Chương 26: Floor Ten

Floor ten opened into grey sky and open ground. Not the enclosed architecture of the previous floors. No corridors, no chambers, no ceilings. Just a wide flat expanse of dead grass stretching toward a town in the middle distance, and above the town, something I had not seen on any floor below this level. Things flying. Mechanical, structured, moving in formation with a noise that reached me as a low continuous pressure before I could identify the source. I had read about these in the secondary archive.

Engineering texts, the ones I had processed in the fifteen minutes before the statues animated. The humans had built machines capable of sustained flight by forcing air across shaped surfaces at sufficient velocity. They had also built machines capable of delivering explosive force from significant distances, and several of the flying objects above the town were currently doing exactly that.

The town itself was gothic, the same architectural language as floors eight and nine, towers and spires and tall narrow windows, and it was being taken apart systematically. The glass structures I could see from here were cracked and collapsing, and the ground between me and the town perimeter was occupied by formations of figures moving in patterns I recognised from the floor two army engagement, organised, directional, with clear command structure. Mimir floated at my left shoulder.

"This is loud," Mimir said.

"Yes," I said. I looked at the town and thought about what I had been piecing together across the floors. The graveyard on floor one with its village. The ghoul formation, human in shape, wearing armour. The army on floor two, hollow soldiers with organised tactics. The archive on floor three preserving human texts. The church on floor eight, floor nine's gothic cathedral. And now this, a town being bombed by flying machines while formations of soldiers moved across open ground.

The tower was not a random collection of floors. It was a sequence. A specific sequence, showing something that had happened in a specific order to a specific civilisation, floor by floor, beginning with a village and ending with, presumably, whatever waited above floor fifteen. The town in the middle distance was the same town from floor eight and nine. The same architecture. What I was looking at was a later stage of what I had been walking through.

'This place is a history,' I thought.

'Someone built a tower out of a history.' A bullet went past my left ear. I stepped right before the second one arrived, using the Pathfinder trait's read on the shooter's position to predict the correction vector, and located the source in the formation to my left. One figure, separated slightly from the group, with a long-barrelled weapon oriented toward me. Another fired from the right. Then two more from different angles. They had noticed me.

"I can help," Mimir said, and before I could respond it moved from my shoulder directly into my chest. The sensation was immediate and total. Not painful. A saturation, mana filling the reserve from a source that was not Mana Circulation, not a potion, something that felt like a second system running parallel to my own, and alongside the mana a quality of perception that I did not have a word for.

A brightness in the Pathfinder trait that expanded its range from its standard thirty-foot resolution to something that encompassed the entire visible field. Every living thing in my line of sight was visible on the trait simultaneously. Every human in every formation. Every figure behind cover. Every shooter with a weapon raised. Their positions, their orientations, the micro-adjustments in their stances that the Pathfinder read translated into movement predictions two seconds ahead of the actual movement.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. It was the archer passive. Not my archer passive. Something that resembled it but ran at a scale the archer class had never reached.

"What did you do," I said.

"I am inside you now," Mimir said, from somewhere that was not outside me.

"We share the field. Think of it as cooperation."

"I did not agree to cooperation," I said.

"You put me in your bag," Mimir said.

"That was implied consent." I did not have time to argue the point because the nearest shooter had corrected their aim and fired, and I was already moving, pushing off the ground with an Arcane Burst at my feet that gave me height and lateral distance simultaneously. [Arcane Burst: Active.] I landed six feet from the nearest figure in the formation, a shadow-type, human in outline but without the colour or weight of the soldiers I had encountered on floor two.

I hit it with a headbutt because I was already at close range and the Spellfist channel was slower to activate than the impact, and took the rifle from it as it went down. I had used a rifle before. Different run, on this same floor, in one of the upper sections where the human groups carried them. The mechanics were simple enough and the weight was familiar from that iteration. I looked up.

The firing squad had reformed, six figures in a line, and the Mimir-enhanced Pathfinder trait was showing me something that would not have been visible without it. Their timing. The reload interval. The specific window between one volley and the preparation for the next.

"Six o'clock and twelve o'clock." They said. The first volley would go straight. Everything moved at its normal speed. The volley came. I stepped into the line of fire rather than away from it, which was not the intuitive response but was the correct one because the volley was aimed at where I had been standing, and at contact range with the nearest shooter I drove a palm into their face with an Arcane Burst discharge before they had processed that I had moved toward them. [Arcane Burst: Active.] [Experience Gained: 1, 200] The one to my right had not yet completed the reload. I swung the rifle by the barrel and hit the second one across the head with the stock, drove the blade end of the bayonet into the third before the swing had finished, and looked at the remaining three. They were already repositioning.

"Stamina is low," Mimir said, from inside my chest.

"You have been moving hard." I checked without pulling the screen fully open. [Stamina: 31 / 100] Thirty-one. Low enough to matter if the engagement ran long.

"I know," I said. I looked to my left, past the formation, toward where the heavy machinery was positioned. I had seen it at the edge of the field when I first stepped through the gate, large tracked structures with long barrels that I recognised from the archive texts on artillery and mechanised warfare. Tanks. The humans had called them tanks. There were three of them at the field's left perimeter, oriented toward the town, and they had not yet rotated toward me.

I pulled the red spellbook from inventory through the Wormhole aperture, which opened and closed in under a second, and flipped to the page I had been looking at in the white corridor. The incantation was three lines, and I had the Wisdom now to run it without the notation in front of me, but having the text available reduced the error margin.

"What is that," Mimir said.

"A test," I said. I read the incantation. The remaining three formation figures were still moving toward me and I let them come, because the incantation required three seconds of uninterrupted vocalisation and moving while reading was a variable I did not need in a test scenario. The trait showed me their approach vectors and I was going to have to trust the timing. The discharge that left my hands was not an Arcane Burst. It was wider.

It covered an arc rather than a point, and it hit all three remaining figures simultaneously, and the force of it continued past them and hit the ground behind them hard enough that the dead grass flattened outward from the impact in a circular wave. [New Technique: (Incantation-Based). Tenebrae Aeternae.] [Experience Gained: 1, 200] [Experience Gained: 1, 200] [Experience Gained: 1, 200] I looked at my hands. The incantation had worked.

Not just worked, it had produced a technique that the skill tree had not listed, derived from the combination of the red spellbook's mechanics and the Wisdom allocation that made incantation-class spells compatible with the mage framework. Mimir pulsed warmly from inside my chest.

"That," it said, "was impressive."

"It was a test," I said.

"A successful one," Mimir said. I looked at the tanks. The three of them had rotated while I was running the incantation, their barrels now oriented toward my position rather than the town, and at the distance between us the Mimir-enhanced Pathfinder trait was showing me their crew positions inside the hulls, small dense mana concentrations in the operator seats. The incantation had a reload. I did not know the interval yet.

I started moving toward them and thought about the floor eleven trader checkpoint two floors above and the name I was going to ask for, and Mimir hummed something inside my chest that I did not have a word for, and the grey sky above the bombed town pressed down on everything without offering any opinion on what came next. [Floor Ten: In Progress.] [Level: 23.] [Floor Currency: +180.]"This is going to be total annihilation," I said. I summoned the staff of Ashen Ruin.