Gaius Antonius 83 - Greater and Greater
In the wake of the powerful revelations of the previous floor, Gaius found himself deeply relieved when the twenty-sixth merely contained a monster. A wide and tall cylinder of a room, the upper levels were lined with some kind of interlocking net-like structure affixed to the stone, to which the newest obstacle clung.
The Floor Guardian appeared to be some kind of owl, over twenty feet in height. A great beast, bearing feathers of gold and silver amongst the white and brown, it bore itself aloft on huge, powerful wings, and carried two sets of talons. It did not attack right away, instead tilting its head and watching closely, waiting for an opening.
An exhalation of tightly-held tension unwound itself from Gaius' lungs, until it felt as if his bated breath was large enough to fill the entire cave network. Khardaza's axe was consumed with flame and re-formed into a greatsword, and Gaius took a steady, defensive stance. His third eye opened, and the world exploded into information, as many possible futures became clear to him.
Diving down from above, his foe pecked at him repeatedly, and Gaius dodged it all. The owl reared up to rip into him with its talons, only for Scylla to burst out from her tank and headbutt the bird. The two went on a combined offensive right away, as Gaius leapt onto Scylla's back and pursued the retreating enemy.
He slashed at it again and again, firing off waves of bloodflame and volleys of Aegis projections, but the owl was just too fast, dodging it all and circling around to attack the pair from behind. They split up, Gaius jumping off Scylla's back as she dived down, both avoiding the newest charge.
The dance continued on for some time; in truth, this enemy was about as powerful as the fire spirit, but far more difficult to throttle. His emanations were perhaps reducing its power by one quarter, but that was enough. The two sides battled evenly for some time, Scylla blasting the beast with fire and wind and Gaius assailing it with his constructs. Occasionally the owl would gain the upper hand, only to be pushed back before it could do much damage. At other times, Gaius and Scylla would take the dominant position, only for their enemy to slip away into the air and reposition itself.
This sort of battle, as Gaius knew, was the way Cores fought. Hours, sometimes days, wearing one another down, with victory being clawed away by inches. His way of doing things, however, wasn't so passive. Allowing the beast to get close, he parried its lunging beak aside as if it were a sword, then kicked it in the head. It stumbled back, and Gaius saw something new.
All at once, the road split one more time. Additional routes opened up, where it had previously not existed, highlighted by the appearance of several new before-echoes. This monster had a weakpoint, a wound on its belly, hidden beneath that curtain of feathers, which had been infected and allowed to fester. As a result, the skin was thin and discolored, and the tissue beneath weak.
That scar had been there already - Gaius had glimpsed it, then dismissed it as irrelevant information - but it had not been vulnerable. It had been a harsh line of rough, thick tissue, nothing weak or exploitable. But now, as of
this very moment, that had never been true. The new truth was as such: that weakness had always been present, and a way forward was thus shown to the King.
The name had come to Gaius the moment he took up the power of the Second Reinforcement: Open Causeway. The power of miracles of impossibility, a power that could turn zero into one.
Juking to the side and allowing the great bird's beak to pass by him, Gaius thrust with a blade of gold, striking the scar and tearing into the skin. He twisted the blade, straining against its thick, nearly immovable flesh, and ripped it out. Angered, the owl pecked and clawed at Gaius again and again, forcing him to back away beneath its furious assault, then flapped its mighty wings, blowing the King off his feet.
But as the owl rose into the air, blood dripping from its re-opened wound, ready to plunge down upon its enemy, a humongous mass rose up behind the great bird. A wall of blue and green scales with lustrous bronze filling in the spaces between. Her roar seemed fit to tear the entire cave asunder. Nearly fifty feet in length, the sheer mass of the thing she had became served to dwarf the Floor Guardian, and made the chamber suddenly feel so much smaller.
Scylla's teeth - brutal fangs the size of saber blades now, not the daggers of a Rainbow Carp - sunk into the great bird's flesh, and she wrenched it backwards. The owl let out a booming, angry squawk as it thrashed this way and that, trying to throw its heavier opponent off, leaving just the opening Gaius needed.
Kardaza's axe, now twisted and elongated into the shape of a spear, pierced into the owl's belly, right in its weak point. Another spear, this one an Aegis projection, followed, striking the butt of the first and driving it farther in. A third spear immediately crashed into the second with unerring accuracy, driving the first spear another foot deeper.
The owl screamed and redoubled its resistance, finally throwing Scylla off. Blood sprayed in all directions from the great bird's wounds, and it began to lose altitude, attacking Gaius in something of a controlled fall. Vaulting over that desperate final lunge, Gaius landed on the mighty bird's back and focused the full force of his will onto the weapon inside its body.
He pulled, telekinetic might straining against the beast's natural resilience - even its insides were extremely tough. With a brutal wrenching, the spear moved upward, tearing through its entrails, through its lungs, and finally bursting out the back of its neck. The owl was reduced to feeble, tortured twitching, lacking the strength to scream. It skidded across the ground before coming to a stop, where Scylla clamped her jaws around its neck and mercifully ended its suffering. Everything fell quiet as the pair caught their breath.
Even as Scylla's movements came to a near-halt and her bloodlust died down, Gaius could not deny how intimidating it felt to stand before her now. There was an almost divine presence about her in this form, a regality achieved by simply existing. Scylla felt almost hyper-real, etched into the word by the finest chisel.
Such was the presence of a Dragonfish, a being close to a true Dragon. A scourge of divine judgment, able to wipe out cities and boil lakes. As such, even a False Core Dragonfish, the weakest of them all, instilled in the human brain an instinctive desire to submit. It would be best for Gaius to turn his mind away from such unsettling thoughts, then.
"That felt too easy." Gaius muttered, continuing to carve the corpse into pieces. The real prize was found deep within, a seemingly mundane Beast Core, albeit a fairly large one. It was a dull gold color, and rather than firm all the way through, it had a hollow center filled with gas. His Celestial Bronze dagger cut into it smoothly, splitting it perfectly into two halves.
Gaius began to eat one half, and tossed the other to Scylla. "A Core doesn't die like that, right? Not in a matter of minutes." He muttered through a half-full mouth.
Scylla either didn't hear her companion or was too caught up in the beauty and power of her fleeting transformation to care. She snapped up the core in one bite, and reluctantly allowed herself to shrink down to the usual form so she could cultivate.
"I mean, clearly I'm strong, but in theory, a Core should have an advantage at this level, right?" Gaius asked. He hacked the corpse up as his body digested the hefty beast core. It would be another minute before he had even processed the thing enough to properly cycle it.
Scylla snapped up a flying leg in mid-air and tried to chew on it. The bones snapped under her jaws, but she couldn't bear to chew it at all. After a moment, she spat it out, coughing, as loose feathers fell from her mouth.
"Eugh, why does anyone eat anything with feathers?"
Gaius sighed, dismissing his worries. What was the point of dwelling on it? He had won, and that was what mattered. "Well, if it works, it works."
—-
"This is where I'm fated to die, Scylla." Gaius said, peering through the entrance of the twenty-seventh floor. Before him was a sprawling expanse of desert, with the crystals up above on the ceiling giving the illusion of a starry night sky.
"I suppose so. It said you'd die on the twenty-seventh floor, cut apart by an invisible mantis." Scylla noted, her voice taking a grim tone.
"But revealing the future leaves it vulnerable to change. Prophecies can sometimes be wrong."
"I've already seen how it happens. It kills me in that future because I don't know anything about it." Gaius muttered, reaching into a pouch and retrieving his invisible arrow. "Didn't have a good chance to use this thing, but I think now might be the time."
"Do you really think the mantis will fall for its own ability?" Scylla asked skeptically.
Gaius grinned savagely. "No, I think it'll realize what I'm doing. Fear will be my weapon. Stay out of it."
"Glutton."
"I don't wanna hear that from you."
Gaius trudged through the sand, each step causing the tension to rocket ever higher. The waiting was the worst part; knowing he was about to be in danger but having no way to avert that outcome. Knowledge of the future would become less valuable the moment he changed it. Everything up until the moment he broke away had to be perfect. Sweat dripped down his neck and gathered in his palms from the anxious anticipation.
Right now. This was the moment it all began. It flashed through Gaius' mind all at once - that inauspicious prophecy of doom. Once more he saw it, his body carved to pieces by an enemy that could not be glimpsed in the slightest. It would approach him from the left, and the appearance of prints in the sand would draw his attention at the last second. He would launch an attack, which the beast would narrowly dodge, then sever his arm while dashing past him.
Instead, Gaius conjured up a sword and threw a faint at, seemingly, nothing, then pivoted away at the last second. The feeling of a blade slicing through the air stirred the wind into his face, and he threw a low kick. Something impacted his leg, but, eerily, the collision produced no sound whatsoever. The only sign that something had been there was the imprint in the snow as the Floor Guardian tumbled across the sand.
Gaius strode out farther into the chamber, flinging a handful of conjured knives at where the beast had fallen and, seemingly, missing. He drew out the invisible arrow, commanding it to fly around this way and that, in the vague direction he knew the Floor Guardian to be. Once again, no dice. Prints in the sand began to appear here and there, the only sign of the beast's passage. This was, presumably, what the sand was for; without it, the challenge would be even less fair. It couldn't be seen
or heard - what an asshole.
"I've seen your moves already." Said Gaius, pitching himself to the side and feeling the rush of air as an attack flew over his shoulder. The invisible arrow struck in response, but the beast had already moved. "Not once, but endless times. The alternate self you killed lasted a while and mostly figured out how you fight. I've already solved these rudimentary attacks!"
Three steps to the right, and another invisible swing went wide. The arrow flew once more, and missed once more. "You're so weak. An ambush predator that preys on other Early Cores with dirty tricks."
The scratches left upon the sand grew harsher by slight degrees, deeper in some spots and shallower in others. The beast was getting angry, aware on some instinctual level that its place on the food chain was being challenged. Good, let it get frustrated, let it lose focus, Gaius thought.
The enemy was outside of Gaius' perception, but that was not an advantage it monopolized. If neither could see the other's attack coming, then the exchange would come down to instinct and intelligence. Tabula Rasa stayed off. Without enough sensory information, the predictions would be inaccurate, hazy things. Better to focus the entirety of his capabilities onto merely understanding the present.
One step back, two to the left, and the monster's charge went wide. More tracks appeared in the sand in front of Gaius as his enemy stopped and spun around to face him again. Spurred on by the force of Gaius' telekinesis, the invisible arrow whirled in circles around him, faintly whistling. The Floor Guardian was definitely trying to avoid the arrow on top of attacking him; he'd been hoping to land an attack before it even knew the arrow existed, but as he had said earlier: fear made a good weapon too.
Waving his hand, Gaius fired off a spray of conjured needles in a wide cone, none of which hit anything, but prompted the prints in the sand to move around him. Gaius whirled around as his enemy rapidly approached - swinging from swordfighting range wasn't working, and now it would try something riskier: lunging into extreme close range and stabbing him. At such a distance, dodging without sight would no longer be possible.
The sharp
fwit of his arrow, right in front of the invisible mantis, stopped it short. It immediately leapt to dodge the equally invisible assailant - right into a trap.
A gout of blood burst out of thin air in front of and above Gaius, as the invisible arrow smashed all the way through the invisible beast from behind. The sound it had fled from, the only sign of the weapon Gaius had employed, had come from his own mouth, a distraction built upon repeated psychological conditioning.
Partially outlined in blood, the arrow flew into Gaius' hand. Upon touching it, he saw that it was broken, having shattered from the force of penetrating all the way through a Core-level beast's body. Already, its charm was wearing off, causing it to flicker into sight.
The heavy flow of blood, flickering in an out of sight, marked the location of Gaius' enemy clearly. He focused his Emanations more tightly upon the body of his foe, which crumpled entirely before the pressure, fading fully into view. A grey-green insect, clad in a thick exoskeleton with bladed arms like those of a mantis, it twitched miserably as its life bled out through the hole in his head.
Gaius chuckled, the tension of that deadly battle releasing bit by bit. "Damn, that was a lucky hit!"
After making certain the beast was dead, by way of impaling it several more times, Gaius slung the insect over his shoulder and slunk off to find a smoother place to sit. "And that's all she wrote." He said with a smirk.
Scylla followed behind, laughing joyfully.
"Slaying an invisible enemy with an invisible weapon? Very amusing."
"Oh? I actually impressed you that time?"
"Sometimes miracles happen."
——
Anytime Gaius started getting used to the cave's challenges, something new showed up. This one seemed particularly novel, in that it was the most artificial-looking challenge yet.
No stone here at all. Beneath his feet: a steel grate, like a metal net , suspending him over a massive boiling lake. Lining the walls: cannons, massive array contraptions of fire and steel far beyond his limited expertise. Half metal tube, half arcane projection, they took metal balls filled with some explosive substance and accelerated them towards him.
Immediately Gaius began dodging and running. There was no time to think whatsoever. Several small explosions resounded right where he had just been as he juked this way and that, activating Tabula Rasa to see it all. However, before he could go far, Gaius found himself violently throwing himself to the side as a huge gout of thick steam erupted beneath his feet, scalding the skin on his legs from the near-miss.
The exit, where was the exit!? Gaius focused his senses in one direction for a single risky moment, only to find the painful truth: it was about a mile away. Alright then: no way out but through.
After that initial minute of surprise and confusion, Gaius realized that he was more than equipped to handle this chamber. The gouts of steam were child's play to avoid. For most, predicting them would be difficult, but to Gaius, the beginning signs of each and every explosion were made clear to him as if they had been painted on a canvas. His route, seemingly random from an outside perspective, ensured that none got anywhere close to him.
The residual heat, dangerous in its own right, was more of a chore to deal with. It made sweat pour from every inch of his body, eating away at his skin bit by bit. Nonetheless, the Blood-Forge conferred enough heat resistance that exhaustion and heat stroke were not an immediate concern.
That left only the cannons; simplicity itself. The immediate intervals were irregular, but there was a larger pattern. Three shots in three second intervals, then four shots in four second intervals, then three shots in two second intervals, then a five second gap, followed by a final shot, after which the pattern reset. A few dozen cannons lined the walls in total, each with enough range to reach across the course, and each one staggered one tenth of a second ahead of the last. It felt like a constant, chaotic stream of destruction, but in truth, it was eminently predictable, so long as one kept track of every individual cannon separately - Gaius could do that too.
The intent of this course became clear rather quickly; a test of his precognition. Unless one was far enough above the level of this floor to react to all of the dangers with reflex alone, then survival would depend upon one's ability to predict what was coming at all times. A precognitive technique, one requiring constant focus, might wear one down if used continuously for a long time, but Tabula Rasa was a part of Gaius. It came out as easily as breathing, if he let it.
As such, his success was yet another predetermined thing, no more surprising than any other predicted outcome. Gaius' feet crossed the threshold where metal grated gave way to cold stone ground, and the cannons ceased firing.
Immediately, the reward made itself known. A relief of a man strung up by his wrists was carved into the wall by the exit, a dull green glimmering in his mouth. Reaching in, Gaius carefully pried this new treasure out, finding it to be a piece of raw jade, removed from the earth but not shaped into any particular form. An oblong lump, unremarkable if not for the way it made his soul alight with excitement at the slightest brush.
"Did you call out to me, darling?" Gaius asked, a sweet smile blooming across his aristocratic features. Not bothering to wipe the blood from his hands first, he turned the lump of jade over in his hands to examine the whole thing. It was heavier than expected, dense in some unusual way. It was not only unrefined, but impure as well, forest green dappled with speckles of black and white.
The blood rubbed off on the jade, and Gaius saw flashes of insight.
He led his forces against a beast with no form, driving it back to the depths it came from. In the end, it spoke one word: 'Niddhogg'. Wings of brass lifted his followers into the sky, and hands of gold cradled their fragile flesh. Ancient Wills, stacked in neat rows and packed together into the smallest possible space, charted their course. It was there for a instant, and then it was gone. Only a crude recollection remained.
Was that a prophecy, or a memory? He pocketed the stone before it could torment him further; he would examine this thing more closely in a more comfortable spot. He longed to get out of this heat.
—-
No no no. This couldn't possibly be real.
Gaius knelt, battered and tired, atop the body of some huge armored
thing, and cast his senses out upon the lands before him. If the place where he fought the bats had been akin to a small, petty fiefdom, then this one was an entire country in earnest. To the west, the sea stretched on, before suddenly hitting a wall and stopping. To the east, the shoreline slowly turned to rocky ground, leading into rolling green hills. To the north, more shoreline. Past the hills stood thick forests and small mountains, each mountain dotted with foothills.
The spaces, having grown more impossible with each successive descent, had culminated in something truly unbelievable. This was an island; a big one. An entire large island, inside of a cave. More uncanny though, were the qi signatures.
The beast beneath Gaius, a hard-shelled thing akin to a fat, tail-less scorpion, had been difficult enough to deal with on its own; much of the beach was a blasted ruin now. Some hundred feet out, Scylla carried another beast of the same species, already drooling in anticipation. Both of those had been Core Formation beasts, if quite weak ones. Possibly two of the weakest animals on the island.
They numbered in the thousands, roaming the island snuffing one another out - thousands of Core Formation spirit beasts, enclosed here together like some kind of twisted zoo, the strongest of them even reaching Mid Core. The only reason Gaius was alive was that they didn't seem to instinctively know his location the way most Floor Guardians did.
Could any country support a density of Core Formation creatures like that, in their blighted dead sea? It wasn't something he could properly fathom. What kinds of resources would thousands of Cores need, in order to sustain themselves? It would take an economy with a production several times than that of the present Golden Devils, surely.
But the truly frightening part was that this was a single floor. Floor Guardians could, through some mechanism, move themselves, that was true. That meant it was possible that not every possible floor was "staffed" constantly. But even so…
Even so…
"What the hell is this place, Scylla?" Gaius asked, voice trembling. "This is one chamber, you know. Even if all of these monsters died, it would resurrect them all like nothing happened!"
His eyes grew wide and wild as he tried to process the sheer implications. "It's the twenty ninth floor, only a few floors into the Core Formation section. After that is the entire Nascent Soul section." He gripped his hair in tight fistfuls and huddled tighter and tighter. "Every single one has an appropriate threat, and this cave can revive all of them over and over. Scylla, how is it not all duels now!? How are there still armies at a level like this!? How many Cores does the whole network have!? How many Nascents!? How…"
Gaius' own anxiety closed his throat up tight, leaving the last question unsaid. How much qi was in the caves, to fuel it all. If this one chamber eclipsed the entirety of the Golden Devil Clan's economic capacity in upkeep cost, then how many thousands, or tens of thousands of times over, did the entire network do it? How strong were the ones who built it?
Gaius had never felt so painfully small. Not even when standing before the grand Elder did the sheer scope of what stood between different classes of beings make itself known to him in such a fashion. And here he was, so very far beneath the earth, walking into the machinations of being so far beyond his comprehension.
Scylla was shouting something, he realized. There were some kind of words, or at least he was pretty sure they were words, beating on the inside of his head. He couldn't hear it over all the ringing.
Beneath Gaius, the cloudy black eye of the dead beast seemed to stare up into his soul. How could something this strong be a weak prey animal? What did that say about him?
Why did he tough it out for five hundred years?
Gaius doubled over, clutching his abdomen. What was this pain? Some poison, perhaps, affecting his intestines? He retched, bending forward until the top of his head touched the ground. Colors swam before his eyes, and it felt as if a terrible shaking had taken the entire world.
Against the unraveling of his being, something in the depths of The Seeker's mind grasped for clarity, for life. He arched his back, raising his head up - then brought it down upon the monster's shell, cracking it from the sheer force and filling his head with a tight, fuzzy feeling. Blood relentlessly dripped down Gaius' face from his cut-up forehead, but despite that, he felt somewhat better now.
"Can you hear me now!?" Scylla growled, headbutting Gaius in the chest and making him stumble backwards.
"Say something, damnit!"
"I hear you just fine, sorry about that." Gaius sighed, soaking his hands in the blood and using it to slick his hair back, out of his face. "I got a little intimidated."
"I'd say you were more than a little intimidated." The Rainbow Carp sighed.
"You were terrified, completely hysterical. What, do you find it frightening that the natural world contains things more powerful than human nations?"
Gaius laughed, both amused and furious with himself for nearly breaking his Pillar, for that, unmistakably, was what he had done. Unacceptable; he was still far too green. "Maybe I do. You'd probably call that the 'coddled mindset of a monkey', wouldn't you?"
"I would. Who cares how much strength is concentrated down here?" Scylla declared, puffing out her chest.
"If they wished, the forces of nature could engulf the works of the civilized world at any time. The reason they do not is because they do not collectively care. They do not benefit from building sprawling empires, made up of hundreds of nations who barely know one another."
Gaius smiled, carefree as could be. "This hole in the ground has enough strength to slaughter every human being in the Third Sea. Whatever. Another one of life's absurdities; it won't keep me down."
And so, they went back into the fray.
On and on, those battles continued; blood-drenched combat suitable for Hell itself. Gaius cut the throat of a bull-man, drenching himself in gore. Scylla burned away a giant venomous plant, which spewed billowing clouds of multicolored smoke as its toxins combusted. Gaius was best upon by demon, fiercer, larger and more deformed than Kardaza, and ran it through. Scylla smashed apart the rotten, reanimated remains of a long-dead dragon, insisting that only she had the right to perform the deed.
But more than anything, they hid. The massive landscape, the size of a large island in its totality, housed monsters around every corner. Rather than an all-out killing field, it was more like a place of measured carnage. Everything in this place hated everything else, attacking their neighbors on sight. Thus, nothing could move out in the open for long without risking destruction itself. Gaius and Scylla learned the ways of this place quickly.
Their bodies braved a constant storm of punishment and injury, testing the limits of their sturdiness and resilience. The ability of the Blood of Bronze to enhance the body's healing was taxed to the utmost, and ever so steadily began to diminish, until their bodies didn't seem to recover much at all.
A month passed, with dangerous battles happening almost every day, before the two, utterly exhausted, approached the end. Climbing out of a deep, rocky valley, they came upon the exit, marked by a ring of False Sun Crystals and surrounded by a deep groove carved into the stone. All that was left was to cross that line and they would be safe.
Gaius' skin had grown pale and his nails discolored from infection. He shook and sweat, even when not fighting. One of his legs was broken; twisted ninety degrees to the side and seeping blood which soaked his pant leg. The sight before him, shown through blurry vision, was wonderfully sweet.
Just one problem: The hulking Sphinx which sat in front of the line. True to the descriptions Gaius had heard of the beast, it had the body of a lion, the tail of a scorpion and the face of an old woman. Supposedly, many variations existed, but this was a common one. It turned to behold the two, eyes flashing in the glimmer of the crystals in an inhuman fashion.
"My my my, aren't you something?" The woman-faced cat asked, her voice distorted by a mouth full of fangs. "You've come all this way, still fighting so hard, and for what? Treasure? Enlightenment?"
"All that and more." Scylla declared, baring her own fangs.
"Shall you be another sacrifice to that end?"
"Mmm, tempting, tempting it is, but I've already eaten well today." The sphinx laughed, flopping over on her side and grinning at the pair. "You know, there are no grudges in this room. We are all reborn after a day, to die and kill again. The ones you've killed, they gossip about you."
"Oh do they?" Gaius smirked, crossing his arms. "And what do they say?"
"That you're strong, and smart. That your will to live is your greatest weapon. That the blood is settling in quite nicely." The sphinx cooed, rolling over onto her other side. "Indeed, I think you're ready for another dose."
With that, the beast unhinged her jaw, opening it up to a grotesque width, until it seemed like her face was about to split in two. Deep red light shined from inside her throat, bathing the man and fish in an infernal radiance. Gaius' skin itched intensely as he felt cuts closing all over his body, along with the grinding, piercing pain of new teeth growing in.
It was over in moments, and the mercurial creature got up, stretching out languidly before trundling off as Gaius and Scylla recovered from the daze. At the last moment, she turned around to address Gaius again. "You'll go far, I'm sure of it. You have the scent of a conqueror."
With that, the threshold to the exit was open, and no more enemies blocked their way. They simply crossed the line in the stone and it was done with. They took a few hours to simply rest their weary minds and bodies, not speaking or even thinking much.
The mending of their wounds was a laughable reward for fighting through such a hellscape. It wasn't really a reward at all, so much as a lessening of the inevitable consequences of the attempt. Perhaps, then, the real prize was the experience; harsh battlefield wisdom, teaching through direct demonstration the ways in which one survived in Core-level combat. Gaius couldn't deny that he had indeed become a better fighter, but it wasn't the sort of gift he would ever give thanks for.
"Should we keep going?" Scylla asked, trying to make it sound more casual than it was.
"We seem to be brushing up against our limits. We will be risking our lives on every floor, from now on."
"Don't give me that crap." Gaius laughed, walking around to test leg, which seemed to no longer be broken. Well. Perhaps 'no longer broken' was a little too generous. It still hurt, and itched deep within too, in the way that a halfway-mended bone does. But everything was aligned and pointed the right way, which meant his body could do the rest within a couple of days.
"I mean it, think about it."
"No you don't. I know you, and I know that you want to do more."
Scylla rolled her eyes.
"It's not about me. I'll ask you again - do you want to leave? Your mental state seems fragile, brother."
Gaius hardly registered Scylla's words, still enraptured by the little chunk of elucidation given form. "What? No. I feel alright. I'm fine…" He muttered. "Can't clear the floor out. Have to stay here by the exit for a couple weeks…"
Sit. Medical tools. Clean the wounds, set the bones, clean Scylla's wounds, set her bones, stitch, bandage. Spirit stones. Replenish qi. Rats, mice, bugs, moss, Legionnaire rations. Eat. Bedroll, barrel. Sleep. The routine the two performed at the end of every chamber had become a well-worn one at some point.
—-
The thirtieth floor, as it turned out, filled Gaius with almost as much dread as the twenty-ninth. After what he'd seen in that teahouse, a restaurant could only mean one thing.
The building was seven stories in total, a rectangular stack of floors with elaborately curved red roofing. In the center of the first floor was a big, wide set of doors, already open for him. To either side of the door stood a doorman, both of whom bowed deeply and beckoned Gaius in.
Gaius sighed. Time for another lesson with Ji Shin, then. His feet carried him in with a mind of their own, as his body instinctually approached his destiny. The inside of the restaurant was tastefully opulent; not overly ornamental or ostentatious, but tastefully displaying wealth through the quality of the marble floors and the rich wood of the furniture.
Before Gaius could get far, he found himself stopped by a zombie, one of a similar type to the ones back at the teahouse. The man's cloudy, bloodless eyes looked at Gaius politely as he bowed. "Thank you for dining with us today, sir. However, we cannot allow pets in the establishment."
"I am no pet, little corpse!" Scylla growled, bursting out of her tank and looming over the waiter.
"And you're the ones who put this building here in the way of the exit!"
"Stop it, there's no point getting violent here." Gaius chided, before turning back to the waiter. "Look, We're both very worn out, as you can see. We've been fighting down here for a long time. Can't we both eat?"
"Not to worry, sir." The waiter said, maintaining that serene tone flawlessly. "We have all manner of kitchen scraps we can feed to the beast. She may wait in the storage area and can eat all she likes, but she cannot take part in the tests themselves."
"Tests, you say?" Gaius asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Yes, tests. We apologize for any discomfort, but we have been advised to administer a series of tests to you before you can leave." The waiter explained, bowing again. "Not to worry Sir, none of them pose a risk of physical harm, and you may attempt them as many times as you wish."
Gaius snorted, then broke into full-blown laughter. A free win!? This was nothing, he had persisted for five hundred years already - any trial which could be overcome through a brute force approach was, as far as Gaius was concerned, already overcome.
The restaurant, he soon realized, was true to its word; they didn't care about anything as long as he didn't get in the way of the tests or the kitchen. This was a game-changer, because it meant Gaius could do whatever he wished, right there in the dining hall. He kept up his training, taking a break every dozen or so consecutive meals to exercise in the limited ways his confinement could manage.
He practiced with all of his newly acquired treasures, ideas already forming in his mind. The flames of the Blood-Forge danced at his command, melting this bauble and that together into a crude weapon.
The pommel was inlaid with that raw chunk of jade. He wove the tassel from the jet black silk of those space-warping spiders. For the guard, he made use of the beautifully resonant horn of that silver beetle. Finally, the Celestial Bronze made for a splendid base, and some of the metal from Khardaza's axe filled it out farther, until it was large enough to be called a sword and not a large knife.
It was a crude thing, unpleasing to the eye and forged with amateurish hands and no tools. It could be said to be a saber, in that it was a crescent of metal with a sharp outside edge. Lacking a hilt, Gaius smoothed out the bottom until no roughness remained, then bound it tightly in rope. Alloying with mere Spirit Steel would slightly reduce the hardness and cutting power of the blade, but it would still be sufficient to cut through Core Formation hides.
These, however, were merely diversions. Mostly, Gaius ate.
Enough noodles to fill an entire room. Meat so dense, it took ten minutes to chew a single bite. Sauces so spicy they verged on poison, making Gaius sweat and sweat until the floor beneath his chair was soaked. If there was any rhyme or reason to the challenges, Gaius could not tell, but one by one, he ascended the floors of the restaurant. After all of this descending, it was a novelty.
It was comical, more than anything else. A man dressed for war, dirty and shabby from his struggled and wearing the sad remains of what was once sturdy masterwork armor, sitting around eating an endless series of prepared meals. His friends would all have a good laugh about this, once he got out and told them.
One day, flummoxed by the fifth floor and unwilling to eat anymore for a while, Gaius beckoned over a slim waitress with a long, thick braid of hair. She approached at a brisk pace, bearing the doll-like expression typical of a woman providing a service to her social superior.
"Is there anything else you need, Sir?" The waitress asked demurely, bowing at the waist.
Gaius chuckled. "There's a lot of things I need, and you people can't give me most of them."
"I'm terribly sorry to hear that, Sir." She replied with no change in tone. "Is there anything that we
can do for you?"
Gaius exhaled slowly through his nose, looking down at the half-eaten bowl of stew before him in disgust. He quickly decided that he'd rather look at the pretty woman calling him 'Sir', and turned back to meet her gaze. "What's your name, miss? Where are you from?"
She blinked hard, taken aback by such a personal question. "
My name? It's…" she trailed off, eyes half lidded, and stood stock still for several seconds. "Gong Chunhua." She finished, snapping back to reality. "And I am from the Shanqu Clan."
How interesting. He'd suspect the woman of lying, if not for the total certainty with which she had spoke. She really hadn't remembered her own name?
"How did you come to this restaurant, Miss Gong?" Gaius asked, turning to the side and leaning his forearm on the back of his chair. "Did you try to dive down here once?"
If the undead woman could sweat, he imagined she would be sweating now. Her hands, which were folded behind her back, must have trembled terribly, because her shoulder were shaking too. "I am sorry, I don't believe this sort of conversation is allowed within protocol."
"Who wrote the protocol?"
Gong Chunhua's pupils shrunk to pinpricks, and she took a step back, her unsettled body language contrasting strangely with her lack of breath or heartbeat. "I… I… our job is to provide you with service, Mr. Antonius."
Looking over Gong Chunhua's shoulder, Gaius spotted two more waiters entering the room and standing by the door. They kept their eyes affixed squarely on the woman's back, watching with hawk-like sharpness. He heard the waitress' teeth begin to quietly chatter behind her smiling, painted lips, as if their attention had physically struck her.
This angle wouldn't go anywhere productive, it seemed. Alright, time to try another. Gaius pushed the chair away from the table, turning it to face the door, and sat with his legs spread apart. "Service, huh? Alright. And you say you'll do anything you can for me. Then let me hit you with a hypothetical."
Gaius looked Gong Chunhua in the eye and pointed at the ground in front of him. "Hypothetically, if I were to tell you to get on your knees and give me oral sex, would you? I'm
not telling you to, of course, that would be very rude."
The building fear finally threatened to overwhelm Gong Chunhua's fake smile, and she began to shake again, but with a monumental effort, the waitress righted her face and posture once again. "Hypothetically… I would follow your request, Sir…"
"And how does that make you feel? Would you really be okay with doing that? Right here, in front of your coworkers, in front of…" Gaius gestured vaguely, at the cave itself, or perhaps at its governing intelligence.
Gong Chunhua would definitely be crying now, were she capable. The cognitive dissonance of her conscious mind pressing up against whatever compelled her was practically audible. A sharp, unpleasant discordance; she had probably not felt so much free will in a very, very long time. "As w-waiters… as waiters in this restaurant, we are to service the customer h-however we can…"
"I know!" Gaius snapped, getting to his feet and taking a step closer to the terrified zombie. "I know it's your job, but that ain't what I'm asking!"
Hegently put one hand on Gong Chunhua's shoulder. "Hypothetically, if I were to tell you to get on your knees and suck me off right here, would
you find it agreeable or disagreeable?"
Gaius didn't know why he was taking this idle curiosity so far, but something within him felt driven to do so. Perhaps it was just his nature: The Seeker is free, freer than anyone else. He simply couldn't tolerate seeing such a suppression of free will before him. To struggle and move forward no matter what, that was the meaning of life.
Gong Chunhua was like a clockwork doll on the verge of breaking down. The other two waiters by the door watched stoically, not saying a word. "D… d… d…" she wheezed out, the tendons in her neck bulging. She wanted so badly to speak, perhaps more than she's ever wanted anything.
"I can't hear you, Miss Gong." Gaius said, placing his other hand on her other shoulder and forcing her to look at him. "Would you, Gong Chunhua, find it
agreeable or
disagreeable?"
Though now gripped in the throes of a full on panic attack, the zombie seemed to regain a semblance of life, becoming more aware of her situation with every passing moment. The two other waiters approached calmly intruding on the scene and siezing Gong Chunhua by her arms. They tried to pull their coworker away, but she stayed put, Gaius' grip easily overpowering theirs.
"You can do it." Gaius said softly. "The only one silencing you is you."
Something finally broke through. "Disagreeable! It would be disagreeable, Sir!" She shouted, just as a pair of fleshy tendrils burst from the floor and dragged the surprised Gaius back into his seat.
He snapped them, only for a dozen more to wrap around his limbs, holding him tightly in place. "Get off me! Ain't the customer always right, huh?" He growled, continuing to struggle as yet more restraints fastened him down.
"I wouldn't want to do it! I don't want to do any of this!" Gong Chunhua cried out triumphantly, even as the two waiters dragged her away. "My name is Gong Chunhua, from the Shanqu Clan! I wanted to be a dancer! My caravan fell into a sinkhole and into Ji Shin's clutches! You're just like the man he worships! You can-"
The door slammed slut, cutting off the rest of Gong Chunhua's words, and all went still.
—-
Those tendrils bound Gaius tightening for a little while longer, and he didn't bother to fight it. There was no point in starting a serious battle in this place, where the conditions of victory could be achieved with no personal risk.
Another waiter arrived shortly after Gaius was released, advising Gaius to please not antagonize the staff any more, to which he agreed. And just like that, the test went back to how it was before, as if nothing had happened.
Gaius didn't see that particular waitress again, after that incident. What had been done with her, he couldn't say, but he was glad to have given her a moment of individuality again.
The fifth floor was simple: finish a meal, then roll three six-sided dice. If the result was three sixes, he could move on. Yet after over one hundred days, eating ten meals per day, he had no success.
The odds of three sixes were 1 in 216; over one thousand attempts to achieve it was unlucky, but not to an absurd degree - Gaius wasn't good enough at math to figure out the numbers without a visual aid, but he knew that much less common things had happened to him plenty of times.
After that was done with, and the sixth completed without much fuss, Gaius was again flummoxed by the seventh and final floor. Here, there was no path to victory other than straight through. Whereas others had a time limit, or a hidden puzzle, or some other method of obfuscation, this one was incredibly basic: eat the dish ten thousand times.
Ten thousand roast ducks. Not Gaius' favorite, or his least favorite, though he suspected he might hate it by the time he finished. Oh well.
For over three years, Gaius sat at that table eating ten ducks a day. Scylla popped in to say hello once a day, but otherwise kept to herself, apparently working to master her abilities as a False Core Dragonfish. Understandable; jumping back and forth between significantly different levels of power was a difficult thing to adjust to, and training in seclusion was as good a method as any to figure it out.
In a way, this whole delve could be considered training in seclusion. How many years had it been since Gaius had felt the sun on his face, or spoken to a real human? Even leaving aside the relative time of his imprisonment, that left about a year of cumulative time in various floors, plus five in the thirteenth, plus three and a half on this one… almost nine years? Where the hell did the time go?
But of course, it all eventually came to an end. Gaius ate his ten thousandth duck, and the doors of the restaurant's seventh floor creaked open to reveal a familiar figure.
Ji Shin was still clothed in the body of Jin Muyi; perhaps he found it comfortable, given the two had become similar sorts of beings. Gaius reluctantly rose to his feet to meet the mysterious entity; at the very least, this newest prize promised not to be boring. Idly, he grabbed a new napkin from a nearby waiter and wiped his mouth and hands to make himself more presentable for his… teacher? Captor? Stalker?
"You were supposed to come to an epiphany, you dumb pig!" Ji Shin barked, exasperation creeping into his tone. It was the first time Gaius had seen that old monster be anything less than unflappable. "You didn't even try to think of another way through?"
Gaius shrugged. "I'm sorry, but you just made it too easy to brute force."
"T-too…" Ji Shin trailed off, blinking rapidly. "You ate the duck ten thousand times!"
"Yeah, but it wasn't hard to do, just took time, so I did it. You should have hid the number."
Ji Shin's palm struck Gaius sharply on the ear, which rung a bit in response. It was almost gentle, the chiding way in which he did it. "
Idiot." He repeated. "If you only eat in the restaurant, you'll never learn to cook."
With a wave of Ji Shin's hand, a chunk of the wall beside him simply disintegrated, leaving behind a sizeable hole. "I'm not even giving you the treasure on the top floor because I'm so disappointed. I'll give you something of equal value that you need a lot more."
Looking out the hole, Gaius saw down to the ground, where he beheld a large stone cauldron, suspended over a fire. Before he could even respond, there was a twisting of space, and he was sitting on a rock before the cauldron. Ji Shin stood nearby, tapping a wooden spoon on the rim of the cauldron as he paced around it in circles.
"You are a bull-headed student. Not nearly as elegant as that man, but similar in temperament. Even so, you will never amount to anything. Want to know why?" Ji Shin's arms and neck stretched out, over the cauldron, until his brawny hands gripped Gaius' shoulders, and he looked him in the eye from less than a foot away. "Because you're on the thirtieth floor of another restaurant. You're a useful puppet, but you can't be more than that."
He pulled away. Gaius, once again finding himself paralyzed, simply nodded in response. Even that motion was slow and heavy, like swimming through a thick syrup.
"None of you can. You're waiters, you're chefs, you're servers, but you don't decide. None of you can decide anything. Fate has - kpo cphvi xcvixz vo gzvqdib ocz rjmgy ji cjgy."
Oh no, there it went again. Ji Shin's words degenerated into nonsense and white noise once more, and the man stealing Jin Muyi's face seemed to have no idea it was even happening. It was painful, in a way that Gaius lacked the words to explain, to have knowledge brushing up against the edges of his mind, yet still being denied it.
After a few minutes, the painful babbling finally came to a stop as Ji Shin's words once more shifted into comprehensible language. "So that concludes the explanation. The Heavens, my master, everything. Do you understand?"
Gaius looked on blearily, trying to conjure up the strength to speak. Before much progress could be made, the ground began to shake, and the heat of the fire beneath the cauldron skyrocketed.
The fire roared, brighter and brighter, and everything seemed to swirl and shake. A loud crack resounded all around the two, as reality began to fracture and the soup, smelling of everything and nothing, boiled over entirely. From the fissures in the air, holy white light poured out, and bolts of scintillating lightning lashed through the opening.
Ji Shin was blasted once, twice, thrice, stumbling with each impact as chunks of his body were blown apart. Burnt, pulverized brains spilled of from the side of his head, and one eyeball hung loosely from its optic nerve, not that it seemed to bother him much. "The lecture! Do you understand any of it yet!?" He shouted, as one leg, then the other was burnt away from under him.
"No, it's all fucking nonsense!" Gaius shouted, ducking behing the cauldron to avoid the lightning himself. Strangely though, none of it seemed to hit near him.
"Very well!" The monster shouted, voice slurred from a blood-filled throat. "Then let me give you a cruder message!"
The spilled ichor from Ji Shin's ruined body swirled through the air, dissipating into a red mist which shrouded both them and the pot. The lightning, try as it might, could not break through, its energy seeming to simply vanish upon collision with the blood. As each bolt vanished, some amount of mist seemed to as well, proportionate with the size of the bolt.
Concentrating into thin, dense tendrils, the mist lashed out, striking at the fissures in reality and sealing them away. Little by little, the cracks closed as if they were being welded shut, the blood quickly expending itself to do so. Ji Shin's body began to disintegrate, shredding itself down into bloody particules to reinforce the cloud.
Gaius gaped in shock. This wasn't supposed to be possible, not under the jurisdiction of this world at least. Whatever Ji Shin was doing, it wasn't just clashing against the power of Heaven but directly counteracting it. An interaction of mutual annihilation. But that would require…
"An equal and opposite force?" Gaius said quietly. It should have been drowned out by the crashing thunder, yet his words seemed to equo throughout the chamber.
"There is
so much you do not know!" Ji Shin shouted, fading away into the mist entirely. "Seek strength, and the rest will follow!"
The fire beneath the cauldron exploded into a blaze three times its previous size. The soup did not boil over so much as burst like a geyser and wash over Gaius. In the instant before the impact, though, something clearly formed before his eyes.
A piece of onion here, a clump of spices there. A noodle here, a chunk of stringy beef there. The ingredients of the soup congregated together into lines and blocks. More characters.
解放
And then it all went black.
—-
Gaius' eyes fluttered open, and the first thing he registered was a sharp, stinging pain. Scylla loomed over him, body awash in holy light as she enveloped him in a soothing numbness.
"They tied me up at the bottom of that forsaken restaurant. Half a dozen Core-level beasts showed up out of nowhere to restrain me." She said sorrowfully.
"I'm sorry, I should have been there to protect you. The next time I see that demon, I'll kill him myself!"
Ever so slowly, The Seeker raised his hands, only to find them covered in a mosaic of burns. His arms told the same story: a haphazard smattering of scalding wounds all over the place. Why hadn't he put the Aegis up in time? Perhaps Ji Shin had stopped him somehow.
The remaining pieces of his armor, sad and half-melted as they were, were gone entirely, shredded apart and thrown this way and that. The leather beneath had fared a bit better, though a few small chunks seemed to have fused to his skin entirely, and were gruesomely detaching under the influence of Scylla's healing spell.
"This won't fix the damage entirely, it will just ease the worst of it. That's all I can do without good regents." Scylla muttered.
"We'll just have to hope the rest heals without an infection."
"I'm strong, buddy. You know that." Gaius rasped out, smiling fondly up at his companion.
"Not compared to this place." She growled bitterly, looking away.
"We're both just playthings, kept alive for their own purposes. It wounds my pride."
"All men are playthings. We're just being forced to confront it." Gaius chuckled; he was grateful for the conversation, which distracted him from his vulnerable current state. He turned his head to the side to find the restaurant completely gone. All that remained was an entirely empty chamber, with the exit right beside him.
"And you're okay with that!?" The carp scoffed.
"No. Never."
—-
I do have to admit, I'm growing a little disillusioned with trying to make every floor feel meaningful, and thus I've started making the unimportant ones a bit briefer. In the next Cloud Cave installment, I'm gonna take up a somewhat faster pace so that I can actually get through this whole thing. The original version of floor 29 that I had planned, in particular, would have been miserable both to write and to read. Just a gauntlet of several fights in a row, fights with no real stakes because the enemies are just monsters, after which it would get into Gaius' near-breakdown. I ended up scrapping all of those fights because they were crap.
The exchange with Gong Chunhua, where Gaius tries to make an undead slave regain her humanity through a combination of manipulation and boorish shock value, is one I was looking forward to for a while. His philosophy may be a selfish one in the way it sustains himself, but Gaius does care about others. He respects all free will, though he will ultimately prioritize his own free will. It makes him happy when he sees people becoming their best selves, grasping for freedom and understanding in a cruel world.
