Chương 38: Missing Member

The smell of the staircase wasn't pleasant. Or rather there was nothing to smell. I sat with my back against the wall and the azure sword across my knees and the skill screen open in front of me. The young woman, Petra, was six meters away at the corridor's far edge, sitting with her back to me and her knees drawn up, looking at the cosmological expanse through the gap in the staircase wall that the between-floor architecture always provided and that I had learned in the first hundred runs not to look at directly.

She had not spoken since floor fourteen. Neither had I. Mimir said, "I am sensing something ahead."

"I know," I said.

"I want to be precise about the scale," he said.

"The mana concentration registering from floor fifteen is sufficient to collapse a mountain range." I opened Pathfinder and let the overlay run forward along the staircase toward the floor fifteen gate. The mana signature resolved immediately, not as a threat profile, not the way the shadow formations or the World-Eater or the marionettes had resolved, but as a presence, singular and complete, occupying the floor ahead the way a sun occupied the centre of a system.

Everything else on that floor would be in relation to it. I closed the overlay.

'Five thousand runs,' I thought.

'The first five thousand.' The World-Eater had taken five hundred attempts before I found the configuration that worked.

The dark knight Titan on the floor above this one had taken two thousand, and those two thousand had not been wasted, they had been the construction material for every sword technique I currently owned, the Swordmaster advancement and the Samurai classification and the eight subsidiary sword skills that Master of Many Paths carried forward into this run as functional memory rather than re-earned ability. The sword saint had taken five thousand.

And the honest record was that I had not beaten her on the run where I finally cleared the floor. I had survived her. There was a distinction, and she had known it, and she had let me through anyway, and the expression on her face when she stepped back had been the most unsettling thing I had encountered in fifty-two thousand runs of the tower, because it had not been defeat and it had not been satisfaction. It had been patience.

The expression of something that had been waiting for a specific outcome and had not yet seen it. I had gone back. Not to clear the floor again. To lose. Deliberately, across several hundred subsequent runs, because the sword saint was the only opponent in the tower who showed me my actual ceiling rather than a ceiling I could route around, and losing to her with full attention was more instructive than beating anything else with full effort. She had taught me everything. She had never agreed to teach me anything.

The two facts coexisted without resolving. I looked at the azure sword. Livia had sold it to me three floors ago. The blade was registered. The system kept trying to classify it and producing notations it then suspended, but this one was legit and there was no fear in losing it. I was going to use one arm against the sword saint. Not because I thought it would work. Because this is what I wished for, across several hundred losses, that the problem with my sword work was not technique.

It was that I treated the sword as an instrument of resolution. Something to end engagements with. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. She swung to survive. That was the full philosophy, and I had understood it intellectually on run four thousand and something and had not understood it in the body until considerably later, and I was still not certain I understood it correctly now. One arm.

Because it forced a different relationship with the blade. You could not resolve anything with one arm on the grip. You could only stay in the exchange. I started on the concoctions. I had gathered the ingredients on floor fourteen, where the civilians were taking remedies and collecting rare medicinal items. Moonwell Dew, Emberheart Sap, and Dawnpearl Dust were among the materials I had brought away. [Concoction (Active) Rank 2: Synthesis available. Materials detected in inventory.] [Recipe: Health Elixir II] [Base: Moonwell Dew] [Restorative Reagent: Emberheart Sap] [Catalyst: Dawnpearl Dust — Rare] [Material Sense: Combination stable.] I worked through the combination that Material Sense confirmed as stable, mixing the base compound with the restorative reagent and the secondary catalyst that Rank 2 had made available. [Synthesis: Emberheart Sap dispersed within Moonwell Dew.] [Catalyst integrated: Dawnpearl Dust.] [Concoction Rank 2: Restorative essence concentrated and stabilised.] I divided the amber liquid between the vials and sealed each one, because health was the resource I could not afford to let drop below a functional threshold while the level barrier was still active and the advancement still pending. [Crafting Complete: Health Elixir II] [Effect: Grants +500 Health upon consumption. Excess Health remains as a temporary surplus above maximum Health.] [Mana Recovery: None.] [Stamina Recovery: None.] No mana potions. No mana support of any kind.

This engagement was going to be resolved with the sword or it was not going to be resolved.

"You are not preparing any mana recovery," Mimir observed.

"Correct," I said. He processed that.

"Against the entity on floor fifteen."

"Yes," I said.

"The entity whose mana output is sufficient to collapse a mountain range."

"Also yes," I said. A pause.

"I see," he said, in the tone that meant he did not see but had decided that pressing the point would not produce additional information. I capped the last potion and returned the components to inventory and stood up. Petra turned around when she heard me move.

She had brown hair and green eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, and she was wearing a tunic with a sword set at her back that the system registered as floor-appropriate but that she was carrying with the slightly off-centre weight distribution of someone who had acquired the weapon recently. She looked at me with the expression she always had in the runs where I encountered her, which was a combination of alertness and an underlying exhaustion that had nothing to do with physical fatigue.

I reached into inventory. [Item retrieved: Stuffed bear, red scarf. Condition: preserved.] [Note: Item registered as lost property. Origin floor: unconfirmed.] I held it out to her. She looked at it. Then at me. Then at it again.

"Your parents," I said.

"You are looking for them." Her face did something complicated and quick that she did not fully control.

"How do you know that."

"This is all I found," I said. She took it from my hand. Her grip on it was immediate and complete, both hands, and she looked down at it for a long moment with her jaw set and her breathing audible, and then the set of her jaw stopped being controlled and she sat down on the staircase floor with the bear against her chest and her shoulders moving in the way that shoulders moved when someone had been holding something for a long time and had just stopped. I stood and watched.

Mimir said, quietly, from the belt, "At least you have a bedside manner." I did not respond to that.

'I have seen this four hundred times,' I thought.

'The hope breaking. The specific way she holds that bear. I have stood in this position on four hundred staircases and watched four hundred versions of this moment and I have not found a single thing to say that changes what comes after it.' What came after it, in every run, was floor twenty. And floor twenty was the last place I ever saw her. Petra looked up at me. Her eyes were wet and her expression had moved through the breaking and come out the other side into something harder, a question with an edge to it.

"What do you know about my parents. Tell me."

"They are in the tower," I said.

"Where."

"I do not know their current position," I said, which was true in the specific sense that I did not know where her parents were on this run, because her parents had never appeared during my countless regressions. Petra stood up, and her voice came up with her.

"Then what good are you. You hand me a toy and tell me nothing. Who are you. How do you know their names. How do you know what I am looking for." Her voice was not quite steady. The sword at her back was not drawn. She was angry in the way people were angry when the alternative was something they could not currently afford to be.

"Answer me?!" she was yelling. It was getting unpleasant. I do not like when humans cross my boundary.