He brought his hammer back to its normal size as soon as he arrived, clipping it to his belt. He heard the Overlord let out a snort, and he turned his gaze to follow what he was looking at. There was a large gap between them and the nearest E Rankers, and it was only getting larger.
“What a bunch of cowards. How did they even reach E Rank?” The Overlord scoffed.
“I don’t think people like us are exactly common. These people were raised by their factions to the brink of E Rank. Their journeys were likely far less challenging than ours.”
“That is no excuse for weakness. I only let you live because you are strong.”
“You two have the strangest of relationships,” Glakassa said, shaking her head. “It reminds me of the attitudes in the older factions.”
“You would be surprised just how odd our connection is,” Sam replied. “That is a story for another time.”
“Another time, he says…” The Overlord muttered.
Sam glared at the man. “Anything you want to say about Glakassa?”
“You already know what I meant.”
“I’ll leave you two to have some time alone,” Glakassa interjected, flitting off into the crowd of E Rankers.
As she went, Sam noticed that the reactions of the other fighters to her were far less pronounced than they were to him or the Overlord. She had made a much smaller impression. Had they been able to see his final attack in its full glory, Sam expected that they would have left the Tower there and then.
He fixed the Overlord with a glare, making him quail slightly as he felt the weight of Sam’s aura. The man’s Dao, coupled with his witnessing of Sam’s true power, combined to drive home the situation between them.
“For the last time, if you’re not my father, then don’t interfere in the things that I want. I have my life, and you have yours. Mind your own business, Overlord.”
The other man sighed, and opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. Then he tried again. “I’m starting to grow tired of that name. If I am truly an avatar of Supremacy, then everyone should know that, no matter my title. I want to go by Jacob again, at least some of the time.”
Sam spluttered slightly. For once, the other man was not acting in an aggrandizing manner. A moment later, he collected himself. “What?”
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“You heard me. I’ve done a lot of soul searching recently. I need to change myself to adjust to this new world that we live in. I know that I can be unbearable at times, hell, that seems to be a necessity of my Dao, but I want to try to fix that.” The man paused, as if working himself up to say something hard. “The thing is, I can’t justify the way I behave while you remain stronger than me. Your way is clearly superior.”
“Well, I’m happy to hear that, Jacob,” Sam answered. “Perhaps this can be a new beginning.”
“I hope so too.”
As before, there was a brief lull as the System planned the next event, but Sam simply waited, not bothering to cultivate. He was starting to grow a bit tired of this floor, due to how much time it was wasting. Why didn’t the System simply stage a battle royale, and let the winners progress? Then again, it hardly mattered in the long run, given that there was a degree of time alteration, which meant that even a few days of extra time would only mean an hour or two of added time in the outside world.
Compared to how long the whole Tower would be, it was nothing. Sam quickly found himself growing bored of standing still and waiting, so he decided to explore the floor a bit. It was odd that his mind could easily sink into days of cultivation with ease, but at the same time was so fast that he could find himself losing interest at shocking rates. Curious, he used his E Rank bodily control to alter his perception of time, and to his shock, he realized that everything was moving far faster than he had expected. It seemed that his mind had automatically adjusted to match the speed of those around him. There was almost no noticeable difference, as he was easily able to interact with people far weaker than himself by noticing a change in their speeds. It was only during his battles that he really saw any sort of change in the velocity of his movements, and his reaction time.
The floor was strikingly empty other than the various competitions and what Sam would describe as arcade games for cultivators, strewn around. He began to take to teleportation, as the constant parting of other Tower climbers around him was beginning to annoy him. He was not the Overlord, who was likely loving this sort of response.
He was beginning to feel a sort of divide between himself and the others here, especially considering the fact that he had been forced to kill many of them. They were simply too different, both in the scope of their power, and in their nature. These were beings that would happily butcher a planet’s worth of mortals for power, or at the very least, most of them would. They had been raised as prodigies, and even those who had not were still endowed with an extraordinary amount of power. E Rank was a qualitative boost in power, and one that could easily send a cultivator over the edge to fatal levels of arrogance, as many here had found out personally.
Sam tried a few more of the smaller competition venues, managing to score at the top for all of them, save for a few that dealt with the manipulation of elemental energy and mana. That was the only field that he was not a prodigy of the extreme sort in. Something like that came with time, which was a thing that he had been given little of. The sum total of his progression journey would not even amount to a blip in the lives of many of the fighters here, and it barely amounted to much in his own. Despite that, he was the one standing at the top.