Arcen stared blankly at Jackson after he stood off the ground wearing Gareth’s outfit. He stared at Arcen just as blankly, and he walked over to a tree, crouched, buried his head in his knees and started shaking. Isadora ran to help him as Leyland tossed Gareth’s corpse into the darkness between the trees.
Arcen had never been this blackened with hate. Bile rose in his throat whenever he looked at any of these people. He wanted them worse than dead, he wanted them to beg for their lives for hours.
I should’ve killed all of these motherfuckers!
For the hundredth time, Arcen regretted not being the King. He wanted to grind everyone around him to pulp. It would feel so, so good. He buried it deep, letting it eat at him from the inside. He had no way of doing the things he was fantasizing about. His chances of escape vanished with Gareth’s death.
The team gathered at the hole about an hour later. Isadora came up to him and did something to his nose. His nostrils felt as cold as ice, and there was some sort of an invisible bubble that plugged his nostrils, ear canals and his mouth like a balloon pumped from the inside.
Morgav snapped his fingers in front of Arcen’s eyes. “Pay attention. Did you hear what I asked?”
He asked something?
Arcen stared at him blankly.
“We have these air bubbles. Only Isa can do it. They only work for two minutes. She has to redo them in turn,” Morgav said, slapping Arcen. “Listen to me! We’re gonna drown if she fails!”
Like I give a shit.
“What’s with you?” He yelled, grabbing Arcen’s face again. “Were you fucking with that guy or something?”
“We go up. Four hundred floors. You need the egg. I got it. Fuck off now.” Arcen pulled his face from Morgav’s hand. He didn’t care about getting beaten anymore.
Morgav glared at him, mumbling something under his breath. Everyone followed him one by one. He wanted Arcen right behind him and Isadora in the middle. Karla was next and Leyland last.
They were leaving Jackson behind. The man had refused to stand after being revived. Isadora looked torn about it, but she followed Morgav into the hole with a last look at her boyfriend.
There was a dead worm inside the hole. Morgav had already punched a hole through it. They squeezed through its slimy carcass. Arcen wiped a piece of worm flesh off his face, pushing himself forward.
They came up to a translucent white wall that was plugging the hole. It looked like dried wax. Morgav extended his hand at it and bore a wide hole through it. Clear gel-like substance poured out of the hole like squeezed out of a tube. He widened the hole and crawled in headfirst.
It was the same capillary shaft that Arcen saw in his dive session.
The polyp walls were nightmare fuel. Arcen would’ve completely lost it if this was any other day. Now, he had way bigger problems than his aversion to touch. He crawled into the gel, letting the polyps explore every inch of skin, armpits, butt crack, and whatever else. He wanted to get it over with.
They didn’t have to swim. The gel was propelling them upwards, albeit very slowly. There were other smaller openings on the shaft wall where gel was being pumped in, circulating towards higher floors. They grabbed polyps and dragged themselves upwards to move faster.
Isadora kept redoing the bubbles over their noses and mouths every two minutes. Soon, the team found their rhythm. Arcen lost track of time inside the capillary shaft, repeating the same motions over and over.
It felt exactly like what Torga told him the first time they stepped into the tower.
Crawling through guts of a giant.
At some point, he ran out of energy to move around. His limbs were heavy and numb. He let himself be carried through the gel, pushed by Isadora behind him and pulled by Morgav ahead of him. This continued for what felt like a full day. There was no way to tell how long it actually took them.
Eventually, they happened upon a fork in the capillary shaft that disappeared to the left. Arcen had lost all sense of direction. He didn’t know which way was up or down. Morgav took the lead, guiding them towards the fork. The gel there was thickening like dried wax that he broke at the bottom. The gel turned halfway plastic, trapping them all in the fork like insects inside epoxy resin.
Morgav did something and burst a hole through the blockage. They spilled out of the other end, fresh gel carrying them down a tiny, disgusting waterfall.
Morgav fell first and vanished into the darkness beyond the opening. A thud and a groan followed. Arcen didn’t even get a second to brace for impact. The gel pushed him out in a thick stream. He fell on Morgav, who was still trying to wade out of the way. Isadora landed on Arcen’s head, Karla and Leyland fell on top of her.
It took them a while to clean off the gel. Morgav used a powerful Radiate to light the surrounding area.
This is the right floor.
Something about this darkness felt familiar. He could remember what Norm felt when he was in this same darkness, before encountering the Meronolith creatures.
“This floor feels wrong… ” Morgav looked around in the pitch darkness after wiping the gel off of his clothes.
“This is the right one,” Arcen said. He had a drop of hope for escape left. Morgav’s team wasn’t as powerful as Norm’s. He could lead them to the queen and watch them get their heads ripped out. There was a solid risk of the same thing happening to him, but he wanted to make this happen, anyway.
The only problem was he didn’t know where exactly the queen was.
Morgav shoved Arcen to the back of the column and took the lead. He didn’t seem to have any contracts like the one that Norm used to flip darkness to light. He was using Radiate. Karla used her own Radiate to light the back of the column.
The chamber they were in felt empty. It smelled of freshly burned wood and the ground texture was confirmation that was indeed true. Now and then, they walked over patches of ash and crumbling coals.
Something burned everything in here?
He’d not wondered this when he first saw it through Norm. They were hyper-focused on defending against whatever was in this pitch darkness.
They passed the desolate chamber without incident.
The second chamber was much more lively. Cactus-like plants grew all over the floor, weaving in and out of each other like vines.
Arcen panicked for a moment when he remembered the tails of Meronolith creatures. Luckily, there were no red eyes staring at them through the thick darkness above.
“Norghals out there!” Isadora said, squinting at the darkness to her left.
“Saw it already. Shoot it if it gets close,” Morgav whispered. He seemed oddly on guard. In the floors below, he would’ve started with killing everything all at once.
Maybe he’s afraid of pissing something off that he can’t beat?
Morgav held up a fist and stopped somewhere in the fourth chamber. Each one that they passed had been completely empty. He sniffed the air and squinted his eyes towards the right. “You smell that?” He asked Karla over his shoulder.
Karla shook her head.
“Something’s dead here. I can smell it!” he said, tapping the floor with his toe. “Can you check where we are?”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
Karla got on her knees and placed her ear on the rock. “We’re on the outer rim, three chambers away from the wall.”
How is she doing that?
“Hear anything else?”
Karla closed her eyes and listened intently for about a minute. “Nothing else. Footsteps, Norghals I think. There’s a bunch of them that way.” She said, pointing towards the right as she stood up.
Arcen pictured the tower floor as a slice of a huge cylinder. By ‘outer rim’ Karla was likely describing the chambers that were far away from the center. They took the capillary shaft that was close to Isadora called the ‘Central stalk’. They took a fork, which extended to this outer rim.
There was something else about the outer rim that Arcen had figured out so far. These chambers were barren, with low vegetation and creatures. One chamber was burned. Two others had nothing in them. These chambers four hundred floors up were unironically easier so far than anything in the twenties below. The outer rim of any floor must have been barren just like this. Arcen hadn’t been to the outer rim in the twenties. Morgav had circled around the chambers near the stalk, ending in the one that gave him the most Gold.
The outer rim in comparison was abandoned, resource scarce. There were no traces of water here.
That Norghal creature is probably one of the few things that can survive here.
“Get ready. We’re moving towards them,” Morgav said after considering for a bit. “If someone’s dead, we can find out where they came from.”
“I wonder where the frontier is,” Isadora said, looking around.
“What’s the frontier?” Arcen asked with a frown.
“Highest floor anybody’s climbed so far,” Morgav said, looking up. “That’s where all the people would end up. I’ll need you there.”
Morgav kept his red eye trained on the distant darkness as they walked towards the Norghals. Their feet clattered on the rocks, echoing within the chamber walls. The foul smell crawled up their nostrils the closer they got.
Leyland used a contract that made a loud noise, chasing all the creatures away. There were hundreds of footsteps clattering into the surrounding darkness.
There was a half-eaten corpse of a man on the ground. He didn’t have any identifiable features left, just pieces of dried flesh clinging to his bones.
“Fuck. This guy’s been dead for a while,” Karla whispered, crouching to inspect it.
“Any idea what killed him?” Morgav asked, peering over curiously.
“Hard to tell. Missing the right arm. There’s bandage. Maybe he bled out.” Karla said, covering her nose with the inside of her elbow. She used her other hand to pat down the dead climber. She tossed a small notebook, a wallet and a small pocket knife caked with dry blood.
Isadora picked the wallet and spilled all its contents on the ground. “Oh, shit!” She shouted, pointing at a white card. “This guy’s from Skyward!”
Morgav grabbed the white card off the floor, inspecting it with his red eye. “No shit. That’s actually Skyward ID. Got to be worth a couple hundred thousand at least.” He said, pocketing it.
What the fuck is Skyward? How is it that valuable?
“When did they send a team up this tower?” Leyland asked, digging through the wallet for other things. He pocketed some cash that was in there and a small metal badge.
“Didn’t hear about that when we were coming in,” Karla said, rubbing her hand on the dry soil nearby. “Looks like they used the shortcut to get here.”
“So everyone else fucking knew about this shortcut?” Leyland asked, already annoyed. “Looks like we’re not in the cool kids’ club!”
“Fucking Helviter hired us and never told us about it. Figures. They probably used Skyward for more ‘fun’ parts of the job like this,” Morgav said in a low tone. “We’ll see about that now. They’re going to pay ten times more.”
Morgav looked at Arcen as if he was personally representing Helviter on this trip. Arcen raised his hands, gesturing that he had nothing to do with anything. Morgav turned away, frowning in a different direction.
“We don’t know what killed this guy. Keep an eye out.”
The next chamber smelled even worse. It smelled of rotting roadkill, nothing like the decomposing corpse they just passed. Arcen knew which chamber they were in right away as soon as Karla used Radiate near him. There were ashen structures all around him, dead gray vines twisting into each other.
This is where the queen is!
Shuddering in fear, Arcen tried to spot red eyes gleaming at him from the dark. Yet there was none. This chamber also felt just as abandoned as the ones they passed. He remembered what happened when Norm came here. It started with those humanoid male creatures attached to the roots like mermaids. There was none nearby. The roots didn’t seem alive. They looked dry and shriveled.
“You two, circle around the wall,” Morgav whispered, patting Karla and Leyland on their shoulders. “Isa and Tentie stay with me.”
There was something about the way he was talking, it was as if he saw or heard something already.
Karla raised an eyebrow, and Leyland looked curiously at Morgav.
“Just do it. Hide and wait for my signal.”
Karla nodded, dragging Leyland with her. They crouched and disappeared into the darkness.
After separating the group into two, Morgav took a few steps forward and gazed at the darkness with his red eye. “Isa, I need light that way.” He whispered, pointing towards the left. Arcen squinted his eyes in that direction, but he couldn’t see anything.
Isadora did what Morgav wanted. She pointed her hand diagonally up. A thin string of light erupted from finger towards the chamber ceiling. It burst into several strands as it went along, like a firework in slow motion. Each subdivision of a strand lit more areas like flares in a warzone.
There was some sort of distortion towards the center of the room. It looked like a mirage on a hot asphalt road. Isadora’s light strands became jagged lines as they passed beyond the center towards the other corner of the Chamber.
They were surrounded by Mernolith creatures. Arcen felt his heart jump to his throat when he started noticing human shapes on gray roots. None of them was standing. They were all flopped on the ground or hanging off of roots.
They’re all dead?
Their corpses had begun to decompose into gray ashes along with the dried roots. There was no doubt about it. Everything here was dead.
“Well, shit.” Morgav whispered, frowning at the center of the room where the distortions were.
Arcen saw it a second later. The queen lay dead at the center of the distortions. She’d died sitting, her head tiled back, pierced with a shattered white blade the width of Arcen’s forearm. The blade held her upright, holding the rest of her limp body as if it was nailed to the floor by the neck. Two more smaller shards of the same blade remained stuck on her back and abdomen. Her guts were collected at her feet.
She’d been dead long enough for her grey skin to turn black with rot.
Who the fuck killed her?!
His question was answered immediately. There was a small figure sitting on the blunt top of the shattered blade that was pinning the Queen to the ground. The figure slowly raised its head as Isadora’s string of light whizzed above it.
Arcen caught a brief glimpse of the silhouette as light strands fell behind the distortion field.
That’s someone with short hair.
Two eyes were staring at them from the distant darkness with glowing orange eyes that couldn’t be that of a human. Arcen felt a chill at the back of his neck. He knew the figure had their eyes trained on everyone here.
Arcen used Reveal on the silhouette.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
REVEAL
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
The gold veins weaved it into his eyes right away.
╭ ╰︶?? ERITHERIA ?? ︶╯ ╮
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ ACTIVATION SUCCESS ╰︶
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ NAME ╰︶
????
TYMON
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ TITLE ╰︶
????
THE GLUTTON OF VARDENZEIG
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ CLASSIFICATION ╰︶
????
ASCENDER [37]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ MAIN CONTRACTS ╰︶
????
PASSIVELY OBSCURED BY
A HIGHER RANK [CONCEAL]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SUB CONTRACTS ╰︶
????
PASSIVELY OBSCURED BY
A HIGHER RANK [CONCEAL]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ TRAITS ╰︶
????
PASSIVELY OBSCURED BY
A HIGHER RANK [CONCEAL]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ DOMAINS ╰︶
????
PASSIVELY OBSCURED BY
A HIGHER RANK [CONCEAL]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ QUESTS ╰︶
????
PASSIVELY OBSCURED BY
A HIGHER RANK [CONCEAL]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ TRIBES ╰︶
????
PASSIVELY OBSCURED BY
A HIGHER RANK [CONCEAL]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
?╭─ AURA ─╮?
╰ 279,748,117 ╯
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
Arcen blinked. He’d never expected to see that number on a human. The mirage like distortions around the dark figure made sense only with that number. It was as if the world itself couldn’t bear the weight of what this thing was. Arcen’s feet started to inch backwards on their own. He didn’t want anything to do with what lay at the center of this room.
Two hundred and seventy-nine million Aura! Fuck.
The figure stared at them, unblinking.
