84. Pushing Through Level by Level

Pushing Through Level by Level

The huge, ugly demon swung its blade, cracking the air as the weapon broke the sound barrier.

The blade was saturated with magic, making it impossibly durable, and the demon poured enormous strength into the slash, trying to cut anything foolish enough to block it into pieces.

A moment later, another seemingly identical sword rose to meet it, edge to edge, set at an angle meant to grind the blades against each other.

To the surprise of the demon wielding the sword, when its weapon struck mine, sparks burst outward.

Like a rubber ball hitting a wall, its attack rebounded, and the demon took its own sword straight to the face.

The green-gray monster froze in shock as its damaged sword shattered into jagged fragments against its body, while deep cuts opened across its face.

While it was distracted, I swung my own sword and sliced easily through its abdomen, cutting it in half. Black blood and entrails sprayed everywhere.

Thanks to Nearby Object Manipulation, not a drop touched me.

I stopped to examine my sword.

The collision with the demon blade had not left a single scratch on it. It had not even dulled the edge.

A Force Adjustment effect had been layered over the sword’s material and permanently fused into it, weakening all forces applied to the sword several times over.

The same effect amplified every force the sword applied to anything else by the same factor, which meant the demon’s own strike rebounded with more force than it had used to swing.

But that was not the only effect the sword possessed.

While Zhao Mancheng was busy fighting another blade demon, two skeletal mages fired purple and green magic bolts at his back.

I used Spatial Leap to appear beside him, while Forced Acceleration gave me enough speed to smack the magic bolts with the flat of my sword.

Before, most of that kind of magic could pass through shields and physical objects to attack me directly. This time, the spells broke into showers of sparks and scattered harmlessly across the room.

A violet-hot beam cut through the undead attackers, causing bone and petrified ligaments to instantly sublimate and burst, before continuing on to carve a finger-deep scar into the black wall.

Several more skeletal mages fired at the source of the beam, but Chi Li did not even bother dodging.

The enemy spells caught fire midair, became a swirling accretion disk of flame, then vanished into the tip of her staff.

That energy returned doubled and destroyed the enemies that had cast it.

A demon sneaking up on the red-haired witch staggered as a glowing, heated shotgun slug struck the back of its head.

It recovered quickly and turned toward its attacker. A moment later, another explosive round hit it in the face, actually improving its nose and teeth by removing some of the uglier parts.

It raised its sword to block the next shots.

Then both of its knees and its genitals were blown out.

Why a construct born for war needed to be so anatomically accurate raised questions about the intentions and/or sanity of the Mavis people.

Whatever their answer might have been, Zhao Linshou winked at Chi Li and me, then aimed Little Black at the next target. A silver beam from the enormous muzzle instantly vaporized a demon’s eye across the room.

Even with my enhanced senses, I could not find Zhao Mancheng.

But there were signs of his passage.

A demon charging toward me was suddenly shot blind in both eyes, stumbled, and impaled itself on my sword.

A skeletal mage’s kneecap shattered. It stumbled, sending a black beam wide of Chi Li, and a moment later it was ash.

A rain of bullets from nowhere disrupted a group of charging imps long enough for Zhao Linshou to reload.

There were a dozen other moments of assistance, each producing effects wildly disproportionate to the effort involved because they arrived at exactly the right time and place.

My senses finally caught the man darting around a corner. He disturbed almost no air as he moved, and across most of the electromagnetic spectrum, he was hard to distinguish from a shadow.

His movements and weapon fire were completely soundless, and most of the time he looked almost unreal. His bullets became solid only in the instant before they struck.

He was nearly intangible, but not invisible. If I had not been relying so heavily on Force Sense, I could have seen him.

Once I had caught sight of his blurred outline, adjusting my focus and “looking sideways” along another vector let me perceive his flickering state in normal space.

That, in turn, reminded me not to grow complacent.

“That… seems to be… all of them.” My best friend leaned heavily on her staff, still not fully recovered from burning a path through the tower’s outer wall.

Her clothes were smeared with blood, bone dust, and things worse than either, to the point that the original fabric was hard to see. Her face was pale, and dark circles shadowed her eyes.

“How many more levels do you think there are?”

Six enormous rooms of continuous fighting, each one containing a small enemy force, had not helped her condition.

“These rooms are always dozens of meters tall. Considering the thickness of the ceilings and the invaders’ obsession with the number six… I think we are only one third of the way up.”

What I did not say was that the number of rooms remaining had no direct relationship to how difficult they would be.

The first level had been full of zombies, probably all the ordinary zombies left in the city, since we had not seen any on the streets in days.

The second and third levels held thousands of imps flying overhead and dropping little fireballs, while more sword wraiths, skeletal archers, and executioners tried to occupy us in melee until we killed them all.

The fourth and fifth levels had mostly consisted of skeletal archers screened by larger, uglier corrosive ghouls.

This last level was the first time those newer, more dangerous enemies appeared in small numbers, but otherwise it was still packed with low-level foes.

“Found the exit!” Zhao Linshou shouted from the top of a spiral staircase.

“Same as before. Trapdoor is blocked by something too heavy to push. Won’t budge at all.”

He jumped down, landing from forty meters up with catlike grace.

Fine, any ordinary cat jumping forty meters onto solid metal would shatter its bones, but you understand the point.

“It is glowing too. More symbols on the one above than last time, and they are brighter.”

Another stupid alarm mechanism, apparently. With that much weight blocking the way, even I had to work to move it, which meant we could neither surprise the enemy nor pass through quietly.

We had already tried opening the passage normally, and we had tried blasting through the floor.

In both cases, it took so long that the enemies on the other side had more than enough time to form up around our entry point and prepare to hit us with everything but the kitchen sink.

Only because the Mavis people did not seem to have kitchen sinks.

“Fuck it. I am not going through another fifteen-minute fight just to make progress,” I said, picking up one of the blade demon swords and weakening its cohesion until I could slowly reshape it with Nearby Object Manipulation.

“I thought you grew stronger as time passed?” Zhao Mancheng asked.

Then he drank half a bottle of something that was definitely not water and passed the rest to Zhao Linshou.

Chi Li and I were not offered any. The official excuse was that we were teenagers and should not drink alcohol, but hey, apparently killing enemies was still allowed.

More likely, they were keeping the good stuff for themselves.