Chapter 199 - All clicking together

Sofia knew enough about the Necrotic Ooze from the book on slimes that she felt she could fight it without a [False immortality] rune. The layer of the maze with the undead was a pain to navigate due to many dangerous monsters like the long clawed zombies, that small ogre Pareth couldn’t handle. However, she found a whole section with nothing but skeletons. The mage ones were a bit of a pain but overall, [Bone dominus] helped her clean it all up.

She had tried checking the area behind the ooze by having a layer change occurring from there in the other layers but no matter how long she tried, she didn’t manage to get it to send her there on the undead layer. After a few hours of trying, she had enough, and the ooze’s fate was set in stone.

Now that she had all that free space in the maze, all she had to do was to lure the ooze in there. That started with a small bolt. Just a regular one like the original skill? She knew the monster of rot and death would regenerate the damage in less time than it took for the explosion to clear up.

As expected, it’s coming…

Sofia had a coughing fit.

The smell…

Compared to her, the ooze was quite slow. It was about half as fast as the amalgam monster from the eye layer, a terrifying speed for a regular person, but barely a jog for Sofia as she was now. She patiently lured the mountain of death into the area she had cleared, sending small electric zaps every so often just to make sure it wouldn’t get bored of chasing her. Pareth was acting as a moving observer, making sure no layer change happened during the fight.

Sofia had doubts about whether blasting the ooze like this was a good idea, she had a good feeling that the orb was probably inside it. Wouldn’t it be a perfect place to hide an orb, among an ooze’s many fake cores? But considering how the mana orb had been shattered before she even got to it, she feared that if it was really there, she might destroy that one too.

If it’s really in there, I don’t have another way to get it out anyway, so…

With the Ooze busy pursuing Sofia in a loop around the empty corridor, it gave her ample time to charge a huge bolt. The only tricky part being to time it well so she was ready to release it while at one end of a corridor with the Ooze at the other end. Just as a safety measure. It wasn’t a huge issue, and the Ooze got treated to the same kind of Angel’s bolt the eye amalgam had brushed off.

The aftermath of the explosion was about the same, and Sofia chewed on a Healing Candy while Pareth looked at the result for her.

No more Ooze.

Finally, a big monster who has the decency to die when I blast it with more than half my mana in one go. Thank you, disgusting pile of flesh, you won’t be remembered. Damn that thing burns well.

Amidst the blue flames and ash, there was only one thing which seemed solid and intact.

“That’s the orb, right?

Sofia took out some bones and made a long stick like a giant ladle and gave it to Pareth, so that he could scoop out the orb without having to touch the flames and the remaining burning fluids of the Ooze.

As soon the long bone ladle touched the orb, Sofia was sent to the eye layer.

“Shit.” I hoped that wouldn’t happen since it was an indirect contact…

Though she cursed, Sofia was glad that she took the time to bait the Ooze out of the middle room before killing it. Avoiding having to be teleported right next to the amalgam monster was almost the whole reason she did that after all.

She stored the orb and strolled through the eye layer while her mana came back up and her arm healed. She snuck a peek at the amalgam monster from afar. The walls of that place were still missing since her last bolt, but the monster had regained its lair anyway. Sofia sighed and found the nearest dead end to leave the eye layer.

I only have two more opportunities to enter the eye layer. Maybe just one depending on the solution to the mana layer orb issue. As long as I can touch the statue…

Sofia was now on a quest to find the wood layer’s orb.

Three days later, she hadn’t found it. She had killed all of the wood monsters, searched everywhere, looked into every room, every corner. No statue, no orb. She had found a few more random books with at most one readable sentence or two, more unimportant stuff, another root that pierced two walls and led to nowhere. But no orb.

She thought she was going crazy, but for lack of a better option, she was now walking through the whole thing again, but slowly inspecting absolutely everything in detail with her mana senses.

As she walked past the cells she had first appeared in again, she abruptly stopped, and couldn’t contain a short bout of nervous laughter.

“This has to be a fucking joke… Whoever did this is so cruel…”

There it was. She could clearly see the weird stone statue holding the orb. It was covered by a piece of dust cloth, inside of an old rotten wooden barrel, not two hundred meters away in a straight line from where the maze started. This was a central corridor that you could use to go in every direction, one she had walked through several times.

But who pays attention to a random crappy barrel?! There are HUNDREDS of them on this layer.

At this point she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, she just ordered Pareth to grab the whole barrel. As she had hoped, while the statue still held the orb, nothing happened.

“Two pieces of good news at once. At least there’s that. I’m almost done with this hell.”

Pareth hauled the big barrel all the way to the knights’ bedrooms, going as far as possible from the main room without going into a dead end, he let it down. Sofia’s hand effortlessly smashed through the rotten wood, ripped off the cloth from the statue and touched the orb, storing it at the same time.

She appeared at the same place in the eye layer, in the only corner of it she hadn’t explored, the section guarded by the amalgam monster. She didn’t have to search, the statue holding the orb was right there, at the very end of the corridor. It was a disfigured fanged monster like the other statues, but unlike every other statue until now, it had no eyes. Sofia walked up to it, grabbed the orb and stored it. Nothing happened.

Can’t send me to the eye layer when I’m already there eh? I can’t say I didn’t expect something to happen when I took the orb, but maybe it’s better that way. Now all I need is the mana orb.

The statue was already in a dead-end, Sofia stored pareth and turned around, she was sent back to the empty layer.

Sofia walked to the big room, and using the ritual circle that was already there on the ground from her previous teleports, she took out the gray stone to enter the cavernous layer.

The giant sculpture of The Annihilator was still waiting, five of his seven hands empty.

One by one, Sofia handed him the orbs. The eye layer’s orb in the leftmost hand, the wood layer orb in the next. She skipped the mana orb because she didn’t have it. Next was the orb she took from the Ooze, then the one from the trap layer. Each hand closed around their orbs, leaving only one left.

“The mana orb then… Do I really need to go for [Restore command]?”

After a minute and a half, Sofia was sent back to the empty layer, forcing her to activate the ritual again. Next she flew up to the empty hand and tried to just send a bunch of mana on it. It was a random idea but she felt it could have worked. It didn’t.

Nice try.

Well… The other orbs were all full, big spheres of weird stones. The mana orb though, looked like an empty glass sphere. I think it’s not too far-fetched to guess it used to be full of mana.

And I would think the glass itself was nothing special, because it broke before I even got there, while the Ooze’s orb survived not only the Ooze’s corrosive blood but also a triple Angel bolt. So… If just mana doesn’t work, can’t I just make another orb out of anything?

Sofia made an empty bone sphere, put it in the statue’s open hand and tried to fill it with mana. It only took Sofia a few seconds to realize why this wouldn’t work, mana was very volatile and it didn’t exactly tend to stay in a ball without moving. As she expelled it from her body without giving it a clear goal through a spell formation, it just spread around, filling up the room.

She tried to focus it and force it to stay there without success. The whole process was being interrupted every ninety seconds by a forceful return to the empty layer which Sofia was starting to find infuriating. She was about ready to give up on that solution and try to find something else when she remembered something. It drove her crazy that she took so long to think about that. She still had the three [Decoy orb] from the trial’s first phase floor 5, the ones expressly made to be filled up with mana.

They’re even the perfect size! Lords almighty, how did it take me so long to think about this?

“Well, they’re also designed to blow up when filled halfway, but that’s all enchantments, right?”

Taking out one of the decoy orbs and observing it closely, there were indeed small ritual circles engraved all over it. Subtle enough to be invisible at a glance, but obvious if you knew they were there.

There were clean ways to render these ritual circles useless, but Sofia couldn’t be bothered and did it the easiest way, scratching the orb all over with her nails. There, no more traps.

As she was transported back to the empty layer, Sofia didn’t go back to fill up the orb with mana yet. She was pretty sure that now her trick would work. And if it did, she might as well be ready for whatever came next. So first of all, feeling safe in the empty layer and with Pareth to look over her, she took out a bed and slept.

When she woke up, Sofia transferred Pareth back to his Alpha skeleton, she refilled her bone storage by cutting off her wings, had a nice meal and toilet break. She put on two [False immortality] runes, brushed and tied her hair, reorganized her items in her storage ring. When she finally felt ready, she returned to the cavern layer, and filled the decoy orb with mana.

She arbored a wicked smile when the hand closed on the orb. Sofia flew back a few meters to admire her work.

The giant statue of The Annihilator was now complete.

Its seven arms started moving.

Author note:

Extra evil cliffhanger, but extra long chapter, surely that evens out... 

I am not sorry ψ(｀∇´)ψ

The original plan was to have each book be a hundred chapters long, but now it looks like book 2 will have to be much longer if I want to fit the whole trial arc... Or I guess the level up part afterwards can be omitted and be the book 3 prologue? But that'll still be more than 100 chapters. I wonder how long finishing this will take. I feel like my next few writing sessions will be intense... I hope you're hyped for what's to come.

Thanks for reading, and have a nice day (=ↀωↀ=)