Clearing this building took an hour, the narrow corridors and rooms inhibiting the girls' mobility, but also meaning only one to two knights could fight them at a time. Close to three dozen knights fell within the span of that hour, Beth and Blood not getting a level out of it, but she did feel they got quite a bit of experience from the fights. Sadly, the lack of real challenge led to her not really upgrading anything, her skills either being maxed for now or higher tiered abilities that would require more to level.
They returned again to the yard, Beth wanting to save the keep for last, leading them over to the armory-like building. This building was smaller than the barracks, even more squat and thick-walled, with no windows other than two small slits on each side. The building was only one story with no basement, as Beth found when they entered, and the rooms within were rather large, connected by short hallways. They cleared the armory in under an hour, Beth just shaking her head at the racks upon racks for weapons and armor stands, all empty, not even a small knife present.
Moving back to the yard after cleaning up the armory, Beth turned to face the keep. It had two fairly large wooden doors banded with iron, probably standing a little over ten feet high and eight feet wide each. Beth moved up and pushed on the righthand door, finding that it moved slightly just from the light shove. She took a half step forward with her right leg and shoved with her arms, the door swinging wide open without her having to use very much of her strength. The large entry hall of the keep had four knights stationed on the far side, all facing the outer doors while holding their swords, points to the ground. The swords quickly left the ground as Beth breached the hall, all four knights closing with the intruder before Beth lashed out, partially crushing the left leg of the lead knight.
Beth's ability to hammer through the knights was actually aided by them being phantoms, as was clearly demonstrated by these four knights. Without bodies to fill out the armored suits, Beth's crushing damage was far more effective in crumpling and twisting the knights' armor. Once the four suits were down and destroyed, Beth took a minute to look them over. They appeared the same as the ones outside the keep, made of decent mana steel, but nothing particularly special, likely another reason her Crush was able to smash them so easily.
The two young women took a moment to rest, meditating for just a handful of minutes to top up their resources. Beth was still down a small amount of mana, but Crush wasn't really drawing too heavily on her small mana reservoir, meaning she would be fine for quite a while before she would need to take an hour for a more serious replenishment. They left the entryway when they were refreshed, moving into a long hallway with several doors on each side. There were two doors on the right of the hallway, one close to the entryway and one near the end of the hallway where it branched out in a T-split. The left side of this first hallway had three doors evenly spaced along the hundred-foot length. Beth motioned to the first door on the right and Blood moved up to the side, ready to intercept but still giving Beth room to maneuver.
The room proved to be a massive dining hall, likely meant to be used by the guards themselves, as it contained nine or ten large tables with benches along each side. There were several knights within the room, sitting on the benches in a mummery of a meal. The knights started to react to the door opening as Beth shot across the room, already well familiar with dealing with this type of enemy. It took the two little time to clear out the scattered knights, the furniture in the room more of a hindrance to the shades than to Beth and Blood.
When the room was empty, they moved back out into the hallway before Beth checked the first door on the opposite wall. It was a room that seemed to be some type of guard station or post, with two of the knights within seemingly just waiting. For what, Beth wasn't sure, but what they got were the hardened knuckles of her gauntlets. With those two enemies down, she checked the other two rooms, Blood trailing after. The first was another armory-type room meant for storing weapons and likely doing some maintenance on them as well. While there weren't any weapons in the room, there were several weapon racks and a few tools meant for cleaning and polishing as well as sharpening blades. Beth dealt with the two knights in the room quite easily before checking the last door.
This door opened into something more resembling a large office, with several desks and bookshelves within. This room also was the first instance of a new enemy, apart from the haunted horse armors, which hadn't really been all that different overall. Behind a large desk made of a lighter shade wood at the back of the room was a knight with more ornate armor. Its pauldrons were more fanciful than the rest of the knights, with gold accents, as well as a more detailed helmet, the metal working more intricate with additional gold worked into the design. Beth checked to see what they were up against as all the knights rose to their feet.
Level 57 Captain Armor Shade
Seemed pretty self-explanatory to her, considering the armor design coupled with the fact it was taller and had a somewhat nicer looking sword. It proved to also be faster than the other shades, as it crossed the greater distance from its desk to them in the same amount of time as the rest of the enemies. Beth was well prepared by the time it got close, running Beastly Body and Swift as she nimbly dodged the first horizontal swing. The captain was faster than the other knights but didn't seem to be that much stronger and, though it was a little thicker as well as fancier, its armor proved not that much tougher. Beth was easily able to dodge the attacks of all three of the enemies present in the room as she slowly crushed the captain's armor into scrap. She finished the other two opponents rather fast after defeating the captain, with Blood contributing a little to make sure she was getting a decent share of the experience.
The two left the office and moved to the T-junction in the hall, finding a stairway at the end of each hallway as well as another hall heading back further into the keep. These additional halls cut inward at the very back of the keep, forming a simple square of hallways with a number of rooms in the middle block. They went through these rooms one-by-one, clearing all of them of suits of haunted armor, finding no additional captains or rare variants on the first floor. The lefthand stairwell led downwards to a basement level, while the righthand stairwell led up further into the keep. Beth decided to check the basement first, wanting to clear everything from bottom to top.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The basement turned out to be a single large level, extending beyond the bound of the keep building and covering part of the yard outside in area. The whole thing was a combination of a jail and storage facilities, almost entirely empty except for a handful of patrolling knights, which they eliminated in just a couple minutes. They returned to the first floor afterwards, making their way over to the stair leading up, Beth finding as they took it that it went all the way to the roof. She then had them head back down to the second floor to continue clearing the keep level-by-level, finding that this floor was a very simple rectangle. With no large doors at the front to enter from, there were two hallways running east-west at the front and back of the floor connected by two hallways running north-south along the side of the floor.
The hallways were on the outside edges of the floor, with only the outer walls beyond them, meaning all the rooms branched out from just one side of each hall. The rooms themselves were rather uninteresting, made to look like the living quarters of individuals who might have lived in such a medieval time, though the shades surely wouldn't need such accommodations. Clearing every room took less than an hour as only about a third of them were occupied, all by individual knights, which were easy pickings for the two young women.
They found floors three and four to be much the same, though the fourth floor had much larger rooms that appeared to be meant to have several different functions, such as offices, studies, and recreation halls. This meant larger groupings of enemies, including another room with a captain and several regular knights, but none of this proved very challenging. The two leveled up again near the start of clearing this floor, pushing them to the big fifty number, not as significant for sapient beings as it was for beasts. Though Beth had to say, the enemies in the first two stages they had faced so far didn't really seem any stronger than the kobolds in the forties in level range in the labyrinth dungeon. She would have to ask one of the workers if they were somehow at a high level but made to be weaker. Either way, the really important level for them to hit, as many people had hinted at so far, was level one hundred and, if the stages continued to provide such abundant experience, she was pretty confident in them getting at least that far by the end of their run in the Trial.
At last, they made their way to the fifth floor, Beth finding it unlikely anything would be on the roof. She did stick her head through the trapdoor at the top of the stairwell quickly just to check, but found the place empty in the waning afternoon light. She popped back inside, letting the trapdoor thump shut behind her as she walked the handful of steps back down to the fifth floor. This floor had a different layout than the previous few, consisting of a set of hallways at the front of the floor with a few rooms branching off said hallways. At the back of the floor was a very solid wall with a single large set of double doors. The doors would have appeared ornate to Beth if she had not seen the incredible opulence of the waiting and rest area for the Celestial Awakening Trial. Now, the doors just seemed sort of…plain and simplistic.
Beth and Bbood took a little more than twenty minutes to clear the front half of the fifth floor, finding a third captain in one of the seven rooms. This captain was a little faster and stronger than the first two, though its level and designation showed the same when Beth checked it, something she found a little unusual but not particularly strange. There were all sorts of crazy variation within the system she now found herself a part of, and variance among beasts even of the same type and level wasn't anything too overwhelming.
Once the front half was cleared, it was time to confront what Beth assumed would be the boss of the mock "dungeon." She sat with Blood for a minute so they could quickly meditate to make sure their resources were doing fine and they were focused for the next encounter before heading to the gold-inlaid double doors. She pushed the doors open with Blood standing back and slightly to the side, both of them ready for whatever beasts waited within. They didn't have to go far to find the first opponents, Beth getting only a glimpse of a large command room, different from the throne room she had expected, before two knights stationed by the door drew on her. The knights both stepped into her and slashed rapidly, going for a neck and chest slice immediately.
Beth leapt back, glad for the extra room Blood had given her, pulling the enemies back into the central hallway with her. She dodged another set of rapid swings before punching out with her right arm, smashing the left arm of the knight on the right. As soon as its balance was thrown off, Blood appeared in the opening, shoulder-checking the knight into its companion. Beth took advantage of the tangle of limbs the two knights became for a moment, raining down heavy punches into both enemies as they tried to right themselves. Catching a glimmer out of the periphery of her vision, she danced back before she could be sliced, not wanting to rely on her new helmet to halt the blow to her skull. She examined the beast that had taken the swipe at her, seeing a large, haunted armor with ornate gold and silver trim worked across the entire helmet and breastplate.
Level 59 Lord Commander Spectral Armor
This beast was classified rather differently, both being a lord commander and being named a spectral armor and not a haunted armor shade. She assumed it would be in a class of its own, not only based on the ornamentation on the armor and different appellation, but also in consideration of the enormous, seven-foot-long greatsword the beast swung at a rather ridiculous speed. The room's other occupants, two captains and six more "regular" knights, were all backed up behind the commander, who did a rather good job of acting as a second door for the double doorway.
Beth took a bit of a gamble, wanting to prevent being swarmed for as long as possible. Stepping forward once with her right leg, she charged up Crush in her left leg before stepping forward with it and stomping down on one of the downed knights' heads, crushing it into a twisted half-bowl of scrap steel. As her left foot smashed down, she charged everything from her toes to her hip in her right leg with mana, shoving extra mana throughout her entire body as she pushed Beastly Body to its current limit. As her foot finished the crushing of the fallen armor's helm, she twisted her hips and lashed out with an empowered kick so fast her right leg was little more than a black and copper blur. The center of her heel made contact with the center of the lord commander's breastplate, Beth's foot proving the greater of the two. The commander was forced to take three full steps back to dissipate the force of the strike without falling, a visible trench of metal stove-in right in the center of its chest.
Blood had grabbed the second knight from the tangle on the floor at the same time, crushing its armored helm in her massive jaws before throwing the remains of the being down the hall. As Beth stepped forward to keep the boss occupied in the doorway, she grabbed the second corpse and dragged it away, clearing the floor of obstruction to allow Beth to move freely without dancing around tripping hazards. She then circled around the tall woman's back, looking for an opportunity to add a thousand-pound shoulder-check into the fray.