Chương 46: Chapter 42 - The floor 25 incident (part 1)

Back to the main stage. After having my breakfast kebab, I headed to the dome, wearing my best suit. Or well, one of the charcoal suits; I forgot which one was which. Sarah's sword, strapped to a belt around my waist, broke the look a bit. But I was going to get used to it… eventually. A package had arrived in the morning. A crate waited outside my door. Temple wax, ofuda paper, purified shimenawa rope, a silver spirit bell, dried chrysanthemums, and a jar of incense ash older than many countries.

Cassandra worked fast when she wanted a topic buried. Yushi's shrine would have to wait, though. The dome buzzed with energy. They'd opened a big preparation hall for us, the one from the first day. With my arrival, twenty-five climbers filled it. Everyone clustered mostly by their organization, which made me wonder where the hell people from the Sands were. There was no Sands section of the climbers, because I was the only one from the Sands in here. I never even met anyone from the Sands during the climbing.

Otherwise, most of the familiar faces were here. Chen, Adaeze, Kenji, Zhao, Yukiko, Liu, and Henrik. The last two sat by a small tea set by the side. With a smile, I walked to them and sat down. Liu poured me a cup as I sat.

"You've come unusually armed, fellow anti-daoist."

"You know the context." He formed a sour smile.

"I do. By the way, what transpired after you activated the waystone on floor 22? The feed cut to other climbers, but you took quite a while to actually return." Well, I tried to burn down the city and got stopped by an overseer. But that wouldn't sound great.

"I experimented. The floor overseers can and do actually fight." Henrik snorted.

"A gem of knowledge surely obtained through peaceful means."

"Indeed." He pushed his glasses up.

"Mina sends a heartfelt fuck you to all of us. She's still stuck at floor 24, so she demands compensatory souvenirs." My turn to snort. The tower really didn't want her with us. And in this context, the tower most likely meant Peace. The way we moved through the floors clearly fit her plans. I took the tea. Fresh batch, by the smell. Somewhere behind us, one of Chen's people said something in Mandarin, low, and a couple of others snorted. Liu's smile didn't move.

"He says the three bozos are drinking tea while serious people prepare." He sipped.

"The tea is excellent, so I struggle to locate the insult."

"Being a bozo is statistically correlated with survival on this expedition," Henrik said without looking up from the tablet.

"I have the spreadsheet."

"Of course you do." Three bozos. Not the worst I've been called. The doors opened, and the air in the room shifted. The man who walked in was past fifty and built like a church door. Black plate chased with silver scripture, a white half-cape pinned at one shoulder, a censer on a chain at his belt next to a sword of office that had clearly been used as more than office. Grey at the temples, a face that had done liturgy under fire and found both about equally moving. Even Chen straightened.

The man crossed the hall to me directly, which meant every head in the room came along for the ride. He stopped, and looked at the sword by my waist.

"That's Langley's blade." I looked up, sipping the tea.

"Who're you, again?"

"Aurelio Conti. I have command of this dive." He didn't smile, face flat.

"Bring them both home."

"You don't get to tell me what to do." I was going to do exactly that, but I argued out of instinct.

"Your demons better not mess the formation," he continued, exactly as if I said nothing. I shrugged.

"The strong climb while the weak zero out. Your presence changes nothing about it." He smirked.

"I can see why you're popular." He moved on. I took another sip from the tea. The main door opened. We started filing out, Aurelio in the lead. The dome was packed to the rim. Tribunes full, cameras on cranes, the replay screens running a graphic of twenty-five portraits arranged in a circle like the world's most dysfunctional clock. My portrait was at roughly seven o'clock. The spotlight came pre-sliced into twenty-five pieces, and I hated it on principle. The host was running on his highest setting.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Twenty. Five. Climbers! The largest coordinated dive in the history of this expedition, against the floor that has gathered them all!" He swept an arm at us as we filed toward the pods.

"And leading them is Inquisitor-Captain Aurelio Conti, of the Vatican Inquisition of the Church!" Oh, this guy was destined to love me. Conti walked to the pedestal, took the beacon, and held it for a moment like it weighed something.

"In His name, we climb." The crowd loved it. My hand had found Sarah's hilt on its own. Different words. Same pedestal. I made the hand let go. The host tried me on the way past, microphone leading.

"Little Horn! Any words before history?"

"I save them for the after-climb interview." I slipped into my pod. The display flickered. Damian Gabriel O'Connor. Level: 26. Tower perks: 0. Artifacts: 0. Highest floor: 25. Ha, so I got a level on the last floor, but I didn't even get the notification because of how passionately Elsha stormed in and out. I was going to have to start checking those manually. The pod closed. Darkness swallowed me. I blinked, and the world remade itself. The wind came first.

Then grass, hip-high, silver-green, an ocean of it running to every horizon. We stood on a long hill, twenty-five of us scattered across its crown like dropped chess pieces, and for a few seconds nobody said anything, because the floor didn't leave room. In the center of the plain stood a fortress.

Pale stone, the same pale as the waystones, rising out of the grassland in walls, and above the walls a keep, and above the keep towers stacked on towers, a hundred stories if it was one, until the top of it smudged into the sky's haze. A tower-style fortress built into a mountain. It looked incredible, but also highly defended with layers upon layers of walls, gates, shooting posts, and even a moat at the base. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

Around it, miles out, ran a ring. Earthworks, palisades, trenches, siege camps, watch fires, battlements circling the entire fortress, crawling with movement too distant to resolve into people and too vast to be anything else. And around the ring, three cities. Smoke rose from all three. Some of it was chimneys. Some of it wasn't. Soldiers filled the battlements, many moving from and to the cities.

"That's tens of thousands of people," Adaeze said quietly. Her staff had stopped tapping. Henrik opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"My model of the floor's size was overly conservative. Also, the timer looks like a problem." I focused, pulling on my dive timer. It wasn't moving.

"Zero movement."

"Same here," Liu said.

"We seem to be destined to partake in this siege."

"Confirmed," said half a dozen others. Conti looked at the frozen zeros with a smirk.

"Then the floor has given us a gift," he said.

"We will use it properly. We move to the nearest town." Might as well. We headed down the hill. The road led by its base. The town ahead looked eastern-medieval in style, with extra tents spread around it. A rider galloped on the road toward us. He slowed down as he approached, raising his hands. He crested the next hill before we'd finished gawking. He came on at an easy canter with both hands up, leading a string of shaggy steppe ponies behind him, and he was grinning like a man greeting relatives at an airport.

"Welcome to the siege!" he called. He wore a tactical jacket gone soft and colorless under local furs, and around his neck, on a leather cord, hung a dead climber's earpiece. Not an Earthen one, though.

"I saw the light on the hill. It's good that there's quite a few of you. We need the reinforcements."

"Identify yourself," Conti shouted back.

"I am Tolun, of the second horde." He stopped the horse, swung down and slapped its neck.

"The Khan keeps me for this. I'm the welcome committee for this sector." He looked us over, counting, and whistled.

"Twenty-five. Khan's going to want to talk to you before the other two cities hear. Come. It's close." I looked toward the city behind him. Not that close. Easily a half an hour walk. Hmph. Everyone else started walking. Damn, I needed a demon dragon to fly on. Or at least a horse. Tolun talked the whole way to the city, riding loose, pointing at things.

"This is a border floor. You'll hear the term a lot, so I'll save you the asking. There is no way to get to any floor above twenty-five without passing through this floor. And few ever pass the Siege." He nodded at the fortress without looking at it, the way one nods at weather.

"So, there's a whole lot of us climbers here. At least five hundred of us are spread across the three cities now. Climbers who stopped."

"Stopped," Chen repeated, flat.

"No timer on this floor," Tolun said cheerfully.

"There's nothing to go down for. No other way up than through."

"You stayed," I said, getting toward the front.

"How haven't you gotten through yet?"

"I got tired of dying on a wall." He shrugged, completely untroubled.

"People who pass do so because they sneak into the fortress and reach the waystone unseen. But one day, we will conquer the fortress, and all of us stuck here will move forward. Since there's no timer, it doesn't matter how long it takes. It might happen with your group." Stealth. The word soured in my mouth. I had absolutely nothing for stealth. But I did have Astarielle to cause general destruction, which increased in usefulness with the number of enemies.

The city resolved out of the grassland ahead, felt and timber and stone in concentric rings, horse smell arriving well in advance, banners in a dozen clan colors snapping over the gates. Tolun called it the Ordu. People watched us pass from doorways and saddles. Among them, here and there, were the climbers. Some looked like locals from lower floors. Others did not. The Khan's hall sat at the center, timber and felt over a stone foundation, iron braziers burning inside, and a sand table the size of a bed.

Khan Temur was about sixty, grey braids, a scar splitting one eyebrow, built like a saddle left out in forty winters of weather. He greeted Conti with two sentences of formality, me and everyone else with a single sweeping look, and then planted both fists on the rim of the sand table and got to business, voice like gravel under hooves.

"Four armies wage war in here," he said. A blunt finger touched the model fortress at the center.

"The Wardens hold the Anvil. Pale men, who neither eat nor sleep. Kill a hundred by sunset, a hundred stand the wall by dawn." The finger moved to the ring.

"Their battlements. Then us." It touched three points around it.

"The Ordu. Maraval on the river, merchant princes, barges, silver. Tagan under the hills, with forges, and the Iron Matriarch, may she choke. Three cities, one wall, and a war older than any of us."

"You fight the fortress," Conti said, "and each other."

"Mostly the Anvil. Every second generation, someone gathers enough spears to try the gates. The Anvil is named for what becomes of them." He paused, and his voice didn't change at all when he added, "I have buried three sons under that ring."

"The waystone," Henrik said.

"Is it confirmed that it's in there?"

"Stands at the summit. On clear nights, you can see it burn from here." Temur's eyes went around the table.

"Sometimes, someone disappears in the Anvil, but they never return to tell the tale." I shrugged.

"This seems pretty straightforward to me. Sends messengers to the other cities that a new set of climbers is there, and they'll break through the walls. Ready your men; we all attack in one massive force, and power through the fortress. We'll be done in half a day at most." For a second, a stunned silence filled the room. I looked over the others. I understood the Khan; he's been stuck here his whole life, but why were they surprised?

"Our colleague," Conti said, voice measured, "Is new to warfare. Please excuse him." I raised an eyebrow, cheeks heating up, forcing me to control my voice.

"Why are you making a scene out of it? The wardens respawn overnight, so one big push clears the fortress and the floor with it."

"That's beyond naïve," Chen said, voice heated.

"We have no intel. No knowledge of the enemy other than that defeating them is nearly impossible. If we do a large push and lose the armies, it will take a generation to rebuild them." I shrugged.

"The armies are unnecessary extras. Liu, Henrik, and I can clear this with the three of us. We've got twenty-two more people, plus three armies."

"As much as I love the confidence in me," Henrik said, "An immediate charge would indeed be pre-emptive. We should, at the very least, gather some intel of the opposition." And give time to Peace to do whatever she wants with Sarah. No, we had no time to spare.

"We also need to arrange supplies," Adaeze said.

"And the alliances," Conti added.

"This isn't Tom and Jerry."

"Indeed," Zhao joined in.

"Our strategy needs to lead to success, not to a mountain of corpses of our potential allies created in the most predictable way possible." A couple of people didn't bother hiding the laughter. Kenji didn't laugh. He watched.

"Numbers without order are meat," Chen said.

"Plus," Conti added.

"These people are not ammunition. Whatever this floor is, they live in it, and I will not feed a field of souls to a wall to save a few days or weeks. We were not sent to spend on the twenty-fifth floor. We were sent to climb it. A blind, all-out push would be idiocy." I sighed. Liu looked like he agreed with me, but he said nothing. Smart, if a bit cowardly.

"Fine." Liu and Kenji slightly paused. They had heard this type of fine from me before. Conti and the Khan started arranging specifics. First, diplomacy and scouting. Everyone from the group got a role, except for me. Soon enough, they started leaving for their missions. To scan the enemies, to map the fortress layout, to see the Khan's forces, to be envoys to other cities. Funnily enough, my stunt gave Conti a massive boost in importance before the Khan.

After all, if one of Conti's men believed we could do it with three people, it promised power. Khan latched onto that, becoming compliant, and Conti took advantage of it. I could even see on Conti how he realized the irony. As everyone started leaving, so did I. Except I didn't have a mission. Instead, I walked to an elevated platform in the town, most likely used for theatre-like performances. I looked over the whole floor.

Even if everything went perfectly, this would take a week before we arranged the all-out attack. Perhaps more. I couldn't stealth this by myself. Nor with others, most likely. After Henrik finished scanning the fortress, we could perhaps make a break for it with the three of us, me, Henrik, and Liu. But that would still take days. Days I wasn't letting Peace have. By how quickly she moved from floor six to eleven, I knew that she got ahead yesterday, when I couldn't climb.

I needed to be catching up, not wasting weeks in this tar pit. The one she knew I would walk into. She kidnapped Sarah on floor twenty-two precisely because she knew our next floor would have to be this one. For as long as I played by the rules Peace expected me to follow, I was never going to catch up. Underneath the rules of the game, I was never going to win against Peace. The only thing I could try was to flip the board and see what happens. I pulled a bit of Sarah's sword. It felt heavy in my hand.

I cut my left palm. I slid it back down and pushed out proper shields. Shields of Deepest Sorrow. My shields turned dark blue and heavy as drowned wool. I ducked, placing my bleeding palm on the ground. The blood flooded out, forming a pentagram around me. I reached for a hundred and twenty-five million mana. The air around me quaked. Everyone in the town stopped in their tracks, their hair floating up, mouths of many gasping for air.

"With my blood, I open the gate through ten thousand worlds. Through Void and Hell, I form the path. Across time and space, I open the way…" Kenji burst from a shadow near me. He stabbed at my throat. His sword got stuck in my shield.

"I open the way for the second exile. I open the gate of the forsaken rose." Kenji managed to tear himself from the shield. But he gasped for breath. Too much mana density in the air for him to breathe.

"I summon Heaven's first song of love. I summon Hell's last song of despair. I summon the goddess of ten thousand worlds." The mana converged, forming a gate frame next to me. The size of a person, black, with pink energy flowing over it like a thorny vine.

"Come forth, El'Sha'I'El." The gate flashed out of existence, and in its place stood Elsha. As infernally beautiful as ever, horns polished to mirror shine, wicked heels perfectly matching the harp she held. I got up, returning my shields to normal. While straightening my suit, I glanced at her.

"Kill everyone on the floor."