Prologue – The Thirteenth Floor

[Mindalia]

[Fourteenth floor]

If the ancient stories were to be trusted, a god was killed on the thirteenth floor. The ripples of such an event were felt throughout the cosmos, cursing the number thirteen with the ghost of a once powerful god. Mindalia rolled her eyes at such thoughts, trudging forward with a grim determination through the StarFang Forest that made up floor fourteen. She had been stuck on this floor for months, maybe a year even. After a certain point she quit keeping track of the slow days and slower nights.

Floor fourteen was all about the hunt. Or at least so far as she remembered that’s what it had been about. Mindalia tried to recall her first time on the floor but It had been a dozen lifetimes since she first stepped foot here. During her age it had been about who could secure the biggest kill within the vast expanse of the forest. The forest itself was enormous both in scope and size. The trees were massive things with trunks so wide it would take you five minutes to walk around them. The leaves that fell off them were so large, thick, and fibrous they were often used to fashion clothing, and the bark was used for armor. It was a forest cultivated for giant-folk and the even larger beasts they hunted. Both still roamed the forest in numbers.

Still, it had been many months since Mindalia laid sight on such dangerous creatures. Not that it was any threat to her, no. But a break in the monotony of her journey would have been much welcomed. Something to toy with. Something to torture.

With a small, bored huff, she melted into the shadows, her body breaking down and becoming one with the darkness itself. She launched forward like wraith, moving through the darkened underbrush of the forest another hundred span in mere seconds. She came to a stop, this time appearing on a branch so far up she couldn’t make out the ground. She was searching for something. Chasing a shadow. No… not a shadow, she thought, getting a slight taste of what it was she was after. People often mistook her for a Shadowmancer, but that was a mistake. Shadows were merely a subset of the darkness that served her.

Absence was her domain. The dark void left behind was where her true power could be found. One such void was what she was chasing after now. At the edge of her senses, the tip of her tongue. She could feel it. Taste it even. There was a tiny, miniscule crack, a void that shouldn’t exist. She tried to position herself in the spot she thought it was coming from, facing in the direction she felt it first, but it wasn’t such a simple thing as picking a direction.

The problem with finding this little crack wasn’t its size. It was its location. If Mindalia had been looking at a map of her spot within the Tower, it would show her at the very edges of floor fourteen, about to run into a wall. Such a thing wasn’t really possible though. If you went too far in any given direction on a floor, the Tower would simply alter space-time and spit you out on the other side of the floor without you having realized a thing. Mindalia had made that mistake twice over so far, and it was the reason her journey had taken so long. One little misstep and she would find herself chasing fairies, the Tower obfuscating the path forward and sending her away from its walls. She would not allow it to happen a third time.

Having learned which signs to follow and which to ignore, her steps were careful. Movement abilities this close to the edge were no longer an option. If she overshot her mark in the slightest, she would again find herself on the opposite ends of the floor none the wiser. But she had found what it was she was looking for. The tiny little void that existed in a miniscule crack that zigged and zagged up the tower wall. She locked onto it like a scent hound, gripping the sensation in an iron vice. She let it flood her senses until there was no chance of losing the path forward. Even still with a destination carved into her soul and the taste of the void growing stronger with each step, it took her hours of careful navigation to find what it was she was looking for.

There, as she rounded one of the giant trees was a clearing, devoid of any life. No giant trees. No flourishing fauna. Just a patch of brown ancient dirt. From the middle of that dirt patch a jagged black tendril no thicker than a strand of hair rose up towards the sky. Mindalia set one foot onto the dirt and quickly pulled back.

Odd, she thought to herself, a curious smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Technically she was at the very edge of the floor, now facing the tower’s wall, and the jagged black tendril before her was a crack in that wall. With confident steps she strode forward back into the radius of the crack. As she entered the radius of the crack the atmosphere of the floor ceased to exist. No air, no mana even. But that wasn’t what was odd about the crack. The reason, she guessed, for the lack of air, mana, life, was due to the fact that the tiny little crack was sucking in everything around it with a considerable amount of force. Mindalia had to put in no small amount of effort to keep the vacuum from consuming her as well.

Her thoughts teetered back and forth as she stood before what very well could lead to her own obliteration. She was not the first to go searching out the mysteries of the thirteenth floor of the Tower, and she wouldn’t be the last. Still, one rule so ironclad of the Tower existed that it might as well be a fundamental law. No one returned from the thirteenth floor.

Mindalia tried to trace the void space that existed in the crack to its source to no avail. It was endless. Bottomless. This may not even be what she was looking for, but it was the first lead that had produced even a shred of results.

As she stared at the crack in the wall, resisting its pull, her thoughts turned to Gideon and the reason she was doing this in the first place. The dragon feigned civility as he always did, but she knew him for the monster he really was. She had killed far too many Golden Dragons in her time and Gideon was not likely to forget, nor forgive such transgressions no matter how friendly he may present himself. Now she could sense within him the power to even out the score her time was limited unless she did something drastic. Climbing the Tower was out of the question. That simply meant trading in the threat of Gideon for the threat of the gods. The Black Centipede had been her patron since she was just a girl, and she was long sick of working for him. Reaching the top meant more servitude-which was something she could no longer abide. Thus, her journey for more power led her to the edges of the fourteenth floor, staring at a crack in a wall that didn’t really exist. If you wanted more power, there was one tried and true method that always seemed to work, provided you had the willpower.

Journeying forth into the unknown.

Mindalia let her form shift to that of nothing but shadows and gave in to the pulling force of the crack in the wall. Atom by atom she slipped into the crack, feeling herself be pulled downwards towards oblivion. There was no pain, but there was considerable discomfort. Like she was being stretched thin and slowly pulled apart by unmeasured and unknown forces more powerful than her. It continued on for what she hoped was seconds but was likely days.

Gradually, the pulling began to subside, and she felt herself regather. Mindalia was floating. Or maybe falling. It was hard to orient herself, and despite the fact that darkness was hers to command, it wasn’t responding to her calls in the slightest. The sensation continued on for several dreadful moments before it was replaced with something entirely new. Mana. In an instant it was as if the entirety of her body had been plunged into mana so strong and pure that it was almost to powerful for even her to handle. She had never felt mana quite like this before, both pure and unmolested.

Her body drank it in readily as she floated deeper through the void. Slowly, an exciting thought started to form. An idea she hadn’t thought possible. The mana here is too pure, she thought. This mana is from outside the Tower. An amused smile played on her lips as she wondered at the possibility. Then she frowned, a screen filling her vision and killing any thoughts of freedom she had.

[Quest: Conquer the thirteenth-]

The notification flashed several times for the briefest of moments before blurring, and then disappearing completely. With a thought she attempted to pull up her status page, but even that didn’t respond. It was certainly odd, but she didn’t care overly much. At some point the system had become little more then a glorified organizational tool. Mindalia didn’t actually need its assistance in fully utilizing her abilities. She floated a little longer in the void waiting for what, she wasn’t quite sure. Maybe something to attack her, but no such attack ever came, so she would just have to take matters into her own hands.

She gathered her power that had been absent moments before and whispered a singular command to the darkness around her.

“Begone.”

The darkness that surrounded Mindalia fled, disappearing completely until all that remained was an endless white room. To her surprise, she was not alone.

I couldn’t sense them, she grumbled to herself. That’s never a good sign.

As the curtain of darkness was pulled back it gave way to giant mechanical constructs. Large golems of grey metal made up from whirring gears and complications. The machines came to life one by one, radiant blue mana pumping through thin conduit that lined their bodies as though an elaborate maze had been drawn on their metal husks. In their centers was a core that shined brightly and rapidly flashed between a series of colors that gave way to no apparent pattern as it cycled through a hundred different types of mana. There were thousands upon thousands of dormant machines waking up and training their sights on Mindalia. They thrust a cannon shaped arm at her, a dangerous red glow coalescing in the barrel.

Mindalia stared at the machines, several pieces of an unknown puzzle falling into place.

Andurian technology, she thought with an annoyed tsk. I should have guessed as much.

Not one to let herself get surrounded, Mindalia cast [Zero]. A black ring expanded outward from her body, growing in size and speed as it easily bisected through the onslaught of constructs bearing down on her position. She watched a thousand of the golems were decimated in an instant, only to be replaced with twice as many just as fast. She quickly sent five more rapid pulses of [Zero] out, the angle off set slightly as to further eviscerate her targets.

This is a horde, she quickly decided, eyes scanning through the wake of her destruction. Horde challenges were bad for her. The Tower liked to use the occasional endless spawning of monsters to wear you down before issuing the real challenge. Mindalia was an assassin, and stamina-based fights were not her strong suit. Still, she couldn’t be sure if this was the Towers doing or not. The system wasn’t responding and so far, as she knew, the Tower didn’t utilize Andurian tech. She didn’t even think it could recreate the things that man did. So, who is responsible for this then? She wondered. The answer seemed obvious, if not implausible. Andurian was among the first to step foot in the tower. He should have lost his battle to entropy long, long ago. None of that changed the fact she was now fighting an endless army of his machines.

Mindalia let her right-hand fall to her side, a chain of black falling out from the palm of her hand as though a ship had dropped anchor. The chain was slender in make, each link forged to perfection and equipped with a set of blades that stuck out like little spikes of hate. This was her garrote.

With a light flick of her wrist the chain that now extended for miles sprung to life, the small ripple moving with growing speed and intensity until it crescendo at the tip with a thunderous boom, the shockwave alone punching out a whole in the army of constructs. Mindalia released the weapon and watched as its smooth movements turned erratic. The chain didn’t swim with grace through the waters or glide like a bird on the wind. No. It crawled. It zigged. It zagged. It lashed out and raged as it tore through the constructs with violent ease. With every kill the chain grew another link and grew a little bigger until it was no longer recognizable as a chain at all. Each link was a segment of the body. Each blade a leg. A black centipede of titanic proportions tore through the constructs, a mind of singular focus. Obliterate everything.

Mindalia latched herself onto the centipede, melding into its black carapace and occasionally popping out and casting [Zero] when things seemed like they might get too overwhelming. She was searching for who or what was controlling the constructs. If she could find the source of this seemingly endless army she could gain control of the situation, but there didn’t appear to be any sort of order to this chaos. No one calling the shots.

That was not her only issue. The deeper she pushed into the horde, the stronger the constructs became. Not that they were a problem to kill yet, but she was killing less of them with every strike. Even her centipede had slowed down to some degree, and it had happened in rather short order. If this trend continued, she would soon be put to the test against one of these machines.

Stolen story; please report.

Her second problem was she was being pulled by something. It was a slight pull, mind you, but it wasn’t something she could ignore, especially in an area that seemed to lack any sort of atmosphere. It wasn’t even something she could shake off. She found that no amount of maneuvering allowed her to escape the pull. Mindalia could sense a deep void though coming from the direction she was being pulled in, which was the only reason she allowed it to continue. It was the only lead she had thus far.

Make haste, she commanded, and her centipede doubled in speed in the direction of the pull. Mindalia became far more active, producing two long slender whips of her own, each with a ribbon that trailed off into seemingly infinite darkness. Her strikes were practiced and careful with no wasted movements, only the slightest flick of her wrist was needed to obliterate her target. Still, the fact that she had to intervene at all was an issue as she was able to confirm they were growing stronger. Changing in form even. Their bulky golem like appearance was gradually becoming more refined. Their tactics changed as well, breaking into strike groups that maneuvered around her with a practiced ease and it wasn’t long before she was fending off trap after trap as the machines pushed her into one disadvantageous situation after another.

With an annoyed huff she peeled herself off the centipede, let loose another cast of [Zero] to allow for some breathing room, and readied another spell.

Mindalia leveled two fingers in the direction of the pull and cast [Absence].

This was a spell she would have preferred not to cast. Obliterating the reality in which you lived was rarely a good idea, and almost always had unintended consequences. Even worse, she wasn’t sure if the Tower would be able to repair the damage her spell was about to cause.

Reality is a fairly fragile thing, a house of cards of unknown elements propped up as an illusion for us to exist inside of. [Absence] removed one of those cards. She watched as a large grouping of the constructs simply disappeared, a large black hole the only thing left in their wake. It didn’t end there, however. Violent chain reactions began to occur as reality desperately tried to fix itself which only served to exacerbate the issue further, black holes popping up one by one and erasing existence itself.

“Move,” Mindalia urged her centipede forward, taking control of the reigns herself as she navigated the tenuous path through a collapsing realm. A curious thing occurred as she moved forward. The constructs all stopped paying attention to her, their cores cycling to a type of mana she had never felt before. The machines moved in unison, leveling their cannons at the collapsing voids and shot mana into them. To her surprise, reality began repairing itself with their assistance. For whatever reason, they wanted to contain that threat, which gave Mindalia pause once more. Maybe the Tower is still active here, she mused.

Seeing the constructs successfully repair reality gave her wicked thoughts and a cruel smile crept onto her face as she cast [Absence] twice more. Suddenly, it was as if she didn’t exist at all, the constructs moving around desperate to put out the fires she was starting. The mana cost was extravagant, and she couldn’t keep it up forever, but she was getting closer to her target.

A piece of rubble was the reward for her troubles. Although calling it rubble, much less a piece of something didn’t quite do it justice. Had she not approached it from a distance she might have thought it was the solid ground of floor thirteen. That was not the case though. More accurately, it could be called a brick. A giant brick. A brick that was designed for a house that a titan might live inside of. She came to a stop on the bricks face, landing on it and kneeling down to touch it with her fingers. It was a smooth creamy ivory and Mindalia let loose the smallest gasp as her fingers grazed its surface.

This is a piece of the Tower, she frowned.

Her eyes scanned the world around her. There were still hundreds of constructs lingering in the air, although they were still busy repairing the black holes that were popping up around her. Mindalia trained her sights on the other pieces of titanic rubble that were floating aimlessly about. Some were the solid bricks she was standing on. Others were broken chunks with deep cracks running through them. She pressed onward, and the destruction only grew as she approached the pulling void in the distance. Soon she was in an asteroid field of rubble, weaving through giants’ pieces of the Tower, her mind connecting dots all the while.

The Tower was not what it seemed. Mindalia learned that long ago and anyone who ventures to the upper sectors would learn as much for themselves. Servitude was the only thing you could hope for if you continued your climb to the top. She didn’t know much about Andurian, but she did know he was a man who refused to play by the rules. No one quite knew what happened to him. Mindalia had only heard a rumor of a rumor, but now as she was staring at the rubble of the Tower itself, things were beginning to make sense.

The resistance of constructs had mostly come to an end, and the pull of the void had reached a crescendo that Mindalia found herself struggling to withstand. Still, she couldn’t help but stop and marvel at it was she saw.

Andurian would not curtail to the gods. He would not join them in servitude. He would not be a pawn in their games. The rumor, she thought, was that Andurian had escaped the Tower. Her eyes fell upon a wall. The Tower wall. There were no illusions here. No altering of reality. She could see the actual wall of the Tower in all its glory, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. No… It was the giant hole that someone had blown in that wall, and the spiraling galaxies and twinkling stars that lay beyond. She took a tentative step forward, unable to resist the pull of the cosmos and a reality outside the Tower only to stop once more in her tracks.

Her eyes narrowed as three slender figures appeared floating in the air before her. Three constructs of a make unlike any before floated in the air, blocking her path forward. Their limbs were long and slender, a metallic seamless sheen connecting their parts together. They had humanlike faces, straight mouths and half lidded eyes staring down at her in condescension. A lance coalesced in their hand and mana began to spill out from their cores radiating a deep, primal power. She focused on the mana. Oathbreaker mana.

That’s going to be a problem, she thought.

Oathbreaker mana was the great equalizer. It was the gift from the Tower for when an oath was broken. It was pure, undiluted, power, and somehow Andurian had figured out how to capture it and stuff it into a construct.

The three constructs radiated power but made no move aside from standing in her path. Mindalia felt little confidence in fighting one, much less three of these monsters. There could be no room for error here.

She held out her hand to her side once more and summoned forth a new weapon. A blackened weapons case rose from the ground, three skeletons clinging desperately to it and a chain with a hundred locks wrapped tightly around it. Fully emerged, the weapons case stood much taller than herself. She glanced up at the constructs, but they remained ever still, sentinels at the post. Mindalia returned her focus to the case, tilting it to its side and waving her hand over it. The skeletons who clung so desperately to it resisted at first, not wanting her to open it up. The locks came off slowly, one by one in a rhythmic clink as they fell to the ground. As the last lock fell, the chain melted away, leaving nothing but a pristine black leather case. Mindalia let her fingers run along the seam, finding the two simple latches that kept it closed. With a small amount of reverence, she opened the lid.

She glanced down at the scythe that lay inside. Smooth polished wooden handle, and silver blade. It looked quaint and radiated no power at all. She would have thought nothing of it at all had the location she found it in not been so… suspect.

The gods were somewhat clever, she thought with an amused grin, her fingers tracing along the handle of the scythe. Almost everyone went up in the Tower. No one ever thought to go down. Mindalia had though, and the thing she found chained up in the basement had been quite the shock. It was not happy at all when she borrowed its scythe.

“I’m not used to this type of weapon,” Mindalia declared, picking up the scythe and leveling it at the constructs. “Perhaps you three could help me practice a little.”

With a single swipe, the fight was over.

----------------------------------------

[Erin Crushers]

[Harvester Prime]

Erin gripped the system crystal tightly in her hands, searching frantically through the Tower. This job was supposed to be an easy posting, she grimaced, her avatar moving like a ghost through the second floor in a panicked search. She was breaking half a dozen protocols and was going to get reprimanded by her boss if not outright killed by the Tower itself. The rules didn’t matter to her much now. Erin had screwed up and she needed to fix the problem fast.

Her posting was to keep watch over one of the labs within the Tower. A system crystal allowed them to hack into the Towers system to some degree. It allowed them to peer inside the Tower and keep track of the goings on. The particular location she was charged with observing was one of the first labs Lord Andurian had created within the Tower. She thought she was special to get a posting like this. It didn’t take her long to realize it was likely a punishment. Nothing interesting ever happened in this particular lab. It had been ransacked long ago and remained more or less stagnant ever since. The reason why was due to its location. The second floor of the Tower by all counts seemed like a wholly useless floor. No one had been able to conquer it, and it was more of a glorified pit stop for climbers on their way to the third floor.

Erin had set to her duties with diligence, but that diligence soon turned to boredom, which soon turned to long breaks and longer vacations. None of which her captain was aware of. She used her free time to focus on projects of her own. She fancied herself an inventor, just like Andurian.

It was much to her surprise that when she went for a routine monthly checkup she found the lab to no longer exist. In fact, the moon that loomed over the city had been blown up completely. Shocking, yes, but that wasn’t even her biggest problem.

The Omni-Core had gone missing.

As she first learned in the beginning months of her careful observation, she found that the lab played host to a long since abandoned project. Andurian had all but given up on finding someone capable of housing the Omni-Core, moving his attention to golems instead as the research there proved a far more viable and reliable path towards his goals.

It wouldn’t normally be cause for concern, but she couldn’t find signs of the Omni-Core anywhere within the rubble of the moon base. Still, even if someone had found it, it was nothing more than a useless trinket. A paperweight. If anything, it was more likely to get you struck down by the gods. They did not like Andurian or his technology in the slightest.

Erin couldn’t shake the feeling though that she needed to find out what happened to the core before people started asking questions. She couldn’t just go to her boss and tell them the base blew up and she had lost track of the omni-core. She could see the veins in her captain’s head popping already. She needed to avoid that. She couldn’t get in trouble again.

The systems crystal allowed her an avatar of sorts that could move seamlessly throughout the second floor of the Tower completely undetected. In a twist of irony, the first thing Andurian had done upon escaping the Towers grasp was to turn around and try and get back in. Thus, the system crystals were developed as a tool that allowed them to hack into the Tower system itself. Hers was a simple observation crystal as befitting her rank and station. It would only allow her to observe. She had freedom of movement, and would remain completely undetected, but that was all. It was wholly useless outside of that, and if she wanted to find the Omni-Core she would have to requisition a system crystal with an item tracking feature, and that would mean coming clean to her boss.

Lucky for Erin, she fancied herself an inventor and liked to tinker with things better left untouched.

Her modified systems crystal could track, although poorly, and judging on where it was leading her, she wasn’t even sure it was working correctly. She moved like a ghost through the chaotic city, winding her way through sketchy alleyways and dark hidden pathways until she came across a dilapidated tavern, a host of dead zombies littering the ground outside.

She moved through the doorway and into the tavern. It was dark and dingy with only two patrons, a man and a tiny little goblin.

The man was drinking heavily, and deeply immersed in a story about a secret agent and some… impossible mission. The tiny little goblin was sipping from a mug that was as large as he was and nodding along excitedly as the man continued his story.

She stared blankly at the two, and her heart skipped a beat when the man stopped mid story and turned to stare directly at her. She didn’t move. He couldn’t see her. She knew he couldn’t see her. But he was staring at her.

“FINISH THE STORY!” The goblin shrieked, pulling out a green potion and hurtling it at the man’s head. It shattered everywhere and he let loose a panicked scream as the acid started to eat away at his flesh. He didn’t pay it much mind and instead tackled the goblin.

She watched in disbelief as the two wrestled on the floor of the dirty tavern, unable to pull her eyes away from the man’s core.

This idiot has the Omni-core…

Before she could form a thought, alarms started ringing and she was pulled out of the system crystal and her careful observation without any warning.

“Battle Stations: Code Black,” rang out on the alarms of the ship.

Code Black. That’s not good. Erin stood up to head to her station but then stopped.

Someone had the Omni-core… Not just had it. They were using it. It was inside them! Her heartbeat frantically and a smile tugged at her lips. She turned and ran towards the bridge of the ship.

She had to fight her way past other soldiers all frantically moving to their stations. It had been a long while since they had seen a code black. Someone had killed the floor guardians, and now they had to clean up the mess.

After some sneaking, coaxing, bribing, and outright ignoring the commands from her superiors to return to her station, Erin stumbled onto the bridge of the ship.

“Looks like we’ve got a live one!” A large bulky man declared; his face glued to the observation windows. “Ready the mana cannons. Send in a request for backup. This is going to be a bloody affair.”

He turned around with a manic grin on his face, a cigar burning heavily at the corner of his mouth. He wore the scars of a man who had been fighting the world since the second he came out of his mother’s womb. He was big and blocky and towered over everyone in the room, his muscles threatening to rip free from his gray and black uniform. His hand gripped tightly at the saber belted to his waist and Erin planted herself in front of him.

“Commander…” she started, but the man blazed past her, barking out orders to the rest of the bridge. Erin felt a vein pop in her head, and she turned around angrily.

“DAD,” she screamed. The commander stopped in his tracks and turned around, staring at Erin as though he had just noticed her.

“Private, what are you doing on-“

“Dad. The Omni-Core. Someone is using it.”

Commander Crusher stopped mid-sentence, staring daggers at her. Then his head turned slightly to stare at the Tower, and the massive hole Andurian had created when he blew his way out. Erin followed his gaze, peering into the deep dark void of the Tower. Bugs began to swarm out of the Tower en masse. A tangled mess of Black centipedes balled themselves together and took the form of a giant black skull that was gradually approaching the ship.

“Just when things were getting good,” the commander grunted, returning his focus to Erin. “You. Follow me.” He turned and stormed the bridge giving her little in way of explanation.

“Where are we going?” Erin asked as they spilled out into a hall that led towards the ship’s hangar.

“We’re going to visit Lord Andurian,” her father replied, barely paying her no mind. “You better hope you aren’t wrong about this, kid. I can’t protect you from him.”

Erin stopped in her tracks, her heart pounding in her head, then she grit her teeth and gave her father a tight nod. “Let’s go.”