Chapter 738 - Seven days

An hour later, I enter the main room, doing my best to avoid any member of the Dusk Horizon tribe who might want to challenge me to a duel. Walking across the way, too strong, man-eating, skyscraper-like tree, I examine it as always, though not too intrusively. It might notice and try to eat me to fill its daily macros by using me as a protein source.

I try to imagine how much stronger one of the reanimated beings on the fifth floor of Beyond is compared to this tree, but I just don't have enough data to do that.

Reaching the room, I create a mana arm to open the door and step inside as the conversation dies down. Even Lily, who had called my name excitedly, goes quiet.

“Nat, why are you wearing a towel over your head?” Maya breaks the silence first.

I shrug, “Tess put it there to bully me, and because I have to hold Biscuit in my arms, I was unable to remove it.”

“He is bullshitting, right?” I sense Maya turning to the others as she talks, “He could easily blow it off, teleport it, use the same mana arm he used to open the door to remove it, anything.”

“I assure you, Maya, there was nothing I could have done,” I repeat.

I hear Lily giggle next to me as she reaches out and pulls the towel down. The light blinds me for a moment before my eyes adjust.

“Here, I have saved you,” she says.

“I appreciate that, you literally brought light back into my life.”

Tess shoots a spark of lightning that twists around me, clearly aimed at my butt, but I create a barrier to block it and quickly reinforce it. That lightning is surprisingly piercing, which makes me look at her suspiciously. Did she get a new skill, combine or improve something?

“Welcome back,” Min-Jae calls from my left, and when I look at him, he smiles and waves. Dozens of metal orbs float around him in chaotic but intentional patterns.

“I am back,” I nod and move to sit next to him before I feel a tug on my shirt as Lily pulls me onto the couch and sits beside me.

She puts her legs across mine and smiles, “I deserve this for saving you.”

I look at her while lifting Biscuit carefully and holding him above her legs. She gives me a confused look, then notices Biscuit’s slightly open, tiny mouth and the drool dripping from it right onto her legs.

She jerks back with very impressive speed, which makes me once again worry about my raw physical stats. Once freed, I cross my legs on the couch and hold Biscuit back against my chest.

“If anyone wakes up Biscuit, I will tell him to grow horse-sized and drool all over you,” I threaten to make sure no one raises their voice too much. Then I ask, “So what were you talking about?”

“We were theorizing who the Rulers of the floors we visited might be,” Izzy says softly. As always, she sits on the ground, her back resting against Noodle, who is coiled in a way that lets him rest his head on her legs.

At this point, I give up trying to figure out how Izzy is growing so quickly. Is it puberty? Do normal kids grow fast around thirteen or so? It’s not like she looks like an adult. She still looks like a twelve or thirteen year old girl. It just feels odd since I still remember her as the tiny baby koala I carried around at the start of the third floor. Maybe it’s my problem.

“Well, my dear misinformed colleagues, I might have more information than you,” I say, and after that, I share all I know.

Then they get into a heated discussion where they start theorizing about the floors we are missing, and I listen with one ear while talking to Min-Jae with the other. He excitedly shares his progress toward his floating city. He also asks for some long-lasting mana projectiles, so while we sit there, I start making some, turning them as durable and as stable as possible. I even try to make them as heavy as I can.

If someone asked me how I make mana heavy, I would tell them to ask someone else and never mention the answer to me. That is how I roll, I just feel it. No need to talk about any proto thaumic mass aggregation cycle schema or whatever.

“How are the demons?” I ask him once he is more or less done with his report.

Min-Jae tilts his head. His hair is a bit shorter now, but he is still taller than the twins, even though they are older. Probably almost a full head taller, and I am sure it bothers those little twerps.

“I do mostly what you told me. I just straight-up beat anyone who challenges me, but I never kill anyone. I lost a few times too,” he whispers, almost ashamed, “They beat me really hard and Lily had to heal me, but they did not kill me. And after that, they only seemed to like me more.”

“So you did not just give up?”

“Of course not,” he answers strongly, “I even bit off the finger of one guy when he got careless while smashing my head against the ground.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” he says proudly.

I start thinking Min-Jae might be another lost cause, and I suppress the memories trying to surface of me doing similar things.

“Anything else interesting happen while I was gone?” I ask.

“I got rejected by Tess,” he says with a small smile, but he says it much quieter and forms a basic barrier to keep others from hearing. It is not like we spy on each other, just him warning people to stay out of it.

I blink a few times and dedicate more of my mental focus to replaying exactly what he just said.

Still, I say, “What?”

“Yeah,” he smiles at me again.

The room becomes rowdy then, drowning out our conversation as Maya stands up and starts showing Dennis how to dance while Aaron quickly finds some fitting classical music to play on his phone.

Using the distraction, Izzy escapes and slides between me and Min-Jae, speaking softly so she does not wake Biscuit. Though the barriers I stacked around him would probably keep him asleep even if the huge tree we are on exploded. Maybe the barriers would even handle the explosion as well. Now that I think about it, I am not exactly the efficient type that would make a barrier just for sound dampening, I just brute force it.

“I made new videos, want to see?” she asks while opening her laptop.

“Do I want to?” I ask her, sending her an invitation to read my feelings.

“No, you do not,” she laughs and presses play anyway.

It is not that different from her older videos. Same heavy bass music, and the main character is me again. But this one is edited much better while keeping the raw feeling of the previous ones. I close my eyes a few times to calm myself down and suppress that dread. I only end up noticing that Izzy pauses the video every time I do that and keeps replaying the last few seconds to make sure I do not miss anything.

She talks about how she started using new software, how hard she worked to match the moments to the music better, and how she added new effects instead of repeating the same ones. Something about composition, lighting, and timing, and other things like that. She also shows me the promotional videos she made for the others.

Maya, with her huge armament facing off against monsters just as large, is framed in a way that highlights her sheer force. Min-Jae appears just as dominant, as building sized boulders break from the ground while the screen shakes, then rise into the air around him with what feels like unnatural ease.

It is torture, and Izzy definitely knows it, yet she keeps laughing and leaning against my shoulder while I sit there and listen, still curious about what Min-Jae told me. But the longer it goes on, the more I start realizing it might be intentional from Izzy. Min-Jae’s expression slowly shifts into something more relaxed, that stiffness around him fading, and I start thinking that the little empath came here at this exact moment on purpose.

When I reach that conclusion, she nods and smiles at me, only then leaving.

So I do not ask Min-Jae anything about what he said earlier, and instead, we talk about combat. Instead, I mention the Champion’s techniques, and together we start examining them. At some point, the information about them spreads through the room, and more people join in, especially Maya, who fits the role of a frontal attacker. Lily joins too, but she has her own combat style and does not seem that invested in this one.

***

For the next few days, I move from person to person. I train with Lily, and we examine how her [Disintegration] and its anti-healing interact with me, trying to come up with a way to modify her healing marks to avoid it.

Well, she does all of that. Almost immediately, she curses herself for not thinking of it sooner, and a few minutes later decides that modifying her old marks is impossible. So she starts creating a new one specialized in removing anti-healing. She wants to combine her healing and [Disintegration] for that. These two entirely different forces.

If I asked Savant, I bet he would probably tell me it is insane that she can even attempt it.

A few days are also sacrificed to me, Maya, Sophie, and the twins working inside the Level 0 thought accelerated mental space created by Sophie and improved by Maya’s [Compounding]. I mess around with [Manifestation], which is in some distant way a mental skill, and the twins support everything using [Connection]. We improve as much as we break, only to discover more gaps in our structure.

Just like Tess said, we hunch over the table like primitives, all of us linked into the same small mental space. But honestly, the potential of this is insane enough to make me excited every time.

I also want to go hunt for a bit, but after the conversation with the vice guild master, I changed my plans. With Lily, I already went over the changes I need to make before the body upgrade and before leveling to three hundred fifty. I already talked to Ruby, and I think what I am planning will give me a lot. The system always mentions individual performance and considers many things, and the level 350 body upgrade, even though mostly the same for everyone, has slight individual changes to spice it up. But that is not even my main intention, though it will likely be really nice.

Sure, I want to survive my constructs and mana messing with my body, but I can aim far higher. I like to partially think of it like an Achievement. If the system sees the fucked up things I do during the body upgrade, if I complete my Absolute Candidate quest on my own, Ruby says my third trait at level 400 will be really something else, not even mentioning what it will do to the Primary class upgrade at 450.

Plus, there is my main intention, to keep my body and constitution weaker so my more powerful active skills can make bigger changes to it, which will, in the end, make them stronger. Of course, it will be nowhere close to what [Immortality] did to Kindness, but I work with that in mind.

So once again, I need to channel my inner coward and be patient a little longer. Lily says it best: We are meant to live hundreds of years now, so what is wrong with planning things across years instead of rushing to have everything done in a few weeks?

It is hard to look at it that way, it truly is, but I think it is part of me getting used to the idea that I am not simply human anymore.

***

I spar with Izzy multiple times, noticing how her combat capabilities have improved. Her Fragment also proves itself to be especially dangerous. I can make my thermal energy hotter than what she and Noodle can do with their flames, but that is only because of my output. If we spend the same amount of energy to create the flame, hers is more dangerous.

That brings me again to wondering if it is just the Fragment of the Eternal Fire being that powerful, or if thermal energy is not exactly a damage type. It is not like my golden flames are weak, so it is hard to say. Maybe there is a level above the golden flames I currently use, and I just did not compress them enough because I mostly use them for healing.

Another thing to experiment with.

It is also fun to watch Min-Jae and Maya spar. While Maya uses [Armament] from her Mana Archive, Min-Jae tears chunks of earth and trees to form a golem-like construct around himself, then uses his [Telekinesis] to move it. I see it more like training and messing around rather than a real combat strategy he would rely on often.

I have noticed it a bit, but there are not many attendees who use huge armors or things similar to them, like us, or like the lumorans, such as Champion Feroy and his disciples on the seventh floor.

I think it is a part of us influenced by Earth’s media, and me, Tess, Maya, and Min-Jae have a really fun conversation about that. In a way, it is safe to assume that other planets might also have certain uses of their abilities that are heavily influenced by their own cultures. Just like we are with mechas, kaiju, and other sorts of stuff.

***

On the last day of my week here, I get new healing marks from Lily, including the newer ones that should remove anti-healing effects. They carry bits of [Disintegration], so they feel a bit dangerous on my skin, but I hope she knows what she is doing.

Surprisingly, she asks for one of my eyes for an experiment she is working on, something about traits. So I do that, and she carefully stores it inside a bottle filled with some liquid. It is a bit creepy to see my gray eye with a faint golden circle around the pupil floating in there, but I have seen worse things.

We plan out our further schedule and the meeting in the Megacity, as they should enter the fourth floor sometime after the Humility event I will participate in.

And so the ninth floor remains the most ignored floor of all.

A part of me wonders if people are expected to start seriously dealing with Beyond around the ninth tutorial floor, and its one-year length is set on purpose to allow for that.

Or maybe it is a trap for people who clear Hell difficulty more slowly, locking them in here for so long and leaving them little time for the rest.

The system is an asshole, and so are the Rulers, so I think it is the second option.

After the goodbyes, I use a Beyond stay token and disappear, finding myself back in the guild lounge of the Primordial Knights. I take a deep breath and look around.

Something shifts near my feet, sudden and quiet, and my whole body snaps back before I can think. I just stare at the spot, caught in that sharp, stunned moment, “What the fuck!”

There is a certain little vicious jerk who sits on his butt and barks at me.

(Food!)