Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 6) - Chapter 64 - Defenders

Xavier soon got into a rhythm with the tower floors again.

His approach to them wasn’t altogether different to what it had been before. He still spent as little time on each floor as he could manage, quickly getting the lay of the land before moving on—with the exception of ranking up Recursive Analysis, as he wanted to get it to Rank 150.

There were other spells he could have tried to rank up, but for those his time would be better spent doing that when he was facing more powerful enemies. The enemies he encountered on the tower floors still weren’t giving him a challenge, though they were steadily increasing in power with each floor he completed.

It wouldn’t be long before he was facing C Grades on the floors—and not by going out of his way to do so, like back on the hundredth floor. Even then, low-level C Grades weren’t exactly a match for him. He also needed to kill a hell of a lot of them to gain enough Mastery Points to push him forward.

Still, he couldn’t discount that opportunity from happening. As frustrated as he was that he’d been pulled back into the tower before he was ready to return, the tower was what had brought him his strength in the first place, especially when he did something unexpected on one of the floors.

When Xavier first stepped onto a floor, he would instantly cast Time Alteration and take everything in. Sometimes a notification would describe what he needed to do, sometimes his mission was clear. His Farscope ability stretched quite far these days. Often, it encompassed the entirety of the floor—or, at least, the part of the floor that was relevant to him.

Each floor was inside a whole different universe, after all.

Once he’d gotten a lay of the land and his objective, he would push out his time dilation field to the limit of his Farscope ability. With his mind split in many, many parts, he could observe each of those enemies as they cast spells.

Then, Xavier would move amongst them. The enemies tended to instantly be hostile toward him. They always seemed to know what he was there for. He didn’t need to do much more than appear near them for them to attack.

Sometimes, however, he would need to provoke them.

Through this process, Xavier became adept at identifying different spells. Not just from what they did, but from how their energies in the air felt. That was something new. Something he might not have looked for if not for Recursive Analysis’s net catching energies when it was cast. Soon, reading those energies became something instinctual. The insights he got from them seemingly coming from nowhere the more he examined them.

Examining those energies was an easy thing. Often, his mind simply worked fast enough to observe them in the air well before the spell itself even manifested—even if that time was merely a fraction of a second. If he wished to have more time examining a spell’s energies, all he would need to do was snap his time dilation field around only himself, freezing the Denizen and energies in place outside of it.

The more adept at it he become, the less he needed to resort to altering his time dilation field.

From the energies that emanated from a Denizen alone when a spell was cast, Xavier could tell if it was a fire spell, a wind spell, a healing spell, a tanking spell—he had most of the major categories covered quite quickly.

Not only that—he could generally tell what the spell targeted, or where its area of effect might be.

When he tried to self-reflect and identify how he knew which spell was which, or how these other insights came about, he always came up short. Whatever mechanism that worked within himself to do this wasn’t something he could identify. While that rankled him, he ultimately let it go.

The important thing was that it worked, and he could improve upon it.

Identifying spell types and intentions this way wasn’t something he’d even intended to develop. Once he’d realised he could do it, however, he’d instantly known it would be useful for far more than finding spells to learn via Recursive Analysis.

It would help him in a fight. It would help him know what his enemy was about to do. When it came to fighting more powerful enemies, Xavier knew things would happen far, far more quickly. He wouldn’t be able to identify things as easily as he did against weaker foes. He probably wouldn’t even be able to consciously know what was about to happen, think on it, then act in response.

But the value in it was clear, and Xavier threw himself into this new ability.

If he mastered this ability against weaker foes and let it become ingrained, and allowed his reactions to become habits, when it came to a true fight, he wouldn’t need time to think.

But in all of the identifying of different spells and the reading of energies, Xavier struggled to come across a spell that he actually wanted—or needed—to learn. One that he could actually justify putting in his arsenal.

He did take the opportunity to rank up Recursive Analysis on his way through the floors. With each rank it gained, the cooldown became lower and lower, and he found it wasn’t slowing him down too much whenever he altered the flow of time within his time dilation field to refresh that cooldown.

Xavier didn’t gain every rank he needed on the first floor he stepped into. Instead, he used the spell on different floors, gaining a few ranks on each of them so that he could experience a wider variety of spells.

He got to play around with a lot of spells. Physical combat and defensive spells, yet more—and more varied—elemental spells. Shadow spells and even illusion spells.

He’d almost went for an illusion spell. One of the ones he’d learnt allowed him to clone himself, which made the inner child in him giddy. He’d never been a huge anime fan compared to some he’d known growing up, or even at university—some students in his writing classes never seemed to shut up about it. But one show he remembered watching religiously was Naruto. Kage Bunshin no Justsu—the shadow clone technique the main character used—had always fascinated him. Naruto had been able to create shadow clones of himself that helped him distract and fight his opponents.

But the illusion spell Xavier learnt wasn’t animate in any way. It would help in misdirection, and he could definitely see the merit in taking it on—illusion had a lot of potential—but that wasn’t a path Xavier wanted to pursue at this time. He couldn’t see how it would help him against the World Destroyer.

So, he’d left it behind.

By the time he’d gone through another twenty floor of the Tower of Champions, Recursive Analysis had hit Rank 150, and he barely even needed to think about identifying a spell’s energies—it was simply a habit, something he did whether he thought to or not.

While on these floors, it wasn’t only spells he looked for. He also looked for opportunities. Times when he could do something different. Times when he could go outside the norm and achieve something unique, like he had in the past.

These times, however, felt few and far between.

Still, he started to look more diligently. Each floor could hold an opportunity for greatness that he didn’t want to miss out on. One way he did this was by using his Willpower Infusion spell on one of the enemies he encountered. In the past, when he’d first been using the spell, he hadn’t been able to use it as an interrogation technique. He could control an enemy’s body, make them cast spells, but he couldn’t simply ask them questions.

Nowadays, that was a different story.

He used that spell to help learn more about the area he found himself in. About the world the floor inhabited. About the power structures outside of the current conflict.

This wasn’t always an option. Sometimes he fought beasts that had no way of actually communicating with him. Not directly, at least. He could probe their memories, but he’d quickly found it was one thing to look at another being’s memories, and a whole different thing actually navigating and understanding them.

There had been three floors in roughly thirty where he found opportunities he could pursue. For each of those floors, he’d managed to gain a unique title. He’d been careful of which opportunities he would pursue. There had been times when he could have gone against the grain of the System and enforced a peace—each time, he had chosen not to.

He didn’t want the System changing a floor’s parameters again.

Xavier was on one such floor now—the fourth opportunity he wanted to pursue. And there wasn’t just an opportunity to do something unique here. There was also an opportunity to gain a spell, one he thought might help him fight the World Destroyer.

The floor was much like the floor with the Endless Horde. A castle to defend, waves and waves of enemies coming at it. There was a distinct difference, however. Where Queen Alastea’s castle had suffered waves that merely appeared endless, but actually would have one day ended, these waves had been going on for ten years.

The castle defences, too, were far superior to what Queen Alastea had. The people here were powerful for D Grades, almost at their peak. All of them were higher level than Xavier. They seemed easily able to defend against the armies on their way without his help.

When he first arrived on this floor—the one-hundred-and-fifty-fourth floor—he wondered why they even needed to summon Champions, seeing how well they had things in hand. The enemies made it atop their battlements, but they never made it beyond them. As he observed, he didn’t see the defenders take a single casualty.

The problem for the Eldaarn Kingdom was all they could do was defend. The D Grades Denizens that lined their walls were powerful, yes but they were constantly besieged.

And they couldn’t leave their walls.

For ten years, they’d been stuck here, endlessly defending against a stream of attackers that would never let up.

Each of them had a very unique class. A class that took Xavier a little while to understand. When he did understand it, he didn’t know why anyone would ever choose it. It was incredibly limiting.

The class was literally called Defender. At least, that was the type of class. There were actually five distinct classes that he’d noticed. Mage Defender, Healer Defender, Tank Defender, Spearmaster Defender, and Bowmaster Defender.

The Denizens were so… Uniform. Each of the five different classes wielded the same exact spells, in the same exact way. The first time he’d been on the floor he’d simply watched them for a while, examining the different energies in their spells, identifying what they did.

The different classes worked in complete harmony. There wasn’t a single gap in their line. To his eyes, he could easily see how they’d defended against their enemies for ten solid years. And, as the castle had access to a System Shop, they didn’t need to leave. They could sell what they gained from killing the attackers to replenish supplies for the entire population.

Xavier was baffled by many things about this floor. For one, this seemed like the perfect storm for gaining levels. For gaining power. It didn’t seem as though the enemy attackers were steadily gaining in strength as their waves slammed into the walls—not like with the Endless Horde.

So, if these people could constantly defend, constantly kill enemies they remained relatively static in their power level, why hadn’t they yet gained the upper hand? Why hadn’t they taken the fight to the enemy?

It was when he’d spoken to their leader, King Elric, atop the castle’s broad battlements that he’d found his answers.

Inside a time dilation field, he’d spoken to the man.

The king was equally baffled by Xavier’s question. “You have never heard of the Defender line of classes?” The large man sighed. He was human, broad of shoulder, with a thick chest, arms, and legs that were evident through his full-plate—all of the Defenders were human. He was a Tank Defender. Despite being their king, he wasn’t a higher level than anyone else along the wall. His armour matched that of the other Tank Defenders. There didn’t seem to be anything to distinguish him from the other Denizens here at all.

“No,” Xavier replied. “I haven’t.”

Elric grunted. He glanced outside the time dilation field’s barrier. He was antsy, standing there. Couldn’t keep still. Like the other Tank Defenders, he wielded a short sword and a large shield. Xavier had seen them link those shields together, creating a shield wall that in turn created a powerful forcefield, combining the strength of each of the different Denizens into one.

The man gestured with his blade—which he hadn’t sheathed—at the frozen defenders and enemies. “You’re sure this will hold?”

Xavier smiled. “I’m sure.”

The man sighed. He didn’t relax. His attention was still everywhere, seemingly never meeting Xavier in the eye.

I guess that comes with constantly being at war for ten straight years.

Xavier could understand feeling that way. It wasn’t until he’d learnt Time Alteration that he’d eventually started to teach himself how to relax.

“The Defender line of classes draws strength from two main spells. These are passive spells. Ones we can cast once every twenty-four hours. That is how long they last, too—regardless of rank.” Elric’s grip on his short sword was constantly tightening and loosening, his forehead creasing and smoothing, eyes darting left and right.

“The first of these spells is location based. When a Denizen becomes a Defender, if their allegiance has not already been pledged to a location, they must do that to receive the class. As you can see, the allegiance of every Defender here is to The Eldaarn Kingdom.” He frowned, then. “The Eldaarn Kingdom was once much larger than this. There was a time when we spread across this entire planet—a time when I thought to expand to another.” He shook his head. “That was a mistake. That was what caused…” He waves his sword lazily, a look of despair briefly flitting onto his face. “Everything.”

Xavier held his opinion, waiting for the man to keep speaking. If he took what the man said at face value, it sounded as though they’d invaded another world, one more powerful than their own, and their current predicament was because of that.

He’d learnt things were not always black and white, however.

While Xavier had become more and more jaded as he went through the different floors and experienced so much, there was still a part of him that was interested in every place he ventured. A part that wanted to explore. A part that wanted to hear the stories of the worlds he visited.

And so, he was eager to hear what the man said next. The king, however, had gone quiet. It was the first time he’d seen the man contemplative. The first time he’d seen the man still.

“What caused everything?” Xavier prompted.