Chapter 198 - Annoyance

With the exploration of the eye layer out of the way, Sofia would have now liked to understand how to leave it. Last time it had been a close call with the monster, now she should be able to easily outrun it, in theory at least, but it was still risky to awaken it. From what she had seen last time, the amalgam monster was like a tidal wave; it looked like it would flood the entire maze if given enough time. With that in mind, baiting it around the maze to loop back around and check the room behind it was unlikely to work.

Last time it woke up when I got too close, but maybe there’s a way to prevent that, but I have my doubts. I had the rune on last time and it didn’t help. Does it have to do with the eyes? Maybe something like invisibility could do the trick but I do not have that…

Sofia spent a few minutes trying everything she could think of to get the eyes on the walls to stop staring at her. Her theory was that if someone managed to make the eyes lose sight of them, it could be an encouraging sign that the monster might not wake up. However, she would never be able to confirm it, as no matter what she tried, the eyes never stopped looking in her direction. If Pareth or a book summon walked away, some of the eyes would look at them too, so this was no good either.

For all I know, this might mean nothing anyway, what else can I do?

Sofia only saw two possible choices for the moment, either she stored Pareth and ran a bit more or spun around on herself to try getting out, or she could bolt it and see what happens.

That was how, standing at the furthest point in a straight line she could be from the monster, she held an angel’s bolt stronger than any she had ever used. The monster was still just some kind of a colored mass far away, very easy to aim at. With her rune still on, she pushed more and more mana into the spell until her arm started to disintegrate from the sheer heat and power gathered in her hand. She let that thing loose, almost four times the power of the original.

Before anything else happened, she was ejected backwards from the recoil. Pareth was there to catch her and soften the blow. The wild trait of energy hit the still immobile form of the horrendous monster. Sofia’s senses were a bit overwhelmed as she was first blinded, then deafened and burned by the heatwave. So far all was going as expected.

She couldn’t heal because of the rune, but that wouldn’t prevent her from running after she confirmed what happened to the monster. Her mana senses would be more than enough to navigate an empty maze she knew the whole layout of. Pareth could still see so Sofia looked through his eyes for now. When the explosion receded, it first revealed a portion of the maze which was only the black speckled stone, now stripped of all its usual stone bricks. The eyes had escaped the explosion and all gathered in a huge swarm at the edge of the destroyed area.

Finally, Sofia saw the purple eye monster. It was still ‘alive’, and now very awake, already, countless maws were appearing all over its form. It was hard to tell whether the bolt had inflicted any real damage at all. Expanding like a slime about to explode, it filled everything as it poured through the corridor.

Sofia stored Pareth and ran away.

I expected as much but I’m still disappointed.

She easily outran the monster, its distant roaring and the shaking of the whole maze a constant reminder that it was still chasing. Not too surprisingly, there was no layer change happening at all until she found herself in a dead end and turned around, then she was back on the woodmen layer.

So at least this way out is consistent, nice. I also now know I cannot kill that thing no matter what, so the orb better be behind it, or I’m never getting it. Sofia sat down and let the blood loss from her mangled arm finish the job of activating her rune.

After her revival, some rest, and the applying of another rune, Sofia got up and started hunting for this level’s orb. She felt she had a solid idea to get the eye layer’s orb too, as long as it really was in the corridor behind the monster.

With Pareth as an impenetrable frontline and the [Bone dominus] aim-assisted bone whip hits, even the countless wood monsters haunting the deeper reaches of this layer couldn’t do anything against Sofia. Eventually, she found the source of this layer’s corruption. It was a huge root piercing a room from top to bottom, it had smaller roots growing off of it at the end of which grew the wood monsters that sofia had been exterminating for hours.

The root did not react when she came near.

Is that how these things reproduce? That explains how there are so many… Where is the orb though?

Sofia attacked the big root, expecting some kind of defense mechanism to activate, or any kind of counter attack really. But there was nothing. After enough whip hits, the root started burning. There was still no orb-holding statue to be seen anywhere, but there was something interesting.

The root pierced through the hard stone?!

The seemingly indestructible black speckled stone encasing the whole maze was a testament to its artificial nature inside of the trial. So far there hadn’t been anything that could circumvent that, even the graveyard skeletons where blocked by whatever was under. But now, the root was burning and revealing a hole through that encasing.

Or so Sofia thought, but it turned out that the root was also encased inside the hard stone, as if a part of the maze itself. That being said, it still offered a way up and down to who knew where as it burned away. Following it upward could be a way out of the maze if it led to the tree trunk. But what interested Sofia right this moment was the way down instead. With the root burning away, her mana senses could feel further down, and there was something there.

After waiting for the bottom part of the root to burn away, Sofia jumped down the hole, finding herself in the weirdest layer of the maze yet.

It looked like every layer except the cavernous one had been smashed into one, there were wall eyes, more roots, traps and bones laying around everywhere.

Came one thing and found another! This is the mana layer, it has to be!

Sofia was elated to have stumbled upon something she had no idea how to reach, she felt that with that, this floor 99 was pretty much over with. She just needed to get the orb here, and she had a good plan for the eye layer’s one, leaving only the wood and undead layers to comb through.

There were no monsters in the misshapen layer unless one counted the stray wall-eyes as such. It made Sofia’s exploration fast and efficient, she found the orb statue in no time.

Except the statue was broken, and the glass-looking orb – shattered.

“What?”

Sofia’s good mood crumbled in an instant.

“Seriously… Is that normal? Is the trial broken? Is this meant to be like this?”

Sir scribe, is this an error?

There was no answer. Usually when the system fucked up and she complained, the scribe would notice, but since it stayed silent, it could only mean one thing. This was how the trial was meant to go.

Sofia picked up the largest remaining part of the orb, she could infer from it that the orb was originally an empty glass sphere. Examining the hundreds of scattered fragments, it did not seem to have any inscriptions or anything special about it.

Was I wrong from the beginning? Is the goal not to gather the seven orbs?! What then? Or am I meant to fix this?

Hmm… I could go ahead and get [Restore command] from my keywords. That would probably do the trick. But I don’t like doing it like that. Not only does it feel like a waste of keywords, but also, what would it say about that trial? Nobody can complete it if they don’t have a skill or the technical know-how and tools to repair this thing? That just doesn’t feel right at all.

So far everything was hard but never unfair. Even the asshole fleeing orb on floor 97 could be caught without anything fancy like flying as long as you have any strong movement skill which everyone should have at this point.

What is the intended solution?

Unwilling to resort to making a skill for this unless she was completely unable to find another way, Sofia returned to the hole left by the root. It had kept burning, and now she could also follow the hole up.

“Will this lead to the eye layer?”

The root came from sideways more than up. Sofia followed the gallery left behind after it had burned for a while until the space around her started to feel unstable. She knew that sensation, that was the edge of the trial zone. She had never tried going past it before, but she had a gut feeling that it would be a very bad idea for some reason.

Nothing here either then… I did so much for so little progress…

This is getting annoying.

Next I’m cooking a grilled necrotic ooze, I’ve had enough. It feels like I have been stumbling around for weeks!

“This giant maze is a giant pain!”