Leaving the third floor was something of a bittersweet moment for Kelsey, she had enjoyed fighting in uninterrupted peace for so long and hadn’t seen a single other person her entire time while in the desert. She was guessing that floors would become more and more crowded as she drew closer to Immortality, but she didn't need to worry about that for now. Up in the base camp she had seen practically zero people around her level which meant for the next few brackets she would probably have some peace and quiet while leveling.

So, she began her descent down to the fifth floor. She decided to skip the fourth floor as the level range was from 80 - 90, and she was already mostly done with those levels. The level range on the fifth floor however was from 90 - 105 which meant that she would be encountering Gold rank monsters.

It was a well-known fact that, like people, monsters went through substantial leaps in strength when passing the advancement levels. She had been told by Owen and Lisa that dungeons like this, where monsters were on the edge of the advancement range, were likely to house variants of whatever monsters was prevalent in the area.

In the case of floor five, the monster type was very obvious the moment she stepped through the door... werewolves. About 15 meters from the entrance, she spotted a werewolf hiding around a corner, waiting to ambush anyone that passed by. I guess people don’t come here often if there is a werewolf just standing next to the door.

Upon entering the room, she saw her first change of lighting since coming to The Trial. Instead of mid-day, and a natural outdoor setting, it was a simulated urban area with what she would consider gothic style architecture, set with a soft white sky that mimicked the light of a full moon.

Deciding it was better to make the opening move rather than simply letting the monster attack her, Kelsey activated her buffs and began creating a telekinetic wave with her saber; the intention was to end the first fight quickly. However, she underestimated her opponent and the moment she began creating the wave, the hairs on the werewolf’s back stood up straight and it looked directly at her. That is one hell of a danger sense. She thought as she launched the half-formed wave directly at the wolf.

The werewolf immediately began charging her, and it was fast. It dodged her attack with the ease and grace of a professional dancer. With her mental speed cranked up as high as it would go, she could tell that the speed of her body was going to be the limiting factor against a monster as fast as this werewolf. As it approached, tearing straight through a small cart that was placed in the middle of the gravel street, she readied herself and got into a defensive stance with her saber extended.

As the beast approached and began trying to claw at Kelsey’s head and chest. It was all she could do to stop it from cleaving her in two. Deflecting blow after blow of the werewolf’s fast and powerful strikes, she could immediately feel her saber beginning to crack, the spatial wires that composed the weapon unraveling slowly. This was the strongest creature she had ever fought with her saber, and it wasn’t holding up nearly as well as she would have liked it to.

As she desperately struggled to keep the wolf's claws from her throat, she searched for a plan of how to deal with the bloodthirsty monster. Her biggest issue was that she wasn’t able to create distance by going further into the floor, as she didn’t know if other werewolves were close by, and the last thing she wanted was to fight multiple of them at a time.

But she knew she had to do something quickly, or she would end up as a meal for this creature. So, doing the only thing she could think of, she teleported roughly to where the werewolf originally was, stored her cracked saber into her vault, and began channeling all the mana she could into creating an ocean of individual telekinetic wires, and launched them at the werewolf.

The wires exploded from Kelsey in a wave of mana and slammed them into the beast, wrapping it up like a cocoon. The moment the creature was completely covered in the wires, she took the nearly half second additional time required to make her creation permanent. It was something that wasn’t usually worth doing in a fight, but in this case, it was exactly what she needed. The creature was completely trapped, unable to move. This gave her plenty of time to activate Meditation and work on creating a singular giant lance to finish the fight in one attack.

It took nearly 6 seconds to dump the roughly 7,000 mana she decided to imbue into the lance, and by that time, she could tell that the werewolf would be free in just another second or two. Knowing she didn’t have any time left, she tied off her new creation and used Telekinesis to launch it at the wolf’s chest. The lance screamed through the air, breaking the sound barrier and causing a sonic boom as it slammed into the creature's chest creating a sizable crater in the ground behind it.

No ding rang out in her mind. She saw that the werewolf was somehow still alive. It was unable to move and clearly in pain, but it was still struggling to get free. How is that thing still alive? It has a hole through its chest the size of ‘my’ chest. Thankfully, it was completely helpless to stop her as she drew her saber and created a telekinetic blade in order to decapitate it.

*ding* You have defeated a [Werewolf - lvl 93]

That wasn’t even one of the variants? It was even on the low end of the range of monsters here. This floor is going to be an absolute pain.

*ding* Meditation has reached lvl 13 -> 14

To top it off, I didn’t gain a level from that fight, or any class skill levels. I’m going to need to learn to fight these things with weapons if I want to get my class skills to 10 before I hit level 100.

To that end, Kelsey started practicing; she spent the next week and a half fighting the werewolves in one-on-one fights, ensuring that she didn’t attract more than one at a time. Eventually, she learned their attack patterns, got comfortable with their speed and strength and became able to fight them on somewhat equal footing. They were certainly still stronger and faster than her, but by incorporating her teleportation, she was able to outmaneuver them and slowly create opportunities for herself. The biggest challenge with fighting them in this way was the speed at which they regenerated, she needed to maintain a constant pressure, or she would find herself stuck in an endless cycle of shallow wounds and regeneration. That very scenario played out multiple times during the week and she had fights with singular werewolves that lasted over an hour thanks to difficult terrain or close proximity to other werewolves.

Is that what it was like for those sharks to fight me? That has got to be annoying.

During her practice and training, she had completely avoided the Gold ranked variants. They were quite easy to spot as they were covered in blood, wearing armor or clothing, and each of them had unique weapons. She assumed that they must use some kind of blood magic due to their Identification as Werewolf of Blood, but she wasn’t ready to test that theory quite yet.

During the week and a half, she also encountered other Classers for the first time down in the dungeon itself. They were a group of very low gold ranks who stopped into floor five to practice and test their new advancement abilities. She decided not to approach them, and simply went the other way, letting them experiment to their heart's content without someone looking over their shoulder.

Roughly 10 days after entering floor five she was level 91 and had all but three of her class skills maxed at level 10. She had also taken the time to create a dozen extra telekinetic sabers and stored them in her vault so she wouldn’t run into a situation like the one against the first werewolf ever again. The other piece of progress was that she felt like she was very close to grasping the Minor Create Water general skill. It turned out that learning creation magic without the help of a class skill was incredibly hard. She was able to create spatial mana manually, but that was mostly due to already having the skill to practice with. Doing it with an element she wasn’t familiar with and had never used before was a challenging task to say the least. The goal of creation magic was to recreate atoms with mana. Water was theoretically one of the easiest creation skills to learn, but it was still impossibly difficult. She couldn’t even imagine trying to learn the process using something as complex as wood creation.

After all the preparation she had done in the past 10 days, Kelsey finally felt ready to fight her first bloody werewolf, and she knew just the one to go for. Floor five was set in a gothic city environment, and most of the werewolves were simply standing in the middle of streets, or in small parks. But there was one of the bloody werewolves she had spotted which was standing inside a small cathedral.

Having a magical fight inside a gothic cathedral was something she had no idea she wanted to do so badly until the opportunity presented itself.

Heading down the street towards the cathedral, Kelsey took the time to really appreciate the new life she had here on Anoura. She missed her parents and friends of course, but if what Thadius said was true, that it had really been 80 years since they left, then her parents and friends were already long gone. She didn’t know how true any of that was, who knows how time worked in between the two worlds, so until she knew for sure, she was just going to assume that they would be there waiting for her if she ever found her way back. She was a spatial mage, there was always a chance that if she became an Immortal, she would be able to find her way back to earth, at least to visit. She honestly loved the life she had now; she had only been in Anoura for a few short months, but she had already seen more places and experienced more things than she had in a lifetime on Earth. She was about to fight a magic werewolf in a cathedral that was underground in a dungeon. It doesn’t get better than that.

Ripping herself out of her thoughts as she arrived at the cathedral, she surveyed the building with her domain and saw the werewolf standing, unmoving in the same spot she saw it in four days ago. The cathedral itself was quite small being only around 30 meters wide and 50 meters long with a roof about 20 meters high, it was the type of cathedral she would have expected to see in a large town, not a city like this floor was intended to depict. The cathedral itself wasn’t exactly like the ones she remembered from Earth, but it was quite clear that the intended use case was the same.

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Inside there were rows of benches all facing the back of the building where a podium was placed on a raised pedestal. The walls were covered in giant sheets of stained glass that depicted scenes from what Kelsey assumed was some sort of holy scripture. She was born into a family who were very religious, so she was familiar with the most common concepts from her childhood, but she didn’t see anything she recognized on the glass here. The lighting in the cathedral felt very old fashioned, there were chandeliers and candelabras that used real fire placed at regular intervals to shed light across the whole room.

The most striking thing, however, was the creature that was standing, unmoving, in the center of the building. It was a tall, blood covered werewolf wearing a set of dark robes. There was something very interesting to her about a blood covered monster standing in the middle of a place of worship. It was the juxtaposition of the situation that, to her, felt almost poetic.

Wanting this fight to be on fair terms so she could really test herself, Kelsey opened the doors leading into the cathedral loudly and confidently. As she opened the doors, she quickly identified the creature and summoned her saber.

[Werewolf of Blood - lvl 103]

“So, you are the one that has killed my brethren.” A gnarled, rasping voice rang out, echoing off the bare stone walls. The Werewolf of Blood turned on its heels and stared directly at Kelsey.

Kelsey nearly jumped out of her skin as the werewolf in front of her started speaking.

“Wait, you can talk!?” Kelsey shouted in shock.

“Of course. My brethren and I are trapped here, doomed to serve our eternal punishment as nothing but fodder for you... humans…” he said, his voice filled with disdain on the final word.

“Punishment, for what? By whom?” she asked, feeling extremely confused.

“That I cannot say. It is not permitted.” he replied as he crouched and entered a fighting stance.

It feels wrong to fight this… creature? I don’t want to kill something that thinks and feels just so I can get some levels out of it. What the hell is going on?

Wanting to delay the fight, Kelsey put her arms up and motioned for him to wait. “Hey, let me just ask one question. What happens when you die here?” She asked quickly.

“I will reconstitute from mana in a few months and suffer imprisonment inside this accursed dungeon once again”. He answered with the tone of someone resigned to their fate.

Does this guy want to die? Would really make my choice easier. “Well, we don’t have to fight. But would you rather me leave you alone or kill you so you can rest for a few months?” she asked seriously.

The wolf looked stunned and paused in thought for several long moments before answering. “Death, please. I must fight back though; it is part of the punishment.”

“Sounds good. I won't hold back then.” she said as she activated her buffs, ramped up her perception of time, and started her attack.

Focusing her entire being on ending this fight as quickly as possible, Kelsey entered Meditation, blocking off the outside world, and began creating dozens of telekinetic lances in a dome around the werewolf. Kelsey didn’t like doing things like this despite how effective it was. Throwing around this much mana into so many creations at once always left her with an insanely painful headache afterwards. She created all of the lances at the same time but sent more mana to the ones between her and the werewolf. She figured that If he tried rushing her, he would need to get through her lances in order to reach her.

But he didn’t try rushing her, he didn’t even move. Instead, seeing that there was no escape, he pulled a small blade from under his cloak and sliced his own wrist, letting blood flood out of his body and pool around his feet. The blood rushed out of the wolf much more quickly than it normally would, no doubt aided by the wolf's magic.

The blood then seemed to act on its own as it moved to form a bubble surrounding the werewolf. It only took a few short moments from when he began bleeding to when the blood surrounded him completely. As the bubble formed, the blood seemed to solidify and harden. To her Eye of the Magus, the sphere of blood seemed completely solid.

I’m not sure my lances are even going to pierce that thing. It seems incredibly sturdy. She thought as she continued pouring mana into the lances. She continued her Meditation and channeling for over 60 seconds before deciding that roughly 70 thousand mana in total would be enough.

She was reaching the absolute limit of her control by this point. Managing dozens of lances filled with this much mana was straining, and she was pretty sure that if she added any more, the lances would begin unraveling themselves before she even launched them.

She briefly considered trying to wait for the werewolf to lower its blood shield, but it was an immortal creature made of mana, it could probably wait forever. So, not having any other options, Kelsey launched the lances at the bubble. The moment she did so, she instantly realized something; she had overestimated her ability to maintain the lance's integrity and she was going to suffer greatly for that mistake. The following collision was unlike anything she had ever experienced before. The lances slammed into the shield and unraveled instantly, exploding into raw spatial mana. The spatial mana that had previously been tightly wound inside her telekinetic lances was released all at once.

The resulting explosion was catastrophically powerful. As the wave of mana expanded, anything in its way was vaporized into dust. The benches, candles, glass, walls, and most importantly, Kelsey were all hit by the explosion as it searched for a way to escape from the cathedral.

Kelsey normally would have been able to put up some sort of defenses, or teleport away, when she noticed something like this happening, but unfortunately, as the lances lost their structural integrity, she suffered some sort of magical backlash that caused her head to explode in pain and stun her for several crucial moments. She was unable to move or defend herself from the mana explosion and it hit her directly as it expanded. Everything she was wearing, including her Telekinetic Armory and Telekinetic saber, was immediately destroyed; her skin and muscle didn’t fare much better. As she regained control of her senses, she reacted quickly and teleported far away onto a roof of a nearby building.

She collapsed onto the roof of the building, her body not having the strength to stand on its own.

She wasn’t in any pain from the blast, thanks to the Pain Tolerance skill, but she was in pain from the magic backlash, which Pain Tolerance seemed to do nothing to alleviate. It was difficult to think and even more difficult to pay attention to the fight that was still ongoing. Through the haze of pain, Kelsey could see that the werewolf had lowered the shield and was looking around the cathedral, no doubt searching for her. She knew she didn’t have much time, so she activated her Mageblood regeneration and teleported even further away, creating as much distance between her and the werewolf as possible.

I’m not sure I can beat this guy. That explosion nearly killed me, and it didn’t even make a dent in his shield...

Once she was far enough away and healed up enough to move, she pulled out some telekinetic clothing from her vault and put it on. It wasn't as durable as the clothes that were destroyed, but it was better than trying to fight naked. Her Telekinetic Armory was usually more than enough, but any protection she could get would be beneficial in a fight like this.

She summoned another saber and began teleporting back towards to the destroyed cathedral. She didn’t get far however, as the Werewolf had started to follow her. She saw him running on the streets below. He didn’t know where she was quite yet, but Kelsey knew she only had seconds before the werewolf sniffed her out.

Deciding to fight head on, she teleported down behind the werewolf and swung as hard and fast as her body would allow her. However, the moment she arrived, she saw the hairs on the werewolves' back stand up and he turned to block her strike with a claw.

As her saber struck the werewolf’s outstretched claw, Kelsey felt as though she slammed a baseball bat into a brick wall, her arms briefly going numb. The moment their weapons connected, the werewolf burst into action, swinging his other claw directly towards her throat. Kelsey reacted just in time, activating her teleport and moving 50 meters away onto the top of a building where she began creating telekinetic spears and launching them as fast as possible.

The spears were more effective than she had expected. Even the werewolf wasn’t fast enough to dodge or block all of them. He received dozens of wounds over the next few seconds before hopping backwards and using his blood magic to create a shield to block the spears. He didn’t use a bubble this time, so Kelsey simply began creating the spears from behind him, causing him to need to turn his whole body around in order to block them. It was harder, from a control perspective, to create spears and launch them from somewhere other than around herself, but it was possible, and during moments like this, her domain's ability to do so was invaluable.

The moment the werewolf turned to block her spears, she readied her sword for a strike and teleported directly behind him. He was still in the process of turning and was unable to stop himself when he noticed her teleport. This gave Kelsey the perfect opportunity to swing as hard as she could at the werewolf, her blade cutting deeply into his back. This caused the werewolf himself to lose concentration and for his blood shield to drop. Not wanting to get hit by her own spears, Kelsey immediately teleported away and restarted her telekinetic barrage.

The instant Kelsey teleported away, the werewolf did something completely unexpected. Instead of using the blood to block the attacks like she had assumed he would, the werewolf drew the blood back in himself and began dodging her spears manually again. A few moments later she understood why. She saw his muscles begin expanding and his body steadily grew bigger until he was 30 or 40 percent larger than he was before. Along with his size, his speed also increased drastically, and he was now easily able to dodge her spears no matter which angle she shot them from.

Kelsey, realizing that her spears were no longer effective, began creating dozens of different types of weapons. Blades, hammers, walls, shields, chains, and anything else she could think of. Nothing worked. The werewolf was easily dodging or blocking anything she launched at him and was steadily getting closer. If she did find something effective, he would simply swat his hand at the object and destroy it.

Over the next few minutes, a steady chase began. Kelsey would teleport away while attacking him with telekinetic projectiles that were seemingly completely ineffective. He would steadily come closer, dodging or blocking anything she threw at him, and she would be forced to teleport away again.

I’m not getting anywhere against him. Nothing I’m doing is working. He’s just too fast. She even tried creating bladed telekinetic rings around him, but he simply used his claws, or his blood magic in order to break them before they were completely formed.

She was at a wall, there was absolutely nothing she could do. The werewolf had already regenerated all of the damage she had dealt before, and she didn’t know if she could deal any more. So not seeing any other options, she retreated. She stopped making projectiles completely and teleported in rapid succession towards the entrance to the Floor. Once she arrived, she opened the door and walked into the stairwell before closing the door behind her.

I have to come up with a plan.