Tom took over thirty minutes to put himself back together. The entire time, with the exception of a small break in the middle that he took to work on Briana, he focused on himself. His physical state was in a far worse condition than he had expected. The explosion that had propelled him through the air had done massive amounts of damage, including internal bruising, and one of his kidneys had actually ruptured.
Luckily, Kang had won, and he could take the time to fix everything that had gone wrong. His charge had been a foolhardy gamble, but, even in hindsight, he couldn’t think of a better plan. The ranged attackers and the weaker stick monsters had to be taken out to keep the others safe, and that is what he had done. Kill them and survive had been the requirement, and he had met it. While the method was unconventional, it was clearly the best that had been available.
It didn’t mean the situation felt right to him, though. Everything was too difficult. Even with the floor warped by fate, beating it had been a close-run thing, and he hoped the next floor would be easier.
He feared it would be otherwise.
When they exited, there was no discussion about testing the final floor or even training. Everyone was mentally exhausted, especially the girls, and Eloise fell asleep while eating. It took their combined efforts to carry her to bed. The contrast of his body as it was now with even the weak one he had possessed when entering Existentia for the first time was startling.
“Sleeping potion, Tom.” Kang ordered him. “Don’t bother arguing. You’re taking it.”
Annoyance flared up, and he briefly considered objecting, but then sighed. His head hurt from lack of sleep, and he could feel every heart beat behind his eyes. As unfortunate as it was, Kang was right. He needed to be at his best, and the sleeping potions were the best way of guaranteeing that.
His night was not fun. It included only two hours of sleep, with the potion making him wake up feeling sick, then half an hour healing Briana and practicing his spear forms in the downtime in order to progress toward the last critical skill in his training schedule. At that point he would be on the verge of recovering from the aftereffects of the sleep potion, but then Adam would get Tom another one, and he would go through the cycle again.
It was not pleasant, but he had no thoughts about changing his approach. Proper sleep was too important, and the potions guaranteed that, while a longer period would have been too destructive to Briana’s condition. This was a middle ground, one that gave him the best sleep while ensuring she continued to receive her regular treatment to keep the petrification under control.
The next morning, and late morning at that, they lined up to face the final floor.
“Just like on floor two, we’re going in and out,” Kang reminded everyone pointlessly, it wasn’t like anyone would have forgotten such a pertinent detail. “We’re expecting rank seven, and I can’t stress how deadly that is going to make them enough. If they have even attributes, they’ll be moving three times faster than you. If they’re focused on speed…”
“They won’t be.” Tom interrupted. While he had more tools to counter speedsters now, they were still one of his main weaknesses.
“If they’re specced for speed,” Kang continued. “Well, you’ll be stunned at how fast they move. If you’ve ever seen a car...” Kang stopped. “No, you haven’t… um.” He glanced at Tom.
“We’ve all seen the volunteers in action. Nothing on this floor will be that fast, but it gives you an idea of the worst-case scenario kind of outcome.”
Both girls’ mouths fell open. It was kind of a predictable reaction, Tom realised.
Eloise shook her head. “We can’t fight that. We’re going to die.”
“They won’t be that fast.” Tom snapped, trying to cut off the argument before it escalated.
“As fast as a volunteer? We’ll die. That means we can die before we even see them.”
Tom shot Kang an exasperated look, one that implored him to do something.
With an abashed face, he went over to try to comfort Eloise, who was becoming more and more hysterical. In between her sobbing, he caught snatches of the other boy’s attempts to console her.
‘We’ve spent fate for this.’ ‘It’ll be okay.’ ‘They won’t be that fast.’
“We’re both reincarnators,” Tom interjected. “We’ll protect you.”
“Yes, exactly,” Kang said, jumping on the opportunity when he saw that it was calming her slightly. “We’ll protect you.”
Ten minutes after they were supposed to have entered, Eloise had calmed down enough to go in again. She had wiped away her tears, and her face had stopped being quite so red. Prepared, their minds on the job, they were ready now.
There were no further questions, so Tom guided them into the lobby and then, after casting Lightning Javelin and not releasing it, he led them through the door to the floor itself.
He hadn’t known what to expect, but emerging into a sunlit, flat valley with unclimbable natural cliffs rising on both sides was not one of these things. It was not as impressive as the Grand Canyon, but it had to be close. Each of the cliffs was over two hundred paces away, and twice as high as that. The valley stretched out into the distance. One, two, maybe three kilometres of sight line, and there was more than that as the walls bent, obscuring how far away the finish point was. They had emerged from an artificial wall that had been clearly used to dam the valley at some point. He wasn’t sure if the water-filled side was supposed to be where he stood or on the other side of the constructed plug, but it looked like that type of engineering.
The direction they had to take was clear. Presumably there was a boss monster on the other end of the canyon.
“Stay where you are.” Tom ordered as he looked around. “Be ready to retreat at a moment’s notice.”
The place was beautiful, he had to admit that. The grass was a multitude of different varieties and went up to his knees. While there were both deeper greens and yellow blades, the combined effect was a light-green, almost-yellow, thick coverage like what he might have expected to see on Earth in later summer. Wildflowers were dotting the landscape, splashes of pink and white amongst the grass, but he skimmed over them to try and find some evidence of the monsters they would be facing.
Danger Sense yelled a generic warning, and time slowed down.
Instantly, the search for the enemy became more urgent. He scanned the grass, looking for flickers of movement or slight discolouring that could reveal what type of creature had locked its gaze upon him.
It took a moment for him to spot it. The creature was camouflaged against the grass, its coat the same yellow green and perfectly patterned so that Tom’s eyes drifted off it. The only reason he even managed to identify it at all was the fact that it was moving toward him, and fast. It might have been large, but it was travelling only a centimetre or two above the grass tops. Yet, despite its diminutive height, it was advancing at the pace of a galloping horse. It must have started over a hundred metres away, but it had already halved that distance.
The pre-prepared Lightning Javelin shot out at thirty metres.
A magic shield flared to stop the attack, and Tom mentally cursed when he saw the failure. This was going to devolve into a melee contest.
He swung the spear tip and braced himself to meet the charge, but, when it was ten metres away, it stopped abruptly. If magic hadn’t been involved, there would have been an explosion of wind, or the ground in front of it should have been torn up, or something else like that would have happened to counteract its momentum. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the momentum it had built up appeared to just vanish.
Then the thing stood up. It flared out and revealed its psychedelic underside, and, in doing so, revealed its dimensions. It was an almost perfect three metre square with eight sets of long claws. One was positioned at each corner, and the others in the middle of each side.
It was one of the weirder monsters he had ever seen, especially given the pattern on its belly that seemed to move in weird, disturbing ways. There was a pressure against his mind that he easily ignored, and he took advantage of the pause to fire a free Extended Lightning Bolt right at its underside. He hoped the shields only protected attacks on its back.
His bolt crossed the space separating them with a boom… and struck another magical shield that mitigated the attack completely.
Tom frowned, and wished he had gained his version of Remote Power Strike, as that would have allowed him to blast through the shields and stun it. His Spark pseudo-sensing domain was up, so he felt it as the other three fell over, and, based on the pressure against his brain earlier, he suspected a mind attack had taken them out.
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A small part of him prayed that they were okay, but there was no time to check on them or think about it further. The monster, having realised that its mind attack had failed, had transitioned into engaging physically.
It fell forward and then, rather than remaining spread-out, it rolled itself up on both sides. This meant it looked like two connected but rolled-up blankets next to each other. Three very prominent sets of claws pointed out the front: the corner ones in the centre of the coil, and the middle one that poked out from the bridge between the two sides. The manoeuvre made it look deadlier because of the conspicuous claws, but also smaller. Each roll was only as thick as a two-litre soft drink container, but it was still large, as it was over three metres long.
It came at him, moving quicker than Tom could easily react to.
He tried to impale it with his spear, which was glowing blue as he enhanced it with a Power Strike, but the attempt was useless. It was able to undulate and twist around his weapon faster than he could move the tip to intercept. Then its body struck the shaft and knocked it wide, and, before he dropped the spear, he summoned it back into his inventory.
The creature kept coming and flared upwards, twisting so its front claws were above his head before it plunged down on top of him like a striking snake.
His sensing domain had shown him that the others had remained unmoving since they had fallen. Given that it had been less than three seconds, Tom was not sure he could read too much into that outcome. He was confident they were not dead, because the pressure on his mind hadn’t felt like a fatal attack. He didn’t know if they were stunned and seeing everything, or else unconscious and oblivious.
But with the claws coming down at him and his spear abilities useless at close quarters, he didn’t have a choice. With a single thought, he produced his tier-three daggers in his left hand. Even if they were conscious and looking in his direction, if he was quick, there was a chance they wouldn’t notice the significance of the weapon; especially as, most of the time, his body would obscure their view of his knife. Any brief glimpses they managed shouldn’t allow them to see any details that would let them link it back to Eloise’s original gift.
The claws spun at him, one going for his upper arm and the other for his stomach. Calculations flared through him; he thrust his bum back and leapt in the air to mitigate the attack upon his vitals. There was a now-familiar distortion as Fateful Repositioning activated to make his leap more effective. The nasty claws slashed past his belly button, tearing through the armour like it wasn’t there and opening traces of red on his skin, but not cutting in far enough for him to even consider using healing magic.
The small feeling of triumph vanished as the other set of claws struck his upper arm close to the elbow. His skin parted just like his armour had, and the claws penetrated straight through to the bone. His sixty percent stronger bones came in handy as, while the claws cut a quarter of the way through, they stopped there. Without the boost from Touch Heal, he would have lost his arm.
The damage didn’t faze him. He had been willing to accept far more to land the counterstrike, and that was what he focused on. The hand, the one holding the tier-three weapon with its singular active skill, descended on the rolled-up carpet-like monster, and he instinctively triggered its ability. Instantly, the blade was longer, as the dagger was converted into something closer to a short sword. It slashed into the still-coiled creature about a quarter of the way down it. Against a human, it would have been a low blow that struck at the thigh area, but for Tom right now, it was the most central location he could target.
Shields flared to stop him, but they broke under the physical pressure and the high-tier nature of the weapon, and then the sharp blade started cutting into its flesh. Thankfully, the extra length was pivotal, as his blade was longer than the coil was thick. The blade sliced through it like a knife through soft butter. There was almost no resistance.
Tom went through an entire coil and began opening up the second when he found himself being knocked flying. Everything had happened in a fraction of a second. His strike and the blow to his arm had been almost simultaneous. Luckily, the gap between the claw cutting into his bone and the momentum being transferred into throwing him away had been long enough for his other arm to do substantial damage to it. He still cursed slightly at having failed to decapitate the creature fully, but the wound he had inflicted had been significant, just like he had imagined it would be. With a thought, the special knife vanished into his inventory as he tried to hide evidence of it in case the others were aware and watching. If questioned, he would play dumb and pretend he had gotten lucky and had briefly managed to use the Extend Dagger skill, he was training. With the amount of fate in play, it wouldn’t be the most outlandish of possible claims.
Touch Heal, with the physical help of his left hand sealed the flaps of flesh together, and, with a groan, he scrambled to his feet.
The monster had not been inactive while he had been fixing himself.
It had unrolled fully, thus showing exactly how successful his desperate knife cut had been. The blade had ripped through half of it like he had imagined. Then the cuts spread in a line through another quarter of the creature from the spot where his weapon had started cutting through the second coil without completing the job. Yellow blood was pooling out of the two metre plus long slash, but, instead of falling downwards, it went upwards. Globules of the liquid floated straight up into the sky.
The monster was still alive, and he could see that it was in the process of doing a similar thing to what he had done to his arm: scrunching itself together to force the cut pieces into alignment and then stick to each other, presumably to allow some form of innate healing to better take hold.
It wasn’t acting as a mortally wounded creature; more like a briefly inconvenienced one.
With a thought, a spear appeared in Tom’s hand, and then he thrust forward with a Power Strike active and infused with precognition mana. His recently-healed wound tore badly as he drove power through the arm, and he mentally cursed the mistake of not doing a more thorough healing job to start with. Patching up as a strategy was fine; patching up so poorly that the mended areas fell to pieces under the stress of standard battle forms, though, was not acceptable.
He needed to do better in the future. However, that was an issue for him to deal with at a later time. He let go of the regret and consigned it as something to consider later when he and his friends’ lives were not on the line.
The spear tip approached a spot behind the closest claw, and a magical shield flared to reject his strike, but Power Strike changed from its normal blue to a lighter, almost white glow, and the shield shattered.
The tip pierced the creature’s skin, and Tom didn’t wait.
He activated Spark.
Lightning crackled from where his spear had impaled itself all the way through the creature.
Its magic had mended it in a similar fashion as what he had done to his arm. Thin links of healed skin held the pieces together sufficiently for it to function, even if the majority of the wound remained unhealed. But its patch job was clearly enough, since it was moving with almost as much fluidity as as it did before, and with too much of it for Tom to counter. The creature rose into the air, its edge above Tom’s head. Its claws were positioning themselves to strike once more… and then the wave of electricity that had spread through it caused it to spasm.
It collapsed into a pile of material on the ground, and Tom could see residual electricity active in and under the skin, keeping it trapped in place.
Tom didn’t hesitate. He leapt on top of it and fell to his knees. It might have looked like a blanket, but it felt more like an inanimate slab of rock. He ignored that, and, holding a normal dagger in his hand, he started stabbing, cutting and slicing. The material parted under his blows, as apparently it was susceptible to piercing attacks. His basically-untiered knife cut it almost as easily as the tier-three version.
That was more support for his lies if he was questioned, he thought to himself happily.
With macabre intensity, he worked through the still-living monster. His cuts focused on understanding what he had faced.
Blood boiled toward the sky as he slashed and hacked to try to locate weak points in the anatomy to exploit in the future. While it lived, he tried to find out what made it tick and identify vulnerabilities, like the human heart or brain.
He searched for critical weaknesses in its anatomy, but there weren’t any.
It perished within fifteen seconds of him starting the butchery. That outcome was made obvious by the sudden stop of yellow blood streaming into the sky. Tom didn’t stop his activity. He kept cutting it to see if there was any change anywhere to the internal nature of the creature. While it lacked a circulatory system-related vulnerability, he was still hoping to find a centralised brain that he could exploit, but it wasn’t there. Excluding where the claws emerged, it was disturbing in its uniformity. It was all the same: skin that was a few millimetres thick; then the sponge-like tissue that filled the centre without any additional layers. That pattern went all the way through it.
The whole time he spent cutting it into one-centimetre-wide strips, Tom had kept watch for any more enemies, but none had turned up.
With his hacking of the monster complete, he stood up, having found nothing significant. Less than half a minute had passed and the other three people remained unconscious. He studied the surrounding area with anxious eyes, then carefully backed toward them without relenting on the watchfulness.
His lower leg made contact with Kang’s and he activated Touch Heal to gain a diagnosis at the cost of two mana.
The boy, at least to the extent that his skill could determine, was unharmed. Whatever method the mind attack used was not one his ability could heal. His only choice was to wait for them to wake, or else to move them back to safety individually. While he could do that, he disliked the risk profile of such an attempt. Inadvertently, such action would hinder his sight, and he didn’t want one of those monsters sneaking up on him because he might not survive that kind of ambush. Alternatively, it could leave the creature an opportunity to tear apart one of the helpless others while he was busy shifting someone into the slightly-safer lobby of the trial proper.
Without the option of more action, he found he had time to think.
The battle had been a bad one.
If it hadn’t had the mind attack and been eventually shown to have lightning vulnerability, Tom would have been assuming his fate had failed. There had been no way for him to attack it at range, and they were too fast and strong for him to fight it effectively in melee. Briana’s Razor Water might be a good mid-to-short distance option, but with the mind attacks in play, she was never going to receive an opportunity to try.
With his current abilities, he was in a bind. Every encounter would play out the same way. The creatures would be able to get in close to him uninjured. Then, when they struck, they would be too agile for him to fight. The only reason he had won the previous deathmatch was that the enemy had been overcome with bloodlust, and, because of that, it had been happy to trade blows with him. Its strike had hit him, while the return blow had crippled it for long enough for him to use his other abilities.
Fighting as is, even with the knife, was too risky. At best, he could exchange blows and hope his opponent didn’t kill him and that Tom’s own counter got an incapacitation. In the best-case scenario, it was a dangerous gamble. Tom could imagine exactly how catastrophic it would have been if its claws had hit his neck instead of his arm.
“Remote Power Strike,” he whispered. That was the only answer. Master that, and he would have the range to stun them before they closed in.
As he waited, he positioned himself so he could touch Briana and use all of his excess mana and free casts to fix her damaged intestines.
Three minutes later, they woke up, which meant that they had been unconscious for the better part of fourteen minutes. They remained disorientated, but pliable as Tom pushed them back into the lobby, and then towards the main room and safety.
