Soulforged Dungeoneer

Floor eight was an odd remix of the last one. The giant tower that had been in the distance was now much closer, reinforcing the fact that it was just painted on the walls and not actually in the distance. However, most unsettlingly, after the first couple of feet around the entrance, there simply... was no floor.

That is to say, instead of walking on planks in a night sky, we were now walking on nothing. There was still a path, just an invisible one. It was highly unnerving. It's the kind of thing that I could see a video game designer putting in as a kind of ha-ha-gotcha for players, but it was vastly, vastly different when your feet were planted on absolutely nothing and you could tell, by poking at it with a weapon or your foot, that a foot that way, the nothing was bottomless instead of solid.

There were ways, of course. Light magic, which both Louise and the mage could cast, made the path glow faintly, like those glow-in-the-dark stickers and toys that held just a tiny bit of green glow when you put them in the sun and then brought them back into a dark place. The mage swept a decently powerful spotlight around to prove this (again, unlike me they had actually been here before) and it made us feel a little better, but it was also very much a thing that made my knees want to go weak.

At the same time, my solo diver instincts were there. I knew that if I wanted to tune out all distractions and focus on my telekinesis, I'd be able to tell exactly where the path was at almost all times. I just... it's just... that would be everything. That would be my world. There would be no more me-and-Louise, just me and the path and any monsters that bothered me. I could feel it in me, the cold certainty that I could go back to being a ruthless bastard and take on this dungeon by myself.

But if something happened to Louise while I was focused like that... would I even notice? I'd never been part of a party before. I didn't have the instincts. The thought scared me.

So Louise and I, again going our separate ways from Mel and the group, made a much more sedate and hesitant march through the sky than we had done on other floors, much slower than I would have if I'd been focusing. Even then, when Harp Harp Harpies attacked and disrupted our concentration, I realized almost too late that I'd been focusing on little else but my fear. I knew where Louise was, but... I wasn't really paying attention...?

That got me experimenting with my aura defenses, hoping that (for example) the Hesitation Aura in defense mode would give me a little more courage in this situation, but no luck. That same re-examination did however reveal something else important: Hesitation in offense mode against the Hungry Horde, projected from the Fallen Angel's Halo, made them a lot more manageable. While by no means were they a push-over, they didn't do the thing where they came at me around every defense I threw up from every direction at once. They staggered a little more, and occasionally horde members would peel off, circle around, and come back--which did them no good at all and did men plenty. At that point, even though they got some hits in, my fear of them lowered a lot, and I could cut them down with no more than a little bit of health loss per fight. If I bothered to spend class points on improving my agility or dexterity, I might be able to dodge or block it, but... somehow, that still felt like cheating.

In any case, in my head I'd "solved" this floor, which said next to nothing given that I was still scared as shit by the invisible floor, at least when adventuring as I was.

"Are you alright?" Louise's question just felt like adding insult to injury, in a way that was hard to put into words. She was for the most part just focusing on a light spell that gave us an overhead halo, and that halo was enough to give us a dozen feet or so of visible ground--not enough to plan ahead, but more than enough to operate with normally. Still, I didn't like it.

"I should be better than this," I said.

"Because you're afraid?"

"Yes, but..." No, not really. I grit my teeth. I knew fear. I'd gotten through worse. But...

"It's okay to be--"

"Stop it," I snapped. "The fear isn't the problem." And it wasn't; I had my pride, yes, but the other group was right over there. If we ran into a problem we couldn't solve, it wasn't like death was the only other option. And that was...

Louise watched me moving forward slowly. "I think you're right," she said, apropos of nothing, and I just turned to look at her, waiting for her to finish the thought. "I think you are better than this."

I could only just roll my eyes, but I kept listening, hoping she had something to say.

But she didn't, and we walked on for a while. I watched, on edge, as a Biochemist Harpy on patrol neared, but turned instead, following some kind of weird patrol route that I was uninterested in figuring out.

"How did you survive?" she asked, and her normally soft voice was softer, or perhaps just quieter. "I can't even imagine."

I took a deep breath. Some part of me expected this to turn into an argument, in spite of it being Louise. "By being better."

"Better?"

"Everything here is a challenge, Louise. You can call it a deathtrap, and that's obviously true. You can say the Administrator is trying to kill us, and yes, they are. But it's also not the point. If the point of a Dungeon was to kill us, they'd just never let us level up."

"That's true..." Louise's voice was full of doubt.

"But that's it, though. That's the thing." I was talking as much to myself as her, at that point. "Experience lets us evolve. We become better. If we don't get better enough then we can't advance. But..." But, I reasoned silently, if you count on experience and levels to be what makes you better, then you admit that really, the dungeon is better. The system is better. You aren't.

"But what?"

Instead of answering, I did what I should have been doing from the start, putting my consciousness in that sweet spot between normal life and using [ Telekinesis ]. Although the system didn't seem to recognize what I was doing as using the skill--nor any other--it opened up a flood of information from the world, telling me all the things nearby that I could use telekinesis on.

Telling me about everything within range. In that place, there was no fear. There was too much to do.

The problem was, the solid weeks I'd spent in that mental place, I'd never had to worry about talking to people or thinking about anything except survival. I felt the stress of that mental state eating away at me, trying to return me to what I'd been back then. Not the people-killer; that had been towards the beginning, before I realized just how damn stupid I was.

No, even after that, I was consumed by the struggle. Mel and her team divers wouldn't understand, and Louise definitely wouldn't.

"You want to see?" I felt the stress at the edge of my mind, but if anything, it wanted me to stop, rather than asking me to go mad. I turned to look at Louise, and I thought for a moment that she was seeing something else when she looked at me, and I wasn't sure what. "How I survived, I mean."

She nodded. I don't... know why, but she didn't look nervous. She should have been.

The telekinesis boosting items helped, but in that moment, I really didn't need them. I picked her up, gently, wrapping a support around her torso and tugging at that instead of trying to lift her by her feet or wrap her in a mental hand or something.

And then I flung the two of us across the room.

It shouldn't have been possible, at my skill level, to throw that much weight that hard. I knew that, and I'd experimented with the skill enough to see the restrictions were real, most of the time. More than that, throwing us was perhaps the most foolish thing I could have done, from a certain point of view. Even in that telekinetic mode, I couldn't sense pathways across the map, and for all I knew, I might have been throwing us at an empty patch. But when we got close, I felt floors, grabbed them, slowed our approach, and set us down on an invisible platform that neither of us had known was there.

I could see a lot of signs that she was really upset, mostly in her face and posture, and I released her. She really didn't have that sweet, patently Louise look on her face, but I thought the look on her face seemed better, in a way. More honest. That stress demon at the edge of my mind smirked, wondering if she was going to explode at me.

Instead, she grit her teeth and let out a breath. "You could have told me what you were doing."

"In a dungeon," I said, not really engaging with what she said, "there is only what you can and can't do. Yes, someday, I'll run into something I can't do." I paused, hesitating. The stress monster didn't want to admit that I'd just seen something I couldn't do. "But if you're willing to become... to embrace what you can do, then there is more there."

Something in her eyes... confused me as she sat there looking at me.

"Is that what you want?" The question caught me off-guard. But... she seemed serious about the question.

"You mean living? Because I kind of want to keep doing that."

"You don't look like you do."

Again, that caught me off guard, and I lost focus. The pre-activation phase of the skill was really a narrow band to be in, honestly. It felt, when you were in it, like balancing on the edge of a knife, and when you slipped... well, you were just on one side or the other. Mostly, of course, you slipped into the "off" state instead of suddenly making things start moving.

And then because we had just catapulted across the map a bunch of monsters that had been alerted to us suddenly started to catch up.

It's not as though it was a ultra-terrible situation to be in; the Hungry Horde and the Hoppin' Hearts were both bound to travel only on the pathways, so even if they caught us moving, they'd just wander around randomly trying to reach us until they got bored and stopped. The Harp Harpies and the Biochemist Harpies came in a group larger than I was used to, and admittedly, that was pretty bad, since they had ranged attacks, luring attacks, sleep attacks, the biochemists created gas clouds with some kind of status effect in them...

...and yet, for reasons I still can't put into words, some part of me didn't even view the whole thing as a challenge. Something about what she'd said made me angry in a way that I didn't understand, and that stress demon at the edge of my mind found a way in after that.

If someone else had asked why I did it, in the minutes after, I would have said I did it to screw with Louise, but I wouldn't understand what those words meant.

I set myself back on that knife edge and dove off the side of the walkway. Instead of climbing, I used telekinesis to trebuchet myself around the walkway, going under it and then whipping myself back back at the Harpies. There was another platform a little ways out, one that was just outside of Louise's light cone, so it was still invisible to her, and I aimed for that, materializing the Executioner's Sword and somehow, only half intentionally, managing to spear a Biochemist Harpy in the face with the sharp axe-like point at the side of the sword's fan tip. That gave me a little rotation in the other direction, which I accelerated with telekinesis and hit a Harp Harpy in the side as I passed.

My aim was a little off, so I adjusted and used the boots of Air Dash to make sure I made my landing look intentional. There were now plenty of Harpies around, all looking at me hungrily, but...

...but the real benefit of that pre-activation phase of Telekiesis wasn't the mysterious power boost, a boost that honestly I had no understanding of whatsoever. In a way I'd never heard anyone else talking about, while in that mode I could read their motions, clear as day.

It was funny how I never thought about the Harpy's center of mass otherwise. For all their flapping and bobbing as they moved, they actually kept the center of mass pretty steady, which you could kind of tell when you watched their heads. But telekinesis told me where it was, in their chests (not their... never mind, I wasn't thinking about it at the time anyway) and it was funny to watch one pivot in midair around their center, which wasn't the amateurish move it sometimes looked like from outside. It was funny to watch them tense up before moving their center of mass much, because (I realized watching them) that meant shaking their heads--their eyes, and whatever senses they used for balance. As long as they kept everything steady, they were a lot clearer headed, but being shaken bothered them as much as anything else.

So I jumped into the air and grabbed a bunch of them, all of my telekinetic grasps somewhat above their center of mass, so when I pushed off of them, they pivoted rather than being cleanly pushed back. If they'd had time, they might have understood, but acting suddenly, the ones I grabbed were all suddenly disoriented.

The two Devil's Swords went free, and I went after the ones that seemed to recover fastest, first. They were not strong enough to one-shot anything, and I wasn't expecting them to be, but with telekinesis, I maneuvered the swords to strike below the center of mass. They were pivoting that direction already, and adding force just made them feel like they'd over-corrected.

The sheer number of handholds among the harpies let me stay hanging in the air there, controlling my swords, for a long moment, before I catapulted myself back to Louise. There were two of the birds harassing her, and I realized I had given no shits about that for the last moment, but I swapped out the two for the Executioner again and gave myself a nice windup that let me really give one of the harpies a heavy underhand cut, and then transitioned to a backhand sweep to get the other's attention trained on me.

And they were. The lot of them, maybe nine-ten in total, were fixed on me, and it didn't scare me at all. How could I be scared when I had so much to do? Simple technical problems to solve. Fly through the creatures, dodge attacks, strike those three, land over there, come back. There was nothing else.

Well, obviously that's not quite true. Some of the attacks--the luring, the sleep, the Strife, the chemical clouds--did give me a scare from one moment to the next, but I knew what I was capable of. If one damn bird-brain stared singing, I thew a sword at her. Strife aura had a counter, and I put on the equipment. The chemical clouds had an obvious tell, and I just had to keep an eye on them.

That's what it meant to have the floor "solved" in my head. Yes, there were things there to make me nervous, but nothing that came close to defeat.

I was honestly surprised when almost half of the harpies ended up not being solo kills. Louise, though she was still bad at it, had pulled out her Harpy Harp and used its offensive skill to harass them, which I didn't recognize at the time but kind of did in retrospect. The side effect of them not being solo kills was that their bodies didn't immediately go to my inventory--and what with us being over a pit, they kind of disappeared when I didn't snag them. And I... didn't care, really. I could have snagged them, especially after I noticed the first two times, but I really wasn't anticipating it, and I wasn't thinking too hard about the loot. Why would I? I'd yet to see a rare drop from the Biochemist, but I wasn't expecting anything fantastic out of them.

When we got towards the end and I ran out of harpies to hang onto, I dropped back by Louise and just maneuvered the Executioner at range. In all, the fight was running me to the ragged edge of being out of mana, which was no surprise, but I'd been keeping track of it.

And then we were done, and I took a long and satisfied breath. And then I... was surprised when Louise turned to me and started talking, because that wasn't a thing that happened when I was fighting.

"You see? I knew you were better. Why don't you fight like that all the time?" she asked, seeming only curious and not in any way upset.

My brain refused to process the fact that she'd even spoken, for a long moment. And then as my heartrate slowed and my mana regeneration caught up, so did my brain.

And I honestly wasn't entirely sure what to say, even then.