NOVEL NEXT Chapter 80: 8, Maybe 10
Along with the debris tumbling from the stairs, in the middle of the room were bits of rock that were not falling. They were flat and suspended in the air, hovering. There weren't many of them, but the way they were placed made Nikola think they were a second emergency path for if the other one eroded away.
The climb would be treacherous, but she could use them to win this if she went quickly enough. This would be where the grip strength would come in.
Her first set of targets would be the adventurers who had held themselves together with rope. Nyla had already set off to take the stairs, conquering them briskly and menacingly, so Nikola immediately leaped onto one of the platforms after a running start. It bobbed under her weight as she landed.
In a cat-like fashion (but with thumbs), she bounced up to the next one, and the next, gripping the edge and pulling the rest of her weight up while her momentum still remained.
People climbing the swirl caught sight of her as she hoisted herself up and sped their ascent. Damn it. Her string of five stayed put, at least, inching along like a cautious caterpillar. When she was one or two rocks above them, she stepped off the edge and allowed herself to fall. On her way down, she grabbed the rope keeping them all connected and the weight of her body and armour had all their feet scuttling and struggling to find balance - but gravity took them. The sweet litany of their screams rang in her ears as she caught the edge with one hand and pulled her cape out of their way with the other. A set of their stubborn fingers had been flailing for it.
The sound of fright made her tingle. Ahhh, what a beautiful noise. There was something deep within her that hungered for it, even if she had been attempting to silence it.
Nikola pulled herself back up to solid ground and hopped her way back up the smattering of tiny islands, delighting in how many people's faces went from apprehensive to actively fearful as she made it to one platform, and then another, until she was back where she had been before the fall. When she stood from her feline-esque crouch and surveyed her surroundings, she saw many players trending upward while Nyla was lagging behind. Statistically, staying at the bottom of the stairs would work in her favour because there were the most people back there, but the wording of the challenge had suggested that getting to the top was part of the objective, so staying and waiting for them wouldn't work for long.
The numbers-savvy part of Nikola, or perhaps the NPC part, wanted the terms of their game to be defined more. Did the kill timer stop when somebody reached the top, or was this meant to be a bonding moment where the rules were intended to be lax?
Nikola scanned the tower for her next set of targets. The remaining adventurers were scurrying up the spiral as quickly as their legs could take them.
"Why don't we just focus on them?" Her ears heard the words as they echoed through the tower.
"Did you see them just take out Scatterscar just like that? Let's just keep going, we have a better chance running." Nikola assumed that was the name of the party of men who had encroached upon her life. Though the arrows were gone, she could still feel their phantoms in her skin.
"Less talky, more climby," the one in the lead sputtered, ending the conversation.
Ahh, so they were already intimidated by her. As per the rules of the World of Wills, their disposition toward their survival would weaken them. It would be wasteful to not prioritize them. Though they were not the closest party to her, Nikola pulled her way up the platforms and watched as the bottoms of their shoes hastened, until she was at eye level with them, the scarlet cape behind her still soaked in ominous patches of blood. Five sets of quaking eyes all met hers as she opened her mouth and spat a [Spray of Thorns] directly at them.
Perhaps they had thought her mouth opening would mean she was about to converse with them, about to try to work out their differences. For example, they didn't want to die. She saw dollar signs when she looked at them. But instead of words, what came out were thousands of stabby quills much less intent on negotiating than they had hoped.
Two of them backed into the bricks and were nailed to them by the spray. Another ducked, hoping to avoid a faceful of pain - instead, the redistribution of their weight caused the concrete beneath them to crack. The section of stone they were on and five steps on either side broke away and fell to the set of steps below, and then the next, causing a chain reaction of cascading concrete. Of course, the three of them that weren't attached to the wall tumbled down as well and their bodies broke in interesting and grotesque ways as they bounced downward.
The needles weren't meant to hold a human's worth of weight. The two that were somehow still attached to the wall stayed as still as they possibly could, each twitch of their limbs another chance to flirt with death. Nikola knew that they weren't long for this world, so she continued her upward climb.
There weren't many more loops of stairs between her and the top. A smattering of players had made it past her as she upped her kill count to 10 (technically currently 8, but the 2 would fall soon enough).
As she pondered her plan of attack, Nikola checked in on how Nyla was doing. Her icy blues found her just in time to see her run two players through, yanking their armour off in pieces just before they bled out. It was a brutal yet viable strategy, to disarm a player of their armour and items before they disappeared and RNG decided whether or not their items would drop.
She flicked the blood off the tip of her fencing foil, a thin strip of crimson freckling across the stone wall. Nikola couldn't help but wonder, as she used her fingers to clean her weapon, how Nyla had become so very comfortable with killing. Nikola knew why she was so comfortable; she had been written that way, created word-by-word with an affection for her blade and a borderline sexual appreciation for pain.
But why, exactly, was this pink-haired princess so giddy about killing? What was life like for her outside the game, for her to be able to tear the clothes off a man while he was still breathing?