CHAPTER 27: SPEED RUNNING A FLOOR

After what felt like an hour of effort, Jenna finally felt like she was able to move without going further than she wanted. Or, at least she felt like she wasn’t going too much further than she could deal with. Jenna made her way back out of the puzzle room and into the rift proper.

Once more, she was faced with the large goblin that she had seen twice before. This time, Jenna didn’t hesitate.

She rushed forward and slammed her mace towards the goblin. To her surprise, it didn’t react in time, and the mace tore a chunk out of its arm.

Jenna leapt back, curious about the development. When the goblin did begin to approach, it seemed to be moving in slow motion. She had no issue dodging any of its blows, and her mace responded as she expected it to, tearing out more and more pieces of the monster.

In just a few exchanges, it was lying dead on the ground. Jenna carefully walked around it, making her way back into the safe room.

Congratulations! You have completed the fourth floor of the rift! Rewards: Available if you would like to leave now. Would you like to leave?

“No,” Jenna said, immediately moving towards the cleaning room. Once she felt clean, and, more importantly, calm, she made her way back into the safe room.

She stood in the center of the room and tried to focus herself even more. While she was able to control her motion well enough to take out the boss, that didn’t mean that she felt in control. As she thought back on the fight, there were a number of times that she avoided hits not by being smart, but simply by being faster. It was a strategy that hadn’t harmed her then, but that certainly wasn’t sustainable.

Another hour later, the overall toll of the day’s work finally set in. Her body, which had been healed from severe damage multiple times, had had enough. Her soul, which had been forcibly stretched, had had enough. Even her mind was exhausted after all of the calculations she had done.

Jenna barely made it to the bed in the corner of the safe room before she was asleep.

When she woke up, there was one major question on her mind.

“How long have I been in the rift?”

Time elapsed since entering rift: Twenty Seven Hours, Fifty Seven Minutes, Sixteen Seconds

Once again, the seconds kept ticking up as she watched. It was strange that she had only spent slightly more than a day inside of the rift. Even discounting the explicit twenty days of Magic density she had received, it felt like she had made weeks of progress inside of the rift. Jenna hadn’t thought that she would make A Grade Hardened Glass for at least another month, to say nothing of her increased skills with the mace or her new ability to protect herself with her Magic.

Please either exit the safe room or exit the rift.

A timer began counting down, so Jenna picked up her mace and walked out of the safe room. With her newfound strength, the first goblin she encountered was no struggle at all. Watching it move was like watching the world in slow motion.

Even though it was well armored, the constant blows she rained down on it dispatched the monster quickly. The same happened with both rooms of goblins, which put Jenna on edge. There was absolutely no chance that the Pyramid would give her such an advantage in a puzzle room that the next floors ceased to be a struggle at all.

After pocketing another ring and some more gold coins, Jenna searched for anything out of place in the rift. Not finding anything, she gripped her mace more tightly and strode through the doorway. She saw what appeared to be another endurance boss encounter.

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This time, however, each of the small goblins appeared to be made of a living stone. With each goblin that she dispatched, Jenna watched her mace grow more and more damaged. Before she had made even a slight dent in the number of goblins in the room, her mace shattered.

Well, at least that explained what the difficulty would be on the level. Acting on instinct more than out of any actual sense of a plan, she picked up the nearest goblin corpse to her. She smashed it into another goblin, noticing that both took a significant amount of damage. If the Pyramid wouldn’t let her use the weapon she had trained on, Jenna would make the most of the weapons it gave her.

Of course, she knew as soon as she started using the goblins as weapons that the approach would not work for long. She was breaking more than one corpse for each goblin that she was able to kill. Doing some quick calculations, she realized that she would run out of bodies before she had killed even another thirty monsters.

That made her pause, just for a moment. The Pyramid probably wasn’t giving her a challenge she couldn’t solve, which meant she needed to figure out what the Pyramid wanted her to do. She thought through what she had done in the puzzle room on the floor above.

There was no combat, which seemed strange at first. As she considered the Pyramid’s scoring, though, Jenna had an idea. Just to make sure that she was thinking something along the right lines, she tried punching one of the stone goblins. It stung slightly, and the goblin appeared undamaged, if slightly dazed.

Then, Jenna coated her hand in Magic. This time, she only felt a slight pressure as her fist connected with the goblin, and its head caved in. Before she had gotten the boost to her Magic density, holding the Magic had been a notable pull on her Magic reserves.

Even now, she thought it would be in her best interest to keep the Magic active for as little time as possible. Any Magic she used up would make her slower and weaker, which would only compound the longer she fought. With her next punch, Jenna waited to coat her hand with Magic until she already had started her swing.

She apparently had underestimated how long it took her to coat her hand in Magic. It had not fully surrounded her hand by the time that she struck the goblin, and while it went down, she felt like it had taken more Magic than if she’d just waited. Maybe the strategy in this fight was less about endurance and more about overwhelming force?

Jenna focused on coating both hands with Magic and began swinging wildly, aiming to hit at least two or three goblins with each strike. As she did, the world began to sharpen around her, and she felt her posture adjusting instinctively to let her react more quickly to changes in the battle flow.

Fighting barehanded was a far different experience than using a mace. She no longer had any way to defend herself, which meant that any goblin coming towards her needed to be treated like the threat it was. The first time that she was able to redirect a flying goblin to land in the midst of the swarm, though, Jenna got an idea.

When the next goblin leapt towards her, she punched into it, trying to force it to move more quickly. It slammed into the horde of goblins, and she saw that more than a few of them were injured from the collision. With her new strategy in place, Jenna began trying to bait goblins into leaping towards her as she moved towards the supply rooms.

Last time she had been in a fight like this, there was a set number of monsters to kill. This time, though, she had a feeling that more would keep coming until she stopped them from doing so. She was proven right when she made it to one of the hallways connecting to the room. With a flash of light, ten new goblins formed and immediately rushed towards her.

Jenna quickly dispatched them and moved towards the engravings that were clearly spawning the monsters. The wall was beautiful, filled with channels of multicolored lights all interwoven to produce some effect. Unfortunately, that same delicate looking beauty was not as fragile as she’d hoped. With each strike on the wall, she saw the pattern disrupt slightly, but she wasn’t able to just tear a chunk of it out like she’d hoped.

If she had still had the mace, Jenna was certain that it would take no time at all to destroy the summoning Spell. Without it, though, she had to dispatch four more groups of summoned goblins before she had disrupted the Magic enough to stop it from running. Turning, she made her way to what she assumed was another summoning Enchantment at the end of the other hallway

Jenna’s Status:

Jenna Fredrickson First Year Spells Known: First Tier: Hardened Glass Expected Years Completed: 8 Prediction Confidence: 31% Points: 5 Qualified to Ascend to Next Year? Yes