Corvayne rolled under a laser-vine's searing beam, the white ray leaving a bar in his vision as he darted around a corner. The dark green plant slowly tracked after him. It had lashed itself to a pillar, and Corvayne lured the plant to wrap around it's trellised base again as he used [Flow-Like-Water] to diffuse another plant's light rays, stinging even in his watery form. He swung his cleaver to activate [Cross Skill: Reap] on a third plant as he rolled by. His shoulder ached as it's light beam seared it's way through his cloak, but he cut the plant he was facing off against into two, causing it to start flopping on the ground and firing bursts of light into the ground and in the air as it died.
He took stock of how many monsters were moving up through gaps in the floor of the scaffolding he was in, noting the twisted up monster and the one who had burned him. He had his shadow hands aim his assault rifle as he turned to put his hands onto it and fire off a burst at one of the plants, popping it's light pod and causing it to sizzle as it fell.
Corvayne used [Cross Skill: Storm-Thrust] with his rifle on the last pod he could see, bullet punching through the plant with a swirl of wind. The blast also pushed aside smoke that had made the already dimly lit area even more opressive. The smell of burning plastic tarps and seared metal was replaced with rainfall for a moment, but Corvayne didn't stop moving as he moved back into the main room they were fighting in, made up of metal shaped into girders, walls, and ramps.
Nyx was doing a good job protecting Wick with his shield and his body when needed, blocking off the entrance to the room as it was the safest spot. Lady Blood Claw was the other source of fire, searing blade lopping through plant and part of the the cubical steel mesh maze they were exploring. Undine and Hari were flickering through the fight, picking off plants when they focused on him.
“Do we see the caster?” He called out.
“Not yet!” Undine yelled back, throat hoarse from shouting information about the battle. They had been fighting for at least four minutes now, and Corvayne could see more plants from seeds that had dropped into the lower levels starting to snake their way through gaps in the struts they were on.
Corvayne called out the info fast, before the next engagement started. “Look down, haven't seen seeds falling, and they are growing up at us!”
The next set of monster plants sprouted all-too-familiar eye like fruits, and while Corvayne slammed his spear into dozens of them, it was only a matter of time before he was raked with concentrated light again. A strawberry orb triggered as he got hit on the side and turned to see two plants at the end of one of the dead end extensions to the room. He stopped himself from trying to get into the room, spotting a short line of green filling itself in between two floor plates. He rolled back around the corner and reloaded. If he went charging in, that little tube would explode into a wall of cactus with steely sharpened spines.
He shuffled to his fire-breathing dagger and then turned, burning the ground before the laser plants could track where he was. From there he used [Flow-Like-Water] with his spear in one hand, managing to kill both. He turned and felt his burns protest, but he had heard pinging that suggested machine-gun thorns circles, the third type of plant summon their current foes could conjuror up. He turned to see Lady Blood Claw with her glowing sword bisect three of the huge loops and a bit of wall too, blazing sword flicking red hot metal into the otherwise mostly dark room.
He heard the structure creak. “Lady! Watch your strikes!”
“Tch!” She responded, carving a cactus-wall with more care and hissing when a beam stung her. Corvayne was about to start calling for a retreat when the plants froze all at once. A few seconds later they all withered and started falling apart into flakes of dust.
“Good. They got the caster.” Corvayne sagged with relief. He saw LBC's burns revert to clear gray patches of skin as Wick used [Rewind] to undo some of the damage.
He sat, feeling burns over his torso and arms and neck all radiating itchy pain. Floor 10 of this Tower was playing rough. It didn't help they had been working their way up for what was, to them, weeks.
The sixth floor had introduced them to the interior of the green tower, and it's structure. The first floor was a vast, in-building space with glass separating the tower from an open exterior that resembled space in orbit. The windows reminded Corvayne of a mix of a green house and space station, with a blue planet visible below when they were close to the windows. All the windows were made up of randomly shaped little panes of glass, diced apart by panes of the same dark green material of the tower. The walls were engraved with geometric images and a few dim green lights. Some of the walls gave off a faint glow, just enough to cast a sheen on the metal floors and walls. There seemed to be both structural material made of the dark green metal and interior 'buildings' built up from the floor. They tended to be more colorful, with stainless steel frames, bright plastic stretched over colored glass walls, and flowering plants creeping up and around dark metal cables that seemed to support or bind together the structures, causing the interiors to require attention lest they run their head into a steel wire running at an odd angle.
Practically, there were places that had been carved into the floor like streams, and they lead to a few places that looked like gardens where there was a little more light nurturing plants with fruits and vegetables and edible leaves. Undine insisted on [Investigating] everything, which was fine as Corvayne thought it was less risky than just trusting his taste-buds. The buildings had a few laid out like homes, and they found a few places where they could camp defensively.
Corvayne could say with hindsight that the sixth floor was a sort of warm up. The monsters they encountered were all variations on space suits animated with plant-things inside them, and while some of them left trails of corrosive goop, or seeped searing gas into the air on death, they were much like any other wiggling easy to kill monster that just rushed at them. Even with ten attacking him Nyx's shield could hold while he beat them all to pulp, let alone with five other fighters picking them off around him.
The main challenge on the floor instead was navigating conveyer belts, both standard rubber bound machines and ones that were floating strings of glass windows. The windows platforms broke under the weight of anyone standing on it after a few seconds, regenerating after about a minute of shattering. They had found the first one they wanted to test while on a ledge about ten feet above the floor and spotted gleaming distortions moving between the ledge they were on and one that was suspended about fifty feet up, floating in the darkness by a set of wires stretching to the unseen ceiling in the gloom.
Corvayne spotted a chest on the ledge which meant everyone wanted to figure out how to navigate the line of windows drifting in a loop. Corvanye fell twice before he tried running with the direction of the belt, getting himself up to the chest and scoring them more healing potions and a hat with a feather in it that let the user create a trail of smoke behind them if they moved too fast. Undine liked how it looked and didn't mind it smelled of cigars, so she took it.
Wick, of course, was interested in floating glass sheets and wanted them to test the entire thing out. It ended up being a somewhat enjoyable hour detour as they figured out if the shards of glass violated conservation of matter (The glass shards evaporated after breaking), if Corvayne gravity offset the time to break (No, it was always 3.6 seconds), if more people standing on it changed how long it took (It was not based on their actual weight, but the time spent on the glass was divided by the number of people), and finally if they could pull the glass off the track and take floating sheets with them (They tended to break before they could be physically wrested from their spot, and using consistent force or gravity to float them or sink them caused them to vanish on the reform timer).
All that meant Corvayne was drafted to scout, given his ability to fall safely. Floor six then was lots of walking, some camping, and doing a lot of solo exploring using low gravity jumping to bypass the annoying multi belt, direction changing movement puzzles. Some of them involved twenty different chains glass passing each-other, leading him to huge bridges between the walls up in the dark heights. After killing a few space suits he would use binoculars to scout for treasure chests or routes to get past building mazes that grew larger as they moved through the floor.
Corvayne found it interesting that from the high vantage point, he got a view out of a windows that let him see thick black lines blocking the view of the blue planet out the window, suggested there were more tower instances on the floor and that they were just as insanely large. On one of the jaunts he saw a series of ramps and made his way back down to tell the group he found a likely spot to find the stairs to the next floor. He had started to get a feel for The Tower as he knew that going physically upwards tended to find stairs up more than just wandering did.
Floor seven of the tower was lousy with mimics in a claustrophobic series of small chambers and narrow halls. A few were fifteen feed wide and twenty tall arched green corridors, lit with orange lights, but most of the floor only gave them room to move single file and was a grind of checking side rooms full of crates and doors that monsters could imitate. Corvayne guessed that half the doors he nicked with his spear grew teeth and would start to hop at him, trying to snap shut like a weird fleshy mouse trap. Nyx had trouble keeping his shield the ideal size to take more than one or two hits, but his fear effect helped them sometimes spot new types of mimics, like patches of wall that tried to fall on the middle of the group and start crushing them.
One thing Corvayne noticed was that nothing on this floor seemed to notice or attack Hari, possibly due to her dress. Meanwhile, wearing strawberry pants seemed to make them reveal themselves quicker, so he ended up leading the way, poking things that moved or looked suspicious. Undine had a cleaning spell that took care of a nasty suprise that some of the mimics left even past death: Glue like blood that sometimes would stick their weapons to the bodies or to the walls.
The entire floor seemed to be focused on making them feel trapped, as the entrance was the only place that had one 'airplane sized window' (Wicks words) looking outside at the planet. Everything else was dark green metal, orange lights, or whatever colors the junk in store-rooms lousy with mimics was. On one room, Nyxion took point with the hopes of finding another shield belt and got chewed on by a veritable quartermaster's dream of different mundane objects, including a swarm of toilet paper rolls with circular leech-mouths where the cardboard tube should have been.
Lady Blood Claw had called it 'A fine complement to the gross hallway in the mall.' and he was inclined to agree, given how many of the mimics died spraying purple goop all over the room.
Despite not wanting to, Corvayne was forced to camp on the seventh floor. They first found a room with a real door they could close, but still kept watches due to Corvayne not trusting that they had caught every mimic on the rows of shelves. Wick said she was tired and rolled herself up in a sleeping bag in the corner that first night, and Corvayne got a sense that she was annoyed at something or upset.
The second camp was a smaller room, and in a complete turn around Wick took watch with him and seemed to enjoy and encourage him to hold hands, ended watch by grabbing him and kissing him over and over, and used him as a body pillow when they fell asleep wrapped in a blanket against a crate they had stabbed a dozen times to make sure it wasn't a mimic.
After that it was just a slog. Corvayne couldn't guess how many miles of dark corridors they pushed through, nor how many routes they took ended up in dead ends or loops. The chests they found that were actual treasure chests were stingy, mostly providing materials and money and a few healing potions. He did collect a nice set of throwing knives, and made an effort to use them as much as possible against the menagerie of living monsters until they saw another tiny window at the end of a hallway and he and Lady Blood Claw had to hold Nyx back from trying to just sprint to the end rather than checking for (and finding) more mimics.
Floor eight the tower had open walls with large arches on the sides theoretically supporting the tower. Some of the passages to the outside were balconies, others bridges across the void to closer towers. Complex glass creations flanked these exits, depicting in subtle colors figures crawling to the top of towers of all shapes and sizes. All the more impressive when they got closer and saw the figures they saw from afar were nearly two hundred feet tall. The scale of the floor was huge, almost like a direct response to the previous one. Everything was big, and that meant that meant a lot of walking and a lot of open space where avoiding being spotted was impossible.
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It did answer another question Corvayne had since they arrived at the floors they were on: There was no pressure difference between the interior and the empty space between towers, even though it looked like the exterior should be vacuum from how far the planet was below them. Corvayne didn't take risks the first time they got close to a massive arch outside, even with a gut feeling telling him it was okay to cross the bridge before him. He used Gravity to latch his feet to the floor and tested if he could breath with every step until he was a mile into crossing a massive green arched bridge.
Lady Blood Claw had to be sedated by Undine for Corvayne carry her across, her skin staying deep green even after she had been knocked out by a [Sleep].
They camped a few times on this floor as well, once by a half pipe made of stone that let flowing water trickle through what looked like some sort of abandoned fair grounds, then another time on a balcony over a bridge they didn't want to tackle before they rested, and then at a place where rows of statues were bathed in moon light from a window far far above the floor in the endless dark. The third camp in the statue ground was stressful, but it was either stake down a spot and throw some glow sticks out or to risk traveling exhausted. The fourth night on the floor was spent in a series of small rooms. Wick stated that it looked like a hopsital. It was another day where she had been quiet and acting odd, and at night had pulled her things and walked off to sleep alone. Hari kept Corvayne company while being unusually subdued and asked him not to worry.
The next night, camped out in a garden dome in the middle of a huge bridge, Wick almost attacked him the moment he was finished with first watch, so aggressive that they were interrupted by Nyx telling them to go outside so everyone else could sleep. Corvayne was slightly distracted by the possibility of falling off the platform but was more than happy to return her enthusiasm. Afterwards she slept like the dead.
Hari stayed with her the last night they were on the floor, leaving Corvayne alone on first watch. Camp was a large broad platform with another platform above it reached with a spiral ramp along the outside, letting them camp with only one entrance to worry about. He had tried to go ask Wick and Hari what was going on but got a death glare from Wick and dropped it. Corvayne didn't feel like sleeping after his first watch so he let Nyx sleep in and sat with LBC, both quietly looking out at the dark for movement. He tried to use Adept with his new word based powers, but it just resulted in creating more black shards and losing some blood. After days and days of travel, they floor finally played fair and gave them a huge multi-level ramp up to a stairway.
The ninth floor was where they started running into semi-intelligent monsters. They looked like crows and caterpillars wearing space suits, poorly. The crows would leap thirty or forty feet with huge pushes from wings jutting out of torn off space suit arms. They were large, with twelve foot wingspans, and landed with disorienting gusts of wind. Wick had dubbed them 'Space Crow-Boys', which stuck and suggested she was in a better mood. The Catter-nauts hung back spitting webs into the group. They were big, nearly ten feet tall, and the lumps of expanding webs were heavy. Corvayne got hit with one that was probably twenty pounds that knocked him over and left bruises for a good five mintues, even with his vitality boosting power running.
The intelligence part was that the crows didn't always attack on sight, instead trying to lure the group into places where the caterpillars could attack as well.
Hari started just clipping the bugs with regular bullets, saving her mana for evading the birds. The suits they had on were sturdy space-age leather but not designed to prevent slugs from going through them. The soft bug-men splattered after one or two shots, and without webs the birds had trouble connecting with their leaping attacks. Corvayne kept on working on his throwing arm when there weren't Catter-nauts, trying to see if he could come up with something besides [Expert Toss] and [Arcing Toss]. A treasure chest with a sack of baseballs let him carry on trying to hit leftover monsters with throwing attacks whenever the real fight had finished and they were dealing with leftover monsters, or fighting stragglers attracted by sounds of fighting.
The floor was as titanic as the last but contained within what seemed like a single huge space-tower rather than many of them. All the windows were miles high and far, far off, barely coming closer as they trudged through the gloom. The majority of the floor was darker than the others, and it was full of pillars and mushroom shaped platforms above a dim floor level choked with air vents, pipes, tanks of some sort, wires, and panels with impossibly small font warnings on them. Lady Blood Claw had proposed just slashing through them, but Corvayne was aware that some of those tanks might be something nasty to cut through, like liquid oxygen or some other rocket fuel. So they wandered the floor, sometimes getting ambushed when they got into open areas or spots where the sloping ground took them to the upper layer of round platforms connected by lines of pipe and sometimes walkways. Some of the pipes vents where tentacles slithered out, clawed suckers grasping for them, which made resting stressful as they had to find a place both hidden from leaping packs of crows but also not prone to random tentacle attacks.
The first mage they found on day two. It was out in the open, a weird weathered thing that looked like a potted plant with crab legs. The vines it summoned didn't help it when Corvayne torched it with his fire-breathing dagger. But moving across bridges and through chasms, more of them came out in force to harass the group. It seemed like they could just keep bringing out more vines, and that included the searing beam plants who almost always managed to clip someone and require Wick to use [Rewind].
They fought, rested, scouted, then camped in rooms at the base of the Mushrooms. There were no signs of graffiti, and for two days Wick became silent again, avoiding looking at or speaking with Corvayne. Hari would spend some time with her, and then sleep with Corvayne. Then Wick flipped back and Hari took watch with Lady Blood Claw, talking quietly with her, sometimes one or both looking over at Corvayne with concern. Nyx grumbled a lot about how they should have brought Spears-Like-Water and Undine most of the time was too tired to do anything but flop asleep when they stopped to camp.
A week of floor nine and Undine complained that they were not finding secrets, and Nyx was firm that after the set of floors he wanted to go home or back to the inn. Lady Blood Claw was the only person who simply was in her element. No complaints from her, even despite Hari and Wick sometimes being... less than subtle.
The end of the floor was a platform with three mages, and it was a prolonged fight with two of them summoning a forest of hostile monsters before Hari and Undine took them out.
The tenth floor ditched almost everything else to throw mages at them in droves. The floor was stuffed with cityscapes made of metal lined mazes. It reminded him a little of the strange towers in the original fifth floor: They didn't seem to serve any function aside from acting as detours full of monsters. It was a floor made for the annoying monsters too, as a plant-mage could sit there making cactus walls, grabbing vines, and laser buds all day and slide them through gaps in the floors, meaning at any point they could go from trying to go around a maze to fighting through every square inch trying to find the monster in it.
All that brought them to the aftermath of the fight trying to get through one of the cubes of twisted metal girders and tough bio-fabric walls. Hari and Undine were climbing up a broken section that Lady Blood Claw had sheared off during the fight, both covered in green blood. Lady Blood Claw looked around then shrugged and slashed an exit to the cube, wall turning into a ramp to the roof of the next building in the city they were trying to get through.
Undine started stomping and cursing. “A hundred floors of this?! What is this place?” She threw her hands over to point at huge window. “Look outside! It's not the same world as the last three floors! Different continents and moons every time! You can see other towers too! I think we've walked a thousand shitting miles, and naught a scrap of Pilgrim for it aside from Lady! What a rip off!”
Wick snickered. “At least we have yet to run into a floor that- no I'm not saying that shit aloud.”
Hari laughed. “I won't say my ideas either, but we DID have a floor that Growl-Whine dragged us hundreds and hundreds of miles through. I suppose the solution is to go around. Different stairs lead to different new floors, right?”
Undine huffed. “What's with that old whiny superstition about not saying things or they come true?”
Lady Blood Claw put a hand on her. “Undine, did you not see what happened to Nyx when Corvayne said the menu idea aloud?”
“I figured it was some sort of dumb joke. Power doesn't just come out of saying 'give me power'.” The older woman snorted. “Though, given that this place has infinite teen advancement monsters, treasure chests with expensive items just sitting in random corners, and grants non-class special powers for beating on an old friend turned rotten... I suppose this place doesn't need much prompting to dump everything you want in a pile.”
Corvayne sighed then tried to look like his vision of a good leader. “We're doing well, with no serious injuries. I don't think we'll make floor 100, but I'm getting better at tossing daggers.”
They walked in silence for a while, hitting a stretch away from the monster cubes where the window lit path started to curve uphill. Corvayne knew it was a good sign, but kept scanning for monsters up until they reached an archway in a thick support cable that had a stairway up.
Wick laughed. “Oh it's about damn time! Good job Corvayne!”
Nyx clapped a little as well. “If I never see dark green metal again I'll be pleased.”
He was about to step in then stopped.
“Lady Blood Claw... I got an idea.”
She stopped, a little startled. “You don't usually tell anyone before you do anything.”
Corvayne smiled. “The conversation we had inspired me. What if there's a place the Pilgrim left for us that answers our questions?”
Wick laughed and slapped her knee. “You mean like a hideout?”
Corvayne looked at the others. “We see those little waiting rooms, and they often are just that, but I was thinking while at the inn and looking at it's version of Cascadia that often they look like particular spaces. Ones that were important to someone. So... let's see if we can go to the solo climbers lair by willing ourselves to go there.”
Lady Blood Claw started walking up and hesitated, then put her chin up and took on her normal stern look, stomping up the steps.
They emerged into a chamber, circular and ten good paces across and dome shaped, nestled in a glass crows nest overlooking both a large segment of floor and a window out of the tower looking down on a drab brown world and it's ocean moon. The living quarters had alcoves and devices and furnishings, but all with a sort of disturbing biological component in their design. In the various cubbies he saw tubes from a suspended udder he thought might produce food, a chair with a hole in it like a flower petal that might deal with waste, and a sweet scented object that looked like a portion of the female anatomy that gushed warm water into a basin, perhaps some sort of bath if one was brave enough to stick a dirty limb into the large gently overflowing orifice or place themselves in the suggestive basin. A finger table with a greenish tan and fleshy looking legs held paints, hints of ribs formed shelves in alcoves with a few dusty books and lots of long stretches of empty shelves. Some of the lit alcoves had folded devices he could not make sense of which were chained together with what looked like rope. Perhaps the climber affected her sanctuary? The most obvious thing of value was more scrawled on the walls, this time in paint.
Hari started casting investigate on something and stopped. “Eww. I don't like the feeling magic had on that.”
Corvayne gestured to the wall. “Then don't cast, what we want is likely here.”
Nyx rolled his hands. “Go to it.” He said as he moved the paints over to take a seat on the bench, not trusting the taunt pinkish bed near the window. Given that Corvayne thought it had dark bands like veins, probably a good idea. He cleared his throat.
“I have left little places, stashes, in this tower. There are safe spaces, pockets where people could set down roots. It is old and empty, full of monsters hinting at other worlds. Look for my sign, an broken tower etching.”
He traced his finger along a red painted rook with a crack in it. He wondered if it was in defiance of the tower, or a sort of calling card that something was broken.
“I found something today on the climb. A bit of a lost memory I found in the grand monster's chest...” Corvayne squinted. “The writer scraped the description off the wall. They just said the memory made them happy, but they had to release it because it wasn't theirs. They also wrote something like... give it back, wish it to return to the one who lost them?”
Corvayne had a hunch and pulled at the couch, little bits of it's dry skin rolling off in flakes as he pulled it away from the wall.
“Ah ha!” He spied the sloppy lines.
“I knew what would happen I know what will happen I agreed to this happening it didn't end the tower it didn't end the tower.”
“World still broken. Calls for vessels. Calls for Wizards. Will sleep. Until ready.”
Wick swore. “Cryptic bullshit. Wait, is it the same word you use and The Magus used for Wizard?” She got animated saying it.
Hari nodded. “It was supposed to have answers... unless it's in the rose machine?”
She stuck her arm in what was assuredly not meant to look like a rose, and then pulled her arm out. “Oh, it cleaned off some of the plant blood!”
Nyx snorted and started saying, “As always, elf, I can't tell if I admire your bravery or regret your lack of-”
Undine slammed out an [Investigate] on her and the.... washing station. She deflated a little on reading whatever it told her, but still wheeled on Hari, poking her with a finger and interuppting Nyx. “You have NO idea what it was! What if it ate your arm!?”
Nyx folded his arms. “Here I thought your concerns would be on something besides Hari further establishing herself as a deviant. We are still looking for an ur-clue, aren't we?”
Corvayne shook his head. “I think the person who was climbing, this was just sort of a rest stop. Looking at the devices though... they had some ability to make weird things or the tower gave them rewards like these and stashed them here.”
Lady Blood Claw sighed. “No answers then?”
Corvayne rotated his neck, and while nodding something caught his eye. He looked at the window and spotted what he needed, a bony curtain that pulled a membrane over the window. As the room darkened to just a sickly glow from the lights at various stations, he pointed up at the ceiling as glow in the dark letters appeared, invisible green on green before. It looked almost like glow in the dark star maps they used to learn to navigate at night.
“What's it say Corvayne?” Wick asked, looking up with him.
He felt a weird sort of fear pass through him. “.... it just says Cascadia. Cascadia, over and over and over again.”