Chương 59: “Uncharted Territory”

"Won't you forgive me," she said, "just like how you forgave him?" Arthur's hands were shaking. His wooden sword hung at his side, his knuckles turning white around the handle. Blood from the cut on his head had run down past his ear and along his jaw, dripping onto the collar of his uniform.

"You…!" For the first time in his life, Arthur wanted to curse at someone. How could someone be so callous? So vile? So unempathetic? He wanted to call her every foul thing he heard from soldiers and adventurers in the taverns. But what came out instead was, "We could have still saved him! He had a family. Friends. People who loved him!" Celestia's expression changed slightly, into one of guttural disgust.

"And how about the victims?" She said, "have you wept for them as much as you're showing compassion to their killer?" Arthur opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He looked down at his hands. The wooden sword. The scorch mark on the wall where a person had been sitting a few minutes ago. He didn't have an answer.

"I thought so," Celestia said.

"Is this not hypocrisy at its finest?" Arthur's vision finally tilted. The corridor swayed and his legs buckled. He hit the stone floor. He'd been bleeding from his head since the explosion. It was a wonder he'd stayed upright this long. Liana was at his side within seconds. She dropped to her knees beside him and pressed both hands against the wound on his head. The green glow of her healing magic flared, brighter than before.

"Y-You could've handled this a lot better!" Liana said, looking up at Celestia. Her voice cracked, but the words came out sharp. Celestia looked at her.

'Oh? She's talking back now?' For a moment, Celestia studied the silver-haired girl kneeling on the floor.

"I don't want to be indebted to either of you," Celestia said.

"I'll send payment later through my maid." Liana's mouth opened, but Celestia had already turned away. She reached into her sleeve and pulled out another fan. This one was intact, its decorative leaves still in place. She unfolded it with a flick of her wrist and held it in front of her face as she walked. The corridor ahead was long, and the damage from the fight was visible along its entire length. Cracked walls, rubble on the floor, scorch marks from the explosions.

At the far end, past the debris, she could see movement. Multiple figures were running toward her. Academy staff. Five of them, all in the faculty uniform, sprinting down the corridor. They must have heard the explosions. It had taken them long enough. Celestia kept walking toward them. The fan covered the lower half of her face, and her pace didn't change. The group slowed as they reached her.

The man at the front, a broad-shouldered staff member with a short beard, stopped a few paces away and looked past her at the destroyed corridor behind.

"What happened here?" he said. Celestia didn't answer his question.

"I need you to ensure that the purple-haired girl back there receives the best medical treatment available. Immediately. Is that understood?" The man blinked. He looked at Celestia, then back at the corridor, then at Celestia again.

"Excuse me, miss, what happ—" Slap! Celestia's hand moved. She slapped him across the face with the back of her open hand. The sound cracked through the corridor, and the man's head snapped to the side.

"I expect an answer when asked," Celestia said. The man's face flushed red. He straightened up, his fists clenching at his sides.

"How dare you—!" Two of his colleagues grabbed him by the arms. Both of them leaned in and said something into his ear. The man's expression changed. The anger drained out of his face and was replaced with something closer to dread. His eyes widened, and he pulled his arms free from his colleagues before dropping into a bow.

"I-I apologize, Lady Reingarde! Forgive my ignorance!"

"You still haven't answered me."

"I— yes! Of course! We will make sure she's properly attended to, my lady!"

"Good." Celestia raised the fan slightly and pointed it past the group, back toward where Liana was still kneeling beside Arthur.

"You can ask what happened here from the healer back there. She can explain. But, what took all of you so long?" The staff member at the front straightened from his bow, still rattled from the slap.

"My lady, we came as quickly as we could. The first explosion came from this side of the building, but we assumed it was Professor Victoria." One of his colleagues stepped forward.

"Professor Victoria's lab is on this floor. Her experiments have caused damage numerous times before, so when we heard the first blast, we didn't think much of it. It was only when the second and third explosions followed that we realized something was wrong."

"We checked her lab first," the first man continued.

"When we found out she wasn't there, we started looking for where the explosions came from and—""Hmm." Celestia cut him off. Professor Victoria. That was Anna's alchemy instructor, the one who oversaw the practical side of the herbology curriculum.

"Fine. Carry on with what you were supposed to be doing," Celestia said, waving her hand. The group parted immediately, making way for Celestia, who walked through the gap they made without slowing down, and behind her, she heard them break into a run toward the damaged section of the corridor. Their voices overlapped as they reached Liana and the others, asking questions and assessing the scene.

Celestia kept walking until she reached the stairwell at the end of the corridor, descended to the ground floor, and stepped outside. The campus grounds were as usual at this hour, though with a few more students who were hovering around due to the commotion. Celestia walked toward the dormitory. Her fan was still open in front of her face, and her pace was steady. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Once she was far enough from the main building that no one could see her, she stopped. She closed the fan and reassessed her actions. She opened the fan again and resumed walking.

* Name: Celestia Von Reingarde Race: Human Elemental Attribute: ክዐ፪ጎረጎፕሃ Synchronization: 25% Story Relevance: 52/100 Stats: Strength: H+ (7/100) Dexterity: H+ (99/100) Speed: H+ (71/100) Wisdom: F- (62/100) Aura: H- (55/100) Special Stats: Nobility: S+ (101/100) Active Skills: Noblesse Oblitère (S-Rank) Cooldown: 3 Days Description: Strike infused with Nobility so overwhelming that lesser beings crumble on contact. Damage scales with rank difference. Plebeians may detonate.

Effect: Instantly inflicts massive physical and spiritual damage weighted by hierarchical superiority. Targets may experience fear, humiliation, or sudden existential crisis. Knighthood (S-Rank) Slot Limit: 1 Sir Ozymandias Effect Cooldown: 1 Year Description: A princess bestows the peerage of knighthood as the highest honor. Once sworn, the bond can be invoked as a royal decree made manifest.

Effect: For a brief period, your anointed knight returns to the peak of their prowess; body and spirit restored to their finest state. When the grace ends, the borrowed perfection is reclaimed, leaving the knight heavily spent.

Passive Skills: Faint Resistance (G) Concentration (G) Fatigue Recovery (G) Pain Resistance (F) Poison Resistance (G) Physical Recovery (G) Mental Recovery (G) After being visited by several staff members, as well as Summit's police, and providing her own statements of the events earlier, she went back to her dormitory to rest. The change in her personality was clear-cut at this point, and it felt so natural that she couldn't help but respond the way she did.

Celestia sat on the edge of her bed in the dormitory room, the door locked, the lights dim. Sir Ozy was asleep on his cushion at the foot of the bed. The Synchronization number sat in front of her, projected from her status window. She couldn't be bitter about it anymore, as she had found the pattern. Arthur was the trigger. Every interaction with him pushed the number up. The hallway confrontation weeks ago had been the first significant jump. Today's events had pushed it further.

Everything from the argument to the disgust she'd felt watching him try to save a man who had murdered students in a ritual circle, all of it fed into the Synchronization. But there had been a moment when the number went down. She'd almost missed it in the middle of everything else. It had happened when she entered the Tower.

'Why?' She thought about it for a while. Was it because the original Celestia had never entered the Tower? Did that mean the number dropped because she was doing something that had no precedent in the original narrative? There were still so many uncertainties, but still…

'That's useful information.' Now, she moved to the next problem. Floor 10. She had been putting it off due to scheduling constraints. Floors 6 through 9 had been cleared efficiently with her hired party, and the preparations for Floor 10 were already in place. But Floor 10 was different from everything that came before it. Floor 10 was where the Tower opened into the World floors. And it was also where most climbers would start to make strides in their development.

The semester's final exam was approaching, and a significant number of students had already awakened their Aura over the past weeks even without reaching Floor 10. Anyone without Aura would be at a severe disadvantage against those who had it. Celestia could compensate with equipment, artifacts, and preparation to a degree. She'd been doing exactly that since she started climbing. But there was a ceiling to what gear could do against an opponent who could reinforce their body with Aura.

She needed to awaken it before the exam. That meant entering Floor 10 as soon as possible. Though she had her mandatory class and a few more classes scheduled. Missing them was simple enough. The mandatory class was technically required, but in practice, it only existed to track student progress and provide students with more support for the floors to come. She dismissed the status window, turned down the lamp, and laid back on the bed. Sir Ozy's snoring filled the dark room.

* Floor 10 was a turning point, just like Floor 5 had been. Upon entry, every climber was sent to one of twenty mountainous zones scattered across the floor's landscape. Once inside, the Tower allowed the climber to set their own trial. The parameters were open-ended: the climber could freely choose what to do, but the rewards also corresponded with the type of trial. The trial period lasted a week, there was no limit to how many trials a climber could shoulder, and during this time, growth was heavily accelerated.

What most climbers didn't learn until they arrived was that each mountainous zone carried its own additional trial, one that the Tower imposed regardless of what the climber had chosen. They varied by zone, and their difficulty was unpredictable. Celestia had prepared accordingly. Her bag-of-holding was stocked with a month's worth of dried food, sealed water containers, a collapsible tent, a bedroll, cooking utensils, a set of backup weapons, medical supplies, and a few useful survival artifacts.

If anything went wrong, she intended to have options. There was one complication she couldn't do anything about. Unity magic, the system that allowed party members to enter the same floor together, didn't function on Floor 10. Every climber was sent to a zone at random, and whether you ended up with allies nearby or completely alone came down to chance. Out of twenty zones, the odds of landing in the same one as Paimon were low.

One moment she was stepping through the Tower alongside Paimon, and the next, she was alone. But she wasn't on a mountain. Celestia stood in a white room. The floor was white, the walls were white, and the ceiling, if there was one, was lost somewhere above in a featureless expanse. The room looked like the waiting area she'd seen on Floors 1 through 5. According to everything she knew, she should have been standing on a mountainside right now, already inside her zone, ready to declare her trial to the Tower.

Celestia's grip tightened on her spear.

"You've finally arrived!" The voice came from everywhere at once. It was female, bright, and far too enthusiastic for an empty room. Celestia's body moved on instinct. Spear raised, eyes scanning the featureless space around her. But there was nobody around, the room was empty in every direction.

'What? Who is this?' This wasn't in the novel. Was this the same kind of exception as Floors 1 through 5? Those floors had given Celestia a different experience from what the novel described. Was Floor 10 doing the same thing?

"Ahahahaha! I see that you're quite confused!" The voice rang out again, amused. Celestia didn't lower her spear.

"Show yourself."

"Maybe it'll help if you can physically see me?" Before she knew it, there was a girl lying on a large pillow on the floor. She was young-looking, with white hair that spread out across the pillow beneath her. Her body was relaxed, her posture completely horizontal, one arm draped over the pillow's edge and her cheek resting against the fabric.

"Ta-dah!" the voice said.

"Feeling better now?" Celestia stared at her. Something was off; the girl's mouth had just barely moved. The voice was coming from her direction, but her lips were out of sync. She was looking at Celestia with half-lidded eyes that didn't match the energy of the voice at all. The body on the pillow was lazy and still, but the voice was bright and enthusiastic. Celestia kept the spear raised. She studied the girl's face, looking for any sign that this was an illusion or a trap.

The girl stared back at her, unbothered.

"C'mon, talk a bit, would you?" the voice said. The girl's mouth moving out of tandem of her words.

"I finally got the chance to meet this time's candidate!"

'Candidate?' Celestia's eyes narrowed. The girl, or whatever this was, had used that word casually, as if Celestia should already know what it meant.

"Who are you?" Celestia asked.