No one was on the fourteenth floor, which Daemonium found suspicious. The room was very different from the previous ones, looking like a jungle that one could find in the Amazon rainforest. The trees were tall, the grass was tall, every bit of plant life was tall, and it was wet. If a monkey were to come out of nowhere, Daemonium wouldn't have been surprised.
Daemonium looked under the shrubs, on top of the trees, and everywhere he could possibly look. He didn't really find anything, except for a few flies and the key to the next room. No sign of the assassin or Sanguisa anywhere.
It was odd. If the assassin was as intent on killing him as he thought, then why didn't he wait for him? It was just... odd. As he approached the golden door near the end he looked around anxiously, afraid that something could leap out and attack him. Nothing did though, and he made it to the next floor unharmed.
The fifteenth floor was cold. It might as well have been the artic. The ground was made of snow and ice, floating on a layer of questionably deep water. What appeared to be seals swam below the icy sea, moving gracefully like mermaids in the deep.
Daemonium shivered. He still wasn't wearing any clothes after all. Dead Daemonium was also quite cold. I personally wouldn't have expected something that was dead to care much about the cold, but they still shivered anyways. Green Daemonium looked like it was starting to freeze over, frost forming all over its body. Fake Daemonium seemed to be the only one that showed no effect, which made sense since under the illusion was a fox covered in fur.
"W-w-w-w-where's th-th-the k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-ke-ey-ey?" Daemonium was shivering so much that he could probably be used as a massage gun. One could probably use him to scratch their back, massage their foot, or do other innapropriate stuff that I won't elaborate on.
Fake Daemonium pointed into the water, where one of the seals had it on a chain around their neck. It was swimming quite deeply below the water, quite difficult for the Daemoniums to see from on top of the ice.
"A-a-a-a-al-ll-alri-i-ight-t-t th-then." Daemonium tried to speak, but gave up afterwards with the amount of shivering interrupting him. So he simply took Dead Daemonium, threw them into the water, took Green Daemonium, stretched it out like a rope, and went to fish for Dead Daemonium.
It took a long while. Daemonium felt like he was going to freeze, and was a bit worried about Dead Daemonium and Green Daemonium. But he eventually felt a tug, and pulled up and reeled the Daemoniums back to shore.
The result wasn't pretty. Green Daemonium was less like a rope and more like a pole, with Daemonium pulling up what felt to him like a long popsicle. He eventually got to the end where Dead Daemonium was attached, and they looked awaful. They shivered so much that the clacking of their teeth felt like a buzzsaw, and their skin was pale like it was covered in a layer of thin ice. Their hair was frozen into one large bunch, and icicles grew from the tips of their hair and the soles of their feet.
Despite that they had the key within their fingers, so I guess this was a win?
Now to the sixteenth floor. They went there as quickly as possible, expecting for a room of at least room temperature in order to warm up. If the tower was able to comment on this it would've probably said that their expectations were too low, as the next floor was a desert.
It was so hot that the three nearly frozen Daemoniums almost burned themselves from stepping on the floor. The floor was covered in red hot sand, forcing them to repeatedly hop up and down in order to avoid getting the soles of their feet hot.
Daemonium tried to look around for the key, but it clearly wasn't out in the open. Looking down, he sighed as he realized that the key was probably buried somewhere under all of this sand.
He looked back, ready to call the other Daemoniums to help him, before noticing something. The ground definitely seemed to affect Dead Daemonium and Fake Daemonium, but Green Daemonium seemed unaffected. It was as if Green Daemonium was in a normal room temperature room like anyone else.
"Green Daemonium!" He grabbed the slime by the shoulder, hopping about in the sand. "The key is somewhere under the sand. You're the only one who can find it!"
Giving a salute to show that it understood, Green Daemonium walked across the sand. With every step a bit of sand was absorbed into its body, lowering the level of sand and exposing whatever was under. He ran around like it was a lovely day in the park, frolicking like a kid in a flower garden. Contrast that with how the other Daemoniums were hopping and jumping like the ground was a hot stove, and you can see how Daemonium started to get annoyed with this.
"Hurry up!" Green Daemonium made itself look like it was groaning, which almost made Daemonium try to kill it on the spot. Green Daemonium splatted itslef on the ground, this time collecting sand on the gound into a pile like a broom. It swept the sand into a large hill, most of it removed from the ground to be placed on top, before gulping it all down like it was named Kirby. The sand quickly dissolved in its body, and it soon spat out an unharmed golden key.
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Daemonium would've been happier if it weren't for three things. The first was that his feet were red from the burns. The second was that the key was covered in green slime that he found a bit gross. The third was that HE WAS PRACTICALLY BURNING TO DEATH WHILE GREEN DAEMONIUM WAS JUST FROLICKING LIKE A LITTLE KID!
He was quite passionate about that third reason.
The seventeenth floor was a wild one. Most of the floor simply didn't exist, instead simply being an abyss so deep that one couldn't see the bottom. It seems weird to have an endless abyss on the seventeenth floor of a hundred floor tower, and it certainly brings up some logistical questions. Shouldn't something like this just lead to the floor below? I've asked the author this question so many times and he still hasn't given me an answer!
As much as this floor confuses me, that won't stop the group from having to deal with it. The only bit of actual ground on this floor hugged the sides of the wall, too small for someone to properly walk on. There were tall pillars of stone at various heights jutting out from the abyss, each pillar a considerable distance away from each other, the tops of them flat and with what appeared to be bats on the top. One of those pillars had the golden key on top, but instead of a bat there was a large and rocky golem was next to it.
Daemonium shook and clung to Fake Daemonium, not being used to such heights. Green Daemonium clung to Daemonium, not because it was afraid but moreso because it liked hugging Daemonium. Dead Daemonium clung to Green Daemonium, well it was more like pulling it away from Daemonium than clinging to it but the author requested some repetition.
Fake Daemonium was okay though. The fox picked the three up and put them on this fox's back, before hopping onto the closest pillar. The large purple bat shrieked at the fox, but it quickly went down in one scratch.
Fake Daemonium continued to leap from pillar to pillar, killing each bat along th way. The Daemoniums clung on as tight as they could, fearing what would happen if they lost grip. Fake Daemonium didn't care however, only stopping when there was one pillar left to jump on. The pillar where the key and the golem stood in the middle.
The golem leapt from zhis pillar to the one the Daemoniums were on, Fake Daemonium barely able to avoid being crushed. The golem followed the fox across the pillars, each jump shaking the pillar zhe landed on and cracking it under zhis weight. Clouds of dust spread into the sky, and the pillars seemed to lower by just a bit every time the golem landed on one.
Realizing this was getting zhem nowhere, the golem jumped to a distant pillar. This time zhe grabbed onto the side of the pillar, hanging off of it like King Kong. Instead of kidnapping a lady however, zhe ripped off the top of the pillar and threw it at Fake Daemonium. Fake Daemonium barely dodged it, but when the fox landed this fox realized that something was wrong. Fake Daemonium checked this fox's back and quickly realized that Daemonium was missing. For instead of kidnapping a lady, the golem kidnapped Daemonium.
Daemonium was screaming his lungs out, never having expected he would've played a damsel in distress that day. The golem laughed at zhis accomplishment, thinking zhe could destroy the weakest member first. But something was off. If there were music in this story, this would be the point where tense and scary music started to play, because that's exactly what zhe felt. Fake Daemonium looked like the fox had a powerful aura around this fox. It was only an illusion, but that was an accurate representation of how angry Fake Daemonium was in that moment.
The golem ran, but Fake Daemonium was faster. Fake Daemonium kicked some of the boulders making up zhis upper body off, the rocks falling into the darkness below. Fake Daemonium wasn't done there, kicking away more and more rocks until the golem's body was just an arm and legs attached to a core. Zhe wasn't letting go of Daemonium however, so the fox kicked one of the legs off. The golem ran back to the pillar it was on originally, and Fake Daemonium was ready to follow, until Daemonium waved his hand and signalled this fox to stop.
Fake Daemonium was confused, but let Daemonium go ahead. The golem sat Daemonium down before raising zhis hand, ready to strike and kill the half demon. Daemonium simply stood up and walked to the golem's core, before giving it a kiss. The golem fell apart, the boulders rolling away and off of the pillar. Daemonium simply grabbed the core and the key before celebrating.
"I did it! I did it!" Hopping up and down, Daemonium shook quite happily in front of a confused Fake Daemonium. "It took so many Lovely Pheromones it was starting to get exhausting, and I had to use a Lovely Kiss in the end, but I finally got myself a golem! What should I name this golem though? Rock Daemonium? Stone Daemonium? Maybe I'll figure it out later."
Before he let Fake Daemonium come pick him up, Daemonium wanted to give his golem a new body. The boulders were a bit too large for him to make a body that looked like his, so it was really just one big boulder for the body, two small ones for the legs, and three for each arm. The core stood on top and acted as the head, animating the rocks and allowing them to move and act as zhis new body. Daemonium wasn't too satisfied, but just left it since he had no other options. When he left he was certainly going to get one of his maids to sculpt a new body for zhem.
And so they left. The addition of what might as well have been a few big rocks was quite the load on Fake Daemonium's back, but they eventually made it to the next floor. The eighteenth floor was intense, appearing as if it were the inside of a volcano. The rocks were red and hot, but somehow not as hot as the sand on the sixteenth floor. Lava poured down from the sides, and flowed like rivers all around this room. And the key? It was drifting around in the lava, floating down as if it were simply water.
It seemed simle enough, but there was just one problem with how they were going to get the key now: you can't swim in lava. You can die.