Chương 9: Physical Magic

The mana potion went down bitter, the way they always did and I felt the reserve climb back toward functional before I had finished swallowing. I grabbed the staff from the ground beside me. It was a plain thing, the wood worn smooth at the grip from someone else's hands. I had not asked where it came from when the hollow knight handed it to me, and I did not ask now.

The largest ghoul in the formation had been holding position at the rear, and I had been watching it since Pathfinder flagged it two minutes ago as the node everything else was anchored to. If it moved, the flanking archers repositioned. If it raised its shield, the front line tightened. It was not intelligent in any way I could define, but it was structured, and structure could be read.

I raised the staff and pulled mana into the casting channel, not a burst this time but a sustained build, a level three arcane discharge that I had only managed twice before and both times on floors where I had significantly more room to survive a misfire. My hands were shaking. Not from fear, I told myself, though I was aware that was the kind of distinction that mattered less the longer a fight went on.

They were shaking because my stamina was at eleven percent and my body was submitting a formal complaint about everything I had asked it to do in the last twenty minutes. The ghoul charged. I held the build. It covered the distance faster than its size had any right to allow, and when it hit the six-meter mark I released the discharge through the staff and felt the weapon crack along its full length from the force of the channel. The arcane burst detonated at contact range.

The ghoul's adaptation was immediate, it had shifted its stance in the half-second before impact to absorb the blast laterally, and it still went down. It hit the ground and did not get back up. The staff was in two pieces in my hands. I looked at what I was holding, then at the formation, which had not stopped moving toward me while I was busy with its commander.

The hollow knights had taken the central line while I was on the flank, and they were managing it, but managing it was not the same as winning it, and the archers behind the ghoul line were already redirecting. I dropped the broken staff.

'Think,' I told myself. The system answered before I finished the thought. [Level Up: Level 8] [Attribute Points Available: 9] [Skills Updated: Arcane Burst upgraded to Rank 2 / Spellfist upgraded to Rank 2 I did not stop to read all of it. I put six points into Vitality and three into Agility and kept moving. By the time floor two ended, I had killed sixty-three confirmed enemies across three engagement waves, taken two more arrow hits that the upgraded vitality had made survivable, and run my mana to empty twice. The second time I emptied it I had resorted to picking up a sword from a fallen hollow knight and doing things the old way, which had reminded me that I had not forgotten how. I allocated four to Intelligence, two to Wisdom, and two to Vitality, and I walked through the threshold into floor three without stopping. The architecture changed immediately. I stopped just inside the threshold and let Pathfinder run. The mana signatures it returned were larger than anything I had seen on floor two, and they were not moving in formation. They were spread through the ruins in irregular positions, which meant either they were not coordinated or they were coordinated in a way that did not look like coordination until it was too late to adjust for it. I filed that concern and kept moving. I found the sword before I found the first enemy. It was sitting in a crack in the ground near the base of a collapsed hollow knight, it was a dull blade, level three, nothing memorable about it except that it was a complete weapon and I had nothing else functional in my hands. I pulled it free, checked the edge, and accepted that it was going to have to be enough. The first ghoul came out of nowhere. I processed the fact that it was already inside my guard. I stepped back, brought the sword up across my body, and redirected its momentum rather than blocking it directly, because blocking it directly with a dull level-three blade against something that had just walked through stone would have been a fast way to lose the weapon. It went wide. I cut across it's back as it passed me. It turned. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. I had trained with a sword across more builds than I could accurately count, not because I had planned to use one as a mage but because certain knowledge accumulated whether you intended it to or not, and swordsmanship had been one of the first things I had ever been genuinely good at inside this tower. The footwork was still there. The reading of weight distribution and shoulder angle and the half-second warning a body gave before it committed to a direction, all of that was still present and accessible, and I let it run without thinking about it. The ghoul went down. Another came from the left. I pivoted and closed the distance before it could establish its reach advantage, which was the one thing a large enemy with a slow recovery could not adjust for if you denied it space. Two cuts, angled, and it folded. Then there were six of them, and I stopped counting individual engagements and started managing angles. I moved through the open battle field in arcs rather than straight lines, using the hollow knights to eliminate approach vectors and keep the number I was dealing with at any given moment below three. It was not elegant. I took a hit across the left forearm that opened the plate but did not cut through, and another one to the ribs that would have been significantly worse if I had not already put those points into Vitality. I was bleeding from somewhere above my left eye and I could not tell when that had started.' Pathfinder,' I thought.' It is showing me the mana pathways.' Every living thing in this tower ran on something, and the ghouls ran on a mana structure that Pathfinder could now map in real time with the upgrades from floor two. I could see, not visually but as a kind of spatial certainty, where each one was going to be in two seconds and what it was going to do when it got there. It turned sixty opponents into a route rather than a fight. I cut through fifty-eight of them before my sword arm told me it was done. The fifty-ninth hit the flat of the blade hard enough that my grip went loose, and I held on through sheer refusal rather than any remaining physical capacity. The sixtieth came at the same time from my right, and I did something I had not planned, I pulled mana into the sword. I felt it the moment the channel connected. Spellfist had been designed for contact discharge through the hand, but the sword was an extension of the hand, and the mana did not distinguish. It moved through the metal with a clarity that made every previous combat calculation feel approximate, and the blade lit with something I did not have a word for, not fire, not lightning, a violet-white coherence that made the edge look like bright steel. My eyes went wide before I could school the expression back to neutral.' This is it,' I thought, and then, before I could stop it, I said it out loud." This is the true scale of my strength." An uncharacteristic smile found its way onto my face, and I was aware of it and did not remove it, because there was no one left standing to see it. I swung. The arc was horizontal and it covered the remaining two enemies and a two-meter margin on either side of them. The discharge released at the point of maximum extension and the result was a line, a brief, clean horizontal separation of everything the blade had passed through, before gravity and physics reasserted themselves and the blood and armour and the ground shook with the weight of what had just fallen. I looked at my hands. The sword had a crack running from the crossguard to the tip, and while I watched it, the crack finished its work. [Dull Sword (Level 3) has broken.] I set the pieces down. [Floor Two Cleared.] [Enemies Defeated: 60] [Level Up: Level 9 to Level 10] [Experience Gained: 14, 800 / 15, 000] [Milestone Reached: Class Advancement Available] [Attribute Points Available: 126]'Class advancement,' I thought. I stood in the ruins and breathed, the ash smell was still there. I put two points into Intelligence, two into Wisdom, and one into Affinity. That left one hundred and twenty-one points sitting unspent, and I was not going to touch them until I understood what the class advancement screen was about to ask me. The floor transition opened before me and I moved through the white space. [Floor Three. The Archives.] The smell reached me before the visual did. I had always found it easy to breathe in here, which was not something I could say about most of the spire. The ceiling vaulted high overhead in pale stone arches. Long shelves extended across every horizontal surface I could see, packed with scrolls and bound volumes, and the light here was white and diffuse and came from no visible source. The grass that grew in patches between the shelf rows was a muted green, different from the dead grey expanse of floor two. Outside the tall windows the sky was white. It was the closest thing to a neutral space that the spire offered. Spectral figures drifted between the rows. Translucent, roughly humanoid, moving with a slow and purposeful drift that did not immediately register as aggressive. They were not passive either. I had learned that across multiple runs. Approach them too fast or make enough noise and they became something different. I moved carefully.' Four minutes,' I calculated.' Maybe five if I stay quiet.' The archives were not a safe floor. Nothing past floor one was genuinely safe. But the threat here operated on a different principle than the ghouls or the hollow soldiers. The spectral residents responded to disruption rather than proximity, which meant that if I was methodical I could cover significant ground before they became a problem. I had come to this floor as a berserker twice. Both times I had charged through in under ninety seconds, taken what was grabbable near the entrance, and pushed upward. I had not read anything. I had not stopped. The speed had served me on those runs because a berserker at floor three was already strong enough that the floors above were the variable, not the archives themselves. I went to the nearest shelf and pulled a volume at random. It was written in a script I recognised from previous runs as belonging to a group the tower's annotation system labelled as humans. They looked close enough to what the system told me I was that I had spent time, in earlier cycles, trying to find the distinction. I had never resolved it cleanly. The system called me Devas and called them human and offered nothing further, and after a certain number of deaths I had stopped pressing the question. The book was a history, not a spellbook. I read four pages before my Intelligence-enhanced recall started doing something I had not anticipated. I already remembered this volume. I had read it on a previous run, two or three cycles back, as part of a longer session in the archives when I had been stalling before a floor I was not ready for. The text came back to me not as memory but as something more immediate, each sentence arriving a half-second before my eyes reached it on the page.' That is new,' I thought.