Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 6) - Chapter 61 - It’s Not Just the Universe I Need to Save

You have completed this floor faster than any other Champion before you. However, as the parameters of the floor were changed, and the challenge you completed was different to that of other Champions in your universe, you will not be given the top spot in the leaderboard.

Xavier sat on the floor of the Staging Room, going through the notifications he’d received from completing the one-hundred-and-twenty-first floor of the Tower of Champions. He seethed a little as he read the description.

Yet again, it felt like the System was cheating him.

It was also talking directly to him. The notification was unusual. It wasn’t for a title, or a quest, or anything more but explaining why he hadn’t gained a title. He was aware that the System could have simply withheld any notification about it completely.

Well, that’s a bit strange…

There were more notifications. He gained the normal title for the floor along with the solo clear and the first clear for his world. He was shaking his head, still frustrated, when he came near the end of the notifications.

Then he read the final one.

The parameters for the two-hundred-and-twenty-first floor of the tower have changed. The Tower of Champions floors, since its inception, have always remained static.

The new parameters for the two-hundred-and-twenty-first floor are deemed too difficult for the average Champion reaching this stage in the tower.

Champions reaching this floor will be given a choice.

They can choose to complete the floor as it has always been, or they can choose to complete the floor under the new parameters.

Fow the new parameters, a new leaderboard has been created.

Xavier raised an eyebrow. Well, that was unexpected. He continued reading, finding that he had indeed unlocked the top-spot title for this floor—it just wasn’t on the normal leaderboard.

He frowned, wondering about the implications. If another Champion came to this floor and saw there were two options when there had only ever been one, plenty of Denizens out there wouldn’t choose the second option. They would go with what they knew.

But there would be countless others who’d want to experience this new challenge. Their curiosity would be inflamed. He knew, because he’d be one of them, if given the choice.

And because of that, they would face a challenge that was beyond them.

The changed parameters had meant Xavier could no longer leave the floor through the Staging Room door. If the same happened to the Champions who chose this challenge in the future…

God, how many people are going to die on this floor, who would have otherwise been able to complete it?

“Will there be a warning?” Xavier said aloud, addressing the question to the System. “Will you warn them that the challenge is a thousand times harder than normal?”

It had been a long time since Xavier had tried to ask a question of the System like this. It never worked. This time was no exception.

He’d never meant for things to change so drastically…

Xavier ran a hand through his hair. This wasn’t something he could fix, but perhaps it was something he could warn others about.

Xavier: [Adranial, are you there?]

Adranial: [I’m in the tavern. What is it?]

Xavier: [Uh, well, I’ve just changed a tower floor.]

Adranial: [What? What do you mean, changed a floor?]

Xavier started to explain what he’d done, but he wasn’t able to. Every time he tried to think the words through the Communication Stone, it was like his mind slammed into a massive wall. A block. One he wasn’t about to circumvent. He was baffled for only a fraction of a second, then he felt like a fool.

The System had restrictions when it came to sharing information about tower floors. It always had. Information had to be shared orally, through speech alone. It was one of the many, many reasons newly integrated worlds had such a disadvantage, and why Adranial and her party needed a physical presence in the tavern to provide information on the tower floors to Earth’s Champions in the first place.

Talking through a Communication Stone did not count as oral communication to the System.

Xavier could go down to the tavern and explain everything in person, but what would be the point? She wouldn’t be able to communicate it to her ancestor, like he’d hoped.

He dipped his chin, put his head in his hands, and released a breath. That rage he’d been feeling toward the System, for all the conflict it caused, had been abating. Right now, however, it was reinflamed. He couldn’t understand why the System would do something like this.

“I just wanted to save a few people, now trillions of Champions around the universe are going to step into a challenge that’s tantamount to suicide. They’re all... They’re all going to die.”

Deep breaths, and slowly the rage cooled. It didn’t disappear. It remained within him. A cold rage, instead of a hot one.

Xavier didn’t have a moral code. Nothing specific, anyway. Bones had been right about that. But this? This was wrong. He could feel that, deep down. The System didn’t have to do this. Xavier may have forced an error on that floor, but this didn’t need to be the solution.

If the Systems acted in ways that were supposed to make Denizens stronger, how could this be one of those ways?

For a long moment, Xavier sat there, the cold rage like a weight heavy inside his chest. It wasn’t only rage he felt—there was guilt, too. But the guilt wasn’t logical. This wasn’t his fault. All actions have consequences, but how could he ever have anticipated this?

Thoughts flickered through his mind.

The System had been created with a purpose. An admirable one. A purpose Xavier now shared, one he would do anything to complete.

But the System didn’t care about the individuals in the universes it shaped. It didn’t care about trillions upon trillions of deaths this action would cause.

It cared about one thing—whatever actions would one day save the universe.

Xavier’s mind worked on the problem. The System’s decision to do this, to his mind, felt completely arbitrary. But what if it wasn’t? What if there actually was—from the perspective of the System—a “good” reason for what it had done?

The Voice of the System had been sent to Xavier, to tell him that one day he might be its Weapon. That one day he might save the universe. This universe had been around for billions of years, and while others had been watched by the System, what if he was the only one who had ever been chosen in this way? At least in his universe.

Xavier tried to look at this objectively. The System, he thought, was akin to a machine. As far as he could tell, it lacked any emotion one might attribute to humans.

Or other races… Like dragonkin. His wings fluttered at his back. I’m not technically human anymore, after all.

If the System had chosen him for this, and this universe was but one of an infinite number it governed, all tests, all “simulations” trying to achieve the exact same end, did that mean it was betting everything on Xavier?

It was an incredibly arrogant thought, but Xavier discarded worries about that, and followed its track, seeing where it would lead.

Though the System hadn’t communicated any reasons for its actions—except for when it had sent him forward to the hundredth floor of the tower—it was clear it actively responded to what Xavier did. It had told the bartender of Hunter’s Home on the hundredth floor, Felicia, to push him toward harder and harder challenges.

Not that he wouldn’t have done that himself. But still, it was a pertinent data point.

The System also, Xavier was 99.99 percent sure, had somehow influenced the World Destroyer into coming to the Silver River sector earlier than it should have—that was reflected in Empress Larona’s shifting visions.

Because it wants me to fight it. Because it wants to challenge me, force me into becoming stronger.

Then, when Xavier was being carried through the Hell Moon Areildon by Yarien’s party, hoarding as many titles as he could, it pulled him back to the tower two whole months earlier than his deadline and allowed him to go back through the floors it had made him previously skip.

Xavier believed it had pulled him back early because it didn’t want him to receive such help. That it saw him walking down a path that was too easy and stopped him before he could go any further.

And the reason it had allowed him to go through the skipped floors was because it wanted him to see something.

It wanted me to see what was happening on the eightieth floor…

He blinked.

It didn’t just have me complete the floors in the usual order because it needed me to be strong enough to at least observe the fight above Earth. If I hadn’t jumped forward to the hundredth floor and ultimately become as strong as I am now, or then encountered the Empress Larona in my own universe, I never would have been able to do what I did on that floor…

Xavier stood from the ground and stretched. He had several messages through the linked Communication Stones he shared with Adranial. She was sounding increasingly worried since he’d abruptly stopped responding.

Rather than address her concerns now, Xavier cast Time Alteration. He didn’t want an ounce of thought to be focused somewhere else. He was onto something; he didn’t want to lose it.

From his Storage Ring, he brought forth a comfortable armchair and sunk into it. Then he summoned a mug of steaming coffee, sipping thoughtfully. The smell of the coffee, the warmth radiating into his fingers as he wrapped them around the ceramic, and the taste on his tongue had a habitual calming effect, allowing his thoughts to come with more ease.

The System is playing the craziest, most elaborate, most complicated game of chess ever. It’s thinking near infinite moves ahead. It isn’t just sitting back and watching what happens. Maybe one day it did that, when it had first been created, but if that was once true, it isn’t anymore.

If Xavier assumed he was correct about where the System’s influence had led him, he had to assume this action was intended to lead him somewhere too.

He sipped the coffee. Released a breath. Gently closed his eyes.

Xavier had forced peace between two factions on that world. He knew the System wanted conflict. Even the leaders of those factions told him such a thing was blasphemy. They’d decided to both attack him when they’d already seen evidence of how powerful he was, rather than make peace.

He tilted his head to the side.

Did the System think he was getting distracted? Think he was walking down the wrong path? Trying to save, when he needed to be gathering spells? Wiping the people out, because that was the path it had set before him? That was the path to power?

Does the System worry I’ll focus on trying to make peace instead of focusing on becoming stronger, and that that will stunt my development?

Deep lines furrowed Xavier’s brow. He eyed the Staging Room’s ceiling.

Every thought he’d followed, every line of logic he’d traced, felt right to him. Following his instincts on things like this was one of the reasons he’d gotten this far. That cold rage hadn’t disappeared as his thoughts had swirled on this matter. It remained, growing, flowing from his chest and through his veins like ice.

There was a part of him that wondered about free will versus determinism. With the System guiding his actions so actively, were his accomplishments even his? He didn’t wonder about that for long, however. He was sure countless Xaviers had died in his place, trying to perform the same actions. He’d seen them himself, whenever he summoned the Spirit of Time. He was sure the multiverse was littered with corpses that looked just like him.

No, whether the System pushed him toward something or not, it was him doing all this. It was him becoming stronger. Him who made his decisions, even if those decisions were sometimes limited because of the position he’d been put into. That wasn’t what made him so angry.

What made him so angry was that the System was wrong. It wanted to stop him from saving people, and it had made that clear. It had been right about a lot of things. Xavier couldn’t deny that. Being put onto the hundredth floor had been a boon—because he’d been able to survive it and thrive there. Because he’d been up to the challenge.

But this was taking things too far. This was playing with people’s lives just to steer him a specific way.

A new goal came to Xavier, then. A goal that seemed just as impossible as the ultimate goal he already wanted to achieve—maybe even more so.

Xavier didn’t know if it would steer him off the path to saving the universe, but he couldn’t help but feel this was right.

It’s not just the universe I need to save. I need to take down the System.

He wasn’t sure which would come first.