Chương 53: (B2 Start) Chapter 53: “Every Dog Has Its Day”

'I grew too confident.' Celestia lay face-down on the ground, the powdery cold ground against her cheek. Her breath was shallow, each one stinging something sharp across the inside of her ribs.

'I believed that everything I'd prepared would be enough to handle whatever came next.' She tried to move her right arm, but it barely responded. The rest of her was no better. Dents and gouges covered the breastplate. The reinforced armor she'd commissioned was scratched and chipped across every surface. Her spear lay beside her, broken in half. The shaft had been sliced near the middle, and the two pieces rested at an angle with the blade end pointing away from her.

'Why did I assume he was just a person who didn't make a mark on the original story? After that outlandish statement he made…' A few meters to her left, Paimon was slumped against a wall. The girl's body was limp, her head tilted to one side, unconscious. Her gauntlets lay flattened against the ground with her hands still inside them. The metal had been crushed so thoroughly that Celestia couldn't tell where the gauntlet ended and the floor began.

A thin line of blood ran from beneath one of the flattened gloves and pooled into the ground, wetting it. She couldn't tell from here if Paimon was breathing. Then there was him. Noah stood a short distance away, upright and casual, though there was a thin line of blood that ran from the corner of his mouth and down his chin, dripping onto the collar of his cassock. His breathing was heavier than usual, but that same smile sat on his face. In his right hand, held by the scruff, dangled Sir Ozymandias.

The pug hung limp, his stubby legs slack, his enormous eyes closed. Noah looked at Celestia, and then he threw the pug towards her. Sir Ozy's body hit the ground in front of her and skidded across the dirty ground, coming to a stop just within arm's reach. A small cloud of dust rose and dirtied his fur. Celestia's arm painfully reached out, dragging him slowly closer to her body. Thankfully, he was still warm. She raised her head and glared at Noah. Every part of her body hurt.

Her vision blurred at the edges, and the simple act of glaring at Noah made her feel as if she could fall unconscious at any moment. Noah simply chuckled back at her, the sound almost friendly. He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the red smear on his skin for a moment.

"You owe me now," he said, "Don't forget." Celestia's fingers curled around Sir Ozy's fur, pulling the pug even closer to her chest.

'How did it come to this?' She stared at Noah's retreating back as her vision finally gave up. The last thing she remembered before her consciousness slipped was the sound of his footsteps growing distant. * —Several months earlier. The weeks after the hallway incident passed without drama, mostly because Celestia had made a conscious effort to keep it that way.

When a commoner student tripped in front of her during a lecture change and froze in terror, she very so dearly wanted to kick them, but simply made-do with stepping on them. When a noble girl attempted to provoke her at the dormitory cafeteria with a remark about the engagement scandal, Celestia had simply drenched the girl with fruit juice, rather than act on her impulses of grabbing the girl by her hair. It didn't always work, though.

There were moments when she was caught off-guard, such as when her history professor asked her a question, and instead of answering, she'd said, "If you'd done the reading yourself, you wouldn't need to ask me." But those moments were becoming less frequent. She was learning to feel the old personality's impulses before they reached her mouth and redirect them. Not always successfully, but often enough that she was able to pause to think, it was the best she could hope for right now.

Nearly a month had passed, and Celestia had climbed to Floor 9. Floors 6 through 9, unlike the trials she'd endured on the first five, had been straightforward with groups of four, combat-based objectives and clear win conditions. The floors were dangerous in the conventional sense. Celestia had thoroughly prepared for the worst, and the preparations had paid off quite spectacularly lackluster. The most useful investment had been the bag-of-holding, a tentative name for now.

She'd acquired the base material, an ore that didn't appear outside of the Tower, through the underground auction within the past few weeks. Nobody in Summit's legitimate markets knew it existed yet, and it took Reingarde House's specialist enchanter and artisan at least a week of non-stop all-nighters to work on this new material that had never existed before. Now, it became a small pouch that was able to carry plentiful enough supplies for extended periods of time.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. The real opportunity, though, wasn't the bag itself. It was the ore. She already knew which floor it could be mined from and a rough estimation as to where the deposits were located.

Once she had reliable access to the World floors, she could set up a streamlined mining operation and funnel the ore to create a spatial storage product; even a modest one would sell to every serious climber in Summit, and every adventurer outside it. As for her party, Paimon had entered the Tower two weeks ago. The girl had cleared Floors 1 through 5 without a sweat. True to her capabilities as the Arc 5's boss, she was talented.

And by the time she emerged from Floor 5, she'd earned a set of passive and active skills… though far weaker than she should've been in the original story. That part of the equation was something that Celestia couldn't help but feel a bit bitter about. True to the game-old adage, unlocking a character and putting them in your party made them weaker. After which, she joined Celestia's party starting on Floor 7. But two people weren't enough for a four-person party.

Which was why she had previously consulted Jade on the matter, sitting across from him in her office one afternoon while Martha poured tea.

"If you're that worried about who to trust," Jade said, leaning back in his chair, "there's no shortage of capable people at the guild, especially adventurers who came to the city but need the resources to be stable outside the tower in the meantime.

"The guild handles the vetting, too." Jade accepted the tea from Martha with both hands.

"Any job involving a noble gets screened like I had been. Haha… they don't want incidents involving nobles after all. They aren't the loyal sort, but it's the most reliable motivation there is just to not get blacklisted by the guild." He was right. She didn't need loyalty for now. She needed competence and the assurance that her hired party members wouldn't rob her or betray her. And what better than the adventurer's guild's own reputation staking on it? And so she hired two climbers.

The first was a shield-bearer. He received a skill on Floor 5, allowing him to force projectiles onto him. He specialized in holding ground and creating space for his party. In the terminology Celestia privately used, borrowed from her previous life's games, he was a tank. The second was a middle-aged elven woman who was cast out of her village for falling in love with a human man; she was both a scout and was skillful with a bow. Their reasons for accepting the contract were straightforward.

Getting a completed Tower escort of a duke's daughter on their guild record would put their foot in the door for more noble clients. One successful job with House Reingarde meant that they would be able to leverage that for better contracts and access to even more high-paying work. Celestia didn't mind this at all, in fact, it was even better since there was a higher assurance for them not to stab her in the back. A logical trade from both sides was something she very much preferred.

Using Floor 6 to try them out, alongside one more person who was hired just to fill out the vacancy, with the shield-bearer holding the front line and the elf mapping the path ahead, Celestia was extremely satisfied with their performance. And so, when Paimon had finally caught up, the four of them cleared Floors 7 through 9 across the next weekend with no major injuries. A month and a half into Summit Academy's first semester, and the exam announcement arrived.

The announcement appeared on the notice boards, and even the professors had it plastered on their doors and chalkboards. The practical exam was, in Celestia's assessment, absurd. The academy would transport the first years to a designated section of the mountain, scattering them across it, and have them compete for points through combat and objective completion. In all honesty, Celestia would have preferred to skip it entirely, but attendance was non-negotiable. The safety measures, at least, were competent.

The three archmage principals had developed a system involving teleportation and a small necklace issued to each student. The necklace was a pseudo-artitact that functioned as a damage proxy that only worked around a designated location, absorbing lethal or near-lethal hits in place of the wearer. When the necklace broke, the student was immediately pulled out of the exam zone through forced teleportation. How any of this worked was beyond Celestia's understanding, and she'd accepted that it would stay that way.

Magic in this world operated on principles she didn't understand at all, especially when Archmages were involved. Aura was the same problem. According to Jade, she should have been able to feel it by now. But feeling and using were different things, and so far, she'd managed neither. The written portion of the exams didn't concern her at all.

Between her meta-knowledge of the world, the hours she'd spent reading, and the coursework she'd absorbed over the past six weeks, the academic side was the one area where she had an overwhelming advantage. Beyond the academy, the business side of things in Summit was progressing well. The trading companies she'd established through Martha would eventually be of use. And the larger project, the one she'd recently thought about, was the transportation system.

The Tower's base covered a massive area, and the infrastructure connecting it to the city proper was built for foot traffic and horse-drawn carriages. It was slow, congested, and wildly inadequate for the volume of people passing through and by every week. Celestia had proposed a rail-based transit line connecting the Tower's main entrance gates to Summit's commercial districts. The proposal required approval from Summit's city officials. So, she did what any self-respecting ducal daughter would do.

She'd written to her father. Within a week, the relevant permits had been granted and the city's transportation committee had scheduled a meeting with Celestia's representatives.

'Nepotism is great.' Celestia sat in her office, a cup of coffee in her hand. The afternoon light came through the window at a low angle, warming the side of her desk. Paimon stood beside her, hands clasped at her waist, waiting for her mistress's orders. Everything was going well. But in the original novel, the first semester at Summit Academy hadn't ended quietly. The second arc had begun with bodies. The dormitory murders. Celestia took a sip of her coffee. It had cooled just enough to drink comfortably.