I quickly acted by twisting my body in the air and reaching out with my hand. This was not simple or easy to do. With only myself as leverage if I had to do this without prior experience there would be no way. But after all the mid-air fighting and training I had done, it only took a moment to twist my body in the direction I needed to be.

I moved my hand back and forth trying to guesstimate the exact spot it needed to be. It was going to be incredibly close. I needed to have my hand hit the spot, I suspected where all four units of flooring aligned.

While one of them had part of the boss spawner, the other three might have a platform. I lowered my hand, more downwards than my body as the floor rapidly approached, praying, that I would touch actual floor. My left foot was moving quickly to substitute for my hand so I had as much time as possible to think.

The tips of my fingers touched solid ground in front of me. I put my entire Body stat to work and pushed off against the floor. My downward momentum slowed and then I managed to keep myself in horizontal position. My fingers couldn’t bend any more to leverage me upwards. They could stop my fall, but I couldn’t gain any altitude or pull myself in.

My left arm moved forward as well, but I stared at the stub that it ended in with a hopeless expression. I was stuck horizontally over a pit of spinning blades and the boss monster was regenerating above me somewhere. At least it wasn’t attacking.

I slowly began to raise my arm upwards, using my fingers as a pivot. The little bit of energy I had left and my regeneration was going quickly. I never thought it would be a concern how much energy the Body stat used, but it was something I was really worried about now.

Slowly, I pulled myself upwards, making sure to maintain my balance and the force needed. One screw up here and I would be shredded to death. Very slowly, I leveraged myself upwards and then more than half my body was over the platform. I pushed myself forward, landing on my gut.

“Ahhh!” I screamed in pain. I made sure not to let my feet dip into the saws beneath the illusioned floor that was the pit trap.

I rolled over onto my back and pushed myself onto the solid piece of floor. I didn’t care about the food in the pack on my back at the moment. Tears were leaking from my eyes. The pain was immense. While I had gone through a lot of pain in the past, there was no pain resistance skill, just my willpower and mental focus.

This internal pain wasn’t something that was easily blocked out. While it had been a light impact on my gut, it still hurt. I made sure to get on my back so I could look upwards at the Shielded Core level 5 boss monster.

While it had taken a lot of damage, this boss was quite tenacious. It hadn’t gone down and was still floating up there regenerating and rotating. An explosive needle was launched at me. I quickly pushed myself away, but I wasn’t fast enough. Low energy, in pain, and mentally tired slowed me down just enough to have my left foot caught partially in the blast.

My boot was melted and smoking. I got to my feet. I couldn’t just lay here, the boss would shred me. I grit my teeth and tried to think as another explosive needle came at me. I dodged using my right foot. When I put my left foot down to land, I winced heavily. The pain was immense. No left hand, and now a damaged left foot.

I considered the platform I was on. Based on its placement that meant there were four platforms scattered in the center of the room, since this one was diagonal from the center of the floor. It was a risk, but as more explosive needles came at me, this platform alone was too small to dodge on. I kicked off using my right foot and moved from this platform to where I thought one would be.

There was a moment of tension as my foot touched the ground, not knowing if it was an illusion or solid. It was solid, thankfully and I let out a sight of relief. I kicked off again moving across the platform as more explosions occurred in my wake.

Thankfully the monsters were terrible at tracking. I moved quickly from platform to platform, hopping, rather than my usual kick off and landing. This situation had just gotten a lot worse. I was mentally cursing myself for not moving quickly enough after getting safely on the platform.

It had only been seconds, but it was more than enough time for the boss to recover and begin attacking. While the Shielded Core was slow, it was relentless like all monsters. Everything hurt. It hurt so much. It would be just so easy to slow down. Just give up here. To just die, but I couldn’t.

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“Screw you!” I shouted at the boss and everything else while I was in mid-air between two of the platforms. It was agonizing, feeling the burnt flesh on my foot, with the seared remains of my boot melted into my flesh. My left stub which constantly ached. And my heaving gut, which felt like it was about to burst.

I never had a burst appendix, but I would probably put the pain in the same category. Why did it have to be a biological bomb that caused pain?! I mentally cursed the Astrologer for being off in his timing. I was supposed to have a lot more time to get to the top of the tower. But the wounds and pain were piling up.

Now that I was mobile, it wasn’t hard to stay ahead of the boss’s attacks. The explosions constantly impacted behind me as I jumped from platform to platform, but I knew how fast I needed to move to stay ahead of them and not get hit again.

Using only one foot wasn’t that big of an inconvenience either. Since my running style was more like skipping, or jumping than running. I just needed one foot I could use and I still had my right one. I could use my left one in a pinch, but it would just hurt a lot.

I would be like the Avatar when this climb was finally over. Limbless and turned into a human nugget. At least the damage shouldn’t be too permanent, since it wasn’t curse damage as far as I could tell. While I would go over the 10 days the Astrologer had warned about, I wouldn’t be going that much over.

Just needed to get the bomb out of me one way or the other and then get back to a city to fix myself. I also used my right foot to move and kick off more than my left foot, which I often used as a course corrector, or back up foot.

If my right foot had been taken out, then I would have been in much bigger trouble. Still, it wasn’t good. I had suffered a serious injury and my overall combat ability had gone down. Racing through the last five floors would not be fun and beating the boss at the top as well.

Maybe the Astrologer would heal me up? I winced at that thought. Since I didn’t want to owe anything to that man but he had put me in this position, forcing me to climb by putting a bomb into my gut. I still was unsure how I would deal with him once I reached where he was imprisoned.

After a lot of running around, my energy was finally back, and I damaged the boss monster some more. It would need one more attack to bring it down. That was when the level 4 spiders showed up. They began climbing through small illusioned passages near the ceiling.

Why not, this couldn’t get any worse. I couldn’t afford to take them out or disable them otherwise I would struggle to have enough energy to take out the boss in comparison to its regeneration. Nothing was ever easy.

The level 4 spiders began to crawl along the ceiling. I knew I couldn’t let them spread out to the various platforms, or I would be in trouble. Once the first one dropped down onto the platform I was on, I focused as more began to drop.

Even when I had to use my damaged left foot, I just grit my teeth and kicked off as more of the level 4 spiders fell down. The boss kept up its attacks as well, damaging the level 4 monsters slightly, but they always seemed to not be in the way of the explosions.

At least I had disabled all the monsters at the same time on this floor. If I had disabled them piecemeal like the last floor, this wouldn’t have been possible. Once all the spider monsters had dropped onto the platform I was on, I quickly leapt to the next one.

The spiders were trapped on the platform. That was why they should have stayed on the ceiling instead of dropping down and why it was a huge boon that they all came back around the same time. If it were spread out then there would be level 4 monsters on all four platforms instead of just three.

I had to change up my route, making an ‘L’ route with two U-turns to avoid that one platform with the level 4 monsters, but it was worth it in my mind to end this fight sooner rather than later. I saw my bloody foot prints where I had kicked off on that platform and winced at the sight along with the pain.

After that I soon ended the fight once I had my energy back, killing the boss monster. I let out a sigh of relief as the monsters were disabled and I made my way carefully to the elevator, making sure to trigger the saw trap in front of it ahead of time.

Going up to the forty fifth floor safe room, I collapsed on the gray stone bench. The blue lighting was giving me a headache along with everything else. I looked at my left boot. It was bad, in a lot of pain, and would probably rot off or get infected.

It took a long time for stuff to decay around here naturally, so I wasn’t worried about getting an infection. Whatever the Almighty System did, it didn’t like micro-organisms in the air. Not sure about how that impacted digestion, but it was something I had never asked the good doctor about. Something to investigate once I left tower.

I had no bandages either to wrap my foot up in. I just had my shorts and packs. I didn’t even have a shirt and my shorts weren’t the greatest either at the moment. It was honestly kind of depressing how run down I appeared and how much my body hurt. I drank water and ate some vegetables.

When I got up to take a piss in the corner of the safe room, I noticed there was blood in my urine and it hurt to urinate. That was not a good sign. I wasn’t a doctor, but blood coming out of the body in anyway was a bad sign. I let out a long sigh as I went back to rest. I needed some sleep before tackling the next floor. That fight had been much harder than it should have been.