Time passed, and no orders came from Varstithon. No strange orders, anyway. We still participated in liberating our current staging Zone, sometimes now in collaboration with other fleets, but other than going to which systems we were told, tactics were still left to General Karl as usual.
Even in our second to last trip to the 7th Floor, I was constantly anticipating an attack by the pro-Federation destruction wing of the Syndicate that never materialized. What were they waiting for?
Around this time as well, not long after this penultimate trip, rumors were surfacing that the Rainbow Mage had been spotted in the 6th Floor along with his team. Many were surprised that he'd apparently waited so long to advance beyond the 5th, but I thought I had a pretty good idea why.
Every single one of those monsters on his team is probably Qualified now, if he really did clear the 6th Floor. I wonder what methods they used? And now they're scoring rewards from a difficulty so high, most people don't even know it exists. That's downright terrifying...no matter how much power he gains, Otto never stops going for more—and he'll do whatever it takes, change his plans in whatever way necessary, to get it.
I'm not sure if I'll ever be capable of fighting someone like that, even with my Power of Imagination ability...
With only a single repeat of the 7th Floor left, Bruzigan decided that it was time for us to start training for the 8th Floor. It had been brought up before in conversation once or twice that the 8th Floor was basically dungeons, dungeons, and more dungeons. Their difficulty levels were widely varied and codified, but as we would of course be entering on Extreme difficulty, our ultimate goal would be to fully clear the most notorious one that world had to offer.
I noted that the Very High difficulty mission also involved that dungeon, requiring challengers to clear a sort of halfway point in it. I had to wonder how far we'd gotten in the previous timeline.
As it happened, I actually started behind the others in a few ways. Apparently the inside of many advanced types of Kinetice vessels greatly resembled dungeons. Bruzigan gave me extra practice solo running sims of types of dungeons that resembled those, to help prepare for the operation to Luuxis. This time, I'd be in the thick of it against the Kinetice.
I'd made further strides in spell training as well. I had successfully gotten the Unlimited version of Lesser Fireball to Level 11 some time ago, proving that further levels beyond 10 existed. I’d moved on to trying to learn Exploding Fireball next, and had now succeeded. What I really wanted was to get Flame Javelin to an Unlimited state, but it was incredibly complex compared to the first two spells I'd learned, which had required only 1 and 2 points in Intuition to be granted by the Tower. Still, I felt as though it was starting to get a little easier the more I studied spells properly, so Flame Javelin, with an Intuition requirement of 43, might be possible one day at least.
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Profession training was starting to show results too, both in my case and others. Mewi had by now reached Apprentice tier in Alchemist and Tactician both, and I’d been a little surprised to learn that Anna had recently gained the same tier in Magic Arrayist at last—training given by her family had been much more focused on her second, Aristocrat profession. As for me, I was hopeful that I was just a few months away from the 3rd tier, Adept, in Chef.
Arvallei and Ri’legh were already Adept in Pathfinder and Energy Enchanter respectively, and both were at least a few years away from the next step up. As for Bruzigan, he was also a Tactician as his only profession, and 4th Tier—Journeyman—at that. So, that aspect of the team had a little redundancy there but was otherwise rounding out nicely.
About a week after the return from the 9th visit to the 7th Floor, enemies finally moved against the Liberation Fleets. Mewi’s fleet as well as Arvallei’s and Ri’legh’s fleets had been struck at simultaneously. The enemies had obviously planned the assault for quite some time, and there were reports of “abnormally, enormously powerful combatants” among their forces who had made it so an immense cost of life would have been required to rout them...if they even could have.
As it was, they didn’t hide the fact that they were after the elite alliance team members, those who were going to challenge a Sanctuary. All three had recognized this, and/or their generals had, and sacrificed portions of the fleets to block the strongest enemies from boarding the flagships, and to give the majority of each fleet a chance to escape.
I was grateful that Mewi hadn’t lost his new extra life again so soon after regaining it, or possibly worse, gotten captured, but the fleets had taken massive losses—at least ten Federation ships destroyed for every one of the ambushers’. It was immediately decided that all remaining liberation forces would alter course to rendezvous with the Sanctuary Liberation Armada and the Caralain ASAP. So, once Bruzigan’s fleet arrived there, we would be back under his command, with him reporting to High Admiral Zain in matters of further space battles, and still to Varstithon as the overall commander.
And Varstithon would have us all under his “protection.” Though so far, it seemed that he really did intend to carry out the Sanctuary Liberation campaign without doing anything nasty to us. In spite of myself, I started to feel comforted by the fact that the Firebrand was just one of such a huge crowd of ships in the armada.
After one more relatively relaxed year of resource grinding on the 7th Floor, Anna completed her major evolution, reaching the same rank of Enhanced Human as me with the exact same benefits. By then of course, we had already moved into the Zone containing Luuxis.
And now, it was time to make our move on it.