13. A Tower Climber Where They Almost Climb The Tower

We made it back to our hideout outside of the city without issue. The entire city seemed to be abuzz with some sort of excitement, whether it was defending the innocent, robbing people blind, attacking rival gangs, putting out fires or starting new ones. It was a night for heroes to be born and for villains to gain new reputations. The action wasn’t all contained within the city, either. We passed long, deep furrows in the earth where Ascended had undoubtedly duked it out. We heard hollering and whooping coming from the forest where quite a few someones were having a blast hunting someone else. It was madness, it was horrible, but it was just what the Tower needed.

As I lay on the floor of our little hideout, I couldn’t help but think that we needed to spruce it up. It really needed some blankets, at the very least. Pillows. A table. A window would be really nice, but too much of a security risk. I dreamt of pillows all night as I used an old jacket as my only source of comfort.

The next day, we set out relatively early. We strode into the battered city and walked directly up to the portal. There were distinctly fewer lurkers this morning. Undoubtedly, some had perished in the city-wide brawling of the night before. So many people had taken advantage of the chaos that hardly anyone had had a peaceful night, it seemed.

“Man, we should have hit up Market Alley last night,” Pyro grumped.

“What would you have gotten?” Thwain asked.

“Food,” Pyro replied without hesitation.

“Pillows,” I said dreamily.

“I could go for some new clothes,” Thwain said, rubbing at his threadbare shirt. “Maybe we should go take a peek after.”

I agreed wholeheartedly. We would loot as much as we could from the Tower today and spend it all afterwards. We were flush with cash, but we didn’t want to attract too much attention by spending silvers. Still, there was no longer a need to be stingy. We could afford to splurge on luxuries a bit. We walked right into the portal without anyone daring to stop us.

I looked around at the sea of slimes. It was beginning to feel like a familiar sight, but also an unbeatable obstacle. Like it had been and always would be there. Today was the day that some of that would change, I swore to myself.

I started by summoning my demon. Without the adrenaline of the day before, I noticed that it really did take a lot of mana out of me. She appeared in front of me, frowning at the sea of slimes. She seemed smaller than her living counterpart, but not by a lot. She was maybe around a foot shorter, bringing her to a still-respectable 5’8”. Well, at least for the lower floors. Apparently, in the upper floors, anyone under 6 feet was considered part of the royal lineage in the Kingdom of the Vertically Challenged.

I was glad that her size wasn’t as intertwined with her soul power as Slimey’s was. Having a demon at a quarter strength was fine, but a quarter of the size would be ridiculous. Quadruple the size, though, would be quite the awesome sight. I didn’t know where we would get a weapon big enough for a 20-foot tall demon, but it would absolutely be a battle-axe.

I snapped out of my blacksmith’s wet dream (or nightmare), noticing her perturbed expression. She was frowning, as if unsure or upset. There was a deep crease between her brows, flanked by her horns. Actually, it was my first time truly seeing her in daylight, since I had only ever seen her in a few basements and covered in rock dust. She was both exactly what I thought a demon would look like, and slightly different.

She had black horns that jutted from the sides of her head, just in front of her temples. They curved, pointing backwards. There was a slight wave to them before they ended in thin, sharp points. She wore sleek black leather pants and a plain brown leather shirt. The shirt was sleeveless, revealing the red scales on the underneath of her arms, contrasted by the black scales covering most of the rest of her skin. Likewise, there was a smattering of blood-red scales showing just above the collar of her shirt, the same color as the smaller scales on her palms and on her face. Thicker black scales grew up her neck and the sides of her face, framing it menacingly.

Contrary to what I was expecting, she didn’t have cloven feet or a spiked tail. Without the horns, she would have looked pretty ordinary from afar. In the right lighting. Ok, with minimal lighting. In the middle of the night, during a festival where people were assuming she was dressed up as a monster from legend, after a few drinks, she would fit right in.

She was also summoned fully clothed, which was kind of weird, not that I was complaining. Ok, that came out weird and pervy. Slimey was a blob of green slime with eyes, no extras. No boots, no pants, nothing. I wondered what would happen if I gave my demon a silly hat before unsummoning her. Would the hat disappear and be resummoned? Would it fall to the ground? What if I made her stuff her pockets with coins? Actually, she didn’t seem to have any pockets at all.

“Why don’t you have pockets?” I asked.

“What?” She looked caught off guard, still half distracted by the never-ending slimes.

“Pockets. Your pants, your shirt, none of them have pockets. That seems highly impractical,” I clarified.

She rolled her eyes. “It’s a Tower thing,” she said, like everyone should know.

“How so?” Was there a Tower pocket conspiracy? It turns out, there kind of was.

“Clothing generated by the Tower doesn’t have pockets,” she half explained.

“Is there any particular reason?” I asked, feeling kind of silly for caring about such a mundane issue.

“Bag vendors. If everything has practical and deep pockets, nobody really needs bags. If you make clothing without pockets, the demand for bags increases,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s one of the ways that the Tower creates demand and artificially increases the rarity of items.” She seemed supremely annoyed at having to explain what was probably basic Tower theory in her eyes.

“Doesn’t matter in this context, what do you plan on doing about that?” She asked, pointing forwards into the sea of monsters.

I looked out at the thousands of bouncing green blobs.

“What’s the issue?” I asked.

“Slimes,” she said simply, a twinge of annoyance in her voice.

“Aren’t you some powerful monster from the upper floors? Shouldn’t slimes be easy pickings for you?” I asked.

Surprisingly, she shook her head, looking at me seriously. “I can feel that my magic resistance stat is far too low to cope with any substantial amount of combat against such numbers.”

“Magic resistance stat?” I asked.

She nodded her head as if it made complete sense that I was a moron and explained it to me like I was a child. “So, monsters like slimes deal magic damage, as opposed to physical damage. Their magic power determines how much magic damage they do. Magic resistance is like armor, but specifically for magic damage. If your magic resistance is higher than the opponent’s magic damage, they aren’t going to be hurting you anytime soon with most of their spells, skills or attacks that use magic. Unfortunately, these slimes have a higher magic damage than my magic resistance, even though both are pitifully low. Errrrgo, I’m not helping. Not if it means I die.” With that, she sat down and started picking at her nails.

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I blinked repeatedly at the demon. “I mean, thanks for the lesson. But what do you mean, you’re not helping? Do you really have a choice?” I asked. It was the wrong thing to ask.

She leveled an icy stare in my direction. “After I did so well yesterday, you’re just going to force me to die repeatedly for you?” Her tone was clipped. She clenched and unclenched her hands, as if trying to stop herself from strangling me.

“No, I just wasn’t sure if you COULD resist. Not that I wanted to test it or anything. But it’s nice to know that… You know…” I sunk my face into my hands. I was babbling and most definitely making things worse.

“Yay. I’m so happy we figured this out together,” she said drily.

I couldn’t take the embarrassment anymore. Pyro and Thwain were bent over, clutching at their stomachs, doing a spectacular job at failing to restrain their laughter.

I unsummoned her.

“HAAA! You just got bullied by your summon,” Pyro bellowed.

“She didn’t bully me, we argued. There’s a difference,” I sulked.

"Nahhh, she straight up, mean girl, talk-to-the-handed you and then made you eat your words.” Pyro was in hysterics by that point, so I just tried ignoring the ribbing. I focused on summoning my slime, but I had a gut feeling that if I tried, I’d fail. So, I waited a few minutes while Pyro and Thwain worked on setting up a few pillars of earth. I wasn’t sure how well our old strategy was going to work, moving forward.

When I had enough mana, I summoned Slimey. He joyfully bounded around, ready for some action.

“Ok, Slimey. Time to dive into the deep end. Go long!” I sent him jumping into the ocean of slimes. He had gained enough strength that the other slimes barely damaged him at all. Right, magic resistance. It must have been high enough that the slimes could barely affect him.

“Oh! And another thing,” I called out. “If you eat loot orbs, I’m feeding you to a demon. If they spawn, jump away. Leave them for us to pick up.”

The sassy monster actually burbled back angrily. I couldn’t make out any words, but I understood the meaning. He was probably hoping that I hadn’t noticed that he was eating so much loot.

Slimey sat a few feet away from our safe stone circle, rolling along in a circular pattern until a loot orb spawned. Then, he would move his circle slightly to the right so that he would miss the loot orb on his next pass. When loot orbs coalesced, Pyro, armored in his skill, would wade out into the slimes and collect the loot. He was far from harmed by the slimes, but he usually dragged a substantial amount of monsters back with him, forcing us to defend against angry slimes.

Thwain also tried something new this time. He conjured wings as black as night and took off into the air. His wings looked leathery in the sunlight, spreading out behind him a good four feet in each direction. They stuck out of his back, attached down his entire shoulder blades. He flew around, swooping down and around, familiarizing himself with his newfound mobility. His new, wide, black wings carried him almost effortlessly. I wondered if the sharp bony bits on the end were useful in a fight or if they were purely decorative.

“Hey, I see another portal! Be right back,” he yelled, speeding off into the horizon.

“Be careful,” I muttered under my breath. He was already out of earshot even if I yelled, I figured.

When Thwain didn’t come back after ten minutes, I thought nothing of it. When he didn’t come back after thirty minutes, I started getting suspicious. When he didn’t come back after an hour, I started getting worried.

“What do you think he’s up to?” I asked Pyro when he returned from a loot run. He stomped and smashed the slimes that followed him onto the stone circle, threw some coins into a pile, then turned to face me.

“If I had to guess, he probably found a nice tall tree with nice, juicy fruit. He’s probably reclined back, eating mango after mango,” Pyro said.

“Why mangoes?” I asked.

Pyro shrugged. “Dunno. I just have a mega mango craving, to the point that I think I’m hallucinating one in the middle of the slimes,” he said.

“You’re… Hallucinating mangoes?” I asked incredulously.

He shook his head. “A single mango, I think.”

“And it’s, what? Bobbing in a tree?”

“No, it’s zipping around. I only see it every once in a while. It’s a very fast mango.”

“A fast… Mango…” I looked over to Pyro, but he wasn’t grinning from ear to ear as I assumed he would be. He was just stuffing his face, chowing down on a piece of jerky. “What color of mango?”

“What do you mean?” He asked.

“Is it a red mango, a green mango, a yellow mango? Aren’t there different kinds?”

“Huh, I’ve only ever seen the yellow ones,” he admitted.

“In the slimes or ever?”

“Ever.”

I nodded my head slowly as if any of it made sense. We really needed to go on a vacation or something. Maybe it was scurvy? I’d look for some mangoes later, maybe satisfying his craving or giving him some vitamins would help.

My musings were cut short by a prompt.

[https://i.imgur.com/Cjv8y8b.png]

Green slime has reached a threshold: 400% soul strength. How do you wish to proceed?

Option 1: And so the slime grew large enough to devour the world...

Option 2: Denser. Slimier. Faster. Stronger.