Chapter 95

Something you didn’t have to deal with outside of the Tower was frozen ground. Icy surfaces were, as I found out immediately, slippery. While the ground crunched and squeaked in some areas, others were solid, and extremely slick. My boots, on which the white frosted ground already clung, had slid immediately out from underneath me when I’d attempted to begin a quick jog away from the Portal. I’d fallen backwards, quickly, and my friends hadn’t even made an attempt to stop my descent. Though, I wasn’t quite sure if that was purely from the surprise of the situation, or a matter of amusement for them.

Their laughter would imply they’d let it happen on purpose, but I honestly didn’t think any of us had expected me to slip in such a sudden manner. From my vantage point on the ground, I realized the flame from Nyle’s fireball had actually melted part of the ground, and then, once the fireball had faded, it had quickly begun to freeze back over. Aiding in, and likely partly to blame for, my unscheduled meeting with the ground.

“It’s uh,” I stood to my feet, dusting the cold white powder off myself, “slippery.” I said, eliciting more laughter from my friends. Considering how miserable the cold was, and how much pain I was already in, and I had no doubt they were in as well, the laughter brought a moment of warmth to the situation. Even though it had hurt, the pain of the fall itself was temporary, and the cold was already causing the soreness to numb. While the fall had been unexpected, my training, at the very least, had ensured I didn’t crack my head on the ground.

“Are you ready to go now?” Lyn asked through her laughter, “or are you planning another trip?” More laughter.

“Ha ha,” I looked back in the direction I’d intended to run. There were tracks leading from the portal that way, long, deep grooves that told me more than likely it was the correct way to head. Whether I was correct in that assumption, the marks at least told me someone had come through the portal and headed that way. So, even if it didn’t lead to the fifth-floor portal, perhaps we’d find other Climber’s who could point us in the right direction.

“Really though,” Nyle added, “we should get moving. The cold is actively seeping away at my health.”

“I noticed that too,” mine was down another point, putting me at 108. It was slow, and it would take a while for us to die at that rate, but it was still a concern. What was the damage rate from the environment? A health-point every minute? It would be miserable the whole time, but with five heal spells, which could heal 50 HP per cast, that meant I could last 360 minutes on the floor, or six hours, before I’d finally die. A long, agonizingly painful, death. And that was assuming there wasn’t anything on the floor actively trying to kill me alongside the cold itself.

“Let’s go then,” Lyn’s voice was exasperated as she spoke, her teeth chattering as she held her cloak around her chest. I nodded and took off running again, this time careful with my footing. Now that I knew what to look out for, feel wise, I was more confident at moving swiftly across the frozen ground, though even still, I was hesitant to run much faster than a jog.

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Running had more benefit than just moving faster towards our goal. At first as I worked my arms and legs, urging the blood to flow through my body to run, my limbs were stiff. But with the exertion of running, slowly and surely, I could feel myself warming. Drifts of steam flowed off my body as I moved, the warmth filling me contrasting starkly with the sharp, biting cold of the world around us. Similar steam rose around Lyn and Nyle, and while slight, it made the cold just a little more bearable.

Granted, running through a frozen wasteland wasn’t a pleasant experience. Even as my body warmed, my lungs screamed. The cold air was bitter and harsh, and each breath burned. Not only that, but it felt thin and empty, similar in some ways to the air on the third floor, as we climbed the mountains. It made me gasp and gulp each breath, searching for air to fuel my body with. Heat radiated from my core and through my limbs from running, and yet pain clawed at my chest and throat. I could taste blood with each breath, and all it did was further conclude that the fourth floor, of all the floors I’d been on so far, was the absolute worst.

I blinked as my vision flickered and shifted, and my eyes dislodged, once again, the freezing teardrops that clung to them. The cold wind cut into my eyes, and the strain of staring at the bright white surface of the floor, along with the chill that attacked my face, caused the tears to come continually unbidden. And the wind was quick to take hold of that moisture, freezing it even as it formed. Combined with the constant liquid running from my chilled nose, which also threatened to freeze, I prayed to the Tower that we could leave this cursed floor soon.

The longer we ran, our life slowly ticking by, the more I questioned my choice to follow the tracks. I didn’t see signs of footprints. Only the deep grooves, about four feet apart, that cut roughly a foot into the ground on either side. The ground between the grooves itself was actually perfectly smooth, compacted down more than the ground elsewhere. That fact, at the very least, made it ideal for running atop, though it kept feeding my doubt about my earlier conclusion.

After about fifteen minutes of absolute agonizing running though, my blurred vision cleared enough to notice the terrain was shifting and changing. Ahead of us were walls of ice, roughly three feet in height, that shimmered blue against the white of the ground. There was a rounded opening in the walls themselves, and I could tell the tracks we were following led directly through that opening. Past it, the ground seemed to descend downwards. Whatever the walls before us signified, it was, at the very least, helped my wavering confidence. Beyond those walls, we’d find answers. If the portal to the fifth floor didn’t lie past that wall, at the very least, hopefully, surely, someone from outside of the Tower did. Whoever, whatever, had made the path we’d been following, had to be close at hand now. And that meant we were one step closer to our end goal. My pace increased, my gulping breaths growing more ragged as my lungs questioned my sanity. I didn’t care. The suffering would soon end. The quicker we got beyond that ice wall, the quicker we could be done with this place.

Pain was temporary, suffering, momentary. I could endure them for a little longer, if it meant we could leave this floor even a minute sooner.