⸢Congratulations! You have successfully survived The Clocktower of Regret⸥.
Percival stared at the blue holographic text with genuine relief painted over his face. To them, it was an angel compared to the rusted, blood-soaked nightmare they had just escaped.
Following the announcent, a chiming of system rewards ca.
⸢Calculating Rewards...⸥
⸢ 18,500 EXP⸥
⸢ 7,000 Mana Coins⸥
⸢Item: Health Potion x3⸥
⸢Item: Elixir x4⸥
⸢ 5 Skill Points⸥
⸢Special Drop: Power Up! All Attributes, Health, and Mana Reserves have been fully restored⸥.
A warm, radiant energy washed over Percival. The phantom aches in his muscles vanished instantly. The toll that subjugating the Nightwraiths had taken on his Constitution and Charisma was completely wiped away, and his stamina bar refilled to its absolute peak.
He swiped a hand through the air, claiming the drops into his inventory. He had to share the rewards with Lewis, given the Arcanist’s assist, but Percival naturally had the lionshare.
Lewis, currently sprawled on the landing, didn’t seem to care about the unequal split. He was too busy panting in relief, staring at the chasm where the blood lake had been.
"We lived," Lewis wheezed, sitting up slowly. "I actually thought my heart was going to burst in my chest. Thank you, Hero Percival. By the Gods, you are an incredible person, y’know! You were right about the tir."
Lewis accepted his portion of the Mana Coins and a Health Potion, his eyes drifting to Percival’s dark armor. He then recalled the Demons.
"And those summons..." Lewis continued, whispering this ti. "That was unbelievable. You made Wraiths your summons. They were blue! So... that’s what you did to them back there in the library? You didn’t just kill them. You enslaved them."
Percival didn’t respond to any of it.
He stood at the edge of the landing, his back to the Arcanist, staring silently down into the colossal chasm of the clocktower.
Everything was as if nothing had happened earlier. He narrowed his eyes, wondering what was actually the story of this Gate World. Everyone had one, right?
He turned away from the abyss, grieving the loss of his War-Scythe with a sigh.
"Let’s go," Percival commanded, planning to purchase another the mont he left this Gate World. "We have one more Encounter Zone left before the boss."
Lewis scrambled to his feet, dusting off his robes, and hurried to follow, keeping a respectful distance behind the glowing form of rcius.
As they walked down the long, suffocatingly silent corridor, the tension slowly crept back into the air.
The walls here had torn velvet for the tapestry and shattered portraits hanging on the way. As they walked, dust kicked up into the air from the dirty, old carpet beneath their feet.
Lewis kept casting nervous, sidelong glances at Percival. He was scared of the silent, heavily armored Hero, but the quiet was driving him mad. He needed small talk to ground himself.
"Do you..." Lewis started, his voice cracking slightly. "Do you think the next Encounter Zone will be a survival type too?"
"I don’t know," Percival replied, his gaze fixed straight ahead.
Actually, he had been wondering the exact sa thing. If the Gate World was escalating in complexity, the final room before the boss could be a puzzle, a trap, or a sheer numbers ga.
He flexed his gauntleted hand, readying himself to draw a weapon from his Sword Case in case it was an ambush type Encounter Zone. He hated those.
Finally, the hallway opened up into a massive, arched entryway that had no visible doors. They stepped through, and seeing how vast the room was, they paused, taken aback.
It looked like they had walked into the master chambers of the manor. It was circular in shape, a bedroom that was clearly beautiful once, but now completely given over to rot.
A massive four-poster bed draped in shredded, moth-eaten silk dominated the center. Above them, a gigantic, shattered stained-glass do allowed pale, silver moonlight to slice through the darkness, illuminating the swirling dust motes.
Surprisingly, the room wasn’t empty.
Clinging to the shadows of the dod ceiling, hanging upside down like gargoyles, were dozens of Manor Vampires.
They were just like back in the Foyer, but this ti, rather than hiding, it seed they were waiting for them.
Not just the Vampires. Pacing the floor below them were the Revenants. These were the heavily armored undead guards of the manor, hulking figures encased in rusted steel plating.
Their green flesh were rotting and their gray bones peaked through the gaps in their armor as they dragged massive, rusted halberds across the marble floor, the scraping tal echoing ominously.
However, there was still more to see. A figure was at the very end of the room, sitting on a raised marble balcony bathed entirely in the silver moonlight.
It was a woman.
She looked almost like a princess, wearing a flowing, diaphanous white gown that had not been ruined by the manor’s rot.
Her raven hair tumbled over her shoulders, framing a face of agonizing, flawless sorrow. Tears shimred like diamonds on her pale cheeks.
In her trembling hands, she held a silver dagger, the point pressed dangerously tight against her own chest, right over her heart. She was weeping silently, her chest heaving as she prepared to drive the blade ho.
"Stop!" Lewis cried out, his voice raw as he stepped forward, raising a hand toward the balcony. "Don’t do it!"
Percival imdiately threw his arm out, catching Lewis rigidly across the chest and hauling him back.
"Stop that," Percival hissed, his eyes locked on the woman. "She can’t hear you. She can’t see you. She can’t even see the Demons crawling all around her."
Lewis struggled against Percival’s grip, confused and panicked. "What are you talking about? Isn’t the goal of this Encounter Zone to stop her from killing herself? To save her? It’s the Suicide Manor!"
"No," Percival said, eyeing the room analytically. "If we interfere, we are likely going to die."
Percival pointed a gauntleted finger toward the balcony. "Look closer. Look at the air around her."
Lewis squinted, channeling a fraction of his mana into his eyes. He gasped.
The space imdiately surrounding the weeping princess wasn’t just air. It was a violently distorted pocket of space, thickly laced with a swirling, invisible vortex of lethal dark magic.
It was a spatial curse so dense that if Lewis even brushed it, his physical body would be instantly vaporized, or aged into dust within a millisecond.
"Our purpose is the exact sa as it was before the clocktower," Percival explained, his blue eyes sweeping over the hissing Vampires and the lumbering Revenants. "We kill the Demons. That woman, the dagger, the tragedy... we cannot interact with it."
He drew the Basilisk Blade from his Sword Case, the snake steel gleaming in the pale light.
"Everything else around us," Percival muttered, "is just a story being told."
Ding!
The Gate World arrived with a notification, revealing the Zone’s quest.
⸢The Suicide Chamber⸥
⸢Kill the threat, then follow your gut⸥.
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