Chương 29: Floor Eleven

I didn't dwell on it; distractions would cause me great problems. The translucent monster circled me. Its body looked almost human beneath the thin, milky layer of ghostly flesh, but its limbs were too long and its joints bent just slightly wrong. Every step made the mist around its legs ripple, giving it enough physical presence for me to track its movements. I let it circle me because the trait was showing me something in its movement that I needed two full rotations to confirm.

The concentration node was not stationary like every other entity's. It moved with the monster's weight distribution, shifting inside its body as it changed its angle of approach. A mobile node. I had not encountered that before. I watched the pattern for one full rotation and identified the position it occupied most consistently, the point where the node settled between weight transfers. It remained there for roughly half a second each time. Half a second was enough. The monster came in on the third rotation.

I stepped inside its approach, the same way I had against every fast enemy since Floor Two, and drove both palms into the node's position at the exact moment it settled. Spellfist discharged through both hands, carrying the last of the mana I had reserved for close-range attacks. The monster stopped. Its translucent body flickered once before collapsing to its knees. I looked at it. It was a phantom; they were annoying. [Experience Gained: 4, 200] [Level Up: Level 26 to Level 28.] [Experience Gained: 51, 600 / 56, 000] [Attribute Points Available: 95] [Floor Currency: +380] I stood in the hall above the dark water and looked at my forearm where the plate had given way, and the bleeding was manageable, and Mimir was pulsing with a rapid light that I was reading as agitation.

"You let it hit you," Mimir said.

"I used the contact point," I said.

"You let it hit you to create the contact point," Mimir said.

"Yes," I said.

"That is either very intelligent, pal."

"Pal?" he said, confused. This possession of mine was referring to me as a pal? Mimir pulsed for a second and stopped. He made a sound that sounded like he was clearing his throat.

"Anyways, I feel like I can manifest a limb with this much experience…hahaha!" I looked confused. Does he have access to my mana pool?

"That's because you have nearly saturated your core, son!" Core… then I thought… indeed there was something inside me other than the heart. But I didn't dwell on it too long.

"Good," I said, allowing for no further questioning. The checkpoint clearing was on the far side of the city, accessible through a bridge that crossed the widest section of open water. I could see the firefly insects from here, their orange glow catching the underside of the bridge planking, and in the clearing beyond them a figure in a green cloak was seated in the standard position. Mimir had gone quiet. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

I walked across the bridge and into the clearing and stopped in front of the trader, and she looked up at me with the face I had seen for the first time on floor six, green hair and green eyes. She had the very same warm cheeks and expression that had moved considerably further from its default neutral than it had been in our previous interaction. She looked at the forearm. Then she seemed to look into my body, focusing.

"You," she said, "have had an eventful run."

"Your name," I said.

"I told you I would ask again here." She looked at me for a moment. The firefly insects moved above the purple grass between us, and the water-city of floor eleven seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. I had not expected her to pause on that question.

She had pressed the barrel upward against the underside of my chin with the specific confidence of someone who had done it before and found it effective, and when I asked why she helped me her hand did not waver but something behind her eyes did, and that something was more informative than anything she had said in the preceding two minutes. I held still and waited.

The trees around us had shifted from purple to rose, a full colour change that moved through the canopy in a slow radial wave originating from where she stood, which confirmed what the pressure I had felt when I used the insight passive had already told me. Her level had returned three question marks. Not an uncatalogued entity.

Something the system had looked at and declined to assign a number to, which was a category I had encountered exactly once before in fifty-two thousand runs, and that encounter had been considerably less conversational than this one. She had been the trader across every run I had completed. Every checkpoint, every transaction, every one-line deflection when I had pushed for anything beyond the inventory display.

I had categorised her as furniture and she had apparently found that classification either useful or offensive, and based on the current barrel-to-chin geometry I was willing to accept that it might have been both.

"Why do you help me," I said again, because she had not answered and I was genuinely curious and also because repeating the question was the only leverage I currently had. Her eyes were the specific green of deep water with light coming through it, not warm but not cold either, something more precise than either of those, and they stayed on me with an attention that felt cataloguing in a way I was now understanding was literal rather than figurative. She lowered the gun one inch.

"You are insufferable," she said.

"That does not answer the question," I said. The cards that had been orbiting us since she revealed herself slowed their rotation slightly. Not stopped. Slowed, the way something slowed when the person controlling it was dividing their attention between the control and something else.

"I catalogued you," she said finally.

"Centuries. Possibly longer. The system does not give me clear timestamps on the earlier iterations." She tilted her head at a slight angle, the same gesture she had made at the table when the small structure of cards had fallen.

"You were consistent. Every run, every class, every floor. You did the same things in the same order with marginal variations and you died at predictable points and you came back and did it again." She paused.

"It was deeply uninteresting."

"And now," I said.

"And now you called me a human bitch," she said, "which is the most incorrect insult you could have selected on multiple levels, and the barrel is still under your chin, and you are asking me questions instead of apologising."

"I am not going to apologise," I said.

"I know," she replied. Her lips did something that was not quite a smile and not quite the compressed expression I had catalogued from six floors of interactions. It was somewhere between the two and considerably more dangerous-looking than either.

"That is also new." The pressure I had felt when I used the insight passive was still present at the periphery, not aggressive but present, a constant awareness that whatever was holding the space around us was not something I had a skill to address and was not something I wanted to test. The metallic object to her right was a relic, the architecture unmistakable once I had identified it, sharing the same structural signature as the weapons the shadow soldiers had carried on the earlier floors.

I had seen that design in the archive texts. It was not a floor-standard item.

'She is armed with two things,' I thought.

'One of them is registered by the system and one of them is not.'

"You said the trade is voluntary," I said.

"That it is not assigned."

"Correct," she said.

"So you chose floor six. Every run."

"Every run that reached floor six," she said, with an emphasis on the conditional that carried information about how many runs had not. I thought about that number and set it aside.

"You chose to be there," I said.

"And you chose to answer when I asked your name. And you chose to tell me the path was to the left of the root cluster when I walked in a circle for four minutes." Her eyes narrowed.

"You were aware of the circuit."

"I was aware of it approximately thirty seconds in," I said.

"I was curious how long you would let it continue." She looked at me with the specific expression of someone revising an assessment upward against their preference.

"Forty-three seconds," she said.

"I let it continue for forty-three seconds."

"Why forty-three?"

"Because at forty-four I would have said something and I did not want to say something," she said.

"And then at forty-three I said something anyway, which I found irritating." I stood in the rose-coloured forest under a gun barrel and considered the fact that the entity who had been my consistent non-hostile presence across fifty-two thousand runs had apparently been managing her own responses to me with a precision I had not credited her with, and that the management had broken down at floor six of this specific run. It had started when she said I looked worse than usual.

"That was the first deviation," I said. She lowered the gun another inch.

"What was."

"Floor six. The first thing you said. That was the first time in several thousand interactions you offered information I had not prompted." She was quiet for a moment. The cards continued their slow rotation. The rose light through the canopy moved in the same direction as the card rotation, which I noted and filed.

"This run is different," she said.

"You said that on floor six."

"I mean it more now than I did then," she said.

"The foolish sage option. The floor five configuration. The assassin pathway unlocking through Master of Many Paths inside a Titan." She paused.

"The dagger."

"The 404 errors," I said.