Chương 27: Chapter 25 – Of course they have a demon detector

The dome was busy, in spite of the hour. Climbers moved toward the pods, technicians swarmed around, and when I started approaching the waiting room I recently used, I got intercepted. The administrator was a woman in a standard business suit.

"Mr. O'Connor," she opened with, drawing a tablet from underneath her arm. I smiled.

"Yes?"

"You are to dive to floor eighteen with Mina and Ms. Sarah Langley." She showed me the tablet with the floor matchings. Now, this looked like something Kareem should have shown me somewhere around day zero. It even had a waiting room written for it, and a date. The date was tomorrow. I frowned.

"Shall I take it Sarah is indisposed today?"

"That was the message her organization has left us. With no other person having advanced to floor 18 yet, all three of you need to attend. The climb is scheduled for tomorrow." I grunted. No diving today.

"Can I do a solo dive? I would like to try to re-run floor 6." She frowned.

"Your handler should have explained all of this to you." She motioned into the hallway.

"All the way to the end, and left, and you'll reach the reserve pods for extra dives." Right.

"Thanks." I headed that way. The side pods were a set of ten pods. No stage, no host, no fanfare. Just the pods, a lone technician, and three climbers already strapped in. I walked over. The technician, a young woman with bags under her eyes and a Golden Sands badge, looked up from her tablet.

"Floor?"

"Six." She pressed something on her tablet and motioned at the pod. I got in. I slipped in. The display flickered. Damian Gabriel O'Connor. Level: 22. Tower perks: 0. Artifacts: 0. Highest floor: 18. The pod closed. Darkness swallowed me. I blinked, and I stood in the cave with rats. Except that there were no rats. I didn't even summon Astarielle. Though Ashy could use the experience. I summoned her, had her turn into a sword, and fly around me as I marched toward the hollow broodmother. The faded forest was gone.

No sign of any monsters, especially not the broodmother. Whatever I killed stayed dead, apparently. That meant no infinite grind. I could scour the floor for a few more stray souls to gather, but with the main boss gone, there wasn't much to take. Actually, technically speaking, there was the town. I headed into the forest first. After I had Ashy shut up, we found a bear eating a carcass. Ashy cleaved the air and split the bear in two. No loot. I activated the Lantern of Eternal Suffering. Nothing.

Oh, so I couldn't even go pick up stuff from enemies I didn't get on the first run. Could I re-grind enemies without completing a floor? I had to try that. But now, I also needed to talk to Astarielle. I found a nice spot on a low hill in the forest, unsummoned Ashy, and summoned Astarielle. She appeared in a flash of crimson flame. When she saw me seated, her expression turned a touch serious, and she sat down next to me.

"Is something wrong?" she asked. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Not really. This is just a good spot to talk in private. How has the island been treating you?" Her expression shifted, eyes sparking up.

"It's been incredible. I've met a lot of people, mostly mages, so I've been networking a lot. Turns out, things are fine when there aren't any non-mages and their stupid police around. I've stayed away from the church section, and it's been fine. More than fine. Turns out a demon is a monster to the non-mages. Mages stop minding me the second they see I can speak." I smiled.

"That's great."

"Better than great." A smile crept onto her face. A real one, small and slightly embarrassed.

"The island has a whole informal research community that meets all over the neutral zone pretty much around the clock. There's this unsaid idea that we are going to change the world, and so everyone sets aside their organization-based grudges. I have knowledge both from inside the tower and from Hell. That's a different perspective on magic than what they are used to, so everyone wants to talk to me. It's incredible." Her voice broke a bit, eyes watering at the end. I put my arm over her shoulder.

She leaned against me.

"There's this woman from Lucielle Legal, Dr. Maren Haas. Mostly a theoretical mage, who's trying to research cross-planar energy theory. I can do half of the things she has theorized, and the other half is stuff I could do if I tried it. We are probably going to write a paper on it. Can you imagine? Me being an acknowledged scholar on Earth." She was glowing. Not literally, though a faint crimson haze did shimmer around her when she got genuinely excited.

Her eyes were bright, her posture was open, and she was talking with her hands in a way that had nothing to do with casting spells. She looked happy. Actually happy.

"Yeah, I can." I smiled, happy for her.

"I suppose you need to get back."

"Kind of." She formed an awkward smile.

"You summoned me from a breakfast with Yi Zhuang Jin. He's Liu Wei's colleague, an analyst, who's trying to figure out how to connect the Daoist tradition to the tower's functionality to manipulate it."

"All right." I hit the disconnect. In ten seconds, the countdown finished, and I woke up in the pod. I got out, and when I got out of the pod section, I summoned Astarielle. She wore the usual new outfit, but also had glasses. I gave her the smirk. She returned hers and hurried to the food court section of the hub. Most likely, enough of the researchers had glasses, so she brought fake glasses from Hell to fit in better. It was a strangely pleasant feeling to see her starting to have her own life on Earth.

She couldn't do that anywhere else due to being hunted for being a demon. But here around the tower, nobody seemed to care. I headed to the Church section. The walk took fifteen minutes. Their section of the island sat on the northwestern edge, built around a central chapel that looked like someone had actually shipped in stone by stone from Italy. Everything else looked like a military base. Functional, protected, and arranged for efficiency and security. The entrance was a gate flanked by outposts.

They wore modern combat armor with crusader crosses on the shoulder plates, assault rifles on their backs, swords at their hips. They watched me approach with relaxed alertness. I stopped by the gate.

"I'm here to check on Sarah Langley," I said.

"We're on the same floor progression, and we need to coordinate our next dive." The guard on the left checked a tablet.

"Your name?"

"Damian O'Connor. Golden Sands." He typed it in. A brief pause while something got processed.

"All clear. Come in." The gate opened. I walked in. I made it two steps from the gate before something beeped. Many things beeped.

"Fuck," one of the guards shouted, and they both grabbed their assault rifles, aiming at me.

"Don't move!" What alarm did I trigger, exactly? More men flooded in, most with assault rifles, a couple dressed more casually but without weapons. Mages. I stood in place, shields up, waiting to see where this was going. The guards formed a half-circle around me.

"I'm not moving," I said.

"No need to panic."

"Take off your jacket," someone shouted.

"Is that really necessary? I'm a climber, remember?"

"Take off your jacket!" With a sigh, I removed the right sleeve of my jacket, leaving the rest on.

"Could we at least do it inside?" No answer, all the weapons still aimed at me. A part of me wanted to summon Ashy and Astarielle and give them a choice between surrender and a very explosive death. Most of me remained reasonable. I started unbuttoning my shirt. I realized what this was about. They had some demon detectors, most likely. Those triggered the second I walked into range for a rather obvious reason. I pulled my right arm out of my shirt, flexing the muscles underneath the tattoos.

"It's just tattoos. I'm a summoner. These are a part of it." The guards went still. I couldn't blame them. One didn't need to understand its minute details to be able to tell that the tattoos meant trouble.

"Remove your pants!" someone shouted.

"And the rest of the shirt!" Oh, fuck no.

"That is absurd. I am a climber, and my power has been displayed publicly. I understand that you follow protocol, but I'm pretty sure the protocol is about threats, which I'm clearly not."

"The alarm designates you as a threat of a demonic origin. Remove your pants!" I started slipping the shirt back on, buttoning it calmly.

"Yeah, nah. You don't get to tell me what to do. And you have no way to force me." A stunned second of silence passed. They had seen the climbing footage. They didn't have a weapon that could get through my shields, not without an unacceptable amount of collateral damage.

"Everyone, stand down," a man said from the side, walking in. He wore a mixture of medieval armor and robes, with far too many crosses on all of it. A blindfold covered his eyes, long hair falling almost to his waist.

"He isn't a threat." He turned toward me.

"It's been a while, Peter." Huh? Did he just call me by my brother's name?