I appear on the surface of Xyphos and right away read the new temporary Floor quest, if you can even call it that.
Preparations are currently underway to transition attendees back into the tutorial setting. Reassignment to your new location will be handled on an individual basis.
You will be assigned to one of the following:
- Option A: The restarted 11th floor.
- Option B: The 12th floor.
Rewards will be determined based on your individual performance. In cases where performance evaluation is hindered by the unexpected interference, your baseline rewards will be adjusted upward to ensure you receive a higher payout than standard calculations would yield.
This adjustment serves as an apology for the recent inconvenience.
Please note that all entrances to the Labyrinth of Xyphos are now strictly blocked for all attendees.
We thank you for your patience in this matter.
- The Ruler of Patience.
And then there is a countdown.
Time remaining until transfer: 19h 11m 33s
I close the window right away and look towards the sky, which is now dark as I find myself on that cold side. I already begin to feel the effects of it, so I rouse up my Ignition Heart to send thermal energy through my body.
A burst of kinetic energy pushes me high into the air, and another pulse follows it. I don’t know how realistic it is to find anyone from Group 4 on such a huge planet and in this time span, but I will try.
As for Xyphos, I also think of it. Xyphos, Domus, Eladore, each of these planets is likely very powerful, as Ruby said.
I’m sure there are numerical values I could get from her. Someone could likely calculate it all. The rise of ambient mana, increased gravity, size, and all these things.
Something tells me that the increase in size also ruins a lot of stuff.
For example, on Earth, would the planets combining during the pairing not entirely ruin satellites and their ability to function? This is not to mention undersea internet cables, sea levels, the need for new maps, timezone changes, and many, many more. And after all of that, is that planet still Earth?
Another question is why. Does the system force the pairing as part of its strengthening and evolution function? Does it want to create more powerful planets or sovereign sparks? Or perhaps it is something that predates the system? I could have asked.
Then, also, why are there pure fragments of gods on each planet? This is likely something that was done after the system war and the killings of the gods. But did the gods do that at their last breaths, or did the system do it afterwards?
I feel like I’m learning a lot about pairings, rulers, the system, and all that, yet as always, many more questions pop up. And I don’t mind it that much, to be honest.
I stop my flight suddenly and look towards one of the smaller corporate ships floating a few miles ahead of me. At that moment, an idea comes to me, and I leave a mark at the space where I am and fly away.
Even on this side, there are many barriers with people from the Easy difficulty, and it seems that some people from higher difficulties use them as well to just slack there and wait until we are moved.
After noticing another corporate ship, I leave another mark and boost myself further as I pick up speed. A crown forms over my head, and I begin to fill it with mana. I pull on the ambient energy as well, redistributing thermal energy into mana.
I also continue to feed my fragment with kinetic energy, aiding its growth. There are multiple methods to do so, and I even got some books from the Primordial Knight’s library on that. Yet I did not like any of those methods that much, so I do it by feel.
Currently, the fragment is imbued in the middle of my chest, and I also practice moving it all over my body. I still like the placement on the back of my left arm, but let’s say that place is often… compromised.
I place another mark next to another ship, and I continue to [Weave] a connection between each of the marks I already placed and between me. Just as with Ley lines, there are these invisible threads that are difficult to see, and in combination with my leveling skills and some help from [Manifestation], they are getting crazier and crazier.
Hiding them from a Champion might be tough, but anyone of lower rank shouldn't be a problem, barring a few unusually perceptive types. Well, or perhaps some item users of the sort I have no experience with.
I pause once again, and observe a corporate base on the ground. I take more time with this one, and instead of placing a mark nearby, I move further away. Let’s skip this one.
Already, I start weaving arrays and preparing tricks that help me trigger skills faster.
There are usually multiple steps to trigger a skill. You need to gather mana, compress it, move it in a certain way, and change frequency and such.
I found it helps if I have these things I call triggers. It’s like mental building blocks adapted to my body. A bit like a mental visualization of the construct of an item, but instead of inscribing it onto materials, I keep it open in my mind and move my mana through it to get the required effects.
Of course, it requires some mental capacity and takes up storage, but it can be faster than my active usage of mana to get a certain effect out of it. Or it can save my processing budget so I can focus on my opponent more.
There are also limitations, such as the fact that I cannot change it mid-fight once activated, and that it’s difficult to stop. Also, after a usage, that mental construct disappears.
Honestly, it’s fun. It’s also similar to, say, thought acceleration, which is something everyone at a higher level uses in one way or another, or at least uses similar techniques.
Sophie has some of her own, and her mental capacities seem to be even better than mine. Meanwhile, Maya stores some of hers on her skin through her mana archive in a way that makes them seem like tattoos. Min-Jae read of people who have bonded themselves to certain animals with high mental capacity to increase that calculative power.
There is also an expensive piece of information I learned from one of the information gathering units of my guild about an Absolute who found a person with a skill called [Share].
He then raised that person to get as high a level as possible, while everyone else treated that person as nobility, which the Absolute made sure of. And so, that person with [Share] can just do that: share their stats, skills, mana, and such with that Absolute, giving them a boost when needed.
The interesting part is that the Absolute then spent hundreds of years making sure that person with [Share] had descendants, in hopes that they would be predisposed to the same skills.
Furthermore, the Absolute tried to have other people awaken it, gathered them, bought them, and strengthened them. Traits, passives, items, anything to make them as powerful as possible, and in the end, created an entire unit capable of supporting them that way, all tied by vows to him and treated like royalty by everyone else.
So much effort and time went into this, and yet there is someone like Diligence with a star sized planet hollowed out and filled with ants he can connect to through his [Hive Mind] or a similar skill to share those stats.
I laughed a lot when I heard it the first time, mostly at the Absolute and his efforts, which seem so small if you compare them to Diligence. It seems like a ridiculous, wasted effort, but it also shows how crazy the Ruler of Diligence is while on his planet.
I wonder how high in the ranking of the most powerful rulers he would place with the support of the entirety of the Colony behind him, and likely many items and other preparations he did on Domus. Not to mention the boost he likely received from the Sovereign Spark of the Domus that he is the Absolute of.
The system remains very flexible, as always, and my fascination with it grows.
Many curse it, want to destroy it, and call its users slaves. Usually, these are the native races of this universe who were born with all these powers naturally. Some of them probably realize that humans simply wanted power of their own, so they aren't surprised humans fell for the system. But I am sure there are powerful beings like the Great Elder who wouldn't care, and such a thought wouldn't even cross his mind. To him, humans should have stayed where they were instead of so eagerly embracing the system.
It always annoys me a little when I meet someone like that, someone who sees the system automatically as an enemy. To me, they are sore losers.
What does the fact that the system came from another universe even change? I bet they would think the exact same way even if the system were native to this universe: just some new power, a mutated god, or an experiment by the elves.
They had all of the opportunities to stop it, and yet they still lost because of their typical attitude of one born with power.
I might be wrong here, maybe the system’s final goal or programming is something that truly needs to be stopped.
Or maybe it does not. No one among them even knows what will happen yet, but they behave all that way. They are slow, too proud, and too powerful beings that lost against that locust-like greed of humans and other races joining them.
And what can they even do now? They must realize the system is much more spread out and powerful now than it ever was during the System War. Yet, it seems they still want to challenge it. There must be a plan, something they have likely been preparing since the System War and throughout all the time the system was spreading.
To me, the second System War seems unavoidable, whether it happens tomorrow or in thousands of years.
I spend most of the remaining time flying around, and as the deadline nears, I boost myself to the ground, where I sit on a rock and wait for a few minutes.
When the time gets closer, my blood drips from my hand, stretching and becoming surrounded by cracking mana with a golden and white core. I [Weave] a strong connection to it.
The crown over my head dissolves, and particles rain down on my skin, flooding into my body or becoming part of my defensive layers.
Some of the restrictions I have on my eyes lessen, and the pressure they put on me increases.
Exactly one minute remains when I teleport, appearing near my first mark.
A burst of kinetic energy launches me toward the corporate ship, I read it with my eyes, break its defenses, and crash against it feet-first. The lance in my hand turns into a sword as I cut into the surface and my mana floods in, placing a mark there that I use to teleport through the jamming field.
A pulse of detection shoots through the interior, and I locate the highest concentration of defenses and boost myself that way.
A thylarin in armor jumps into my way, but I reinforce my body with mana and slam my shoulder into him, sending a disruptive wave through the contact to weaken his own reinforcement.
He crashes against the side of the ship and crumples the metal as I cut toward the room where multiple items are stored. I quickly scan them and remove defenses and marks on them before teleporting them toward the rock I sat on.
Another teleport brings me near a different corporate ship.
This time, the lance shoots ahead, stabbing through and through. In that hole, I place a mark and teleport to it. There, I lift my hand into the air, and the lance that shot far ahead returns to my hand, as I swing it to deflect an attack.
My pre prepared array powers up, sending an EMP-like disruption through the area, and I locate the only defenses that stayed up. I break through the walls and blast away the defenders with pulses of kinetic energy. At my goal, I cut a hole into the door, stepping into the vault where I teleport as much as I can toward the same place as previously and erase my tracks.
Then, I teleport again.
I repeat this multiple times, spending at most five to ten seconds on each ship until, with the remaining 15 seconds, I find the last mark near one of the bases that is on the edge of what I can handle but does not belong to the Aurate Consortium. I made sure of that.
Yet, the moment my lance breaks through the defenses, an Adjudicator appears.
Entirely covered in black, she steps from one of the shielded rooms and turns to face my way. There is probably something to be said about my lacking scans and unexpected defensive deals between the corporations, but I push these thoughts away.
A halo spins over my head, with a switch turning black as I start to devour ambient mana. From where I float, an attack hammers down, blowing away the dunes, compressing the sand, and pushing the Adjudicator down.
I watch her body break and twist, but it restores even quicker than I can damage it. She continues to adapt, and after each attack, she heals even faster and is affected even less. In the end, the sheer amount of raw mana I continuously throw at her just obliterates everything around her while she stands there facing me.
I teleport toward the lance I shot inside and send a scan through the base.
Immediately, in sheer surprise, I boost myself to the side as the Adjudicator breaks through the wall, revealing a straight hole as she bulldozed through a dozen or so heavily shielded walls. She is almost just a skeleton as she passes in front of me, and I barely dodge her, but as she body slams the inner wall and stops, her body restores fully.
Her blonde hair sways and her violet eyes lock onto me as she charges, pushing through the kinetic hold I deploy.
I duck under her attack, face her kick with my own, and teleport away from another strike. The side of the room creaks and explodes under the sheer force of it, and I reach for my lance, grabbing it and turning it into a sword that I use to cut into the door behind me.
I watch as she reaches me with incredible speed, and with wide eyes, I see her hand stabbing at my head with her fingers as I teleport away at the last moment inside the vault through the cut I made.
A quick scan observes the items, and I use black mana to destroy the defenses and send a few things away. The Adjudicator stabs her fingers into the cut I made in the thick doors, made with some sort of extremely durable metal, and pushes them in. She starts spreading the hole wide and pushing herself inside even as she can’t fit in yet and reaching toward me.
I release a burst of thermal energy. The seals on my Ignition Heart lift fully, and a concentrated, roaring stream of golden flames meets her. The flames of the Champion grade heart still do not melt the door or that incredible creature fully, they only heat it up and liquefy the edges as they blast the Adjudicator.
Meanwhile, she does not stop. Burns cover her skin, her flesh sizzles, and where they hit her face, the skin melts to reveal a skull, but it all regenerates just as quickly.
Just as she widens the hole enough, I concentrate deeper and imagine two sheets of paper falling. They sway in the wind, they fall, and then they rub against each other.
My mana screams, and a horizontal cut hits the world, cutting deeply into the door. Instead of cutting the Adjudicator in half, it just cannonballs her away through the wall and through the base.
My vessel manifests, turning black instantly, and moves in front of me just in time to meet the Adjudicator, who is already back. With eyes wide in shock, I watch as she grabs the arms of my vessel, twists them away, and then kicks it, sending it crashing against the wall.
From high in the air, possibly from obit another Adjudicator drops down behind her and begins to walk toward me. A sound above me informs me that something heavy landed on the roof and is breaking inside, and the same noises can be heard from the side where the metal wall to my left bends inward towards me.
I leave a black orb behind to erase my tracks, and teleport a few times, sliding between the gaps in the anti-teleportation array that someone already started deploying.
However, someone messes with me anyway.
As I appear near the rock and the pile of items, the Adjudicator crashes onto the ground near me. It does not take even the shortest part of a second for her to regain her bearing, and she instantly attacks like some unstoppable machine.
That much should be enough.
My mana surges and [Redistribution] halts her steps as Wraith Dance brings me closer. My hand turns to a blur as I stab and cut her with a shortsword made from Empyrean mana and my own blood.
Yet, every time she just regenerates, and I fail to even cut through the bone. Her muscles bulge out and tear, bones snap to restore later, and she pushes through. Her punch bounces off my barrier, and the second one breaks it.
I turn the sword into a lance and launch it at her with a thunder of kinetic energy. It stabs through her head and flings her back.
Yet even then, she snaps her head forward, pulls the lance out, and breaks it in her hands.
Three seconds remain as I throw kinetic blasts against her, each of them strips her of her flesh and is followed by streams of thermal energy, burning her further, revealing only a skeleton with organs that continues to walk by pulling on regenerating tendons and bits of flesh.
I continue to increase my output, allowing myself to go wilder and wilder and throw everything in that direction.
As the sheets of paper made of mana that I imagine in my head begin to fall, each time they slide against each other, a scream is released, and my attack scars the world.
I concentrate as much as I can on a certain spot, bombarding her as I stand there motionless, even as she makes her way toward me. And when that constantly regenerating skeleton reaches out and almost touches my face, my barrage of attacks finally breaks through the bone at her elbow, and the hand gets cut off.
That hand halts mid air under my skill as I grab it and reach toward the items just as the timer ends.
Even during the teleportation away, I watch as the fingers of the severed hand twitch, twist, and grab my wrist, breaking it. A cold pulse surges from it through my body, causing my heart to stop.
Appearing on the other side under the rain of teleported items, I destabilize my hand, causing it to explode, and the Adjudicator’s arm falls with it. In quick succession, I activate several of Lily’s healing marks and feed my healing passive with the heat I send through my body, kickstarting my heart back to life.
Out of my blood, I once again form a spear, surround it with Empyrean mana, and stab it through the arm, which is already beginning to move toward me, pinning it to the ground.
Then I calm my beating heart and breathe out before looking around at the Group 4 members surrounding me and looking between the arm and me. My eyes move, and I notice multiple piles of items not dissimilar to the ones I got in the last minute. It seems that I was not the only person with that idea.
Then I check the notification I received.
Congratulations! You have cleared the 11th floor of the Hell difficulty tutorial.
Welcome to the 12th floor: Ancient Weapons of War.