Chương 34: War

The shaft smelled of dust and old metal as well as gunpowder, not fresh, but embedded in the stone the way smells embedded themselves in porous surfaces over time. The passage at the top was narrow and low-ceilinged and ran horizontally for approximately thirty meters before it opened into something that the sound had already told me was not a cave. There was light. Real light, not Mimir's ambient output, but the grey diffuse light of a surface environment filtered through smoke.

And sound that was no longer muffled by thirty meters of stone above me but immediate and directional and loud enough that I identified its components separately: artillery discharge, impact detonation, something mechanical that I did not place until I cleared the passage exit and stood upright and looked at what was in front of me. I had come up inside a ruined structure, the exterior walls partially standing, the roof absent, the floor covered in debris from whatever had brought the roof down.

Through the gaps in the standing walls I could see the street. And in the street I could see the conflict, but not the conflict I had in mind. The soldiers I had fought through before were present, but they were not what was holding my attention. What was holding my attention was the other side of the engagement, which on every previous run had been a standard defensive military formation and was currently something else entirely. They moved like people.

The proportions were correct, the height and the shoulder width and the way their weight shifted when they changed direction. They were armoured in silver, articulated plate that caught the grey light and distributed it evenly, and they carried weapons I recognised from the floor architecture. But they did not move the way people moved under sustained fire.

They moved with the specific regularity of something that had been given instructions and was executing them without the interruption of self-preservation instinct, and when the light caught them at certain angles the articulation of the plate was visible in a way that plate was not visible on biological forms. Marionettes.

Silver-clad, human-scaled, operating artillery and advancing through the smoke in coordinated silence while the shadow soldiers on the other side of the street returned fire and the civilians in the ruined structures on both margins scrambled for any remaining cover. I ducked behind the nearest standing wall as a shot crossed the open space above me and impacted the structure two buildings to my left with enough force that the remaining wall on that side came down in a cascade of stone and dust.

'This is not the floor twelve I cleared before,' I thought. I looked toward the far end of the street where the gate between floors twelve and thirteen was visible, solid and unremarkable against the backdrop of a street that was actively being destroyed around it. Between my current position and that gate was approximately two hundred meters of active warfare with marionettes on one side and shadow soldiers on the other and a civilian population caught in the geometry of both. Then I saw the wall to my right.

Ghouls. Not the floor configuration type, not the structured formation enemies from the lower floors. These were climbing over each other in a mass that was moving along the exterior of the ruined buildings parallel to the street, using the debris and the standing wall sections as a vertical surface, and the civilians in the buildings along that line were pressing away from the windows and screaming with the specific register of people who had already been terrified and had just found a new category for it.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. The gate was ahead. The ghouls were to my right. The marionettes and the shadow soldiers were between me and the gate and were not distinguishing between each other, the civilians, or anything else that occupied the street. I looked at the azure sword. I looked at Mimir, whose expression from hip height communicated that he was aware of all of it and was waiting to see what I was going to do about it.

I thought about the shadow in the cave. The broken record. The ladder east. Twelve words on a loop from a consciousness that had not completed its exit from the floor's memory, and the fact that it had directed me here specifically, to this exit point, to this view of a floor twelve that was nothing like the floor twelve I had solved before.

'It knew I was coming,' I thought.

'Something in the floor's memory knew this run was different and positioned me here instead of the standard entry.'

"Mimir," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"The marionettes. Are they the floor's standard opposition or are they something else." A pause of approximately two seconds. His processing interval.

"They are not catalogued in the tower's standard configuration for this floor," he said.

"They are a recent addition."

"How recent."

"This run," he said. I looked at the gate two hundred meters ahead through active warfare and a ghoul mass climbing the right-side buildings and decided that the fastest path through this was not the path I had used on any previous run because the floor had changed in exactly the same way floor five had changed, in response to something about this run that the tower or whatever was paying attention to this run had decided required escalation.

I stepped out from behind the wall and moved left, toward the shadow soldiers' side of the street, because the shadow soldiers were the floor's original opposition and original opposition on a changed floor was the most predictable element available. A ghoul dropped from the building above me.

I put the azure sword through it before it landed and felt the Void Channel mechanic run through the blade and into the contact point, and the ghoul disintegrated rather than falling, which was not standard ghoul behaviour and confirmed that the azure sword's interaction with the tower's registered entities was not a standard combat interaction. I kept moving. The gate was ahead. The floor was wrong. The shadow in the cave had known and sent me here anyway. I intended to find out why before I cleared it.

The pile was approximately three meters high at its peak and I was sitting on top of it with my back straight and the skill screen open in front of me, and the smell coming off the pile was the specific combination of scorched chitin and dissolved organic matter that the azure sword left behind when the Void Channel mechanic ran through a registered entity at full output, which was different from the smell standard combat produced and considerably more final.

Mimir's head was resting on my knee, oriented toward the skill screen, because I had unclipped him from the belt to give my hip a rest and he had not objected to the relocation.

"You did not slow down once," he said.

"No," I said.

"The civilians on the eastern passage were actively trying to get your attention for approximately forty meters."

"I know," I said.

"You walked past them."

"I know," I said.

"I am simply making an observation," he said, in the tone he used when he was making more than an observation.

I looked at the skill screen and did not respond to that, because responding to it would require me to explain a calculation I had made on floor twelve that I was not interested in defending, which was that the gate had been the objective and the fastest path to the gate had been through the marionettes and around the ghoul mass and that stopping for any of the variables in between had not been part of that path. The civilians in the eastern passage had found the ladder.

They had found it because the shadow in the cave had known it was there and I had followed the shadow's instruction and climbed it and emerged where the floor's architecture needed me to emerge. Whether I had helped them or simply preceded them through the same route was a distinction the floor had not required me to resolve. Mimir was requiring me to resolve it from my knee.

"They are still alive," I said.

"The passage was clear when I used it."

"They are still alive because you cleared the passage before they used it," he said.

"Not because you intended to clear it for them."

"The outcome is the same," I said.

"The outcome is the same," he agreed.

"You are still a menace." I returned my attention to the screen. [SKILL MENU] [Available Skill Points: 84] [Current Skills:] [Concoction (Active) Rank 1] [Material Sense (Passive) Rank 1] [Alchemist (Passive) Rank 1] [Arcane Burst (Active) Rank 2] [Spellfist (Active) Rank 3] [Wormhole (Active) Rank 2] [Channel Investment (Active) Rank 1] [Infinite Reservoir (Active) Suspended]