Chương 35: Class Barrier

The system had flagged it during the engagement, not as a deactivation but as a suspension, which was a different classification, and when I had attempted to reactivate it on floor twenty, the result had been immediate and specific. The skill had pushed back.

Not a denial notification, a physical response, a sharp pressure behind my sternum and a warmth along my forearms that had resolved within seconds into a thin line of blood at both wrists where the Vitality-to-mana conversion had attempted to force itself through a channel the system was actively resisting. I had stopped the reactivation attempt and filed the information. The system was pushing back on Infinite Reservoir specifically.

Not on Channel Investment, not on Spellfist, not on any of the other skills that operated outside standard mage tree parameters. Just that one. Which meant the system had a threshold for what it would tolerate from this build and Infinite Reservoir was currently sitting on the wrong side of it.

I looked at the suspended notation and thought about what Livia had said about the entity outside the system, and what Mimir had told me about the 404 errors being that entity's notation rather than the tower's, and I filed the Infinite Reservoir situation in the same category as those two data points and left it there for now. Eighty-four skill points.

I had been accumulating them across the floor twenty subsection engagements at a rate that reflected the volume rather than the difficulty, which had been higher than any floor below it but lower than I had expected given the level spread. The marionettes from floor twelve had reappeared in modified configurations across floors fourteen through eighteen, which had confirmed that the tower's escalation was not floor-specific but run-specific, adjusting to what I was doing rather than where I was.

I started with Spellfist. The skill was already at Rank 3, which was the highest I had pushed it in the current run, and the upgrade path above that required a material cost in addition to skill points, specifically a conductor medium of sufficient density to hold the increased channel capacity. The azure sword qualified.

I was not entirely comfortable using an unregistered relic as upgrade material for a combat skill without understanding the full implications, but the alternative was leaving Spellfist at Rank 3 on a floor where the engagement density was about to change significantly, and that was a worse choice. I spent twelve skill points. [Spellfist upgrading: Rank 3 to Rank 4...] [Spellfist (Active) Rank 4 Unlocked.] [Effect: Discharge now propagates through any conductive surface within two meters of contact point. Chain discharge enabled.] I catalogued it and moved on. This was to be expected. I accepted that and moved to the next allocation. Wormhole at Rank 3 had been functioning as a traversal skill since floor three, and the upgrade path above Rank 3 listed a capability I had been thinking about since floor ten, when I had first understood the full scale of what Livia had told me about the tower's extent. [Wormhole (Active) Rank 3 to Rank 4: Cost 18 skill points.] [Rank 4 Effect: Traversal range extends to floor-skip capability. Maximum skip: 3 floors. Cooldown scales with distance skipped. Requires clear spatial memory of destination floor.] Floor-skip capability. I spent the eighteen points immediately. [Wormhole (Active) Rank 4 Unlocked.] [Floor-skip enabled. Current cooldown: 8 hours per floor skipped.] [Warning: Destination floor must have been previously entered. Blind skip not supported.] Eight hours per floor skipped was a significant cooldown, which meant using it carelessly would cost me more than it saved. But the mechanic I had in mind was not about skipping floors I needed to clear. It was about the floors above thirty, where the engagement density made linear progression considerably more expensive than the floors below it.

If I could skip two floors in a sequence where the intermediate floors were purely resource-draining without meaningful skill or information payoff, eight hours of cooldown was worth the exchange. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. I spent six more points on Concoction, pushing it to Rank 2. [Concoction (Active) Rank 2 Unlocked.] [Effect: Potion mixing now yields enhanced output. Standard materials produce superior results. Toxic combinations now detectable before synthesis.] The toxic combination detection was the part I had wanted. I had been mixing potions since floor eight with Material Sense guiding the component selection, and the combinations I had been attempting on floors seventeen and eighteen had produced results I was reasonably confident about but not certain about, and certainty at the scale of what was ahead of me was worth six skill points. That left forty-eight points unspent. I left them.

The class advancement was still pending, and whatever class path I selected would have its own skill tree requirements, and spending points now on skills that might not interact efficiently with the advancement output was the kind of optimisation error I had made in the first few hundred runs and had not repeated since. I closed the screen.

[CURRENT STATUS] [Name: Koalemos] [Level: 29] [Class: Mage Apprentice (Advancement Pending)] [Skill Points Available: 48] [RESOURCES] [Health: 310 / 310] [Mana: 287 / 300] [Stamina: 91 / 100] [Level 30 Barrier: Active. Class Advancement required to proceed.] The barrier notification had appeared on the screen at the end of the floor twenty subsection, flat and non-negotiable.

Level twenty-nine was the ceiling without the advancement, and the advancement was tied to clearing the floor twenty subsection, which I had done, and selecting a class path, which I had not done, and completing whatever the floor twenty advancement objective was, which the system had not fully specified and which I suspected was not a combat objective.

"The barrier," Mimir said.

"I know," I said.

"You have been at twenty-nine for six hours now pal."

"I know," I said.

"The advancement objective is not going to resolve itself while you sit on a pile of ghouls." I looked down at him. He looked up at me with the cataloguing attention that had softened slightly across the floors we had spent in proximity but had not lost its fundamental precision.

"I know what i am doing and where i am going," I said. He held the look for a moment.

"Then why are you still here."

I did not answer immediately, because the honest answer was that I had been thinking about the Wormhole upgrade and what it made possible, and what it made possible was something I had not had available on any previous run, and the implications of that capability in the context of what Livia had told me about the entity outside the system and what it had left on a floor I had not reached were large enough that I had needed to sit with them for a few minutes on top of a pile of dissolved ghouls before I trusted myself to move toward the gate with the right orientation.

The floor twenty advancement objective, based on every contextual signal the floor had given me and what I understood now about the tower's actual architecture, was not a boss fight. It was a negotiation.

The entity waiting at the advancement checkpoint was not hostile in the standard sense, and walking into a negotiation with the wrong orientation was considerably more dangerous than walking into a combat engagement unprepared, because combat had clear failure states and negotiations had failure states that did not announce themselves until several floors later.

"I am thinking," I said.

"You have been thinking for twelve minutes," Mimir said.

"It is a large thought," I said. He made a sound that was not quite a sigh and not quite an expression of professional resignation but carried elements of both, and I stood up from the pile and settled him back onto the belt clip and checked the azure sword's position and looked at the gate at the far end of the cleared floor twenty subsection. The gate had a different quality from the standard between-floor architecture.

It was the same material, the same surface temperature when I had touched it earlier to confirm it was real and not a residual projection, but the light around it was slightly different, a warmer register than the ambient floor illumination, as if something on the other side was producing heat that was transmitting through the gate material.

"The entity on the other side," I said.

"Do you know what it is." Mimir was quiet for two seconds.

"I know what category it falls into," he said.

"I do not know its specific identity."

"What category," I said.

"The same category as the thing that left something on the upper floors," he said.

"But is currently contained by the advancement checkpoint architecture, which means it cannot reach you until you open the gate." I considered that.

"It is contained and the advancement requires me to open the gate."

"Yes," he said.

"The tower designed an advancement checkpoint around a contained entity and made opening the gate the condition for advancement."

"The tower," Mimir said carefully, "did not design this checkpoint. The checkpoint was already here when the tower was built around it." I stood in front of the gate with forty-eight skill points and a Wormhole upgrade that could skip floors and a Spellfist at Rank 4 with a variable output factor and I thought about an entity old enough to predate the tower that was currently on the other side of a gate I needed to open to proceed. Mimir spoke.

"Looks like you got company lad!"