“So, here we are once again, with Lheticus getting himself into a duel in the early stages. For the second Floor in a row, I might add.”

I rolled my eyes at Anna’s ribbing. “It’s not as though I plan to make a habit of it. And yeah, it’s a curious coincidence, but that’s all. There won’t be any such chances on the next two Floors, at least.”

Besides, I did not say out loud, the last thing I need right now is another running gag to rear its head.

“There’s nothing wrong with becoming a 1-on-1 specialist,” said Arvallei. To his credit, he didn’t seem to think Anna was funny either.

“Never said there was,” said Anna, “come on, we shouldn’t keep Ormin waiting.”

We caught up with Ormin at a spacious inner courtyard that clearly doubled as a training ground. “That’s an interesting helm,” he said on seeing me, noting that I had put on my Amplifier Helmet, “you’ve traveled in Trioron?”

I tilted my head for a moment, offering no further answer. He shrugged, and measured a distance from me. “So, the terms. How about first reduced to half health loses, or to surrender?”

“You sure you want to go that far? I wouldn’t want to injure you, or be injured by you.”

“I have plenty of potions on hand. We can recover in no time,” said Ormin.

“Not to mention there’s an Honored Healer in the house,” said Anna.

“My bad.” I gave her an imitation of her own wry smile. “So milady, do you mind counting us down?”

“Sure thing.”

After a quick “3 2 1 go,” I immediately activated Enemy Scan while also launching an Exploding Fireball to test the waters. However, Ormin launched one a split-second faster, and I barely redirected mine to intersect with it.

Ormin’s eyes widened as his fireball was subsumed by mine. He probably expected it to play out the other way around, or at least to clash with each other if our spells were roughly equal in strength. Unprepared as he was, my spell slammed into him. It had been weakened by his own, but the damage it dealt still wasn’t small—I doubt he expected my ability to bypass fire resistance either.

I knew this because of the new feature added to my Amplifier with the Damage Analyzer Chip installed:

Special Passive

Displays enemy health meters and numerical damage to your enemies and yourself on your HUD.

From the Enemy Scan, he actually had slightly more points in base Magic Power than I did. However, the buffs my equipment and class traits gave me were enough to overtake him. I also had a severe advantage over him in speed. It was obvious in the first five seconds that Ormin was outmatched.

However, there were ways in which he acquitted himself. His control over his spells was at least close to as good as mine, so he must have had a high Psych stat. I hadn’t trained much against opponents who could home in their spells against me exactly like I did to others.

It took us almost three minutes to conclude the fight. I won, but not entirely without scathe. “Truly amazing,” said Ormin, wiping his brow while reaching for a health potion brought by a servant with his other hand, “indeed, I must bow to your remarkable talent. It’d be a rare mage of any stripe who could match you!”

“I thank you for the compliment—and the one to milady, too. It’s her I train against most often, and she wins roughly one spar in five.” This, at least, wasn’t a lie at all, though such spars took place in virtual space. By now, she had a few formidable debuffs to go with her plentiful excellent buff and healing spells. She never actually beat me unless she caught me out, but it did happen sometimes.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Then I am tenfold more confident in your experiment, lady Anna. Please rest and relax while I prepare the documents.”

The documents, meaning things like writs and other pieces of paper that would give us actual authority to make plans and assist and advise General Ormin with tactics. The fact that we’d gotten this far this fast was already an achievement—of course, the Tower would hardly see it that way. That was going to take rather some time, so I thought this was as good a chance as any to clear at least some of the air of my secrets.

“Anna, Bruzigan,” I began, “since it looks like we have a few minutes, and we’re all together, there’s something I think I should say.”

“You’re finally going to tell us about your Personal Trait?” said Bruzigan, a bit too eagerly.

I shook my head. “Think of this as a test of the waters for revealing that soon. But believe me, this is almost as big. But in this case, it’s not that I didn’t want to tell you, but because I don’t think this is something safe to talk about when there’s the slightest possibility of being overheard or recorded. In the Tower, nowhere in Area 1 fits that bill, not even virtual space. So I decided to wait until we were together, by ourselves, on a Floor.”

“You’re going to tell them about that?” said Mewi, “I thought we shouldn’t speak of it again at all?”

“There’s too much potential for trouble later for the whole team if they don’t know. I figure we can’t possibly be being watched, here.”

“Okay, you got me interested,” said Anna. Arvallei and Ri’legh looked alert, but Bruzigan looked thoughtful—possibly, he was trying to think of what information the Federation had that he knew of as a general that could demand that kind of secrecy.

There was no going back now. “First, I should apologize. When I gave my account of the 4th Floor, I changed some of the details. Everything up to the hidden mission was as I said, but it wasn’t an ordinary hidden mission. The difficulty rating was noted by the Tower to be higher than my normal mission’s difficulty.”

“Higher than Extreme difficulty?” said Arvallei, sweeping a wing, “that’s not possible though?”

“That’s what I thought. That’s what everyone thinks. Except it’s not true. I accepted the mission, and it pushed me like nothing else before had. My body almost gave out by the time I was extracted from Yzmar.

And the rewards I got were...unusual. A few AP, a Secret Scroll, a Title that doesn’t seem to do anything, and what it called a Qualification. Edwin thought the Qualification and the higher than Extreme difficulty were connected, and I think it’s pretty plausible.

And that’s not all he told me. He said he thinks there may be a shadow organization which knows about and relies on rewards from the difficulties higher than Extreme.”

Ri’legh’s eyes bulged. “Wait. Difficulties?”

I nodded. “When I cleared the hidden mission, the Tower notification said the name of it was ‘Titled I.’ On top of that, the Tower Pioneer trait I also got said it was locked, and needed one more Qualification for me to even see what it does, and another on top of that to unlock it.

Neither the Qualification nor Tower Pioneer were part of the standard hidden mission rewards—those were the AP and the Secret Scroll. I think they were added specifically because the mission difficulty was Titled I. Then, gaining more Qualifications unlocks the next ones, probably Titled II and Titled III.”

Anna practically stammered, “But that implies that finding a hidden mission of Titled I difficulty isn’t a usual method of getting a Qualification—could that be my ancestor’s secret?”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“Maybe the creation of a ‘pseudo-spell’ without the Tower’s assistance was supposed to give you a Qualification, but you already had one.”

“Edwin did suppose that most likely, the conditions to gain Qualifications after the first change and become harder...hmm.”

“Most of this seems a bit high-minded to me,” said Arvallei, “I don’t think the rest of us are going to get a Qualification any time soon. No matter how much better the rewards may be, I have no interest in taking on a mission even harder than Extreme difficulty.”

“There may be other benefits,” said Anna, thoughtful, “but I agree that the unknown organization is most pertinent right now.”

“Very much so,” said Bruzigan, “to be honest, I’ve found certain evidence myself of the existence of just such an extremely powerful and secret group. We certainly can’t rule out that such people are capable of listening in on our virtual space. But it seems we must speak more of this later.”

Bruzigan quieted down again as I as well saw Ormin returning, carrying a leather folder.

“So sorry to keep you waiting, milady. Everything you’ll need is right in here. I’ll contact you via communication stone as soon as I know where I’m being deployed,” said Ormin to Anna, “best of luck with the rest of your preparations.”