the one I had just wrecked. I let go of the wing and straightened up.

The light in here was blue-white and it pulsed at a steady rate, attached to chains that ran from an object in the center of the room up to the ceiling, and the object at the end of the chains was approximately the size of my head and was not a stone and was not a focus and was not anything the system had shown me before. It hovered. Ten entities in the room.

The Pathfinder trait lit them up the moment I landed, all of them registering the same mana signature, smaller than the statues but faster, already moving toward me before I had fully assessed the space. No staff. I had dropped it in the chamber above and it was buried under stone now. I put my hands up. Not in surrender. I mean I raised both palms and checked what was in the reserve. [Current Mana: 41 / 300] Forty-one. That was enough for two Spellfist contacts at full output or four at reduced.

Not enough for anything with range behind it. The first one reached me and I stepped inside its approach the way I had learned to do on floor two against the ghoul formation, close enough that its initial swing went wide, and drove my right palm into the concentration point the trait was showing me. [Spellfist: Active.] [Experience Gained: 1, 100] The second came from the left and I turned with it instead of against it, using the rotation to add force to the contact on the third before the second had fully registered that I had moved past it. [Experience Gained: 1, 100] [Experience Gained: 1, 100] My mana was at eight. Seven entities left. I drank the potion from my inventory without stopping moving.

[Mana Restored: +80] [Current Mana: 88 / 300] I worked through the next four in pairs, staying mobile, using the cramped space of the lower chamber to keep the number engaging me at any moment below three. The compressed earth under my feet was better traction than the stone above had been, and the lower ceiling meant nothing was going to flank me from above. I went to one and punched my fist through its stone skull.

[Experience Gained: 1, 100] Then came another to the side which activated a quick burst from my elbow shattering it slower stone jaw. I saw three more enclosing, I wanted to eradicate them from exitance using my ultimate sword move from a past time. But no… I used the something much worse… more arcane burst. [Experience Gained: 1, 100] [Experience Gained: 1, 100] [Experience Gained: 1, 100] Three left.

Then from the far side of the chamber a different one came through, and the Pathfinder trait put it at level twenty-one before I had visually confirmed it. It was carrying a blade, which the others had not been, and it moved with the specific economy of something that had been trained rather than generated. I stepped to the side and let it commit to the line it had launched on. It adjusted mid-stride, which the lower-level ones had not done, and the blade caught my forearm instead of missing entirely.

Not a clean cut through the plate but enough force behind it that my arm went briefly unresponsive. [Health: 201 / 310] A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. I shook the arm out. It came back at about seventy percent function. The level twenty-one reset its stance and came again, and this time I did not try to redirect it.

I caught the blade with my left hand at the flat, channelled Arcane Burst into the grip point, and the metal failed at the handle from the inside out. The pieces hit the floor. Then I put my right palm into its concentration point with everything Spellfist had at current mana output. It went down. [Experience Gained: 2, 800] The last two came together, which was poor tactics in a small space because they got in each other's way, and I went through them fast enough that the system announcements stacked.

[Experience Gained: 1, 100] [Experience Gained: 1, 100] I stood in the lower chamber and breathed. My mana was at nineteen. My health was holding. The blue-white light from the chained object was still pulsing at the same steady rate it had been when I landed, completely indifferent to what had just happened around it. I looked at it properly for the first time. It was round. Smooth.

The chains attached to it at four equidistant points and the light came from inside it rather than off its surface, which meant whatever it was, it was generating the light rather than reflecting it. The Pathfinder trait put its mana concentration at a level that made the level twenty-one I had just dropped look modest.

'Free experience or skills,' I thought. I stepped toward it. Then the voice came from above, dropping down through the gap I had fallen through, resonant and unhappy and projecting the specific energy of something that had been sitting in one place for a long time and had opinions about being disturbed.

"I am Mimir," it announced.

"Ye ill-bred mortal, trampling sacred ground. Face your god, and mind your manners." I looked up through the gap in the ceiling. Then I looked at the glowing object on the chains. Then I looked back up.

"You are shacked," I said. A pause.

"Well… shackles or no, I have defied the age of divinity! Aye!" Mimir replied. I looked at the object again. It was, now that I was standing directly beneath it, clearly a light source of significant mana concentration attached to a ceiling in a basement by four chains, which was not a configuration I associated with divinity based on anything I had read on floors three or nine. It resembled, closely, the illustrations of electrical illumination devices from the human texts in the floor three archive. A light bulb.

A very old, very mana-charged, apparently self-aware light bulb.

"How long have you been down here," I asked.

"Since the beginning, lad. A long while before ye learned to ask foolish questions." Mimir said.

"The beginning of what."

"The spire, ye dung beetle in a prophet's robes," it said, with the confidence of something that had not spoken to anyone in a very long time and had not updated its self-assessment in the interim. I checked the collapse timer. [Floor Nine Collapse: 8 minutes remaining.] Eight minutes. The chains were attached to the ceiling. The ceiling was the floor of the chamber above. The chamber above was structurally compromised because two large stone statues had fallen through it.

"Mimir," I said.

"Ye presume much, lad, using my name without so much as a bow."

"Your chains are attached to a ceiling that is currently partially collapsed," I said.

"The floor nine collapse sequence begins in eight minutes. You are going to devoured by dark entities." A longer pause this time.

"I am a god, lad," Mimir said.

"I do not fall. Have ye no grasp of the sacred?"

"Alright," I said. The light pulsed once, sharply, which I read as irritation. I looked at the Wormhole skill. [Wormhole: Available.] I looked at the chained object. I looked at my inventory, which had the stuffed toy from the floor eight church, the unclassified dagger, the World-Eater's Essence, the Mythic Attribute point, and two grimoires. There was room.

"I am going to take you out of here," I said.

"Ye'll do no such thing," Mimir said immediately.

"I am sacred. Eternal. The divine light of this temple, worshipped here since before your kind crawled out of its hole. Ye might at least ask leave."

"You are going to fall in seven minutes and forty seconds," I said.

"I," Mimir said, and then stopped. The light pulsed again, slower this time.

"Ye cannot simply make off with a sacred being! This is a temple, not a turnip patch!" it said.

"I am not taking a god," I said.

"I am taking a chained light source out of a collapsing building. Whether or not the light source is a god is none of my concern." The shackles were bolted into the ceiling at attachment points I could see clearly from below. The bolts were the same stone as the ceiling, which meant the Channel Investment technique at contact range would crack the attachment points the same way it had cracked the statue.

I jumped, caught the nearest chain, pulled myself up to the first bolt, and ran a short Channel Investment through my palm into the stone. The bolt cracked.

"What are ye doing, lad," Mimir said, with considerably less divine authority than the previous statements.

"Keeping you," I said, and moved to the second bolt.

"I gave ye no leave to do that."

"What permission you are an object I am going to use," I said, and cracked the second bolt. The third and fourth came down faster because the ceiling was already stressed from the statue impacts above, and Mimir descended into my arms with the specific energy of something experiencing an entirely new category of situation and not having processed it yet. The object was warm. Not uncomfortably warm.

The warmth of something that had been generating light in a sealed basement for what it claimed was a very long time, and the mana concentration the Pathfinder trait showed me up close was genuine. Whatever Mimir was, it was not a standard tower-generated entity. I put it in my inventory.

"A shrine to a sack. Aye, a fine measure of mortal reverence," Mimir said, from inside the inventory.

"Six minutes," I said, and opened the Wormhole to the floor nine gate threshold. [New Item Acquired: Mimir, the Chained Light. Classification: Uncertain.] [System Notice: Non-standard entity added to inventory. Monitoring.] I stepped through the aperture and came out at the gate as the collapse sequence started behind me. [Floor Nine Cleared.] [Enemies Defeated: 17] [Level Up: Level 21 to Level 23.] [Experience Gained: 36, 800 / 40, 000] [Attribute Points Available: 79] [Hidden Area Discovered: Chamber Beneath. Bonus experience applied.] [New Title Acquired: The Wise Sage's jester.] I looked at the last title.

"That title," Mimir said from my inventory, "fits ye well, lad."

"A jester?" I said. I have heard it somewhere around the upper archives, it's a term. But I didn't have much time to dwell on it.