88. A Short Rest

A Short Rest

There was only one floor left before the top of the tower, and by our calculations, we still had one third of the deadline remaining.

So, instead of charging in like two brainless idiots, we sat down.

We ate the last few cookies Grandma Lin had left us, drank a jug of juice, ate a Snickers bar of uncertain origin that had probably been salvaged from a flooded downtown shop and might have tasted faintly of beer, and opened a pack of bacon strips.

“Breakfast of champions,” Chi Li muttered as she fried the bacon in midair with fire.

“Now I really want jianbing guozi.”

Unfortunately, aside from a small number of magically grown vegetables, all perishable food had long since… well, perished.

I had no idea how the bacon had survived weeks of frequent power failures. Maybe the strange chemicals listed on the packaging had finally done something heroic. Humanity’s finest hour: preservatives.

“After this is over, we can go buy some,” I suggested while calculating the trip. “Ice cream too. I think I can fly to Shanghai and back in five minutes?”

I took a sip of juice and found it decent.

I tried to use Forced Acceleration to make the sip last longer subjectively, but it did not work. That was fine. I took another sip.

“I bet you do not even remember where Shanghai is supposed to be,” Chi Li told me pessimistically.

She poked the bacon with one finger directly through the flame, then licked her finger.

“What? I do too!”

The red-haired traitor rolled her eyes at my protest and poked the bacon again.

“Who failed geography last semester?” she asked, extinguishing the flames and letting the bacon strips float on two translucent red disks, each two meters wide.

“You would miss it, fly somewhere you were not supposed to, and some idiot sitting behind a fancy desk would panic and order missiles fired at you.”

“It was one test! One! And I was dealing with Xia Xinglan’s nonsense at the time.”

I picked up one of the floating disks.

Somehow it was made of a thin layer of plasma, able to make things float without scorching them?

No. Once heat transferred outward, magic drew it back into the disk, leaving only the pressure of infrared light.

Ha. Light could exert pressure. That was interesting.

Also, the bacon tasted good.

“Speaking of that, what do you think about her ‘twins’ trick?” Chi Li’s eyes shone with a light I did not like. “I bet they messed with your mind.”

“Ugh. Do not remind me. My time at school was a disaster! Xia Xinglan was not even the worst part.”

Honestly, the opposite was true, but I was never going to give that girl any excuse again.

“I should have left the moment I saw something was wrong, but I wanted so badly to learn anything about you and Cheng Rui, and then everything just gradually spiraled out of control.”

To avoid thinking about that any more, I announced that I was claiming the entire Snickers bar for myself.

All of it.

Chi Li only picked at a few bacon strips while glaring viciously at the Snickers.

This proved that even in a magical apocalypse, when people could essentially choose what they wanted to look like, certain habits were hard to change.

Over the rest of the meal, we chatted about pointless things and occasionally made jokes, but that was not all we did.

Chi Li fed strand after strand of fire into her staff, an amulet, and two silver bracelets, working at a slow rhythm that let her body relax a little after all the fighting.

Since I had already enchanted my own equipment, I melted one of my force disks and made a set of eight rings for her.

Now that the boys were out of the fight, we had to face what was probably the hardest battle on our own. Hopefully, the rings would strengthen her defenses.

“You know, I always dreamed of becoming a sorceress,” my best friend said more than an hour later, when we were ready to face whatever the big bad had prepared for us. “I was obsessed with fantasy novels all through middle school.”

I did not point out that this was obvious, because it was.

I also did not mention the many times she had dressed as a sorceress for Halloween, or how much effort she had put into those costumes.

Everyone has unrealistic dreams growing up.

And I could guess what she was about to say.

“Now I have magic, and it is every bit as amazing and wondrous as I imagined.” She pulled on the rings I had made for her with sharp, angry movements. Sparks of literal fire flew from her eyes.

“But the rest of this world is terrible. So are the other people who have magic.”

“They were given this miraculous gift, something that could have made every dream come true, and what did they do with it? Death, disgusting monsters, and doomsday artifacts. Why?”

She glared around at the tower, the monsters inside it, and maybe the entire universe, demanding an answer.

“How dare they turn miracles into horror?”

“I guess some people can only enjoy things by breaking them.”

Wasn’t that a pathetic excuse? Everyone could have done better, and they chose not to.

“This Mort guy is like that. He leveled our city for power.”

He really was a classic supervillain.

His entire magical system was awful, and the fact that we had been forced to use parts of it to survive was worse.

But he had to be stopped, and we were the ones who were going to do it.

Which left only one real question.

“How do you want to handle this? This guy is not a mindless monster, so—”

“Fuck him,” she cut me off harshly. “He killed most of the people we knew. You tear him apart, and I throw the pieces into my fire. That is what he deserves.”

That was not quite what I had meant to say, but all right.

I had been worried about my best friend, because most good people could not do something like that.

Apparently, that would not be a problem.

Either way, it was him dying or all of us dying.

And I chose us.

The two of us charged into the seventh level, expecting a huge wave of monsters.

When we found the level almost completely empty, we actually became more tense and more worried.

After all, we had just been through the fake-captive trap on the previous floor.