Chapter 209 (Patreon)

Chapter 209

Luna watched the planet of copper and gears floating in front of her and waited.

It took a deliberate effort to not allow her perception of time to slip into a timeframe relative to her Tier. That would just make it take subjectively longer for the children to get out. Great for when she needed to sneak in a cat nap, but less than ideal now.

It was a symptom of the increasing stress that was affecting everyone.

As the final floors of Minkalla were revealed, everyone stuck outside started to fray at the edges.

Even now, two idiots, one from the Monster Collective and the other a Feddy, were fighting it out. While she hadn’t paid attention to the situation, observing the high Tier chats with her AI told her everything she needed to know.

The two had personal stakes in some of the children who had gone in this cycle, and the kids from the Federation had killed the Monster Collective kids. If that was all, it wouldn’t have been that large of a matter, but the Feddy had then gloated to the Badger woman.

That set the woman off, and she and the Feddy had been fighting for the last few hours.

Turning her head, Luna looked out at where the two were throwing spells at each other and narrowed her eyes as their battle moved in her general direction.

With a thought, she sent them both a message. “Fight somewhere else.”

They ignored her, and their battle nearly washed over her house.

Nearly, because two paws appeared and batted the two idiots in the direction of the sun.

Two extra large solar flares showed where they skipped off the surface of the celestial body. She had controlled her strength to ensure the hit or impact wasn’t lethal. She didn’t need to set off an inter-Great Power incident by killing anyone, but a little slap into the sun never hurt anyone.

Luna caught the smirk Carol gave her that signaled that she had pulled herself out of her AI long enough to watch the show. The other manager wasn’t able to stay as idle as Luna, no matter how much she wanted to. Not with half a dozen other teams she needed to direct.

She also knew that the woman would be preparing to break away from directly teaching Susanne for a decade or two, after they spent a few years digesting the girl's gains from Minkalla.

She was once more wondering what the sixth floor would be when two figures appeared out of the Federation’s and Monster Collective’s moons, and teleported over to above her house.

“You attacked down at our juniors. Care to explain yourself?” The Federation woman was Tier 40s and strong, judging by the fluctuations of her spirit, but Luna wasn’t afraid.

More surprised.

The woman didn’t recognize her. And from the glare from the Monster Collective man with wolf ears was giving her, he didn’t recognize her either.

Clearly, she had been out of the game for too long if they hadn’t scurried away with their tails tucked upon seeing her.

Giving them a chance to leave, she turned back to the planet above her. “I warned them to take their fight elsewhere. They declined to listen. I’ll give you the same warning. Leave now, or I’ll attack outright. I’m busy.”

The wolfman opened his mouth even as his limbs started to transform, signifying a partial shift into his beast form.

Luna smiled even as the two spells came down at her.

A heavily modified [Lightning Blast] and a [Poisonous Spore] hidden inside a [Mana Bomb].

Adorable.

Void mana washed out in the shape of her paws and targeted the weak parts of each spell, dismantling them before slamming into the two idiots’ chests.

Holes appeared where their hearts once were, and started to grow as her mana started to eat at their very beings.

She started ignoring them the moment she saw the realization hit them of who they provoked.

Or, more likely, their AI told them.

Same thing, really.

Luna wasn’t that good a combatant, all told. She never considered herself a fighter, but training untold generations of top-tier fighters and listening in on all of their lessons still meant she had a trick or two of her own. Besides, most spells were sloppy enough it was trivial to dismantle them in midair, and void mana was meant for destruction.

Granted, if they had been prepared for a void user, they wouldn’t have suffered so much, but that was their own fault.

Like their juniors before, she batted the two of them into the sun, but to account for their higher Tiers, she aimed for the center of the stellar body instead of the edge.

A great wave of solar fire blossomed out, but with a thought, she prevented it from washing out more than a few dozen miles from the surface.

She certainly didn’t want a solar storm interfering with her vigil, and there was no need to take even a slight risk of a supernova when she could so easily prevent it.

Days turned into weeks, with all of the higher Tiers checking each new person who exited for someone who had left during the sixth floor.

A first floor Eternal Darkness, a second floor Genesis Cultivation, a third floor Back to Basics, a fourth floor Courtly Warfare, a fifth floor Taxing Skills.

What would the sixth floor be?

So far, this cycle of Minkalla had been better than average, but Taxing Skills wasn’t a deep floor that she would have chosen for her group.

They could use it, but it wasn’t ideal. The fact that they would have an odd number of Inner skill slots would itch at her, even if it wasn’t a problem objectively.

When half of a woman appeared on the Sect moon, Luna only paid enough attention to see if she would say something useful.

That fraction of her attention turned to all of it, along with everyone else, when she started crying about how it was gone.

Even as the healers picked her up and started closing her wounds, she kept flexing her Concept. Or rather, her willpower was being spent, but there wasn’t an effect, like she didn’t know how to use her own Concept.

She would be fine, in time.

If she truly didn’t like her new Concept, breaking it after Tier 15 and remaking her previous one was a quick, century-long endeavor; far easier than making a brand new one or reforging a legitimately shattered Concept.

Luna caught Carol’s eyes and smiled.

A sixth floor Folded Reflections.

Perhaps it was slightly deeper than was optimal, but the extra life experience it would provide was already invaluable. She held particular hope for Liz, that perhaps her other lives would be more used to utilizing more esoteric forms of blood magic. Using blood like an entry-level water mage was a waste of her potential, but Luna simply didn’t know the other ways in which blood magic could work. Ideas, yes, but she would not accept presenting mere speculation as genuine training methods, and the few blood mages that April had reached out to had all rebuffed her, were executed for their misdeeds, or some version of a healer. Minkalla told many lies, but it often carried a seed of truth. It was simply her job to find those seeds and place them in fertile soil.

She silently allocated a bit of their recovery time to have their therapists help them deal with the inevitable trauma Folded Reflections inflicted. Nobody escaped from living full lives unscathed, be they their wildest fantasies or a living nightmare. Both carried psychological damage.

Now it was just a question of what the final floor was, but she suspected that she wouldn’t get that answer until she was talking to her charges.

***

Their gear had mostly faded. The actual items were useless at the moment, as were any enchantments focused on empowering the material it was made of, such as hardness and sharpness runes, leaving only their more directly magical abilities.

“Heck yeah!” Matt pumped his fist in celebration, a smile spreading across his face. He couldn’t really say what final floor he most wanted, unlike the rest of his team, but Mind Over Matter had been on his list of candidates from the very start. Being able to use his repulsion endlessly was already a solid reward, but a sixth floor Folded Reflections- or any Concept-related reward- made it even better.

“I think top… five to ten, at this point,” Aster decided. “Double Concept final floors is great!”

Susanne was even more pleased. “Top four for me. The discount it gives applies to Folded Reflections, right?”

Liz nodded, studying her arm as she responded. “Yeah, well… Depending on how similar it is to your base abilities, your Concept could be almost unaffected, or made almost as free as your base abilities. I’ll probably end up… maybe with a one quarter to one third reduction on most of my new abilities? Matt will be better off there. Anyway, top five here, I think.”

Queen nodded, but before she could say anything else- if she planned to say anything at all - Aster spoke up, and Matt’s head instantly whipped around. He actually heard her speak instead of just reading an AI message. “Liz, can you move your arm? I got my tail back, but I can't move it.”

Liz shook her head, still inspecting the veins that made up her left hand. “Nope. Not really, at least. I can open or close my fist, but the spiritual concept of my hand is missing at the moment. Pretty normal for Mind Over Matter, but it makes my prosthetic mostly useless. I’ll have to figure out another way to use my shield.”

Matt looked at his own left hand. The fingers he’d lost in his reflection fight looked more like the wisps of white light leaking from his joints than the armor they should have been. And while they opened and closed with the rest of his hand, he couldn’t move them on their own, and his right hand could pass through them as if they weren’t even there.

Unsettling.

Liz called his attention back to what mattered. “So, floor seven Mind Over Matter. Great result for all of us. The only problem is, this is an expensive floor reward. We might have a bit of an advantage from being Tier 11, but we need to press our lead.” Pointing off to the side with her good arm, she added, “Let's get moving.”

With that said, they immediately started scouting their surroundings, trying to find both monsters and an exit.

Mind over Matter changed the floor and themselves to a spirit form, including landscapes and monsters, and that was readily apparent.

Everything looked like a painting dipped in water, with the edges bleeding out into the air before fading away.

That also brought up the second issue.

They didn’t have physical bodies, and moving wasn’t quite so easy.

Instead of just walking forward, they had to think about moving forward. It was almost like flying with a Concept or flying device, but slightly different, making it a frustrating skill to master.

Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be any monsters around the area where Minkalla had dumped them, so they had some time to adjust to the new mode of locomotion.

Just as they reached the wall of the ruin they were in, they encountered their first monster.

Matt had never seen anything like it before.

It was eight feet tall, and it looked like someone had stuck a half-dozen different creatures into a single body. It had three arms on the right and six on the left, and each limb seemed to be from a different monster. It screamed the instant it saw them and launched a beam of white flames at them.

Matt cast [Bulwark], but called on his Concept to reinforce the skill. Normally, that wouldn’t be possible, but the entire floor was literally about enforcing your will on reality in ways it wouldn’t normally work.

He’d had practice, of a sort, protecting Aster with a very similar Concept in the life where it had just been the two of them. His Will infused [Bulwark] and turned an attack likely to seriously damage or outright break the skill into a harmless splash.

Aster yowled, and the blazing flames burned away the heat, leaving only a dead chill.

Almost at the same time, Liz and Susanne attacked.

Fighting was a bit odd without their bodies, but their spirits knew what to do.

Susanne lifted off the ground, her sword dancing like [Phantom Sword] or [Sword Doppelganger], save for the fact that her indistinct form came along for the ride. It flew towards the monster, with Susanne’s outline trailing behind as it severed one of the abomination’s arms.

Liz had her shield, held by a [Blood Whip] tentacle extending from her left arm, raised to block an attack that never came as she struck the monster with a blood spear. Wherever she hit, spots of dark, rotting necrosis followed. It slowly spread across the monster’s flesh, thanks to Liz’s insistence that the monster was unable to do anything but die, contested by the monster’s peak Tier 14 spirit.

Matt joined the assault with a flurry of [Mana Slash]es. His sword’s steel may have been worthless on this floor, but it was still a useful spell focus.

The first of several attacks slammed into the abomination’s spirit, carving out lacerations in its body and forcing it to split its attention between him and his teammates. Liz took advantage of the opening to push harder on her rot, and the blackness spread. Matt’s final crescent of mana struck the rotting flesh that Liz had created and cut deep. Matt pushed it farther with his Concept, forcing it through the weakened flesh and clean out its back, causing the upper half to fall to the ground.

The lack of Genesis Energy told him it wasn’t quite dead, and the arms each pulling away from the body corroborated his theory.

It was more of a chimera instead of just an amalgamation of random monster parts. It was literally multiple monsters smooshed into the same body.

As the monsters came out and returned to their normal forms, Matt blasted a wave of flame at one of them while Aster used her Concept to make the fire burn cold, and used the resulting ice to entomb the nearest lion.

Two of the beasts tried to attack Susanne in a melee, but even without a real body, she was no easy target, and she was barely restricted by the floor’s rules.

Her blade had never been anything more than her Concept and willpower given form. On a floor where the mind ruled, it was even stronger than normal.

And she used it well, a single slice caused the two animals that attacked her to fall apart into tiny cubes.

Liz blocked one leaping at her with her shield then slammed it against the ground, crushing it entirely, and Aster turned one into a literal ice sculpture. Matt finished off the final bear that tried to run him down with a [Fire Bolt].

When the last monster finally fell, a rush of Genesis Energy hit them like a truck.

A single kill here was worth at least a dozen kills on the sixth floor.

Aster walked over to the deer closest to her, and he felt her activate a skill, even though nothing happened.

“Aww, I can’t eat their hearts. Now that's just unfair.”

Even saying that, Aster floated back towards the rest of them, and they started moving onward once more.

After they had killed their third monster, Matt had to speak up. “So, I have an idea.”

Everyone looked at him, and he continued. “I think this is how Minkalla makes the monsters. It needs to make a peak Tier 14 monster for the final floor, right?” At the nods, he gestured to the dissolving corpse. “So maybe it just sticks half a dozen low Tier 14 monsters together to get the power it needs. But on normal floors, it's only got one body. Here, there’s no actual body. Just their minds.”

Gesturing once more, he let the visual speak for itself.

Aster shrugged, which looked weird as her blob of dying stars crunched up. “Does it matter?”

Matt frowned. “Not while we’re inside, but it could be a really cool academic subject of study. Though, I’m sure Erwin already knows the answer. I can’t be the first person to theorize this.”

Susanne started floating forward. “That's a nope from me, then. They’re monsters, who cares how they get as strong as they do?”

Liz blew him a kiss as she passed by, but Matt really wished Erwin was with him so they could dissect this mystery. The act of researching was half the fun, and this could prove to be an interesting case study of monsters.

The next monster finally dropped a skill that he was going to toss into the bucket, when Susanne reminded him, “We're on the seventh floor, so the skill might be a Tier 20 skill. Check it.”

Matt hit it with [Analyze] to see what it was after his AI didn’t recognize it as one of the Tier 20 skills from his admittedly sparse database.

“Seems like a bow skill. I don’t know what it is beyond that.”

Tossing it into the pile of other skills they didn’t immediately need, they moved on.

The ruin didn’t seem to have a boss, so after they killed the monsters, they moved on to the next ruin, where there were slimes with various other monsters dissolving inside.

Killing them also spawned more monsters, which seemed to confirm Matt’s idea, but when they encountered a ruin with normal-looking orangutans, the others thought he was wrong. To Matt, though, it only reinforced his theory.

The place was made out of tens of thousands of ruins, so it made sense that some of them would be peak Tier 14 ruins, and have correspondingly strong monsters inside.

They had just burned down most of a wispy forest to kill a ruin of mosquitoes when Matt felt the first people they encountered approaching them at a run.

He had hoped they had been far enough ahead to avoid other people on this floor, considering how quickly they attacked and killed their final boss mirror selves on the sixth floor.

A pair of indistinct figures rushed around the corner, one being carried by the other, with their spirits obscured behind powerful enchantments. It gave them the appearance of dull, gray humanoids, and their bodies blurred as though out of focus.

Matt raised his sword to meet their attackers, intercepting… a wave of molten metal from the one being carried. He quickly swapped to blocking with a [Bulwark] and sent out an AI pulse towards both his team and the newcomers.

“Start running,” Bradley responded, as he swept his prepared attack back behind them. “Nine assholes ambushed us coming out of a challenge room.”

Looking at his team, Matt knew exactly who that was. Or at least, suspected he did.

They were one of the teams of ten who were running around killing anyone they encountered from the Empire and Guilds, and Matt started reaching for an Aurora Lance array.

Putting words to action while he set up the array, he said, “Pretend to run and get ready to duck. I’ve got another one of the arrays I used on the General, and I’ve been itching to use it.”

“You know what, Quill, I think I missed you,” Jill added, redoubling her speed as Bradley shifted to be more firmly in her arms. Matt and his team followed at about the same speed, though ready to turn and fire at a moment’s notice.

Thankfully, it worked, and a squad of nine people bursted out from the adjoining ruin in tight formation. They appeared translucent bodies over glowing skeletons, with a shield bearer leading their charge with a shield manifestation not unlike Susanne's.

It didn’t do them any good.

The spell that forced the general with most of an Intent to dodge wasn’t so easy to block, and as it fired, Aster threw her own mana and Concept at the array, strengthening it even further.

What happened proved too fast to even see, but the entire passage between ruins was suddenly replaced with blue ice as the world went still. The sheer presence of the millions of mana blown in a single instant even proved almost contagious to the only-mostly-real Mind Over Matter, and some of the passage’s walls even transmuted from metal into massive sheets of ice.

Even before the spell exploded, Matt felt nine streams of Genesis Energy rushing into his body, signifying the death of the entire squad.

Matt stood there and cast [Bulwark] to protect himself and his team as the mountain of ice exploded and tore holes through everything that wasn't the impenetrable walls of Minkalla.

When the debris stopped falling, Bradley poked his molten head out of the hole he and Jill had created.

“Fuck me with a polearm, that was awesome!”

Jill looked less than pleased as she said, “You couldn't tone it down a little? No way any of their gear is intact after that. And those fuckers owe me a bowstring.”

Matt gestured off to the side, seeing the couple's injuries. “Need some healing?”

Jill shook her head. “We’re already pushing the healing cooldown, so it wouldn’t do much for us.”

Hearing that, Matt tossed them half their remaining [Bandage] talismans before casting the spell on them a few times.

Now that they knew the final floor, they had no worries about needing the talismans later on. They had already gone through Taxing Skills, after all.

Bradley gave him an indistinct thumbs up before rubbing his side.

“Fancy seeing you guys here.”

Liz snorted as she pointed at the icy hole in the ground with her spear. “How did you guys get on their bad side?”

Bradley shrugged. “I wouldn't say we got on their bad side, so much as we got unlucky about timing. They caught us coming out of a challenge room, and they decided to attack. We ran. You killed them all. That about sums it up.”

Jill was busy trying to restring a bow that very clearly still had a string, albeit one that was more theoretical than actual. The sight sparked something in Matt’s memory, and he started mentally rummaging through his spatial ring for a bow they’d found earlier.

Not finding it, he dropped their house and managed to track it down in the loot pile therein after mere moments of searching, it being in literally the first place he looked.

Mind Over Matter. Convenient.

Tossing it over to Jill as he put the house away, he said, “Bow of reflections. It will split any arrows shot with it into six copies, including enchantments and spells, but the range won't go out past three hundred feet.”

Jill took the bow and started fiddling with it before thanking him. “This would have come in handy five minutes ago, but better late than never. We have a few Tier 20 skills if you want, in exchange.”

With that, she sent over a list, and almost immediately, Liz jumped on a skill. “Oh, [Lesser Mana Clone]? I’ve had my eye on that one for a little while. I know it’s on the pricier side, anything else we can toss in for the trade? .”

Bradley ‘threw’- the action was all wrong, but there was no better way to describe it- a skill shard at Liz, “Call it even with the save and talismans.”

Aster floated over and said hello. “What challenge room did you guys find? Also, how did you even find one this deep? It's way harder to find them here.”

Jill answered even as she fired a few arrows at a nearby fallen tree with her new bow. “There was a circular patch of mushrooms that looked super suspicious. Took me about an hour, but I figured out if you ‘hop’ on your left foot through the mushrooms, you find a challenge room pillar. And the challenge was ‘What Doesn't Kill You.’ Which was less than fun, but profitable.”

Matt winced along with everyone but Susanne, so he explained, “That's the one where you need to sit there and let monsters eat you. The longer you can refrain from attacking, the more reward, but the pain you feel amplifies as time goes on. No lingering damage, fortunately.”

“Oh, we should do that one.”

Despite it sounding like an awful time, Matt agreed.

They were doing well with Genesis Energy, and getting a challenge room where they knew the challenge, and knew they could beat it, would only amplify that advantage.

After ensuring the duo were safely settled into a hidden alcove to recover some, the four of them headed to where the ring of mushrooms lay.

It was a good thing Jill figured the secret out, as Matt was sure he never would have thought of it, and it wasn’t one of the puzzles he’d memorized. Though it was funny to see Aster trying to use her mental body to hop on her left paws.

Without having done that before, she stumbled a few times, landing on her face.

When they finally all made it into the hidden space, they found the pillar of crystal, just as Bradley and Jill said there would be.

Touching the pillar and sending all of his Genesis Energy into it, Matt found himself standing alone, surrounded by a field of monsters who looked at him hungrily.

Taking a deep breath, Matt calmed himself as the monsters started tearing into his body with claws and fangs.

The pain was indescribable, as the challenge magnified it a thousand fold, but Matt blocked it out as best he could.

It wasn’t real, and he had trained to withstand pain like this with Luna a number of times before. He was Endless. This was temporary. He was Endless. He was eternal. He could withstand pain. The image of a white hole flooded his mind, and he tried to detach from his body, even as it screamed at him to defend himself. He would not yield. He would not give way. Pain… was an illusion.

Breathe in, breathe out. Even if his body didn’t properly exist, the action was meaningful. If he could last for a breath, he could last for a lifetime. A moment was eternity, and eternity was a moment.

The skin on his skull was being peeled back, and what felt like boiling salt was being poured on the open wound, nearly causing him to break. But he kept his reaction to just a flinch and forced himself to unclench his fingers.

He wasn’t sure how long he lasted, but it felt like decades when he finally broke. As a monster tore into his wrist, dragging its claw along the length of his arm, fileting him alive, Matt couldn’t clamp down on his arm. It only took a single smack from his palm, but it counted as an attack, and the trial ended..

When he appeared, the rest of his team were waiting for him. Aster yipped an approval, “Three minutes more than Liz and me, about a minute more than Susanne.”

As Matt rubbed his nonexistent arms to settle the goosebumps from the all-too-recent pain of them being ripped open, the pillar started to spit out their rewards.

At this stage, the main thing they wanted was Genesis Energy, but any skills or items they could get would still be useful.

While they hadn’t had anyone stay outside to get a full accounting of the time they spent inside from the rush of Genesis Energy, they could speculate that they lasted at least fifteen minutes, as they all got more than triple the energy they put in.

Even then, the pillar also spat out a number of items.

Minkalla was a planet of miracles, and the final floor was a source of incredible wealth, if you could survive long enough to claim it. While they were in a relatively secure place, and in order to take his mind off the trauma he had just inflicted on himself, he picked through some of his unidentified skills he had picked up on this floor.

Many of them were only useful for selling on the outside, like [Consistency Check], a favorite of writers across the realm. [Telescope] sold well to archers, artillery mages, and scouts for its ability to pick out details at incredible range, though sadly there wasn’t a copy of [Light Sensor] that could turn the skill into a real analytical workhorse. Generally, it was better in rifts with long sight lines, like space rifts, rather than the more typical planets with curvature. [Electroplate], [Locate Ore], [Desalinate], and [Mend Bone] were the next skills he found. The last one alone would net them a tidy sum, considering how in demand healing skills perennially were for healers all across the Empire.

[Antenna] was an interesting skill, formerly used in long-range communication, but the advent of the modern [AI] pseudoskill made it almost entirely redundant.

Most of the rest of the skills he didn’t even recognize, which was to be expected at this point in a Minkalla run, but he did manage to get a few that could be of use to his team.

[Snowpack] went to Aster, who could benefit from a strong frontal defense spell to benefit from her new ice strengthening Concept effect. In many ways it was similar to [Bulwark], defining an area with the initial mana then channeling more in to strengthen it, though it did so by summoning real snow that then became compacted by the spell. Fantastic for creating strong barriers, though slower and only a fraction as maneuverable as Matt’s own spell. The bread and butter support skill, [Lifeline], would allow her to yank an ally to her with a glowing force tether, which Aster solemnly swore not to abuse in training.

Liz was more than content with [Octopus Assault], which would hopefully be an upgrade to [Blood Whip] in almost every way. At least, if the skill didn’t break. It was an incredibly versatile mid-range spell, and eight lashing tendrils of blood could strike fear into the heart of anyone. It was technically a mid power Tier 20 skill, but it sold better than most. Not because of its incredible damage, but because of the ability to mimic Duke Waters’ assault on the Sons of the Seven Skies. The movie that had been made around that fight still sold out copies to this day because of the iconic scene. She also claimed an [Analyze Water], which she expected would help her with her blood alchemy.

[Mass Deflect] was claimed by Susanne, a fairly utilitarian sword skill that summoned short lived copies of the user’s blade to deflect large numbers of weak projectiles. The bottle of Mercury’s Might would let her aspect her mana to metal, though without instruction on how to properly split her pool, she would need to wait until they were out of the planet in order to use it.

[Double Tap] was the most obvious skill for him, a general purpose yet expensive spell that boosted any non-channeled skill that was cast twice in a row, though it would be a few Tiers before he could cast it with no setup. The primary drawback was how it could make him predictable, but it would help his non-channeled skills keep up in power with his channels as he got more and more mana. Additionally, [Extend Arms] was a classic spell that he couldn’t pass up, and he was eager to experience the lowest Tier of body morphing skills. He’d seen both Luna and Aunt Helen use it on occasion, and if it was good enough for both of them, it was good enough for him. It was a notoriously tricky spell to integrate into real fighting, but it offered a lot of fun and utility off the battlefield, and Aunt Helen swore by its ability to give better hugs.

With their Genesis Energy reserves ahead of the game, they just needed to push ahead and get to the second level of this floor before anyone else.

Speed was their greatest defense at this time, and they intended to push their lead ahead as much as possible before everyone else landed on this floor.

With that in mind, they moved back to where they left Bradley and Jill to send them a message that they were moving ahead, and then started killing their way through the nearest ruins at their fastest speed. The monsters were… tough. He was used to killing stronger things than Tier 14s, of course, but that was with his body. Without his cultivation and channeled buffs, he was left as just a mage. A very good mage, who could still [Cracked Mana Spear] just about anything they encountered to oblivion, but it still felt wrong in some undefinable way. Everything was just slightly off, without his body.

They didn’t have the time to get accustomed to their new reality, either, and they could scarcely delve two ruins without being interrupted by someone, so the endless battles were slowly starting to take their toll. Matt lost half his foot to a delver with an oversized axe, which somehow slightly interfered with his ability to fly. It was manageable, but still mildly annoying. Liz had a chunk blown out of her shoulder courtesy of a [Fire Bolt] and a misaligned shield. Aster took a cut lengthwise across her flank from a [Mana Slash] and broke two ribs when a giant troll clubbed her halfway across the battlefield. Susanne had taken an Aster to the face, further aggravating her already-injured head and interfering with her spiritual perceptions as a result.

They thought they had found a boss ruin from the energy fluctuations, but when they approached, they found a stick-like person wielding a familiar scythe fighting off four other people.

William, who had taken the scythe from the Fall General.

There was no compelling reason for them to engage with the man, so they hid as best as they were able to, and watched him for a short time. Susanne eventually recognized the opposing team as the Dauntless, a strong group of masked Gladiators from the Republic who had placed highly in their version of the Pather tournament.

It was obvious that William was dominating them, entirely alone, and would win the fight in short order. The most surprising thing was that William hadn’t been an air or decay mage when he had taken the scythe, or at least, hadn’t used the spells much. He’d focused more on earth magic from what Matt had seen, but now he barely used it in favor of the scythe’s specialities.

Aster criticized his air magic a number of times, as the man was clearly still adapting to the new fighting style, but the results were undeniable. An enormously overcharged [Guillotine] from the front liner’s axe was stopped dead in its tracks against the haft of the scythe, without so much as a scratch. The responding [Wind Lance] from William tore through the man’s [Bulwark] and body like they were made of paper.

As William finished off the remains of the Dauntless, Matt and his team made a stealthy retreat. There was no assurance that they’d be able to win against him, between his Tier advantage and the new scythe. Matt was also opposed to initiating fights against people who had yet to directly antagonize him, and an opening [Skewer], [Cracked Mana Spear] or Aurora Lance against an unsuspecting William would be the only moderately safe methods of fighting him.

The only thing they wanted to do was gather enough Genesis Energy before everyone else.

And they were close.

As Tier 11s, their advantage in price reduction and more Genesis Energy per kill was showing itself. After they evened out their Genesis Energy, all of them had enough to take the exit reward, but not enough to take the floor challenge, and this was the first time they needed to be able to afford both.

While Mind Over Matter wasn’t as expensive as Spirit Journey, it was still quite costly.

With a little more searching, they found what they were looking for.

A ruin with a boss.

Second level. They were ready.