85. They Are Buying Time

They Are Buying Time

“All of this feels like it was designed specifically to delay us, just so the big bad can finish his doomsday plot.”

In my hands, the sword had already become a disk two meters across.

“Zhao Linshou, could you shoot the ceiling on the other side of the room? I have an idea, but I need more disks, which means I need time. Also, if this works, I want the enemy caught off guard.”

As the old hunter’s enormous gun began firing golden beams of energy that would normally reduce things to ash, I started making a second disk.

Each shot only carved a shallow mark into the absurdly hard metal the tower was made of. I estimated I had time to make forty or fifty of the disks.

The magic on them was far simpler than the magic on the guns I had improved. The shape was simpler too, and the volume smaller, so the base cost would be much lower.

Given our time limit, they did not need to be permanent either. A few hours of use would be more than enough.

But first…

Name: Ye Lin
Profile: Human female, 17 years, 3 months, 16 days old

Ability Points: 8/73

Word of Force [41 points]
Force Adjustment lv3, Force Sense lv2, Force-Field Creation lv2, Forced Acceleration lv3, Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation lv4, Constant Force lv2, Sustained Force lv2

Other Abilities [24 points]
Time Leap lv1, Enhanced Regeneration lv4, Focused Invulnerability lv1, Instant Action lv2, Defensive Counter lv1, Super Suit lv1, Spatial Distortion lv1, Spatial Leap lv1

Attributes [1/73]
Strength 36, Agility 18, Intelligence 6, Perception 9, Spirit 18, Luck 2

The enemies on the lower floors had been almost completely unable to pressure me, so it made sense that killing them had not given me much growth.

The stronger enemies on the previous floor, however, had given me one ability point and one attribute point, which meant I could finally raise Force Adjustment to the next level.

And yet, just as I decided to spend the points on that upgrade, a memory surfaced in my mind.

The skeletal mages’ magic was entirely immaterial. It had bypassed most of my defenses and my Super Suit to attack me directly.

For the second time in my life, I felt uncertain about the direction of my ability development.

The whole point of having so many synergistic abilities under the same theme was to gain stronger raw power, but if the enemy could casually ignore that power, then it was not going to help much.

Fine, I could still smash their fleshless skulls. If I moved fast enough, things might still turn in my favor… but that depended on luck.

It depended on the enemy not having too many servants specifically designed to counter physical attackers, and our last major battle had already shown how badly that assumption could fail.

Relying on invincible power and nothing else only worked if that power was actually invincible.

If a power was invincible except for one narrow weakness your enemy knew about and could exploit, that was much less impressive.

To avoid joining the long, stupid parade of people killed by overconfidence, I spent half of my hard-earned ability points raising Constant Force to the next level.

And because nobody knew what tricks the enemy had prepared, I spent the other half on Instant Action.

Lastly, I put my only attribute point into Agility.

At Agility 19, I still did not feel like Spider-Man, but my balance and proprioception improved significantly.

They reached the point where direction and tolerable levels of acceleration, aside from serious physical interference, would no longer disrupt my body’s movements. Fighting while sideways or upside down would be as natural as fighting on level ground.

As for flexibility, accuracy, and grace, any movement a normal person could technically perform through stop-motion photography or infinite retakes was now routine for me.

Without ability enhancement, I still could not dodge lightning or swat bullets out of the air, but dodging bullets, jumping out of one speeding car, and flying through the window of another speeding in the opposite direction?

That sounded doable.

Maybe after we all got out of here, I could try some stunts.

That would be fun.

“Are you ready?” I stood at the top of the spiral staircase leading to the next level.

There was an indentation in the ceiling leading to the so-called trapdoor: a twenty-meter-wide cylindrical screw set perfectly into the opening.

To open it, it had to be lifted while being rotated, unscrewed and removed at the same time.

It was thick, sturdy, and magically protected enough that unless Chi Li burned through it with serious effort, smashing it open by brute force would take longer than unscrewing it.

For some reason, my own abilities could affect it only a few centimeters deep at most.

It was not the first time I had wondered why the tower was designed this way.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply have no entrances at all and force us to blast our way through every time?

At the moment, that did not matter. The seventy-fourth disk stuck hard to the bottom of the obstacle with a loud metallic clang, and Zhao Linshou was almost ready to shoot from the other side.

In fact, when I ran out of blade demon swords to reforge into disks and had to remake all the disks I had already made into thinner versions, he had to stop and wait for me.

That did create another delay.

But if this worked…

“Do it!”

The old hunter blasted through the last few centimeters of metal. At the same time, I pushed harder on the disks with Nearby Object Manipulation.

The magic on the disks was simple: a Nearby Object Manipulation effect that responded to the force I applied to the disk with the full force the disk’s magic could produce.

That was about half of my total strength, and applying the same effect to the same object did not stack.

However, each disk was a different object. When I spread my force across seventy-four disks, each one cared only about itself.

Metal groaned and screamed as the rotating door was pushed with a combined force equivalent to thirty-eight times my maximum strength.

Grooves as thick as my arms bent and snapped. The metal cylinder tore through them with the force of a speeding train.

It popped out like a champagne cork, and I followed it to the floor above.

Thousands of monsters occupied most of the seventh level. The weakest and most numerous among them were skeletal archers screened by ghosts.

I ignored them. My first targets were skeletal mages. My second targets were blade demons.

Conveniently, all those enemies had arranged themselves in perfect formation to ambush our group… but they were on the other side of the room and completely unprepared for me.