Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 6) - Chapter 50 - Terrible Options

Xavier appeared on the hundred-and-twenty-first floor of the Tower of Champions.

The sun blared down at him. He shaded his eyes, blinking. No, four suns blared down at him. The air was wavy with heat. The ground beneath him felt brittle and hot.

He lowered his hand, narrowed his eyes, and gazed up at those four suns. His eyes were more than strong enough to handle the level of brightness, he’d simply been surprised, taking a moment to adjust.

The sky was empty of clouds, but it wasn’t empty of everything. Giant, flaming birds flew through the air in a V formation. They weren’t heading toward him, but instead toward a blazing city in the distance.

Is everything burning in this place?

Xavier glanced around. He stood on a long expanse of cracked earth. A desert of nothing. A land that looked like it had been parched when the Earth was still young and hadn’t had a drop of water since. A heavy, hot wind blew from the mountains in the north. The wind felt unnatural. Course on his skin. It made the flaming birds fly faster toward the city, as though summoned to push them along.

When no notification was forthcoming, Xavier took a step forward.

Welcome, Champion, to the 121st Floor!

The Bright City of Aethisa is under siege by the Phoenix Empire.

The Archbishop of Aethisa summoned a Champion to fight for their cause. The Phoenix Empire’s spies detected this summoning. They were not able to intercept it. Instead, they forced a summoning of their own.

As two opposing forces have summoned you here, you must choose between them.

1.      Help defend the Bright City of Aethisa.

The Bright City of Aethisa have been terrorised by the oppressive Phoenix Empire for a thousand years. The Phoenix Empire lays siege, the Bright City defends, many die on both sides.

The war never ends.

Protect the Bright City from its foe so its populace can one day grow strong enough to take the fight to the heart of their enemy, instead of constantly remaining on the defensive, their warriors depleted after every siege.

2.     Assist the Phoenix Empire in their siege.

The Phoenix Empire have sought revenge upon their darkest enemy for a thousand years. The residents of the Bright City capture the Phoenix Empire’s young to power their city’s defences and have been doing so for millennia.

Assist the Phoenix Empire in finally vanquishing their evil foe.

Choose, Champion, who you will fight for. Your decision will tip the balance on this world forever.

Xavier sighed.

Well neither of those options sounds good.

As he’d read the first option, he’d figured that would be the one he would choose. They were defenders after all. He felt a certain kinship to that, having defended Earth from invading forces.

Then he read the bit about the Bright City capturing their enemy’s young…

God, these are both terrible options.

Xavier tapped his foot on the ground as he thought about his decision. Using his Farscope ability, he spotted the door to the Staging Room behind him about a hundred feet. It was on the surface of the cracked desert floor and made from metal, with a single loop to pull like a trap door.

There was no Safe Zone. Safe Zones were becoming less and less common through the different floors, not that he needed one. But it was good to know he could leave this floor whenever he wished.

Considering the Bright City of Aethisa and the Phoenix Empire both sounded terrible, he wasn’t exactly worried about innocents—perhaps that wasn’t how he should view things here, but this wasn’t his war, after all.

It reminded him of one of the early floors, the one he’d been able to choose between the human army and the elven army. He’d killed indiscriminately on that floor.

Then he’d tortured that beast at the end of it to test out his Spirit Break spell…

Xavier took a breath, then chose to protect the Bright City of Aethisa. He stepped forward once, then leapt into the air and spread his wings wide. He caught the same stream of wind that pushed the giant, flaming birds toward the city.

As he flew, he cast Time Alteration. He kept the time dilation field around him, carving his way through the air. The wind stopped. The flaming birds froze in the distance, not yet having reached the city.

He soared toward them, the only sound his breath and the beating of his wings and heart.

Expanding the time dilation field, Xavier brought the flaming birds—which, on closer inspection looked more humanoid than he’d imagined—into the barrier.

They were skinner than most humanoids, but they had arms and wings. Their arms were kept close to those wings, unseen from a distance. Their hands and feet ended in vicious talons, making them look far more bestial than most races.

But they were nothing like dragonkin.

Xavier scanned them. Their race was called Phoexian. Clearly having something to do with the myth of the phoenix. They didn’t appear to be beasts that evolved to become humanoid, like some tend to, and that was confirmed by the description—they were Denizens of the System, sapient when the System had come.

The Phoexians were D Grade, ranging between Level 280 and Level 295. A step up from the usual beast packs from the previous floors. Though there had been many beasts at a higher level on the hundredth floor, those beasts tended to fight alone, and for the truly powerful beasts back on that floor, large groups of Denizens were put together to fight them.

The rise in level was something positive to note. Eventually, the floors might even become a challenge for him again. The System hadn’t forced him to skip any more floors yet—he’d fully expected it to do so when he’d backtracked and “caught up” to all the floors he’d missed.

Part of him had been hoping he would be propelled forward to the two-hundredth or three-hundredth floor, just to see what it would be like…

Soon the tower floors will be filled with C Grades at the rate I’m clearing them.

He looked forward to that day.

The Phoexians cawed violently as they spotted him. He’d appeared directly in front of them, as though he’d teleported there. The bird creatures instantly saw him as an enemy. The System must have tagged him as such.

There were thirty of them, and in the distance, Xavier spotted more flights, frozen in time, heading toward the Bright City. A few flights had already made it to the city—a couple of the Phoexians were lying dead near the front of the city’s burning walls, while others were terrorizing the defenders on the walls.

Up close, Xavier felt the heat waft of their flaming wings.

He smiled as they came at him. He imagined most Champions didn’t take on entire flights like this but rather headed to support the defenders in the city.

Thirty high-level D Grades would be a lot of enemies to take on for the average Champion on this floor—even the average party of Champions.

Then again, the tower had been ramping up to this level of conflict for a while now.

Xavier didn’t fight back right away. Instead, he waited. These beasts could hurt him, but it would take a lot of damage from them to become a threat.

He needed to see what spells they were capable of before he frightened them off or accidentally killed every single one of them.

He knew none of the spells that these beasts would provide would be the type of spells Adranial’s mother, Rowalla, had informed him would help in the fight against the World Destroyer, but his Recursive Analysis spell was still a measly Rank 1.

I need to change that, fast.

It would be a while before he could learn enemy spells and make them permanent.

The first Phoexian attacked him with talon and teeth, no sign of a spell being cast at all. From the lack of fear wafting from these creatures, it was clear they didn’t see him as a threat.

When they scanned him, they saw a D Grade at a lower level than themselves.

Xavier dodged the strike with ease, his leathery black wings moving him through the air far more gracefully than Phoexians could manage. Their flight felt mechanical and slow compared to his own.

Anger flashed in the eyes of his attacker. More Phoexians reached him, screeching masses of talons and fangs. Spears appeared, summoned from Storage Rings, in some of their hands. Spears they thrust toward his chest, his thighs, his head, his neck.

Xavier dodged every one of the strikes with fluid movements born of thousands of hours of practice.

Cast a damned spell, you bastard birds.

He figured his dodging about would goad them into casting something, but for whatever reason they were holding off. Anger flashed in more than one set of Phoexians eyes now, but not even a hint of fear was forthcoming.

A voice entered Xavier’s mind. The Lost Bone of a Dead God.

They hold back, preserving their spells for the siege. You must provoke them. Kill one.

Xavier usually found it frustrating or distracting when the soul bound weapon spoke to him in the middle of combat, but the suggestion made sense to him—it was a conclusion he’d felt himself coming to on his own but hadn’t quite reached.

With his right hand, Xavier grabbed the neck of one attacker and closed his fingers around it like a vice. His superior strength was easily able to crush the Phoexian’s windpipe, making it impossible for them to breathe.

He wrenched the thing’s neck with a violent snap. A kill notification appeared.

The atmosphere within the time dilation field turned. What the Phoexians thought was a nuisance suddenly became a deadly threat. Their angry screeches shifted to that of fear. But they did not turn and flee. Perhaps they knew they were confined by a time dilation field, even though they would be too weak to perceive it. Or perhaps these birds were braver than he’d given them credit for.

That fear made them attack him like caged animals with all the ferocity they could muster.

The first spell was cast.

Xavier cast a spell in return. Recursive Analysis. The description told him that the spell pushed energy into the air so that it could catch an enemy spell when it was cast, but it didn’t explain how that worked.

If the enemy’s spell was caught, did that mean it wouldn’t hit him? If that was the case, didn’t that lend the spell defensive capabilities?

Was there a chance Recursive Analysis could fail if he tried to capture a spell that was too powerful? He had to believe that would be the case, so he needed to be careful if he ever used it on an enemy that was much more powerful than himself—it might not have the desired effect…

He imagined trying to “catch” the spell the Demon of the Depths had cast. That massively powerful beam of energy it had shot at him.

Could he have negated that spell entirely?

He shook himself out of his reverie as the spell was cast. Splitting his mind, he tasked several parts of him with examining how the spell worked.

Energy flooded out of his Intelligence Core and entered the air. He could see the tendrils of energy if he focused hard enough. He watched as that energy created some sort of net. It was perfectly formed, the geometric shapes looked like they’d been stencils onto the air.

No. They weren’t simply geometric shapes.

His attention burned as he examined those shapes, and how they were made.

They were made from runes. The shapes were perfectly formed as he’d first seen, but the lines looked almost faint or slightly disjointed—because they comprised of runes. The same runes he’d been learning how to use.

The runes had been drawn into the very air by… By his Intelligence Energy?

How in the Greater Universe did his Rank 1 spell manage to do something so damned complex?

The spell heading toward him looked like a fire spell. Xavier wasn’t surprised, considering the attackers—their wings were still aflame.

This wasn’t a basic Fireball spell. This was a stream of fire, like it was coming from a flamethrower. It shot toward him, sizzling the air on its way.

Xavier held his ground—or rather, he hovered in midair, not moving from his spot. Intently, he watched at the spell moved through the net of Intelligence Energy.

Something was caught. Something he could see.

Xavier, thinking fast, dropped into the meditative state that allowed him to better sense the runes and their connection to the Greater Universe—the way they gained power.

He couldn’t feel any connections active, despite all the runes he was seeing floating around the air.

What the hell am I seeing?

That net caught the spell—but it didn’t stop the spell. Some part of the fire spell was left behind in the net. It looked like raw energy, at first glance.

Closer inspection showed it wasn’t simply raw energy. There were shapes in that energy. Similar to the shapes he saw in the net itself.

The stream of fire continued through the net and slammed into Xavier’s chest. He could have gotten out of the way, and despite how much of his focus was on the energy and the runes he could see that energy depicting in the air, he’d still had the presence of mind to contemplate dodging.

He didn’t care to.

The stream of fire didn’t hurt him. Not much, at least. It was like skimming your hand across the top of a candleflame—nothing more dangerous than that.

The discrepancy between this creature’s power and Xavier’s toughness was just too high. Besides, dragonkin didn’t tend to be weak to fire damage.

A notification popped up as the stream of fire slammed into his chest.

Recursive Analysis is attempting to capture the spell Fire Stream.

Fire Stream is a Rank 120 spell.

Recursive Analysis is a Rank 1 spell.

The rank discrepancy will affect the efficacy of the learnt spell.

…

Recursive Analysis has succeeded!

You have temporarily acquired Fire Stream with an effective rank of 60.