The group finished the newly built third floor puzzle before I was even remotely ready. The puzzle had been a dozen unlit torches, around the third floor, and a door in the middle of it with twelve carved fire rune symbols in a circle. After a few attempts on his life, which I prevented with spontaneous steel blocks, Oliver had helped the group understand that they needed to light the torches.
To make the puzzle more clear, I even heated up one of the fire symbols until I was sure it was visibly glowing, after the torch was lit. Get all the twelve torches lit, and the doors will open into a small room which would work as an elevator to the fourth floor.
Once the group understood what they needed to do, I grabbed Oliver with a stone sphere, and pulled him to the fourth floor where we could talk in peace. Problem was, it took the group only about half an hour to light all the torches. By that time, the best idea I had was a yet another labyrinth. I didn't want my entire tower to be labyrinth themed, nor did I want the group to enter a completely empty fourth floor. If they did that, I could only imagine the disappointment they'd feel. They might not even want to enter the tower again, and consequentially not learn any of the runes I'd come up with in the future, which would mean that they wouldn't learn of all the wonders I could give them, nor would the group give me as much of their mana as possible.
I didn't have enough time to design any new creatures, since they always needed a while to get used to their bodies, unless they were near exact copies. I could use some of the unattached human minds, but they'd be more confused than anything, which means they wouldn't be very good enemies. So I decided to make some simple golems. Scratch that, I made elementals. Just floating balls of water, stone, fire, air and lightning that I could move around and spew their respective elements from.
The group stepped through the now open doors, and I had no choice but to move the elevator up... very slowly. Sure, I could just entirely prevent them from getting to the fourth floor, but that had the same problem that not having a fourth floor had. People might think that three floors was all I had to offer.
During the ascent, I just about managed to build a decently large circular room leading out of the elevator. I was very good at building stone walls by now. Before I opened the elevator door, I made five doors in the room, each decorated with the rune symbol for one of the different elements, with the corresponding elemental behind them in a small closet sized space. I had some half baked idea that the elementals could only be defeated by their opposite element, water could defeat the fire elemental for example. Reason why it was half baked, was because there were five elements, which meant the classic water-fire and air-earth opposites might not work with lightning somewhere in the mix. I'll worry about that when the group opens the first door.
The elevator made it to the top, just as I had the idea to make five small pedestals that'd fill with the material of each elemental upon their defeat. I made a show of the pedestals forming as the elevator door opened, spiraling to existence from coalescing dust.
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"So far, we've gotten lucky. Sure, we've been able to handle everything that we've come across, but if something catches us off guard like that mole did, it could very well be over for us. Especially with our opponents becoming tougher the higher we get. That means no more playing around." The gruff voice of the groups leader, Kerto, said as the door to the odd moving room opened.
The room was dark, lacking the fluorescent moss that covered the walls of the previous floors. Kerto, and a few other members of his group, brought small flames to existence above their palms with the fire symbol they'd found on the second floor. The room was empty, the walls and floor barren of any decorations apart from the few symbols on the doors surrounding them.
"Watch out!" one of Kerto's underlings shouted in response to a slight wind picking up dust from seemingly nowhere, and spiraling it together in the center of the room. Ready to fight, Kerto was almost disappointed when the dust formed a handful of simple pedestals, instead of any enemies to destroy. He stepped forward to inspect the newly formed objects.
They were simple, in the shape of a spiraling pentagon, with bowls resting on top of each. The bowls were empty of any fluid, instead having simple symbols carved inside each bowl, two of which Kerto recognized. One bowl had the tower's symbol for fire, and the other had the tower's symbol for water.
"The doors have the same symbols as the bowls!" Another of Kerto's underlings said excited, "should we open them?"
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"Yes, open the one with the fire symbol. Everyone else, get ready in case there's something behi-" Kerto said, before he was interrupted by a stream of bright orange flames erupting through the now open door.
From a small space behind the door, a floating flame brighter than Kerto thought possible entered the room. Out of panic, Kerto's first instinct was to push the thing away with his mana, only for nothing to happen. The flame was as if alive, it was the spirits golem. Kerto quickly took cover behind one of the pedestals, before attacking the flame with his blade. His prized weapon, the blade made from metals created by the Ancients, melted in an instant upon contact, spewing hot liquid all over the room.
Kerto ignored the growing panic at the back of his mind, the screams of his team, some no doubt currently burning alive, and forcefully calmed himself. One thing that put out fires often enough was water. And Kerto was technically a cleric of the tower now, even if giving up much of his mana made him feel slightly like a puppet on strings, being played by the god who was both the threat and the weapon. He grabbed a good chunk of his mana, formed into the water symbol, and spewed it out from the tattoo he so recently received. The stream of water gushed in a cone towards the floating flame, drowning it in a bout of steam that left nothing behind.
The injuries to his team were severe, if not deadly. The person who had opened the door had lost his sight, and his face would likely forever remain scarred. Another had their entire abdomen covered in blisters, and a third had burned their entire left side. They weren't in immediate danger, but if they were to get infected... It was better left unsaid. Counting the two earlier injured, almost half of the party was left wounded.
Kerto decided it was time they return, and give their report of the tower's danger to the chief hand. He couldn't risk any more of his men getting injured, or dying, Kerto thought as he looked at the unopened doors. Only then did he realize there was still something inside the door where the flying flame had come out from. There was a pedestal, like the few others they'd come across. It had a small vial filled with the precious black dust on top of it, behind which there was a new symbol, and some mysterious unreadable writing.
However, what caught his eye was the blade leaning against the small wall. It looked almost exactly like the blade he'd lost only moments before, except for the collection of black symbols on it. There were a dozen, connected together with lines of varying widths, like some of the odd items they'd found in the earlier floors. Kerto gently grabbed the blade, squeezing its flat sides with his fingers, for there was nowhere else to grab it. He almost pushed some of his mana through the symbols, but then thought better. He could test the blade later, the injured men and getting out of the tower were higher priorities. Though he did quickly copy the new symbol on a piece of parchment, and pocketed the dust vial before following the others back into the moving room they came from.
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'I... May have gone a bit overboard with the fire.' I admitted to Oliver, as he looked up with a very judgemental and crowy expression. 'Ok, I'm sorry I didn't make a door where you could've gone and helped them, and yes, I do feel kinda bad. It's the first time someone got seriously injured here, but it's going to be a normal occurrence.'
'Why not just give them the knowledge without risk?' Oliver wrote back. He wasn't very happy at me setting people on fire, and it showed.
'You already know the answer to that. It's the best way I could come up with for separating those who are too irresponsible to safely use the stuff I can offer from those who aren't, without being able to talk at all. If someone is willing to sacrifice all their teammates, or spams fireball constantly, then they won't be able to get higher up the tower, because the whole idea with the life risking and various puzzles is to make sure the people are worthy. And even if someone dies, I'll just make them an employee of the tower, like you are. A conscious sword like you wanted.'
'That was a joke, and you know it!' Oliver quickly scratched. I hadn't in fact known, but sarcasm was hard to understand through writing, especially when the one writing was a crow, and the one reading couldn't even really see. But that didn't matter, once I figure out how to connect a consciousnessess to something that isn't living, conscious weapons would definitely be a thing.
'Anyways, I know you don't like that I hurt people, but I don't think there's really any way to make sure people don't get hurt, so it might as well be me who hurts them, in my domain where I can make sure death isn't the worst thing that can happen' Oliver quickly looked up in indignation, 'That came out wrong. But this is also why I made the new rune. I'm pretty sure I know enough about biology and consciousness that I can heal at least external wounds. If they want to heal the burns in an instant, they can just cut away the burnt flesh and use the new rune.'
Oliver started sulking, but I was pretty sure he understood where I was coming from. Neither of us wanted some random to get their hands on runes so they could teach their children arson, or go and conquer the world into slavery or something equally messed up. I couldn't even properly deny someone from using their tattoos, since responding to mana becoming mine in the shape of a rune was already instinctive.
Oliver couldn't give any reason to 'hurting people is bad' other than it feels wrong, he even agreed that it does more good than bad. He's probably just emotional because of his crow brain influencing his mind. Huh, I would've never thought that I'd be happy to have no brain.