Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 2) - Chapter 10 - Wave One Thousand

“Wave one thousand,” Adviser Kalren said. The man sat at a small table on the battlements, one that had been brought up from the inn weeks ago. He held a quill in his hand, poised over a long scroll. It was an odd sight, like seeing an accountant working next to a battlefield.

“What?” Xavier asked, sure he couldn’t have heard that right. “Wave… that’s the thousandth wave?”

Kalren pointed toward a number on the left-hand side of the scroll, hovering his quill’s nib just above it. “You have been here for six weeks. Almost forty-three days. The waves have come hourly without ceasing.” He nodded curtly. “Yes. This next wave is wave one thousand.”

Xavier sighed. He was sitting on the parapet, his legs dangling over the side. “Feels more like a million,” he muttered. But he couldn’t help but smile at the knowledge.

Six weeks.

They’d spent longer here than they had back in the Tower of Champions proper. He knew sometimes it could take upwards of a week, even two, for denizens to clear each of the first ten floors, but he’d never expected to spend so long on one.

Xavier still felt the monotony. The incessant grind of the floor. Each of the waves became successively more difficult while at the same time what he gained from them diminished. Though he was fortunate he hadn’t needed to deal with any enemies of a higher Grade than his own yet.

After so long at it, he’d began to find a rhythm. The pain in his head from lack of sleep was still there, but he was far better able to deal with it now. The pain hadn’t lessened—if anything, it worsened—but his tolerance had improved tremendously.

When he’d spoken to Adviser Kalren about this, the man had said he’d heard Denizens of higher grades didn’t need sleep. That they could go without for hundreds of years, if they needed to.

Xavier wondered if reaching E Grade would take the pain away.

As time had passed and Xavier had taken down progressively more waves of the Endless Horde, he’d come across ever more limitations. The Mastery Points he received were the first thing that became limited, something he’d simply had to accept. This floor of the Tower of Champions, these waves… they hadn’t been chosen with someone like him in mind.

The other limitations felt more severe.

He’d been progressively increasing the ranks of his spells and skills while fighting the waves of the Endless Horde, repeating the same tactics over and over until he moved onto different ones to advance different abilities.

Some waves, he focused entirely upon Heavy Telekinesis. His skill with the spell had grown tremendously. It lacked the precision another path of telekinesis would have given him, but the more focus he’d given the spell, the more versatile he’d been able to make it.

It had been Adviser Kalren’s prompting that had made him push the ability further. Initially, while Xavier had been fighting goblins back on Earth and clearing the first few Tower of Champions floors, he’d focused purely on brute force with the spell’s application, as that was its highlighted strength.

Now, after hours and hours, days and days, and many waves, Xavier could do far more than simply fling an enemy into a wall, floor or ceiling. He couldn’t levitate a sword and launch it at someone—such applied control was too precise—but he could levitate his enemy and crush their bones where they hovered in the air.

The first time he’d broken through and managed such a feat, it looked like the beast he’d used the spell on had been put into a car crusher.

First, he could do that with only a single enemy. At the time it hadn’t seemed like a terribly useful application of the spell. He’d been focusing so hard on his Soul Strike spell—which was dramatically more effective, especially in such a large scale battle—but as he progressed the Heavy Telekinesis spell, he was able to crush multiple enemies at once. He could even pick up enemies—or allies—and move them in the air without simply giving them a heavy push. Such an application wasn’t much use to him right now, but he could see how it could come in handy in the future.

Besides, even though his soulkeeping threshold had expanded an incredible amount over the last few weeks, not every floor would be like this—with waves and waves of enemies for him to reap. Not every encounter outside of the tower would be like this either. He needed to prepare for situations where he was fighting without a full reserve of souls, and without any means of gaining any more.

As useful as all of his soul-based spells were, Xavier didn’t want to only be reliant on them. Especially with all the research that the others had been doing in the library. On the second week of their being there, Justin had brought a book up to the battlements. The book detailed an entire society of golems—constructs, much like Siobhan’s Divine Guardian, but of a more permanent nature.

It wasn’t entirely clear, but it seemed as though these constructs didn’t have souls.

Then there were armies of the undead. He had no idea if he could harvest undead souls, or if they even had any. And while he had his melee abilities—which he’d also been strengthening to a high degree—he wanted to be more versatile.

But that’s when he’d been hit by his limitations. Advancing his spells and skills, he’d ran straight into an immovable wall, unable to push any of them past the rank of 50. He’d been made aware of this limitation already. According to Kalren, while there appeared to be no limits to how many attributes an F Grade Denizen could possess, there were hard limits on how strong their skills and spells could become.

This had honestly taken Xavier by surprise. Mostly because if there were limits to how much he could rank up these things… he hadn’t expected to reach them so quickly. So when he told Kalren of trying to break past those limits, the man had looked at him as with a deeply furrowed brow.

“You, of all people, should not be surprised coming up against these barriers.” The man had stood from his small table then walked to the parapets. He rested a hand on the wall and motioned toward the Endless Horde with the other one. “Sometimes I wonder if you are truly aware of the position you are in. This situation… it is entirely unique. If you were a normal Denizen, one whom had entered the Tower of Champions at the proving age with prior knowledge of what you would face, but lacking the titles you have access to as a true Progenitor… you would be able to farm the different floors for levels, yes. But this?” He shook his head in slight disbelief, his gaze drifting over the ranks and ranks of soldiers and beasts. “This isn’t a once in a lifetime opportunity, Xavier. This isn’t even a once in a billion lifetimes opportunity. The Greater Universe is more vast than any of us can truly imagine, and though I would not wager my life on it, I would say that the position you are in is entirely unique to you. A normal Denizen would not be able to progress their skills and spells at the rate you have. The amount of Mastery Points they would receive from these enemies would be significantly higher. They would have reached level 100—or more—before being able to rank up that many spells and skills.”

Xavier thought on what the man had said once more as he surveyed the enemy. Entirely unique to you. That appeared to be true, but he couldn’t bet on it. Once again he recalled being visited upon by that presence that made him feel like an ant in the face of a supernova. Out of so many Denizens, could he truly be the first to get this far?

It boggled his mind trying to think about who else could have been in this position. All he knew was that he needed to keep going—needed to keep pushing.

But Adviser Kalren’s point was clear. Other Denizens simply wouldn’t have been able to gain as many ranks as him by his level—which had stalled out at level 60 and was now growing at a snail’s pace.

There were some skills he hadn’tbeen able to rank up quite as quickly, however. Assimilate Properties was one of them. He had tried a myriad of different, slightly crazy things to spur the skill into activating over the last few weeks. Kiralla had observed him, a single eyebrow raised high, as he’d dug gashes into his arm and rubbed rocks into the wounds.

“What in the Greater Universe are you doing?” Her level of bafflement had been amusing, so he hadn’t stopped there. He’d tried all sorts of different materials. It was a bit of a gruesome procedure. The skin healing over the rocks, trapping them inside. But he hadn’t been able to imagine another way of doing it.

Unfortunately, it simply hadn’t worked, even though when he’d originally gained the skill it had been when he’d broken through the 100-point Toughness threshold while arrowheads had been lodged into him. His skin had healed over them, and his body had tried to “purge” the impurities.

This was a process he hadn’t managed to repeat, which baffled him. It didn’t appear to work like other skills, and his party hadn’t been able to find information about it within the library. That didn’t mean there wasn’t information about it. No doubt it was hidden within one of the myriad of volumes in the tower library, but just because they’d been there for some time didn’t mean they’d had a chance to go through them all—even with their accelerated reading speed.

Identify was another skill that hadn’t ranked up as swiftly as others. Admittedly, Xavier hadn’t been using it as heavily as things like Physical and Mental Resistance. He was often too busy working on uncovering his secondary core or fighting waves to bother with using the skill.

Still, it had proven useful. Though speaking of limitations, Identify has its share. When he’d first used it, the skill had had a cooldown of ten minutes—which, incidentally, was the first time he’d encountered a skill with a cooldown. That was usually reserved for spells.

The skill could only give him extra information on enemies that were within a certain level limitation. It could only properly identify enemies with levels twice as high as the skill’s rank. So, if the skill was Rank 20, he could identify enemies at level 40.

Considering the level of the enemies he’d faced had progressed far faster than his Identify skill had, he’d never gotten a chance to use it on them, which meant he had to rank it up from Identifying items alone—a very lengthy process when the skill had such a long cooldown.

Still, he diligently identified each of the flagstones that made up the battlements walls—which were all sandstone—along with other items he could find that were of a low enough level to allow him to do so.

It wasn’t his favourite skill to advance.

Adviser Kalren cleared his throat, bringing out of his reverie. “You still have seventeen minutes before the next wave charges toward the walls. You best make good use of them.”

Xavier released a sigh. He settled down onto the cold flagstone floor of the battlements and closed his eyes. One thousand waves. When he’d discovered what this floor entailed, he hadn’t known how far he would get, only that he would go as far as he could. One thousand was definitely a good number. Enough to get the top spot?

He shoved those thoughts away and focused on his breath, looking inside himself and sinking into a deep meditation. Since he’d discovered his Spirit Core at level 10, and his Spirit attribute was now well over a 1,000, he’d assumed it would be far, far, easier to discover his secondary core.

But no matter how much he “searched inside” himself, using his now Rank 50 meditation skill, the discovery alluded him.

It was growing incredibly frustrating. There was supposed to be a core for each attribute within a Denizen, with different energies associated with them. A Spirit Core was everyone’s first discovery. He still found it difficult to imagine that there were five other cores within his body somewhere he simply couldn’t feel. Now he’d found and developed his Spirit Core, and the three skills associated with it, it was impossible to imagine not being able to feel it.

He’d told this to Kalren on several occasions. The man had only shrugged. “I was never blessed with the opportunity to advance beyond F Grade. I wish I could instruct you from more than the knowledge I have gained from books, but unfortunately I cannot.”

That was another thing that surprised Xavier. The fact this man had grown to his age without growing his level and Grade very high. The man possessed some sort of administrative, knowledge-based support class that helped him retain memories easier and teach others more easily, but his level could only grow based on the level of those he taught.

Right now, he was level 62. And it had taken his entire life to get to this point.

This world, even before Kiralla’s mother had been killed by the Endless Horde, had always been a weak one.

How did a world like this survive for so long? It felt like an insensitive question to ask, but Queen Alastea had provided him with an answer without his prompting.

This world was millions of years old and had been stripped completely of all its natural resources. Like many worlds in the sector, it was what was considered a “dead” world. The beasts upon this world did not thrive, for they had been decimated long ago. For a world to retain its strength, it needed to maintain a balance. When a strong entity ripped it off its resources, its beasts, materials—everything—it was rare it ever came back from it.

And so, such a world wasn’t sought after like Earth was, being a newly integrated world with resources ripe for the taking. If Alastea’s family had not gained the ire of the Endless Horde, it might have stood for many more centuries. Those lack of resources also helped explain how weak those in the world were.

Xavier breathed deeply. Even now, with Meditation at Rank 50, it was still difficult for him to quiet his thoughts. He let them drift away and followed the lines in his body—his Spirit Lines—that led to his primary core.

He had done this same exercise countless times with no luck. But this time… this time, he sensed something different.