Chương 36: Shadow Army

The shadow army and the ghoul formations had worked together. I had seen that configuration before, but not at this scale and not with this level of coordination. On previous floors the two enemy types had operated in parallel rather than in concert, occupying the same space without genuine tactical integration.

What I had moved through in the lower subsection of floor twelve had been integrated, the ghouls clearing the structural interior of buildings while the shadow formations held the perimeter and the marionettes, which were still a new variable I had not fully classified, directed the artillery from the eastern ridge. The civilians were dead.

Not all of them, I revised that assessment as I moved deeper into the town and found evidence of the evacuation route the marionettes had been running before the shadow army closed the perimeter. A portion of the population had been moved out through the northern passage before the shadow formations completed their encirclement.

I had seen the tail end of that evacuation from the subsection entry point, human shapes made of shadow being guided by the silver-clad marionettes in a direction that was away from the artillery line and toward the northern gate. It was the objective.

I had understood it within thirty seconds of arriving on the floor and had run the evacuation route rather than engaging the shadow army directly, because engaging the shadow army directly on a floor where the army had already completed its primary objective was a resource expenditure that produced nothing except a lower mana pool on floor thirteen. I had still killed a significant number of them. Not strategically. They had been in the path towards my plan.

I walked past the remains of what had been a market square, the stall structures collapsed inward, the cobblestones blackened in a pattern that indicated the artillery had targeted the open space deliberately. The smell here was heavy and chemical, coal smoke and something underneath it that I categorised and moved past without cataloguing further.

"There is nothing I could have done," I said.

"I know," Mimir said.

"The shadow army cleared this floor before I arrived. Whatever happened to the civilian population happened in the subsection I came through after the fact."

"I know," he said again.

"Then why are you still talking about it," I said. He was quiet for a moment. Not the processing interval quiet. A different kind.

"Because you have seen this before," he said.

"Not to this extent. But the pattern. And you filed it the same way you just filed it now, which is efficiently and without remainder, and I am noting that for my own records." I looked down at him. He looked up at me with the green eyes that the system declined to assign a number to, and the expression on his face was not accusatory.

It was the cataloguing attention, but softer than usual, with something underneath it that I had learned to read across the floors we had spent together as a version of concern that he did not have a comfortable way to express directly.

"I have been through this floor on thirty-seven previous runs," I said.

"In thirty-six of them the civilian population was either absent from the floor design or present as background architecture with no interactive function. This is the second run where they have appeared as an active element. The first time was this run, on the cave subsection."

"And," he said.

"And the pattern is escalating," I said.

"The floors are not adding difficulty in the standard sense. They are adding consequence. The tower is making the floors more populated, more specific, more historically detailed, and it is doing it in a way that runs parallel to what I am doing with the mage class." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Mimir was quiet again. This time it was the processing interval.

"You think the two things are connected," he said.

"I think the entity outside the system has been leaving things in the tower for a very long time," I said, "and that the things it left include the populations, and that something about this run is activating those populations in a way that previous runs did not."

"That is a significant conclusion to reach while walking through a destroyed town," he said.

"I have had a lot of practice reaching significant conclusions in poor conditions," I said. He made the sound that was not quite a laugh, short and precise, and I turned my attention back to the street ahead. The sword saint was going to be at the upper floor or more precisely the Dark Knight.

I had not encountered this specific entity on previous runs of this floor, but the pattern was consistent with how the tower had been introducing new elements this run, placing something at the threshold of each major transition that had not been there before and that the standard floor configuration did not account for. On floor five it had been five simultaneous primaries. On floor twelve it had been the marionettes and the integrated shadow-ghoul formation.

At the northern gate it was going to be a sword saint making a last stand against a shadow army that had already won the floor. I had cleared the shadow army on the previous floor iteration and they had come back. That was the information I was working with.

You could remove the shadow formations from a floor and the floor would repopulate them for the next climber, which was standard tower behaviour, but the repopulation timeline on this floor was shorter than anything I had seen on the floors below it, which suggested the shadow army was not being generated by the tower's standard configuration but by something that was actively maintaining their presence on this floor regardless of what I did to them.

"Mimir," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"The shadow army. Are they the tower's standard opposition or are they something else." The pause was longer than two seconds this time. Closer to five.

"They are a residual," he said.

"Similar to the consciousness fragments in the cave. But larger. A collective residual from a conflict that occurred in this space before the tower incorporated it." I processed that.

"The tower built around them the same way it built around the checkpoint entity on floor twenty."

"The tower built around a great many things it could not remove," he said.

"The shadow army is one of them. The civilian population is another. The sword saint at the northern gate is a third."

"All residuals," I said.

"All residuals," he confirmed.

"All from the same conflict. The same moment, technically. The tower captured this floor at a specific historical point and has been running it on a loop since then, which is why clearing the shadow army produces a repopulation. You are not killing them. You are clearing a loop iteration." I stopped walking. The northern gate was visible ahead, solid and unremarkable against the backdrop of a street that was considerably more intact on this side of the town than the market square had been.

And in front of the gate, exactly where the pattern had indicated she would be, was the sword saint. She was smaller than I had expected. The tower's checkpoint entities had a tendency toward scale, and I had built an unconscious expectation of something large. She was not large.

She was approximately my height, armoured in plate that had seen sustained use and showed it, carrying a sword that the material sense passive registered as significantly above the floor's standard item tier, and she was fighting four shadow formations simultaneously with the specific economy of movement that indicated she had been fighting for a long time and had made her peace with how it ended. She was losing. Not quickly. But losing. I watched her for a moment.

The shadow formations she was holding were a fraction of the army that had cleared the town. The main body had already moved through the gate, which meant the gate was open, which meant floor thirteen was accessible without clearing anything on this side of it.

"She is buying time," I said.

"Yes," Mimir said.

"She has been buying it for approximately four centuries." I looked at the azure sword. Then at the sword saint. Then at the gate behind her.

"I cannot help her," I said. It was not a conclusion I was comfortable with. A statement of the constraint I was working inside, which was that the sword saint was a loop residual and any intervention I made would reset with the loop, and the floor thirteen gate was open, and I needed to ascend before the level twenty-nine barrier cost me the run.

"No," Mimir agreed.

"You cannot." I started walking toward the gate. The sword saint saw me when I was approximately twenty meters from her position. She did not stop fighting. She held two of the shadow formations in her off-hand engagement and looked at me directly for approximately two seconds with an expression I could not fully read at this distance, and then she stepped sideways three feet and opened the path to the gate without breaking her defensive line. She knew.

Whatever the loop had preserved of her consciousness, it contained enough to understand what I was and what I needed and that the two were not the same as what she needed, and she moved accordingly. I walked past her. I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that the four centuries of her loop had not already accounted for.

I passed through the gate and the white corridor received me and the gate sealed behind me with the resonant closure I had heard it make on floor nine, and I stood in the between-floor space and checked my status. [Floor Twelve: Cleared.] [Evacuation Objective: Partial. 47% civilian population successfully routed.] [Experience Gained: 8, 400] [Level: 29 (Barrier Active. Advancement required.)] [Floor Thirteen: Initialising.] I looked at the partial objective notation. Forty-seven percent.

"She moved them," I said.

"The sword saint. Before the shadow army closed the perimeter."

"For four centuries she has been moving approximately half of them before the loop resets. She has never managed more than fifty-one percent." I said. The tower repeated events, even the people within those events. I stood in the corridor and said nothing for a moment. Then, ahead of us, the floor thirteen gate materialised out of the white space with a sound like a stone settling we were almost done. We were almost there...