Chapter 18 #3
“Our work together is concluded,” he said. “You are never to contact me again.”
“Why?”
“I am no fool. Do not treat me as one.”
“The abyssal attack on Zaglis?”
Samson shook his head. “The attack on you. I know who sent that army. I do not wish to be his enemy by being your ally.”
“Just like that?”
“If that shocks you, then I am even more certain of my decision. You tasted minor success on the material plane, and it made you arrogant. I will not have my fate tied to yours.”
“Very well. Give me two more sets of gates, and I will be gone from your life.”
“You lack the standing to make demands,” Samson spat.
“I could stand here for a while longer and talk about our friend by name. He can hear when that happens, I'm told. And who would he find me talking to? He's probably reasonable, though. He would give you time to explain yourself and would undoubtedly believe your explanation.”
Samson glared. “You would not be so foolish.”
“You're my most powerful ally. It would be foolish not to force your hand in the final moments of that alliance.”
“Fine. Take your gates, and never speak my name again.”
I couldn't suppress my smile on my walk back to the Ice Temple. I may have angered Samson enough that he would look for a cunning way to cripple me, but all of my best assets were behind Abby’s wards.
He could pick off a few of my followers if he really wanted to, but that was the worst he could do.
So fuck him.
No.
Wait.
Mirko spent a lot of time outside of the wards, and Samson knew I valued him.
Shit.
I Silk Walked across the sky at full speed and left a crater in the street in front of the Ice Temple, where I landed. I burst inside, teleported to Sanctuary South, and then warped to Lopav.
I was too late. I was one step out of the shed where the teleporter was hidden when I saw the guild hall.
The entire structure was encased in ice. Mirko couldn't survive that. He would be entombed inside the Northern Rangers guild hall until summer came to melt his prison.
Fuck.
Who was going to run Penny's for me now?
With the immediate threat of Abbadon’s army behind me, we returned to climbing the tower.
Do not mistake that for the kind of arrogance Samson accused me of harboring.
I knew that attack had been nothing more than a probe, Abaddon’s way of using a quick jab like a boxer to gauge the distance between us. Now he had a sense of how strong I was.
I didn't learn nearly as much about him as he did me, but the Zaglis attack demonstrated that Abaddon had substantial resources. Few generals would expend that many soldiers on an experiment. Most importantly, it revealed he could move armies around the material plane with relative ease.
Every member of the city watch working the night he arrived said that Abaddon's army “just appeared.” My guess was that the upper levels of the sovereign class had something to do with troop movements.
I had planned to ask Samson, but I never got the chance.
Two sets of permanent gates were an okay consolation prize for the loss of that relationship.
With a recent reminder of how much stronger Abaddon was in every way, I was motivated to push my plan forward, so we resumed the climb with the next sin in the set: Wrath.
Wrath felt like a repeat of the barbarian floor we ran previously. Every enemy had permanent Rage.
Greed was dozens of the most obvious traps ever. Treasure rooms were scattered about the floor, and they all featured highly desirable items. Outside every room was a probability. For some rooms, you had a 1 out of 4 chance of triggering a trap, and others were strange numbers like 1 out of 33.
Gems the size of coconuts. Books written in languages none of us recognized. Every weapon, accessory, and piece of armor you can imagine. We couldn't tell what enchantments they had, but power billowed from them like heat out of an open oven.
Even as obvious traps, they were tempting, but we restrained ourselves and worked through the floor.
Pride was a series of surprisingly powerful monster variants, like goblins who fought like top-tier demons or kobold shamans who seemed to be level 15 to 20 wizards. I gathered that the idea was to trick you into underestimating enemies or overestimating yourself.
Or were those the same thing?
Lust was all hot demons and succubi, and they were relentless, promising me more pleasure than I could fathom. They grinned as they showed me what they meant on each other. That floor was challenging. We had to stop five times for one of the girls to relieve my painfully hard erections.
Gluttony was a variety of monsters who wanted to eat us, ranging from toxic slimes to vampires, but nothing too challenging.
Blasphemy was all undead who used Unholy magic and attacks. Also, a breeze.
Floor 49, however, was the strangest yet. We fought our fathers.
Hundreds of clones of each of our fathers ran at us like crazed monsters.
The experience was pretty upsetting to everyone but Invia.
She enjoyed killing her father. But I couldn't have a bunch of trauma messing with my party’s heads.
I ordered them to wait while I cleared it myself. Invia wasn’t happy, but she obeyed.
Killing copies of my father bothered me at first. Eventually, my mind agreed that they weren't really him. At that point, seeing his face again was kind of nice. My memories of exactly what he looked like had aged just enough that details were muddied, and grew muddier with each passing day.
I had forgotten about the mole on his neck, and the corners of his eyes were more rounded than I remembered.
But these were still just monsters.
We couldn't immediately figure out what floor 50 represented. We were mobbed by warriors, guards dressed like they were from Flowst, men and women dressed in evening wear, and old men in pajamas.
Then I recognized one of them. Good old Father Finlee was part of the horde. These were all people we had murdered. The majority of them were my victims, but if the previous floor’s mechanics applied to our whole party, the people my party members killed had to be in the mass somewhere as well.
We didn't encounter a boss at the stairs, but the passage to the next floor was still blocked. We burned another 4 hours searching the floor for a way to open the passage and came across one nun we hadn't killed. When she died, we heard the grate of stone dragging on stone.
“Maybe the objective was to kill every enemy?” Solara proposed.
“Logic seems right,” Podni replied. “It's interesting that the tower customizes floors based on us and our lives.”
Solara nodded. “Which begs all kinds of great questions, ‘how’ being the biggest. But what about other parties entering behind us? Do they see our floor? Does the floor change instantly the moment they enter?”
“And we're only halfway,” Purity said. “If the trend continues, what will more challenging floors entail?”
For my part, I didn't devote much thought to that genre of question. We would find out for ourselves very soon.
As we walked back to the stairs, I took a look at my progress:
Progress to Next Level: (3,290,083 / 13,107,200)
Class: Abyssal Sovereign, Tier 15 (2,781,694 / 3,276,800)
Seeing how much XP I still needed made me wonder if I should have been doing boss rush runs instead to level faster. After some thought, I decided that I was already on the right path.
I had to reach the heavens as soon as possible. Staying the course was critical.
“Level-up party tonight?” Podni asked. “Level 19 is worth celebrating.”
“I agree,” I said. Even if it wasn’t my level-up, party progress was as good for me as it was for them.