Chương 6: A Warrior at Heart

I landed on soft grass and counted twenty ghouls before my feet were fully under me. They moved wrong, pulling themselves forward with their arms dragging behind their bodies, heads low, all of them angled at a single point in the field. That point was me, and I already knew the open ground was a problem There was no cover, no elevation, nowhere to force a bottleneck.

I relocated immediately toward the graveyard to the east, not because I had a plan, but because standing still in open grass with twenty or a hundred ghouls and no plan was a faster way to die than I was interested in. I fired a quick arcane burst on the move. One ghoul dropped. The rest did not slow down. I did not level up. Good to know the burst did not scale with the pack. At the center of the graveyard the problem got worse.

Two ghouls near the back registered as level six and level seven, which meant I could not reach them until the lower ones were cleared. That was the rule, not mine, the floor's. The progression was locked in sequence. You could not skip ahead regardless of how well you fought, except that was not entirely true. If you understood the mechanics of each swing, if you read every movement before it resolved, you could kill anything on this floor regardless of level. I knew that.

I had spent enough time in this tower to know what the system enforced and what it only implied. I focused on Pathfinder. The shift happened faster than I expected. Residual mana became visible in the air around me, faint threads running between the ghouls and the ground and every particle of dust drifting between the headstones. I could see the systemic thread connecting each one, the way mana circulated through the earth itself, through their limbs, through the spaces between them. It was not just the ghouls.

It was everything. The air had structure. The ground had current. I looked back toward the gate and registered the large ghoul standing there, bigger than the others by a full head, positioned directly between me and the exit. I was cornered. Deliberately. The floor had walls at its perimeter. You could not advance beyond a set boundary, and I had moved myself into the graveyard without accounting for what was behind me.

That was my mistake, and I stood in the low stance with my staff held like a sword and accepted it. The large one came first. Its claw swung in a wide arc and I saw the attack fully, not as reflex but as information. I had already moved before the arc reached where I had been standing. I did not use arcane burst. I could not, not yet, not with what I had in reserve. At the edge of my vision the screen flashed and I made a choice without looking at it directly. I allocated everything into strength.

[Strength: 28] [Agility: 11] [Vitality: 9] [Intelligence: 24] [Wisdom: 19] [Perception: 16] [Affinity: 21] The surge came up through my legs and shoulders. A second ghoul moved past the large one, cutting toward me at an angle. I saw it well before it arrived. I pushed off the back of my heel and threw the hardest punch I had delivered in this run, or any run before it.

Something in my stance shifted, a memory of a martial arts monk stance I had used in a different class, a different floor, a different version of this same grinding attempt. I ducked the follow-up, punched into its back, drove a hook through its gut, and moved off its body before it registered the damage. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. I was behind the large ghoul now. The stealth phase was over, this was a full assault and I had to relocate fast.

I ducked another swing, absorbed a hit I could not fully avoid, and kept moving. I entered an old room in the graveyard structure through an already-open door and fired a burst. One more down. A second came through the window with a crack of old wood. I met its skull with my foot on the way through. I wanted it to break inward, not outward, which gave me half a second of reaction time if something came through behind me. Then I moved the remaining points.

[Strength: 28] [Agility: 11] [Vitality: 9] [Intelligence: 24] [Wisdom: 19] [Perception: 16] [Affinity: 26] Pathfinder reacted. My eyes went wide. A faint purple edged my vision and the mana threads I had seen before became sharper, denser, layered. The door burst open. The screen opened across my field of view. [Would you like to use 80 Mana Points?] I had 240 total. I barely registered the prompt. Mana had never been my primary resource before.

Stamina was the thing I had leaned on across every previous class, warrior, archer, berserker, all of it built around recovery and output and how long you could keep moving. Mana was different. Mana was scarce in a way that stamina was not. But there were twenty-nine ghouls outside the shed and the arithmetic was simple. I either channeled the largest attack available or I got sent back to floor zero, and being sent back to floor zero at this point would be humiliating in a way I was not willing to accept.

I located the eighty mana points to Arcane Burst. [Current Output: Level 1 upgraded to Level 6 via Mana Allocation] [Arcane Burst >>>> Ignis] A ghoul crawled through the gap in the door.

"Ignite." The word came out of me and what followed was something closer to plasma, a compressed burst that detonated outward from the center of the shed. The structure exploded. I was carried by the blast and landed hard in the open grass, ears ringing with a silence that the system did not account for. [Level Up] Level: [5] to [6] Experience Gained: 0 / 5, 063 [Free Attribute Points: 80] I looked back at the explosion and said, mostly to myself, "Magic is nuts."

Not the food but rather a human expression I had read somewhere in a previous run. I got to my feet. A large ghoul lunged out of the dust and debris. I caught it in my peripheral vision just in time and barely got my staff up in the block. The staff shattered, dissolving into loose mana particles that scattered across the grass. The screen flashed. [Insufficient mana to manifest the Staff of Ashen Ruin] That's right it's not a physical object but something I summon.

I was standing in an open field with no weapon and fifty-something ghouls still unaccounted for and a big one. An attack came from my left. I did not fully avoid it. It burst through my side, tearing through muscle and skin, and I hit the invisible perimeter wall at the edge of the floor. The impact registered as damage. I stood up without pausing, pressed my hand against the wound, and moved to the opposite side of the boundary. Another ghoul lunged. I stepped back. Dodged.

They were fast, faster than I expected at this stage, and I was burning through stamina without any means to recover it mid-fight. I made a decision. I tore off my robe. Wrapped the upper half around my lower body, leaving my torso exposed to the wind coming off the grass. It was cold. I felt better anyway. There was less weight and better range of movement. The scratch from before still bled though it had stopped. But I could move without the robe, my arms and environment with every swing.

The gate behind me was locked. I had checked it twice. Nothing was going to open it from this side until the floor cleared. The large ghoul was still standing, watching me from across the grass with patience It understood I had run out of options. It walked slowly now and Deliberately. Like it was aware I had nothing to fight back with. [Warning: Floor Collapsing] The voice registered somewhere behind my ears. I knew what it meant.

I had maybe a minute before the boundary began degrading and whatever had generated these dark entities came in behind them. The ghoul I had dodged earlier came back around, and the large one near the gate moved to intercept the angle. They were coordinating, or the floor was coordinating through them, which amounted to the same problem. I took a step back and focused. I am not a mage. I am not a warrior, not an archer, not a monk.

I am every one of those things in sequence, and right now none of those classes are what I need. What I need is fifty-two thousand runs of experience in a body with a strength attribute of twenty-eight and a perception score that can read every attack before it lands. The smaller ghoul bit into the larger one. I did not question it. I used the half-second it bought me. I grabbed another smaller ghoul by its eyes. Held the skull firm with both hands. Punched through its mouth with my right.

My strength attribute was sufficient. It went limp and dropped beside my left shoulder. I did not stop there. I gripped it by the shoulder and separated the arm from the socket. I wrenched it free and I held its severed arm.