Sofia was increasingly worried as minutes passed and the floor’s task did not complete. Did she mess up something? Was there a stronger hidden enemy incoming? She was back at full mana but still missing 40% of her health and could lose more if the wrong elves died. It made it hard to relax.
As the day turned to night, things were calming down in the city; fires were being put out, and the last remnants of the invaders still hiding in the city were being hunted down. The invaders remaining count actualized to remove all of the humans who had left.
[Invaders remaining : 128]
“I have to wait until it goes all the way down to zero? The city is saved already…”
No point in moving out; the elves can handle the cleanup. Doesn’t look like anyone is still coming to attack, either.
Sofia sprawled on a bed in the house she was waiting in and decided to take the opportunity to get more rest, even if she couldn’t allow herself to sleep.
Sofia got the objective completion message. Finally, she could relax. At the very least, she had completed one floor. Now onto the next one.
The transition from the bed to the waiting room floor was a bit abrupt.
Sofia took off her armor to stretch, drank some water, and ate a bit of bread as she waited the five minutes for the next floor’s events to kick off.
The scoreboard was quite uninteresting this time.
‘Floor 97
Known people who have failed on this floor :
None
Current rank : 433
(You are currently ranked at the bottom of this floor’s list)
Should you complete this floor, you will climb to rank : 61’
Still, it told her something, about a third of takers got through the invading army floor, but out of those, less than a fifth got through floor 98.
And my starting floor was meant to be the last I could overcome ‘with high certainty’ according to the spire. So basically, it didn’t really believe I could get through this next one, but doesn’t find it impossible, right?
“My guess is that it’s more dangerous than the army then. Last floor, I could have played it much safer, maybe even directly side with the elves. If you ignore the big fire attack, it was not that dangerous. Most of the soldiers were quite low-level too, even if there were tens of thousands of them.”
Sofia’s thoughts were that most people failing on floor 96 probably failed to save the city or Key targets rather than die in battle. And these indirect dangers led to fewer people giving up early due to life-threatening emergencies, resulting in a higher win rate.
She didn’t have much to go on, but that, and playing around with her bone shield construct blessed through [Bone dominus], kept her occupied until the countdown reached zero, and she found herself in the middle of a dark abyss.
She was standing on a not-so-wide, round-ish polished smooth platform of the nigh-indestructible speckled black rock from the labyrinth. It stood in the middle of nothing, like a flying island the size of a small city square. It reminded her of the Midenicite city's empty dimension, but it felt much less empty for some reason.
In the middle of the platform was a black-stone obelisk several meters high. And that was it.
If not for VPPV, I would be in complete darkness right now.
The system messages for this floor shed some light on her situation, but not much.
[Ranking Spire Phase 2 : Floor 97 - Murderous keys]
[Objective : insert the correct key into its slot at the base of the obelisk]
As the messages faded, hundreds of fist-sized orbs materialized everywhere in the air. They simply floated mid-air at various heights, like many small planets just hanging out. Though all made of polished stuff of some kind and all of the same size, they had a variety of colors and patterns engraved on them. Some were softly glowing, others not.
That’s it? No conditions for failure, no additional information, no time limit?
Alright then.
The first thing that Sofia did was to observe the obelisk. She had not missed that the floor’s title was ‘Murderous keys’. The only thing on the platform except her and the obelisk was the newly appeared cloud of orbs, so they had to be the keys. As such, she decided not to touch them yet.
If I want to find the correct key, I first need to inspect the lock. Sofia weaved her way between the multicolored floating orbs and walked around the obelisk, finding the slot for the key. It was in the shape of half a sphere, confirming the key was one of the orbs, and there were grooves inside, matching with one of the patterns Sofia had seen on many of the flying balls.
Matching pattern. That gets rid of a lot of possible candidates, I suppose. But even if I only look for this specific pattern, there has to be tens of them with it. And some of the highest flying orbs are just hard to see with all the lower ones in the way. Of course, I could try them one by one, but…
Sofia looked around but couldn’t find a single spot empty enough to summon Pareth. She would have to move a few orbs if she wanted to make one. However, she wanted to call him in the first place because she didn’t want to touch the orbs herself. Not when the whole focus of the floor seemed to be that they were ‘murderous’. Since so many of the people who passed the previous floor failed there, she was expecting some major murdering to happen.
Deciding to employ cheap labor for the dangerous task, she summoned the soldier skeleton from the book, the one with a bow. That was her cheapest humanoid skeleton: 50 mana and a tiny bit of fog for a willing disposable test subject. Now go on, grab… This yellow one, it has the correct pattern, so…
The skeleton made its way to the orb and extended his arm up to grab it. The instant his first phalanx touched the orb, the whole void lit up in a glaring red light accompanied by a loud and short buzzing sound. The yellow orb’s form changed into that of an arrow covered in rampaging yellow electricity. It shot straight for Sofia’s heart. The skeleton was reactive enough to barely catch it, his hand burst on contact, but the arrow’s trajectory was altered, and Sofia didn’t even have to move to avoid it. To her surprise, the arrow turned back after missing its target, still at full speed and aiming for her head this time.
Sofia ducked out of the way, raising her staff. Her left knee brushed dangerously close to another orb but didn’t make contact. The projectile wasn’t sucked into the staff despite the weak magical projectile protection function it had, so it was either not considered a magical projectile or it was not considered weak enough for the staff to eat it. Must be quite dangerous, then. Though I already expected that from this floor’s failure rate.
When the arrow came for her again after a second U-turn, she was ready to catch it. She summoned a bunch of bones from her storage right in front of her and melded them all together as the arrow hit them. An orb arrow imprisoned in a bone orb. Catching the bone prison, she could still feel the arrow struggling to move inside, slowly carving its way out of the bone prison.
It never stops attacking? Sofia had the soldier skeleton catch the arrow as it freed itself; its hands held itself together this time. Though the electrical discharges from the former orb kept gnawing away at its health, the blessing from [Bone dominus]’s construct outhealed it. That left Sofia free to experiment with the lightning arrow that never stopped trying to stab her.
She tried breaking it, cutting it with her Mithril dagger, and even sapping its mana the best she could, which, admittedly, she had no clue how to do, but it was still a good effort. Nothing seemed to affect the thing. Sofia gave up. She had the skeleton stick the arrow against his back and reshaped his spine to have the arrow inside. As long as the marrow construct was nearby to heal the skeleton, the thing wouldn’t manage to carve its way out, and even if it did, it would still be aimed straight at the ground, giving Sofia some time to react as it turned.
One orb contained; about seven hundred to go.
One crucial thing Sofia noticed while she dealt with this one arrow, it was very easy to accidentally touch the orbs. They were everywhere around her in all directions. If all orbs but the correct one turned to deadly weapons as soon as something touched them… Things could turn ugly very fast.
And without her even doing anything, announced by the emergence of a dull whirring sound, they did.
Sofia was increasingly worried as minutes passed and the floor’s task did not complete. Did she mess up something? Was there a stronger hidden enemy incoming? She was back at full mana but still missing 40% of her health and could lose more if the wrong elves died. It made it hard to relax.
As the day turned to night, things were calming down in the city; fires were being put out, and the last remnants of the invaders still hiding in the city were being hunted down. The invaders remaining count actualized to remove all of the humans who had left.
[Invaders remaining : 128]
“I have to wait until it goes all the way down to zero? The city is saved already…”
No point in moving out; the elves can handle the cleanup. Doesn’t look like anyone is still coming to attack, either.
Sofia sprawled on a bed in the house she was waiting in and decided to take the opportunity to get more rest, even if she couldn’t allow herself to sleep.
Sofia got the objective completion message. Finally, she could relax. At the very least, she had completed one floor. Now onto the next one.
The transition from the bed to the waiting room floor was a bit abrupt.
Sofia took off her armor to stretch, drank some water, and ate a bit of bread as she waited the five minutes for the next floor’s events to kick off.
The scoreboard was quite uninteresting this time.
‘Floor 97
Known people who have failed on this floor :
None
Current rank : 433
(You are currently ranked at the bottom of this floor’s list)
Should you complete this floor, you will climb to rank : 61’
Still, it told her something, about a third of takers got through the invading army floor, but out of those, less than a fifth got through floor 98.
And my starting floor was meant to be the last I could overcome ‘with high certainty’ according to the spire. So basically, it didn’t really believe I could get through this next one, but doesn’t find it impossible, right?
“My guess is that it’s more dangerous than the army then. Last floor, I could have played it much safer, maybe even directly side with the elves. If you ignore the big fire attack, it was not that dangerous. Most of the soldiers were quite low-level too, even if there were tens of thousands of them.”
Sofia’s thoughts were that most people failing on floor 96 probably failed to save the city or Key targets rather than die in battle. And these indirect dangers led to fewer people giving up early due to life-threatening emergencies, resulting in a higher win rate.
She didn’t have much to go on, but that, and playing around with her bone shield construct blessed through [Bone dominus], kept her occupied until the countdown reached zero, and she found herself in the middle of a dark abyss.
She was standing on a not-so-wide, round-ish polished smooth platform of the nigh-indestructible speckled black rock from the labyrinth. It stood in the middle of nothing, like a flying island the size of a small city square. It reminded her of the Midenicite city's empty dimension, but it felt much less empty for some reason.
In the middle of the platform was a black-stone obelisk several meters high. And that was it.
If not for VPPV, I would be in complete darkness right now.
The system messages for this floor shed some light on her situation, but not much.
[Ranking Spire Phase 2 : Floor 97 - Murderous keys]
[Objective : insert the correct key into its slot at the base of the obelisk]
As the messages faded, hundreds of fist-sized orbs materialized everywhere in the air. They simply floated mid-air at various heights, like many small planets just hanging out. Though all made of polished stuff of some kind and all of the same size, they had a variety of colors and patterns engraved on them. Some were softly glowing, others not.
That’s it? No conditions for failure, no additional information, no time limit?
Alright then.
The first thing that Sofia did was to observe the obelisk. She had not missed that the floor’s title was ‘Murderous keys’. The only thing on the platform except her and the obelisk was the newly appeared cloud of orbs, so they had to be the keys. As such, she decided not to touch them yet.
If I want to find the correct key, I first need to inspect the lock. Sofia weaved her way between the multicolored floating orbs and walked around the obelisk, finding the slot for the key. It was in the shape of half a sphere, confirming the key was one of the orbs, and there were grooves inside, matching with one of the patterns Sofia had seen on many of the flying balls.
Matching pattern. That gets rid of a lot of possible candidates, I suppose. But even if I only look for this specific pattern, there has to be tens of them with it. And some of the highest flying orbs are just hard to see with all the lower ones in the way. Of course, I could try them one by one, but…
Sofia looked around but couldn’t find a single spot empty enough to summon Pareth. She would have to move a few orbs if she wanted to make one. However, she wanted to call him in the first place because she didn’t want to touch the orbs herself. Not when the whole focus of the floor seemed to be that they were ‘murderous’. Since so many of the people who passed the previous floor failed there, she was expecting some major murdering to happen.
Deciding to employ cheap labor for the dangerous task, she summoned the soldier skeleton from the book, the one with a bow. That was her cheapest humanoid skeleton: 50 mana and a tiny bit of fog for a willing disposable test subject. Now go on, grab… This yellow one, it has the correct pattern, so…
The skeleton made its way to the orb and extended his arm up to grab it. The instant his first phalanx touched the orb, the whole void lit up in a glaring red light accompanied by a loud and short buzzing sound. The yellow orb’s form changed into that of an arrow covered in rampaging yellow electricity. It shot straight for Sofia’s heart. The skeleton was reactive enough to barely catch it, his hand burst on contact, but the arrow’s trajectory was altered, and Sofia didn’t even have to move to avoid it. To her surprise, the arrow turned back after missing its target, still at full speed and aiming for her head this time.
Sofia ducked out of the way, raising her staff. Her left knee brushed dangerously close to another orb but didn’t make contact. The projectile wasn’t sucked into the staff despite the weak magical projectile protection function it had, so it was either not considered a magical projectile or it was not considered weak enough for the staff to eat it. Must be quite dangerous, then. Though I already expected that from this floor’s failure rate.
When the arrow came for her again after a second U-turn, she was ready to catch it. She summoned a bunch of bones from her storage right in front of her and melded them all together as the arrow hit them. An orb arrow imprisoned in a bone orb. Catching the bone prison, she could still feel the arrow struggling to move inside, slowly carving its way out of the bone prison.
It never stops attacking? Sofia had the soldier skeleton catch the arrow as it freed itself; its hands held itself together this time. Though the electrical discharges from the former orb kept gnawing away at its health, the blessing from [Bone dominus]’s construct outhealed it. That left Sofia free to experiment with the lightning arrow that never stopped trying to stab her.
She tried breaking it, cutting it with her Mithril dagger, and even sapping its mana the best she could, which, admittedly, she had no clue how to do, but it was still a good effort. Nothing seemed to affect the thing. Sofia gave up. She had the skeleton stick the arrow against his back and reshaped his spine to have the arrow inside. As long as the marrow construct was nearby to heal the skeleton, the thing wouldn’t manage to carve its way out, and even if it did, it would still be aimed straight at the ground, giving Sofia some time to react as it turned.
One orb contained; about seven hundred to go.
One crucial thing Sofia noticed while she dealt with this one arrow, it was very easy to accidentally touch the orbs. They were everywhere around her in all directions. If all orbs but the correct one turned to deadly weapons as soon as something touched them… Things could turn ugly very fast.
And without her even doing anything, announced by the emergence of a dull whirring sound, they did.
