“Splitting Chop!”
One crosswise sweep and half a dozen undead fell lifelessly to the floor. Well, more lifeless than they had been, at any rate. And again, and again, and once more for good measure. Jun’s arm a blur. His lemon-yellow extension a reaper’s blade, scything down moaning zombies like wheat stalks by the dozen. Bane to every creature unfortunate enough to find itself within his long reach. Well, with one rather persistent exception anyway.
[Agile Undead (Middling D Grade)]
Like some fickle wind spirit or slippery water elemental, it flipped, soared, and dove between his attacks. Wielding its rotting body with staggering precision. Over, then under, and around his every chop.
Fluid of motion and dripping with poise, it trailed arcs of a viscous, vile smelling ichor, like glittering beads off a dancer’s brow. Showering everything in its nearest vicinity as it pirouetted through the air with enviable grace. Treating his deadly attacks like one might a friendly game of hopscotch, it wasn’t a sight you ever thought you’d see twice in one lifetime.
And then the Agile Undead went on the offensive.
It exploded into motion. Slipping. Sliding. Leaping through the air. Contorting its body to clear overlapping chops. Landing, rolling, feet whispering against the floor. Barely a scratch on it that wasn’t personally inflicted. It raced, froze, let lashing yellow bands score the ground in front and behind.
Then it was up and running again, back to a full sprint in less than a second. At times it moved so fast, and so unpredictably, that Jun honestly had a hard time keeping track of the blasted thing. And then it was upon him, barely an arms length away—eyes a milky white and blackened nails extended.
Naturally, Jun kicked it through a wall. Or, he would have, had it not gone all mushy upon impact.
Grunting with satisfaction, Jun turned toward where, even now, Eleanor appeared to be facing off against three such Agile Undead. Ducking and weaving with comparable grace, she appeared to be… no, that wasn’t right.
It couldn’t be… could it?
Was she using them as some sort of training?
Weaving in-between unpredictable strikes without dealing any in return. Using her tiny buckler to great effect, deflecting and blocking. Even as she dispatched any of the wandering CommonBorn Zombies that’d sought to creep up behind her with lightning quick flicks of her blade. Shaking his head at her antics, Jun turned back to the undead arrayed before him.
They were only on the sixth such floor of the expansive tower, and, by his count, he had to have been winning by at least thirty or so kills. It wasn’t nearly a significant enough lead.
image [https://i.ibb.co/rw6tMBB/IMG-2711.png]
The rattle of bones and squeal of armor was what greeted them on the twenty first floor. An army of skeletons decked out in busted plate armor—piecemeal and dented. Wielding rusty iron longswords, chipped daggers, punctured tower shields and the like. A legion of animated bones nearly five-hundred strong, twin pinpoints of green light emanating from each pair of vacant eye sockets.
[Skeletal Footman (Middling D Grade)]
Beside him he could practically feel the excitement radiating off of Eleanor in waves. He could tell she was ready and more than willing to tear into the bastards like a runaway carriage straight out of hell.
“A girl after my own bloody heart, and make no mistake…” S. Jun wiped away an imaginary tear.
“What?” she turned to him, startled from her reverie. “I’m sorry, what did you say? I didn’t catch that.”
“Nothing! Ah, it’s nothing, don’t mind me…” S. Jun sniffled. “Just… let’s get at the bastards, yeah? All four of us. Like one big, happy family…”
“Four…?” her face scrunched up in confusion, before comprehension dawned. “Ah, right! Four. Yes, well, let’s. Shall we?”
“I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.”
And with that, mist wreathed buckler held aloft and knuckles liberally dusted with silver, familiar and master both exploded forth—hitting the waiting undead army with an impact much like that of a fallen meteor.
Bones, blades, and broken armor flew. And in the space of five frenetic minutes, floor twenty one of the Impregnable Bastion had been cleared like all twenty that’d come before it.
image [https://i.ibb.co/rw6tMBB/IMG-2711.png]
It was from there that the analytical mind of G. Jun began to notice a rather interesting trend. As far as enemy distribution went, the floor layouts appeared to follow a repeating pattern, with every tenth floor effectively acting as the reset point. With the overall difficulty subtly trending upwards the further along they went, while spikes in difficulty only seemed to occur on the fifth and tenth floor increments respectively.
It went something like this. The first floor of any ten-floor grouping would typically introduce a weaker undead enemy—call these individuals grunts for the sake of time. Every floor after the first presenting half again as many grunts as the floor prior, until the fifth floor where an advanced variation on the traditional grunt archetype was introduced. For the first ten floors, that had come in the form of the Agile Undead, with its grunt counterpart being the CommonBorn Zombie.
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Floors eleven through fourteen had consisted of what Eleanor had referred to as Ghouls. Lanky undead creatures—comparable in speed to the Agile Undead—with six-inch-long claws and razor-sharp fangs. Their evolved counter part came in the form of something called a Draugr.
A lot like the ghouls in overall appearance, but with the martial abilities of seasoned warriors. Or so Eleanor had assured him. He’d never gotten close enough to notice. And when he did, they usually didn’t last that long, regardless of their martial prowess.
From the fifth increment onward, so fifteen to twenty, twenty-five to thirty, etc. the total number of enemies stagnated, with grunts slowly being replaced by their advanced counterparts the closer to floor ten they went. Until, by floor nine, all they were fighting were the advanced variant in mass. Floors thirty-one to thirty-eight consisting of Skeletal Footmen, with their rarer counterpart being a bulkier skeleton with intact equipment, suitably dubbed the Skeletal Legionnaire.
And then came the tenth floor, where all prior conventions were chucked straight out the window. There was only ever one enemy on this floor, and it was always the toughest enemy they’d faced by far, every subsequent time they faced one.
[Skeletal Goliath (Lowly C Grade)]
Eleanor stared up at the spot on the far wall, some ten meters off the ground, where a clear indent in the brickwork, radiating hairline fractures, still housed the massive figure of one Skeletal Goliath.
A fifteen foot tall skeletal warrior of uncommon speed, strength, and durability, reduced to a smoking wall ornament. Gleaming bronze cuirass indented with a decidedly knuckle shaped impression, and eye sockets notably dim with whatever amounted to true death for these undead.
“A bit much, don’t you think? Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, preserving your strength or something?”
“What? You said you were done toying with the creature,” said R. Jun. “I merely allowed for Crushing to do what he does best. If you have any complaints, I’d take them up with him. Though I can tell you right now, I don’t think moderation is a word that exists in his very limited vocabulary.”
“Can’t they hear you when you insult them like that?”
“Hmm? Oh I’m sure, but what are they going to do? Hit themselves?”
“That’s… actually genius. Fair enough, forget I said anything.”
“Thank you,” he replied.
And, for the first time ever, if her ears weren’t deceiving her that was, she actually thought she heard a hint of sincerity in his tone.
“So, by my count that’s, what? Your four-thousand ten something to my eight-thousand two-hundred twenty-three? I think I’ll demand a foot massage for my first ever decree as your rightful lord and master. It only seems appropriate, given the indignities I’ve been forced to endure in this world.”
And it was gone.
Why all of these floors were laid out this way, G. Jun honestly had no idea. It didn’t make much sense from a defense oriented perspective.
[Nightshade Revenant (Greater C Grade)]
A floating corpse draped in shamanic adornments, it’d belched a thick, almost viscous gas near constantly, spilling over its rotten teeth to pool around its feet—slowly filling the room with its deadly toxins. In the end, Jun had been forced to punch a hole in the side of the tower, then whirl his cutting blades about like a giant fan to help disperse all the noxious mist.
That said, besides the poison and it’s surprising mobility—able to fly and all that, and not slowly either—the fortieth floor elite proved itself not much of a challenge whatsoever. This despite Eleanor’s insisting it was ranked higher than anything they’d faced thus far.
To finish it, Eleanor fell on her buckler, launched herself flipping into the air with the explosive rebound, then lopped the revenant’s head from its shoulders from forty feet up—crushing it to paste under her boot heel on the way down.
Needless to say, Crushing was nearly brought to tears.
[Imperial Wraith (Lowly B Grade)]
Breaking the mold somewhat, the sixtieth floor elite—ghostly, etherial, and decked out in tattered imperial finery—conjured ranks upon ranks of wraithlike minions to fight its battles in its stead.
The vast majority of its army made up of the ghostlike enemies they’d seen on earlier floors, there were a few pertinent exceptions in the form of its Imperial Wraith Guard. It was similar to the base Wraith—a ghostly enemy whose touch could, quite literally, freeze the blood in one’s veins.
Also the Warrior Wraith variant which, instead of swarming mindlessly like the former were prone to do, were more cautious and orderly in their approach. Each of them wielding etherial weapons that phased through stone without leaving a mark, yet could carve frostbitten lines in living flesh with ease.
The Imperial Wraith Guard were like the Warrior Wraiths in that way. Just bigger, faster, and more or less susceptible to the same strategy that’d worked throughout all of the ghost-oriented floors thus far.
“Splitting Chop!”
He hadn’t even needed to aim really. Just wave his arms around frantically and watch the chilling hoard of specters disperse into reverberating screams and luminescent goo.
“This seems… unfair,” said Eleanor, from where she hovered at his back. “They won’t even get a chance to doanything at this rate.”
“Untrue!” Y. Jun exclaimed, indignant. “It is he who chooses to be unsportsmanlike, friend Eleanor! The audaciousness of this finely dressed fiend! To think that he would stoop so low as to bring martial aid to a duel strictly of passions! When I would have been happy to test my fighting spirit against his any day of the week!”
“Well, I suppose when you put it like that…”
“I simply cannot abide trickery from any but my closest rivals, and he has clearly proven himself too untrustworthy to be counted among those honest deceivers!”
And, at the end of the day, Eleanor thought to herself, there really was no arguing with logic like that.
[Unholy Abomination (Greater B Grade)]
Nothing needed to be said about this tenth floor elite. Not because it was overly easy or anything. In fact, as the elite of the eightieth floor, it was likely the hardest fight they’d come up against thus far.
No, it didn’t need mentioning, because it didn’t need remembering. In fact, both Eleanor and Jun were working very very hard to make sure they forgot about it as soon as was humanly possible. All rippling meat, thick veins, and throbbing…! No. The entire floor grouping. Just… no.
Jun had no idea why it wasn’t organized in the way of a traditional bastion. With murder holes and cramped confines, instead of massive circular arenas that actually made the fights easier, if anything.
Whatever the reason, it ultimately made for a challenging, though ultimately predictable gauntlet that was quite a lot of fun—if one ignored levels seventy one through eighty, as anyone in their right mind should do, in fact what levels were those again—so it wasn’t as if he were complaining.
Perhaps that was why he was caught so off guard when they reached the hundredth floor and were greeted by the final elite of the tower.
[Undying Lich (Monarch Class—S Grade Rift Spawn)]