Chương 5: Stealth Mission

I moved to the door and pushed it open slowly. The ghoul inside turned at the sound. It moved the same way it always moved, that same unhurried rotation of the head followed by the body, like it was deciding whether I was worth the effort. I had seen this particular sequence so many times that I almost felt something close to familiarity looking at it. I thrust the end of my staff at its mouth. It caught the shaft in both hands. My stomach dropped.

'Right,' I thought.

'Of course.' I had forgotten, or more accurately I had not properly accounted for the fact that when your physical attributes are below a creature's level, it sees through you. Not literally, but close enough to matter. Every attack I made was readable because my level telegraphed my reach, my speed, my force. The ghoul's level showed above its head in clean numerals. [Level 3] It was level three. I stepped back and did not take another hit. I could not afford another hit.

I had no buffer for error with this build, no armor rating worth mentioning, and enough health to survive approximately one solid strike from something at that level before the screen started flashing red at me. I looked up at the interior of the watchtower and made myself think clearly instead of fast, because fast thinking in this tower had killed me more times than I could count without actually counting. I had a skill I could fire. That was the one thing I had in this run that I hadn't had in the others.

The ghoul lunged. It came at my face with its mouth open wide, and I turned the shaft of my staff sideways and braced it between us. The bite came down on the wood instead of my throat. I felt the pressure of it through my wrists and up into my shoulders. It was not trying to overpower me gradually. It was simply stronger and it knew it, so it was pushing forward and waiting for me to fold. I did not fold. I also could not hold it much longer. The real problem was not this ghoul. The real problem was noise.

If I made enough of it, one hundred more of them would pile through the door and into the stairwell and I would die in a very small room with no exit, which I had also done before and had no interest in repeating. I remembered my first several runs here. I had a greatsword then and I had no patience and I had simply started swinging, and the sound of it had brought everything within a hundred meters through the wall. I remembered running with that sword and thinking I could outpace them. I couldn't.

You can't outrun a hundred of anything. I let go of the staff to gain some mobility. It was fast. The ghoul was fast. But I had seen this exact motion so many times that I had already begun moving before I consciously decided to move. I stepped sideways. Its teeth grazed my cheek as it lurched forward, and then it was falling, pitching down into a pile of old hay and bundled cloth that had been sitting in the corner of the ground floor since the first time I ever walked in here.

I summoned it again and thrust the staff down into the back of its skull. In that moment, I focused on the residual energy with Pathfinder's help. Mana wasn't easy to control. In other classes, it was nearly impossible to use directly. At most, I could imbue it into a sword or facilitate its circulation through my body to fight in a specific manner. But pushing out excess energy was something entirely foreign to me. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

I focused on the mana particles. They were bright and small, prickling against my skin like goosebumps. I held onto that sensation and didn't let go. Now came the hard part. Redirect that ambient energy. Then expel it. The voice of the System came... [Arcane Burst] A yellow light pulsed out from the contact point. Quiet, contained, nothing that would carry through stone walls. The ghoul's head came apart against the hay.

There was blood and there was brain matter and there was silence, and I stood there in that silence and allowed myself one full breath before I straightened up. I hadn't taken a hit. That had been close enough that I probably should have, but I hadn't. I put the screen to my back and looked at it. [LEVEL UP] [Name: Koalemos] [Level: [2] to [3] [Experience Gained: 2, 500 / 3, 000] [Additional rewards granted] [Rewards: +5 Free Attribute Points] Five free points. I looked at the allocation screen for a moment. The obvious move was strength, or maybe endurance, since both of those would help me survive the next floor without relying entirely on positioning and timing that I only had because I had died here so many times. But that was the logic that had kept me cycling through warrior builds for ten thousand runs. If I was going to pick mage and actually use the class for what it was, then dumping my free points into physical stats was just building a bad warrior with a staff. I closed the screen and decided I would think about it later, which was something I had told myself before and occasionally even followed through on. I came out of the tower into the grey light. The grass outside was the same dull color it always was, flat and still, the kind of stillness that wasn't peaceful but empty. Ahead of me was the town, and past the town was the graveyard, and in and around both of those were the ghouls. A hundred of them, spread out in loose clusters, most of them standing motionless in the way they did when they weren't tracking anything specific. I stood there for a moment and let my eyes move across the area the way I had trained myself to do, slow and methodical, checking sightlines. Then I dropped my staff. It hit the ground and I took a step back and looked out at the field and understood immediately that something had gone wrong. Every single one of them had turned toward the watchtower. Not toward me specifically. Toward the tower. Every head, every set of shoulders, all of them oriented in the same direction at the same moment, and their mouths were open, and I could see even from this distance that their eyes had gone fully white, that flat blind white that meant they had switched from passive to active state, which should not have been possible because I had not made enough noise for that.' How,' I thought, and then I thought, 'the spell.' Arcane Burst. I had used it indoors against a hay pile and I had been satisfied that it was quiet, and it had been quiet in terms of sound, but I had not considered what a mage-class spell might register as to creatures that had been living in this graveyard long enough to have some sensitivity to that kind of output. I had never used that spell in this area before. I had never been a mage in this area before. I didn't know what they could detect. Now I knew. They started moving toward the tower. All of them, pushing against each other, climbing over the ones in front, the sound of it rising into something low and collective that I felt more than heard. It was not panic, exactly. I had panicked in the early runs and it had never helped. What I felt was closer to a sharp and specific alertness, the mental equivalent of every background process shutting down so the one that mattered could run at full speed. I was on the roof. If I stayed here and they came up the stairs, I was finished. If I jumped I would survive the fall given my current stats, barely, but then I would be on the ground surrounded by a hundred of them with no walls between us, which was worse. I called my staff back to my hand and started moving. Something hit the tower from outside. The whole structure shook. I heard the windows give way somewhere below me, I also heard the sound of old stone finally breaking, and then something came through the roof access at a speed that made no sense for something that size. I dodged left. It came past my shoulder. I fired Arcane Burst directly at its head on instinct, intentionally off-center this time, not to kill but to knock, and the thing went sideways and hit the low wall of the roof hard enough to crack the stone. [Level Up] [Level: [3] to [4] [Free Attribute Points: +20] Twenty points. I registered it at the edge of my awareness and kept moving. Something came at my side. I turned and it cut across my ribs through the robe. I felt it and noted it and kept moving because stopping to assess damage was how you got more damage. I fired again. The creature I hit went over the edge of the roof and dropped. Then the wodden hatch below me burst open and the sound outside became something I had only heard a few times across fifty-two thousand deaths, all of them running at once, none of them slowing, the ground shaking faintly under the weight of it. I looked at the gap between the roof edge and the nearest structure.' This is going to hurt,' I thought. I jumped.