Chương 4: First Floor

The screen had the nerve to tell me that after the fact. I pulled the door shut behind me and threw my back against it. My hands were already shaking, which annoyed me. I had faced worse than this. My body had not gotten the message yet. One of them reached the door before it closed. I felt the frame shudder. Then teeth caught the back of my robe and raked across my lower back, a graze. I got the door shut. I held it there. Nothing pushed back from the other side.

I slid down against it and sat on the floor, breathing too hard for what had just happened. A streak of blood marked the door where my back had been. The screen appeared without asking. [RESOURCES] Health: 87 / 90 Mana: 240 / 240 Stamina: 100 / 100 Three points, It had only taken three points. It would be a scratch, if I had been wearing armor, or even a second layer of clothing, it would have taken zero. I pulled a strip from the hem of my robe without thinking too much about it and pressed it against the cut.

It was not worth dwelling on. It was already done. I had kept three rules across every regression I could remember, and I ran through them now the way I always did after a close call, not because I had forgotten them, but because saying them to myself helped. The first was to never let my guard down. Not on a floor I had cleared a hundred times, not in any room I had memorized, not even when things looked quiet. I had died in too many unwarranted ways from dropping my attention for thirty seconds.

Every new floor required full caution from the first step. Efficiency was not a bonus. It was the minimum. The second was not to lose hope. I had broken my leg on the thirty-first floor once and crawled through four rooms to reach the exit. I had reached it. Dying on purpose, deciding the run was over before it was over, was not something I would allow myself. It was the one form of giving up that I could not come back from with any self-respect intact.

Whatever the situation looked like, however badly I was bleeding or however far I had to go, I would keep moving until the spire made the decision for me. The third was never to underestimate a floor. The end sections of each level had surprised me more times than I could count. What looked manageable at the entrance became something else entirely near the exit, and I had found too many useful things by taking time to search properly rather than rushing toward the stairs.

Nothing in this place was worth taking at face value. Always prepare. I got to my feet and crossed toward the white staircase at the far end of the room. The stairs led to a gateway built the same way as the one I had just come through, the same grey stone, the same heavy frame, the same sense that whatever was on the other side had been waiting there for a while. This gateway led to the first floor. The floor with the ghouls. I took the handle and opened it. Light came through first.

Dim, grey, pushing past thick clouds in thin strips that hit the grass and died there. The air had that particular stillness to it, the kind that showed up right before something went wrong. The grass was tall. That was the one advantage this floor had going for it. It reached past my shoulders when I crouched, and I'd learned early on that in a place like this, tall grass was worth more than armor. Someone had buried their dead here.

I'd read about it in one of the books left behind on the lower floors, the practice of putting bodies in the ground and marking the spot. The markers were everywhere, worn stone jutting out at angles, names rubbed off by whatever passed for weather here. I didn't stop to look at them. I moved through. Then came the screech. I dropped lower into the grass and turned toward it. Twenty meters out, something stood between the stalks. Long legs, too long for the body they were attached to.

Arms that reached all the way to the ground, fingers dragging through the dirt. Its head was hollow at the eyes and its tongue hung past its chest, slack and grey. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Disgusting. Like most things on this floor. I stayed still. One rule I'd written for myself after the first few hundred deaths: when a ghoul screeches, it hasn't found you yet. It's asking the air a question. Don't answer it. The problem was the robe.

Blue fabric in a field of dead grey grass was not subtle. I'd chosen it anyway because the class demanded it, and I was already regretting that decision in a very specific and practical way. Moving up a floor meant clearing the challenge the system set for you. On this one I'd handled the ghouls with a sword, with a bow, once memorably with just my fists as a monk.. A mage out in the open, facing creatures that reacted to movement and sound, was a different problem.

Normally I'd say it was a bad matchup and find a way around it. But the system had other ideas. I looked up at the screen floating just above my eyeline and read the letters carved into it, each one precise and deliberate, the way the system always wrote when it wanted you to understand there was no negotiating. [Objective: Kill the Ghouls] [Sub-Objective: Stealth Assassination]'Confirmed,' I thought.

'Every fear I had about this floor was correct.' Every floor carried an objective. Some were difficult. Some were unreasonable. Floor fifty, back in what felt like another lifetime, had been both. I still had not fully processed what happened there, and I did not plan to. What I knew was this, I had cleared this particular floor before. More than a thousand times, actually. Once with the archer build, once with the swordmaster.

Both times I had leaned on the first objective, went through the front, and did not bother with the secondary. Stealth kills. Not once had I done it clean. The assassin class was built for this floor quite literally even by just its attributes. Stealth... which was something I didn't have. The mage build did not give me the option of going loud either even though strength was an universal attribute. I moved through the interior of the building without a sound. The floor was stone, cracked and uneven in places.

A door somewhere to my left opened on its own, slow and deliberate, drawn by a wind I could not find the source of. Three creatures turned toward it. I did not. I already knew their patterns. Fifty-two thousand deaths gave me that much. These ghouls moved in cycles and very predictable ones. A warrior or an archer might have noticed it after a few runs. I had had thousands of runs to confirm it down to the timing of their footsteps.

I waited for a gust, let the wind cover my movement, and crossed the open corridor in four steps. The window on the far wall was my target. Stone frame, no glass, a two-meter drop to soft ground on the other side. I went through it without slowing. The landing was quiet. One of them noticed. Not by sound but instinct maybe, or just bad timing on my part. It started to turn, and I watched its mouth begin to open. I drove the base of my staff between its teeth before it could finish the motion.

My other hand caught the back of its skull, fingers finding the base, and I pulled in opposite directions. Not hard enough to separate anything, just enough to direct the force inward. The bone structure of a ghoul was its weakness. Strong on the outside, brittle within. The inner walls of the skull collapsed on themselves. I winced... these horrid creatures... they reminded me of four limbed creatures that talked and laughed. Humans... The body went slack.

I held it up for a count of three, making sure nothing nearby had registered the motion, then lowered it to the ground.

'A warrior would have been done with this floor twenty minutes ago,' I thought. That was true. The system activated before I had fully straightened up. [LEVEL UP] Name: Koalemos Level: [1] to [2] Experience Gained: 1, 250 / 1, 000 Additional rewards have been granted. Rewards: [+10 Free Attribute Points] Bonus: Stealth Kill [+1 Skill Point] I dismissed the notification. There were still four ghouls in the building, and the door on the left was beginning to creak back shut.

The mage build had the worst stats for almost every combat situation, and I had known that going in. What it had instead was something a warrior never needed to care about: patience, and the room to be precise. Fifty-two thousand deaths and I had never once cleared this sub-objective. Not with any build. I felt better the moment I stood up. Not good, just better, which was enough. Something had shifted in my body since the level-up, a faint steadiness in my legs that hadn't been there before.

Probably physical prowess, even a single point in that attribute made a difference when you were starting from nothing. I moved through the grey grass at a slow pace, and I reached the watchtower without losing my breath, like always. I remembered this place exactly. I had come here as an archer once, which now felt like a different lifetime, though technically every run was a different lifetime.

I had stood below this very structure and launched arrows up through the broken windows while the things inside stumbled around trying to locate me. It had been genuinely funny at the time, watching them trip over each other through the gaps in the stone, none of them smart enough to come back down the stairs and circle around. They were stupid creatures, and that was why I had liked them for it. I didn't feel that way anymore.

This run I wasn't above them, I was going inside, and the windows were broken precisely because the structure was falling apart, which meant any significant noise would carry through the whole floor and pull every ghoul in the surrounding area toward the source of it. There were exactly one hundred of them out there. I had counted on fourteen separate runs. The number didn't change.