Chương 37: Cooldown

I entered floor thirteen and the civilians were already moving when I came through the gate. Not orderly. Orderly was not a reasonable expectation of a population that had spent the last several hours inside a shadow army encirclement.

They were moving in the directed way that people moved when someone had pointed at a direction and said that direction was survival, which meant the marionettes had already established a route, and my job on this floor was not to find the route but to keep it open long enough for the tail end of the column to clear the district. An abandoned remedies cart stood beside the gate. I pulled open its remaining drawers while the civilians hurried past.

Most of the finished medicine was gone, but a stoppered bottle and a sealed jar remained beneath a bundle of empty bandages. I transferred both into inventory. [Item Acquired: Moonwell Dew] [Classification: Alchemical Base] [Item Acquired: Emberheart Sap] [Classification: Restorative Reagent] A bombardment struck beyond the adjoining street. The cart rattled against the wall, and the column compressed as the people ahead stopped moving.

"Lad," Mimir said.

"The eastern flank." I checked the last drawer. [Recipe: Health Elixir II] [Base: Moonwell Dew — Available] [Restorative Reagent: Emberheart Sap — Available] [Catalyst: Dawnpearl Dust — Rare — Missing] The shadow ghouls were advancing between the buildings. I could see their silhouettes through the dust, approaching the stretch of road where the civilians had stalled. I opened Advanced Reagent Synthesis. [Advanced Reagent Synthesis (Active) Rank 1: Alternative synthesis available.] [Target Reagent: Dawnpearl Dust — Rare] [Compatible Material: World-Eater Divine Essence — Mythic] The essence had remained in my inventory since the World-Eater encounter. I brought it into my palm and selected the conversion.

"Pal. Tell me ye aren't doing alchemy."

"I'm missing a catalyst."

"Then stay missing it! They're coming through the street!" Another impact interrupted him. Dust rolled across the crossing. Several civilians fell, and when it cleared enough to see, some did not rise. The survivors pushed toward the route the marionettes were holding open.

"Carlos!" I steadied my hand above the cart.

"Since when did you start caring about mortals?" I asked, letting the question linger. Mimir answered with a string of ancient divine syllables, his accent thickening until the words ran together.

"Vaer akh, thul mordain! Ye altar-licking, crownless fool! Move your feet!"

"The synthesis has started."

"Aye, and so has the slaughter!" [Synthesis Initiated: World-Eater Divine Essence → Dawnpearl Dust] [Warning: Mythic-grade material will be consumed to produce a Rare-grade reagent.] The essence contracted above my palm. Pale grains formed within its light, collecting at the centre while a shadow ghoul reached the abandoned cart on the opposite side of the street. I watched its position beyond the window.

"And ye're wasting divine essence while doing it," Mimir snapped.

"Magnificent. Shall I recite a blessing over the dust while they surround us?"

"You could watch the flank."

"I HAVE BEEN WATCHING THE FLANK!" The last of the light collapsed into powder. [Synthesis Complete: Dawnpearl Dust — Rare] [World-Eater Divine Essence consumed.] I collected the reagent in an empty container and sealed it. [Base: Moonwell Dew] [Restorative Reagent: Emberheart Sap] [Catalyst: Dawnpearl Dust — Rare] [Material Sense: Combination stable.] I stored the ingredients without mixing them. The elixirs could wait. I activated Wormhole before I had finished reading the floor.

[Wormhole (Active) Rank 4: Initiating traversal. Destination confirmed.] The displacement was immediate, thirty meters forward and left, directly behind the shadow formation that was pressing toward the column's eastern flank. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

I had the staff up before the traversal completed, and the first discharge from Spellfist ran through the wood in a violet arc that took two of the formation's anchoring shadows at the joint between their constructed shoulders and the mana holding their silhouettes together. They collapsed. The formation lost its left edge and pulled back two steps to compensate, which was the response I had catalogued from the floor twelve engagements, and I was already gone before it finished pulling.

[Wormhole (Active) Rank 4: Cooldown resetting. 8 hours per floor.]"You are using one arm," Mimir said from the belt. I switched position again, this time to the northern mouth of the column's route where three shadows had broken off from the main body and were moving parallel to the civilians at a distance that suggested flanking rather than direct engagement.

"Yes," I said. I brought the staff around in a single-handed arc and pushed Spellfist through the contact point at the apex of the swing. The discharge propagated along the full length of the staff and jumped the two-meter threshold that Rank 4 had added, catching all three shadows in a chain that the system logged and I did not wait to read.

"There is no tactical reason for it," Mimir said.

"You have higher output with two hands on the medium."

"I know," I said.

"Then why?" I did not answer, because the answer was that I was going to face the sword saint on floor fifteen and I wanted to know if the rust had set in.

Fifty-two thousand runs was a long time to maintain anything at peak function, and the sword work specifically, the real sword work, the kind that the Swordmaster advancement and the Samurai classification and the two thousand deaths against the Dark Knight Titan on floor fifteen had built into the architecture of how I moved, that was the thing I was most afraid of losing without noticing. One arm on an unfamiliar medium against shadow formations was not a reliable test. But it was a data point.

The staff felt adequate. Not perfect. Adequate. I moved through the next three positions in four minutes and the column cleared the district boundary with the system's notification arriving flat and immediate. [Floor Thirteen: Cleared.] [Civilian Evacuation Objective: 71% successfully routed.] [Experience Gained: 9, 200.] Seventy-one. Up from forty-seven. I noted it and walked toward the gate.

"Seventy-one percent," Mimir said.

"I read it," I said.

"That is twenty-four percent more than the sword saint managed in four centuries."

"She did not have Wormhole," I said. Mimir was quiet for a moment.

"No," he said.

"She did not." I went through the gate. Floor fourteen was quiet. Not the managed quiet of a cleared floor, where the absence of enemies was a result and the silence had a resolution to it. This was prior quiet, undisturbed, and that was the anomaly, because floor fourteen on every previous run had announced itself with artillery before I was ten meters through the gate. Bombardment from the eastern ridge, heavy and sustained. There was no bombardment.

There was a destroyed forest, trees down at irregular angles with their root systems exposed, the soil dark and wet under a sky that gave no indication of weather because the cloud cover was uniform and low and the light coming through it was flat. The smell was pine resin and turned earth and underneath both of those, faint, the specific chemical trace of ordnance that had already detonated and cooled. The bombardment had happened. It was just finished. I stopped three meters past the gate and read the floor.

No movement at the treeline. No formation signatures in the mana overlay. The Pathfinder skill was showing me a floor that had already resolved its primary conflict without my participation, which was not a configuration I had encountered on this floor in any previous run, and the combination of that fact and the prior quiet was information I did not yet have a full interpretation for.

"This is wrong," Mimir said.

"Yes," I said.

"The bombardment sequence on this floor runs for approximately ninety minutes before it pauses," he said.

"You came through the gate at the correct interval. It should still be active."

"It stopped early," I said.

"Or it never started," he said.

"Which would mean something interrupted the floor's standard configuration before you arrived, which is not a thing floors do." I started walking. The fallen trees made the route irregular, requiring detours around the larger root systems, and the ground between them was soft enough that my footsteps were quieter than they would have been on packed soil. The mana overlay showed nothing.

The Pathfinding passive showed me clear lines of movement in every direction, which on a floor that should have been an active engagement zone was its own kind of wrong. Then I saw her. She was face down in the gap between two fallen trunks, young, wearing clothing that was not tower-issue and not civilian-floor standard but something between the two. She looked like a challenger. It was a term used among humans who climbed towers. Her right hand was extended past the trunk's edge. Her left was under her chest.

She was breathing. I could see it in the movement of her back. I stopped.

'Not here,' I thought.

'Not on fourteen.' I knew her. Not from this run, not from anything that had happened in the floors below this one. I knew her from the accumulated record of my regressions, from the specific failure state that this particular person represented across every run in which she had appeared, which was all of them, which was that she died on floor twenty without exception and there was nothing I had ever been able to do about it. There was a reason I had collected the stuffed animal and the red scarf.

I had met humans, and I knew some of them. Some had killed me. Others hadn't. I hated them, but I had gained so much from them. A few had even helped me reach the higher floors. I still avoided interfering in their affairs whenever I could. It was too much of a pain. Too many complications. I had tried. Not extensively, not after the first few hundred attempts had established the parameters clearly, but I had tried enough to know the shape of the constraint. She reached floor twenty. She died on floor twenty.

The variable was only how long it took her to get there. She was on floor fourteen.

"Hey," Mimir said quietly. Not a question. I looked down at her.

"Do you know her," he said. I held his gaze for a moment and then looked back at Petra between the fallen trees, and something in my chest did the thing it occasionally did when the arithmetic of a situation produced a result I did not have a prepared response for, which was that it registered the information without resolving it, a held calculation.

"Yes," I said. Mimir waited. When I did not continue, he said, "From this run."

"No," I said. Another wait.

"Carlos."

"She dies on floor twenty," I said.

"Every run. She reaches twenty and she dies there and I have not found a way to change that outcome. I stopped trying on run four hundred and something." I paused.

"She should not be on fourteen." The silence between us was brief and had a quality to it that Mimir usually avoided, which was the absence of his professional precision, the space where he would normally produce an observation or a classification and instead produced nothing. Then from the eastern treeline, without warning and without the preliminary ground vibration that should have preceded it by several seconds, a tank came through the treeline.

An actual armoured vehicle, tracked, turret traversing as it cleared the trees, the barrel coming around toward the gap between the fallen trunks where Petra was lying unconscious and entirely unaware of the geometry that was resolving itself around her. I moved. [Wormhole (Active) Rank 4: Initiating traversal.] The displacement put me between the tank and the fallen trunks with approximately one second before the turret completed its traverse, and I brought the staff up and pushed every available mana point through Spellfist at Rank 4 into the barrel's end as it came level with my position. [Spellfist (Active) Rank 4: Chain discharge propagating. Unregistered medium amplification: variable.]