Chương 8: Get up and Move

The charge was fading but not gone. I watched it go with my arm raised at an angle that was going to ache tomorrow, assuming I survived long enough for the next five minutes to exist. Fifty-two thousand deaths, and not one of them had ended on a floor I had already cleared, most of the time. Not one of them had handed me something I did not already know how to do.

This run I had broken a ghoul's skull with a staff and monk stance, pushed mana through my body, and found out that the worst class on the selection screen had been sitting on the one skill that made everything I already knew make sense.

'Spellfist,' I thought, quieter this time, and let my arm drop. The ceiling was still very far up. The zone was collapsing at a pace I had five minutes to outrun. I was covered in something I was choosing not to examine too closely, lying on scorched grass, with one level to my name and three attribute points I had not spent. I had also, for the first time in longer than I could accurately count, not known what was going to happen next. I got up. It took me a few minutes to go through what was left of the floor.

I knew floor one better than any floor that came after it, since it was always the first place I stopped at, so I moved with some efficiency. A dagger came out of a shed I had already half-demolished. A handful of arrows I found scattered near the base of the watchtower. I pulled a necklace from beneath a loose stone near the graves, something that would probably matter on later floors, and I did not spend long on it as I moved on. Then the system announced what I had already felt coming. [Floor One Cleared. Collapse Imminent.] I stepped through the threshold calmly and pulled the door shut behind me. There was no room to celebrate, not that I had ever been the type. Writers of a certain kind liked to describe moments of triumph as expansive, like the chest opens and everything slows down. That had never been my experience, what I felt was forward motion, and a quiet awareness of what was waiting ahead. Floors one through five were the most desolate stretch of the tower.

I had walked them as a berserker, as an archer, as a monk. Floor two would be marginally more manageable for a ranged build, and that meant I had a narrow window to use. I checked my status before moving further.

[STATUS] [Name: Koalemos] [Race: Devas] [Level: 6] [Class: Mage] [Class Rank: Mage Apprentice] [Titles: The Regressor / Pathfinder / Master of Many Paths] [RESOURCES] [Health: 68 / 90] [Mana: 103 / 240] [Stamina: 45 / 100] [ATTRIBUTES] [Strength: 28] [Agility: 11] [Vitality: 9] [Intelligence: 24] This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. [Wisdom: 19] [Perception: 16] [Affinity: 21] The stamina had taken the worst of it, which made sense.

Mana was lower than I had expected it to be after all those arcane bursts, but not as low as it should have been if Spellfist had drawn from the same reserve as standard casting. I ran the numbers again. It was possible the skill pulled from stamina instead of mana, or split the cost between both, I filed that away and moved on. Vitality sat at nine, which was the real problem.

I had thrown some allocation toward strength, and standing here with my health at sixty-eight percent of a ninety-point ceiling, I was not sure that had been the right call. If I ran out of mana and had nothing to absorb the answer, nine vitality was not going to do much for me. I shook my head and kept walking. The three unspent attribute points could wait until I understood floor two's first engagement. Floor two opened without requiring me to step through anything.

One moment I was in the corridor between floors. And the next I was standing inside a column of soldiers, all of them dressed in the same grey plate I was now wearing. I had done this transition before, enough times that the wrongness of it had worn smooth, but the armour still sat on me like something borrowed from a person considerably more certain about what they were doing.

I was surrounded on all sides by hollow knights, their helmets sealed, their movements mechanical, none of them acknowledging me as anything other than another body in formation. The landscape opened ahead in a wide grey expanse of dead grass and flattened earth. I had forgotten how colourless this floor was. As a berserker I had charged through it fast enough that the colour had not mattered.

Now, moving at the pace of the column, I had time to notice the sky, which was the shade of deep grey clouds, and the grass, which was neither brown nor green but some exhausted middle ground. I activated Pathfinder. It was a passive title skill, something that sharpened pattern recognition in unfamiliar territory, and what it showed me ahead of the formation made me slow down by half a step before I corrected myself.

The ghouls waiting at the far end of the field were larger than the ones I had encountered on floor one. They carried shields. Behind them stood a line of archers, and behind the archers I could see something I did not immediately have a name for, a shape that was too tall and too still to be anything passive. One of the knights beside me stepped slightly out of line and pointed toward the right flank. I understood what was being asked.

They wanted a flanking position, which meant they were treating me as a skirmisher rather than a line fighter. Given what I was wearing, that was reasonable. Given what I actually had available, it was complicated.

'Right,' I thought.

'Right, then.' I broke from the column at a steady walk, not running, because running would signal uncertainty to anything watching. I moved to the right edge of the formation and let the gap between myself and the main line grow until I was operating in the open space between the column and the treeline to the east. That was when the archers on the other side noticed me. The first bolt came in low and I dropped to one knee, feeling it pass close enough that I heard it.

The second one I did not dodge cleanly and it caught the outer edge of my right shoulder, deflecting off the plate but transferring enough force that my arm went briefly unresponsive. I got back upright and pushed mana toward my hands before the arm had fully recovered. The cold calculation I had carried for fifty-two thousand runs was still there, but something else had started to climb underneath it. It was not panic, I knew what panic felt like and this was not that.

As a berserker I had taken three arrows in the chest on this floor and kept going because the health pool was deep enough to let me. At ninety health and nine vitality, a sustained volley was going to end this run before I reached the formation's objective. I fired two arcane bursts in quick succession at the ground in front of them. The impact scattered dirt and disrupted the next shot, buying me four seconds of disorganisation in their line.

I used those four seconds to close twenty feet of distance, which put me inside the range where their bows became a liability. Then the ghoul with the shield reached me. It was faster than it had looked from a distance, and heavier, and when its shield connected with the left side of my torso I went sideways across the ground and felt the impact in places I did not have time to catalogue. I came up spitting dirt. My mana was still functional, my stamina was nearly gone.

I had, generously, sixty-three health remaining and no way of knowing whether the thing standing over me was going to hesitate long enough for me to do anything useful about it.

'Get up,' I thought, it wasn't a motivational thought. I got up. I put my hand against the ghoul's chest plate and pushed every unit of mana I had left through the Spellfist's channel in one burst. The discharge hit at contact range. The ghoul did not fall cleanly. It staggered backward four steps, and one of the hollow knights from the column took the opening and drove through it. I stood in the middle of a field that smelled of scorched earth and I breathed, I waited for the system to tell me what I had earned.

Name: Koalemos Level: [6] to [8] [Experience Gained: 9, 000 / 11, 391] [Additional rewards have been granted.] Rewards: [+10 Free Attribute Points] Bonus: Onslaught] [+23 Skill Point] [Attribute Points Available: 23] [New Skill Unlocked: Mana Circulation (Passive)] I did not celebrate. I added three points to Vitality and two to Agility, and I looked at what was still standing ahead of me, and I kept walking, deciding it was time to use the mana potion I had just taken.