“Are you able to share any details of what we’ll be facing, Floor Master?” Rabyn said, leaping back to us from the food table. While I was incredibly impressed by his abilities, the idea that he was this powerful and yet did nothing to stop the slaughter across planet Earth wasn’t helping my acceptance of him. I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to order his execution if it ca to that, but I doubted I’d ever like him, and once Earth recovered, there was a real chance he’d face a trial for war cris. But that was a potential future that required his help in the here and now.
“You know I can’t, but smart to ask anyway. I do know that the earliest they could get you scheduled for a third floor is in ten minutes. So if you were to sohow make quick work of what’s behind the door, you could make up the ti you need for a break,” Floor Master said as they led us to the door.
“I deeply appreciate you telling this,” Rabyn said before we all walked through the door into a monochro, featureless hallway, the door closing behind us once we were all through.
“How did you beco friends with Floor Master?” I asked, curiosity finally getting the better of .
“That’s not a story I currently wish to tell,” Rabyn answered.
“And it doesn’t look like we have ti anyway!” Elicec yelled as the hall we had entered vanished, leaving us standing in a giant empty field.
“Uh, shouldn’t there be sothing here?” I asked. There was nothing I could see other than fields of grass. Then I heard it, just before I saw its shadow pass over us. The loud screech of a giant bird sowhere far in the skies.
“There!” Elicec shouted, firing a blast of electricity out of his finger at the monster, managing to strike it on one of its massive wings. It screeched again, now diving in for an attack.
Dave: Corey, hit it as hard as you can. We want this battle over as soon as possible.
Corey: Understood.
I followed my own order, switching over to my aether orb. I tried a quick gravity reversal, not sure how it would apply to sothing already flying. As soon as my spell touched the creature, all of its montum seed to cancel itself out, and the bird slamd hard into the ground below. Corey capitalized on my strike, hitting it in the head several tis, soon joined by Cecile and Rabyn. It didn’t stand a chance.
Combatants Defeated
Giant Plains Falcon
150,000 Experience
Experience Gained
150,000 Points
Arena Bonuses
Floor 2 Cleared
2,000,000,000 Experience
Experience Gained
2,000,150,000 Points
Multipliers Applied
No Armor
x1.1
No Weapon
x1.1
Unoccupied Squad Positions
x256
This novel's true ho is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
Total Experience Gained
619,566,464,000 Points
The landscape vanished around us, and we were back in the sa bland hallway we had started in. “That was impressive, though a sha they had such a magnificent creature used like this,” Elody said.
“I don’t think they’re even real, honestly,” Rabyn replied, his knives already gone from his hands.
“Conversation for later. Everyone, grab the food. Glorp, Connie, load your storage space with as much food as you can. I’ll explain everything once we’re ho. Everyone et by the green floating cloud,” I said as the hallway door opened, letting us back into the waiting room. Before I could get to the table, the others had already picked it clean, so instead, I made a beeline for l.
“Good choice on the dwarf, but why the Larvin? Looks like a kid, too. Is he so kinda prodigy?” l asked the mont I reached him. I already knew he wasn’t going to like this answer.
“Glorp is my fault,” Pryte said before I could answer. “He was the courier I sent to warn Dave.”
“Oh, so he was bait for so trap, and ya managed to get him out anyway?” l asked.
“More or less, not really sure what the end goal with him was. We can see what he knows after we finish this place. The problem is that most, if not all, of the other squads seed to be bribed to target us, so even if we hadn’t wanted him, what choice did we have?” I responded.
“Hey, don’t put words in my mouth, ya saved a kid in there. That’s always the right move. I just didn’t know the whole story. We’ve got a bunch of class orbs just lying around gathering dust back in yer garage anyway, so we can make this work. They didn’t fuck us past floor seven, either because they couldn’t or because they assud this was good enough, but we’re watching now, so it ain’t happening again. Now, tell everything that happened on the first floor quickly,” l demanded, and I did, speaking as fast as I could. I managed to get it all covered just before Floor Master appeared next to .
“Please follow . Your floor three match is about to begin, and if I may be so bold, thank you for giving Rabyn a chance. He deserves far better than what was done to him,” Floor Master said.
“You’re welco, I think,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I wanted to press for answers on what the orc had been through, but I also knew that now wasn’t the ti as I caught up to the others already standing in front of the usual door.
“Our squad is too empty to play the actual ga, I think,” Rabyn said the mont I caught up.
“Oh, I agree entirely. My plan was already the sa if I couldn’t find a full group by floor three, and you bunch do seem a notch above the usual first-tirs,” Connie said as we entered a familiar hallway.
“Rabyn isn’t technically a first-tir, and neither myself or Elody ever really intended to climb, but you have to accept the reality you are faced with sotis. So what exactly is this plan you two seem to already be in agreent on?” I asked.
“The mont the floor starts, a signal light goes up, alerting all teams to where everyone else is. Once soone captures a flag and gets it back to their starting zone, the color of the light changes, but for the most part, we aren’t going to care about that. We’re going to go for squad wipes. Despite our squad lacking in numbers, the collective power of most of us puts us well above what we should be facing until the tenth floor,” Rabyn said.
“How does that work? Couldn’t we just end up fighting one of the powerful squads early?” I asked. It seed entirely plausible and likely Korl would want that.
“No, well, yes, but it’s pretty unlikely now; we could’ve on the first floor. They probably even intended us to. Everything after that is going to be System randomized from the near infinite numbers of competing squads throughout the Spiral,” Rabyn explained. That actually made so sense. Considering the size of the Spiral, there had to be a near unlimited number of squads wanting to compete. I wasn’t exactly sure why we were so likely to have such an issue on floor ten, though, but that was a question better saved for when it mattered. The hallway shimred out of existence, and in its place was left a massive forest. Trees the size of redwoods surrounded us, and standing in the center of our group was a flagpole with a bright green flag on it. A blinding yellow light, similar to a spotlight, erupted into the sky from the flag. I looked around, spotting four similar lights. We had our targets.
“Connie, do you have anything that can speed us up, preferably sothing nice and loud?” Elicec asked. Rabyn nodded at Elicec in what looked like approval.
“I sure do,” Connie answered before she began belting out the most shrill vocals I had ever heard. While the song may not have been pleasant on my ears, I could feel the energy of it deeply in my muscles urging forward. Rabyn pointed at a light and yelled sothing, but I couldn’t understand him over the sound of the singing. His aning beca clear when he tossed each of us what looked like a piece of candy and ate the one still in his hand. I did the sa, and sohow, the sound of the dwarf’s singing seed less overwhelming.
“That should let you filter sounds a little better, but it isn’t good for anything else, and I don’t want to waste ti on a complex al preparation, so let’s just make our way through these lights starting clockwise,” the orc said now that we could all hear him. I nodded back at his suggestions, and no one else spoke up to disagree. The scenery never seed to change as we ran on; it looked like the entire floor was this giant forest. How did they manage to construct these areas? Was it all real and they just had planets sectioned off for the events?
Rabyn threw his hand up as he ground his feet into the dirt, signaling all of us to stop, causing my wandering thoughts to end. “There are at least seven ahead of us. They obviously know where we are,” he said as his knives appeared in his hands. I pulled Corey from my pack just as a group of mantis n ca into view, though not exactly like the one I already knew. For one thing, there were no Hawaiian-style shirts. For another, they were all shades of blue and pink, and their arms looked much more like nacing blades than things used to pilot a flying bus.
For whatever reason, the nature in the multiverse seems to favor the sapience and growth of so species over others. Given the idea of infinity, you would expect that, eventually, all types of people would be equally represented in the Spiral, but as of now, that is far from true. On the far end of the most commonly found species are humans, dwarfs, orcs, mantoids, and then on the other end are many different species with a sole representative universe, one of the most famous being the cloudforms of the Floating Empire.
A History of Power, the Rise and Fall of the Floating Empire by lhelm VII
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