Chương 28: A name?

Floor eleven opened into water. Not the submerged corridors of floor seven. Open water, an expanse of it extending in every direction with no visible boundary, and standing above it a city built on stilts and bridges and platforms, every structure rising directly from the surface with no ground beneath it. The architecture was dense and vertical, buildings packed against each other with narrow walkways between them, and the whole thing sat under a sky that was the same grey as floor ten but without the smoke.

I stepped off the gate threshold onto the nearest walkway and it held my weight. Mimir pulsed from inside my chest.

"This is wet," it said.

"Yes," I said.

"I do not like wet." I didn't bother replying I was thinking so far ahead. I checked through Pathfinder. The city above the water was occupied, the signatures distributed through the upper levels of the stacked buildings in a pattern I did not immediately recognise from previous runs. They were moving in circuits, short repeated paths through the walkways, which was patrol behaviour. This floor had never had patrol behaviour before.

I started moving through the lower level of the city, beneath the occupied upper sections, using the stilts and the underside of the platforms as cover. The walkway was narrow enough that I had to angle through some of the gaps between support structures, and the water below was dark enough that I could not see the bottom.

"How long have you been walking," Mimir said.

"Since floor one," I said.

"That is not an answer to what I asked."

"It is the only answer I have," I said.

"I do not experience time the way the archive texts describe it." Mimir considered that.

"You do not sleep," it said.

"No," I said.

"Or eat."

"No."

"Or rest."

"The floors do not allow it," I said.

"The collapse timers run regardless of what I want."

"That is not what I asked either," Mimir said.

"I asked if you rest. Not whether the floors permit it." I moved through a gap between two support columns and emerged onto a wider platform on the city's northern edge.

"I do not," I said. Mimir was quiet for a moment.

"I sleep," it said.

"Or something adjacent to it. In the basement, between visits, which were infrequent, I would dim and the time would pass differently."

"That sounds useful," I said, meaning it. Sleep seemed like a peaceful thing, apparently it was like death but without dying.

"It was the only way to make several thousand years bearable," Mimir said, which was the most direct thing it had said since the cathedral, and I registered it and kept moving. I thought about responding but I preferred to remain quiet, I preferred not to say anything that would leave me exposed. The patrol signatures above me were running on a forty-second circuit, which I had established by watching three full rotations on the trait.

The gap between one patrol completing its circuit and the next one starting was eight seconds. Eight seconds was enough to move between cover points on the upper level if I used Wormhole to close the distance rather than the walkways. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. I had recently upgraded the Wormhole to level two by using my skill points. I was sitting at a rather decent amount, seeing as I had around 51 skill points.

I held off on investing in my skills for now, since most of floors one to thirty could be cleared with genuine ease. The problem was travel, short distances and long agility on mage wasn't the best. Moreover, there were other classes I wanted to explore and commit to before investing in any skill, even if they could be carried over. Investing in a single skill to its utmost capacity is always better than having many mediocre ones but that depends on the class.

Versatility might also be more useful for magic than physical prowess. But I held off on the Arcanist skills for now… there were probably much more potent and valuable skills as a Grand Magus or the Foolish Sage. Arcanist seemed good in the short run for allowing short outbursts of damage, but elemental magic, as well as summoning magic, I hadn't explored those areas yet. I just realized there was a huge information gap that I wasn't aware of.

Cleric, Alchemist, Summoner, Sorcerer, Necromancer, and all of those roles. I just couldn't wait to explore them. Maybe that would be my key to climbing even further up. Suddenly, the queue came. I heard it and waited. I waited for the gap, opened the Wormhole to the upper level platform, and stepped through. [Wormhole: Active.] The upper level was tighter than it had looked from below. The buildings here were built against each other with shared walls, and the walkways between them were single-file width.

The patrol signature was six seconds out on the trait. I moved to the first junction and waited. The patrol came around the corner and I let it pass at arm's length, pressing against the wall of the nearest building, and it went by without adjusting its circuit. Shadow-type again, similar to floor ten, but these ones were not carrying rifles. They were carrying bladed weapons, which told me the floor's conflict had a different temporal setting than floor ten's.

I followed the patrol for two circuits and mapped its full route. Then I took it apart at the point where the route doubled back on itself and the walkway was widest, using a Spellfist contact at the concentration node the pathfinder marked, fast enough that the sound of it was minimal.

[Experience Gained: 1, 300] I worked through the next six the same way, following each one's circuit until the optimal contact point, taking them one at a time, staying below the threshold of anything that would trigger a group response. Mimir was quiet through all of it, which I noted. The seventh patrol was different.

It ran a longer circuit that covered two levels, and the concentration node on the trait was positioned differently from the others, higher in the torso, which suggested a structural difference that might mean a different resistance to the standard Spellfist output. I followed it for one full circuit and confirmed the node position. Then I took it at the same doubled-back point and adjusted the contact angle upward to match the node location.

[Experience Gained: 1, 800] The extra five hundred points registered before I had finished processing the engagement.

"You killed that one differently," Mimir said.

"The target was different," I said.

"You noticed that from watching it walk."

"I can see node patterns," I said.

"The position told me the structure was different."

"And you adjusted," Mimir said.

"Yes." Mimir pulsed once, slow and warm.

"You do that with everything," it said.

"I have been watching. You read what is in front of you and you adjust. You do not commit to a method and then force the method onto the problem."

"Committing to a method on the wrong problem gets you killed," I said.

"Most things in the inverted spire follow patterns," I said.

"And when there is no default pattern," Mimir said. I thought about the humans on the upper floors. The ones who climbed down.

"Then you read slower and move more carefully," I said.

"Be… better." I cleared the remaining patrols in the next twenty minutes, moving through the city's upper level in the same methodical circuit, using the Mimir-trait to stay ahead of any grouping before it formed. The floor's central structure was a building larger than anything around it, occupying a platform at the city's highest point, and inside it the Pathfinder trait showed me a single dense concentration sitting above a large open space on the building's upper floor.

I went in through a window rather than the main entrance, because the entrance had its own patrol stationed at it and I did not want to trigger an internal response before I had assessed the interior geometry. The inside was a single large hall with a vaulted ceiling and water visible through gaps in the floor planking, the same dark water from below.

At the far end was a raised platform with a chair on it, and on the chair sat the concentration the trait had been tracking, a figure in layered clothing that was heavier than anything the patrol figures had worn. Level thirty-two. Nine levels above me. It noticed me when I was twelve feet inside the window, which was faster recognition than I had anticipated from a seated target, and it came off the chair before I had fully oriented my stance.

It was fast it covered the twelve feet between us in a time that the trait processed but that my body had to catch up to after the fact. The first impact caught my left forearm and I took it rather than redirecting it, using the contact point to activate Spellfist and running the discharge into the arm that had hit me. The figure pulled back. [Health: 249 / 310] Forty-one points. Through the plate.

"Carlos," Mimir said. First time he had said my name… I thought.