Soulforged Dungeoneer

After everything that happened, the rest of my rest was actually pretty straightforward: I didn't spend any time thinking about the new Enhancement Sage stuff, and instead stared at my list of telekinesis skill improvements and decided on a small handful of them: "Telekinetic Sense", which (as I'd hoped) turned out to be a passive skill, Psychokinesis (mostly because I was curious what the difference was), and Sharpen 1. The last, as you might expect, just made it easier to do what I was already doing when I enhanced strikes with my Telekinesis--it felt more natural, and when I focused on adding it to my weapon, I could tell I was just plain doing it better.

Psychokinesis, as it turned out, was some version of Telekinesis that used a poorly-defined glowing green "energy" that was visible in the air, rather than being a kind of transparent force effect. Unlike raw telekinesis, psychokinetic energy could (when I chose) just be damaging to whatever it touched, even if it wasn't actively applying force or sharp, but it wasn't some well defined type of damage like fire or lightning or light or whatever. It was just... "energy". Mana, maybe. I didn't know, and neither did Merry or Skill Sage.

And telekinetic sense... at my current level, was a lot more limited than my sense when I was in my telekinetic trance, but it was entirely passive, to the point where I had to actively toggle it off if I wanted to have peace. Aside from that, it felt like that trance did, which meant it was a lot of what I wanted from that trance. I sensed things without looking, and had a grasp of center of mass and force, even though those details were a lot fainter than they'd been before.

After all of that, and after saying a polite goodbye to the (non-barbarian) librarian, we walked back over to the edge and looked down on the world, to discover a very unpleasant fact: Louise and I being up in this secret area had not stopped the Caesarians from spawning beneath us. While apparently, the timer had been slowly increasing in duration, so that fewer and fewer spawned over time, that was not enough to prevent a mass of deathly Italian men in English suits and bronze plate armor from flooding the floor beneath us.

I counted sixteen of them, cursing every last one of them as I did so. I'd been hoping that I could duel one or two of them to test out my new abilities; no such luck. In fact, the sixteen of them would probably be too much even for me to keep suspended with my telekinesis while I dueled with the remainder.

Nor were they wandering aimlessly; they all locked eyes with me as soon as my face appeared above them. When Louise came forward to see what I was looking at, about half split their attention to her. It was eerie, even before considering that the mass was, I calculated roughly, 100% capable of killing me in a straight fight.

"Welp," I said, entirely aware of my earlier hubris, "time to run."

"Do you think we can get away?" Louise put her hand on my arm. "There's a lot of them."

"I think--Merry thinks, we think--that they are there to force us to rush past all the hazards of this floor. So they will not be fast, most likely, just relentless." I put my arm around her and lifted the two of us with my skill. "...but even in the worst case, I'm pretty sure we'd be able to escape, yeah."

And so down we flew, and the crowd of Caesars walked, unhurriedly, after us, their level gazes full of death. It was something like being chased by a crowd of ancient Terminators, if they had gone a more classic route in their character designs.

Once we got a thousand feet ahead or so, I set us down, and we both hurried on on foot. I had my Executioner Sword out, and after piling on all the enhancements I had and adding extra telekinetic sharpness, hurriedly smashed anything else that came after us so that we could keep moving.

And frankly, after facing down a few Caesars, the rest were kind of a relief. First of all, with Louise now having read a skill book, none of the Librarians would attack us, though I'm sure if I attacked them first, it would be a different story. The rest--the custodians and the birds--even if they took a couple chops to get rid of, that wasn't nearly as scary as a ruthless, relentless enemy that endured those chops while unerringly aiming to remove your spleen.

"You know," I mentioned to Louise as I finished off a naked custodian, "this is kind of the difference between me and normal people."

Louise had been conspicuously trying to not stare at either the nakedness, or the violence, or both. And... probably also trying not to look back at the horde of Caesars. They scared me, so I had no doubt they scared her, too. "What do you mean?" she asked, forcing herself to keep looking around aimlessly.

"I mean not being scared because I've seen worse. Or... worse relative to where I was at the time." We moved forward, and I eyed a Barbarian Chair that was just sitting there, but made no move against it. Most things here seemed to have a trigger, though I didn't know what the Custodian's deal was, yet. Anyway, I'd bet that smashing a chair would call all of its brothers to attack. "The fight against the Caesars... it took me a minute before I was sure I wasn't going to die in single combat against them, even though I could pick them up and throw them. I still can't beat them with just my sword, but... but that's not the point. It's not just about feeling fear, it's the fact that, in the fight against a really overpowered thing, the fear is entirely rational. When you don't know, you hesitate. But when you know... I mean, the first time I saw the Librarians on the last level, yeah, I was just a touch scared, but it wasn't the same. That was less of a rational fear, just... fear of the unknown."

Louise fully caught up with me and walked beside me, studying my face or eyes or something, and I looked back at her. She nodded, after a minute. "Were you afraid of the Harpy boss?"

I hesitated, and I knew that hesitation was in my voice, as well. "Yes? I was scared before I saw the fight, scared when I considered that I didn't know some of the little things, like the status effect and what was scary around the edges. When I decided to go for a challenge fight, that was terrifying, because it might have been even worse that it turned out to be, and as I saw how the difficulty was higher, and that there was a real chance of dying, there was rational fear there. But it never felt like it was the most dangerous thing I'd ever faced. Once I ran out of unknowns, there was a long list of things I had to do in order to not die, and I... I could just go down that list and say, yep, I can handle this, as long as I'm careful."

"In a way," I admitted, as two birds and a custodian suddenly decided to stop leaning on a chair and come after us, "I guess I was trying to relive that... that feeling of discovering that I can win against odds that seem... suicidal. Because I can. I doubted myself for decades, I held myself back, I let other people push me around..." I grit my teeth, and paused my speech long enough to knock one of the comedian birds away (they had status attacks and threw razor feathers, but mostly just charged you and pecked and clawed at you) before braining the custodian (who had some kind of water powers, was definitely pushing some kind of aura that didn't affect me, and also liked to hit you in the face with a mop) and pushing him away with psychokinesis that was roughly in the shape of my open palm, which did just a tiny bit of damage, but definitely didn't throw him as far as Telekinesis did. "...I didn't have to," I finished the thought. "I really was strong enough."

And then, as if to prove it, I dispatched the enemies, and we walked on.

It was only a minute later that we got to the end of the first level, and as we approached the wall, as we'd suspected, gravity flipped, and the floor that we'd seen "above" us became our floor. Above us, the Caesars we'd left behind kept marching forward, proving that the point of this floor really was for it to be a gauntlet--they would keep following us until the end. So we kept going, too, through a huge flock of yelling birds, a smattering of idiots with books, and entirely too many naked men with mops.

To my surprise, the end of this floor had another gravity reversal as soon as we jumped off the edge, leading us to be upside-down again, but on the reverse side of the floor we were just on--effectively, we were now exactly where the "library" house had been, proving that the dungeon really wasn't set up the way it pretended to be. The other end of this had another reversal opposite another pit, which I suppose meant we were going to have this floor and another three more before we were done. The mind-bending maze-like qualities of the place might have been confusing, if it wasn't all laid out in a straight line; all we really had to do was keep going and we should reach the exit.

Halfway through this section, though, was a large, hand-lettered sign. It just said, "FASTER". Louise and I looked at each other, sighed, and picked up the pace. As we passed the sign, behind us, the Caesars, who were slowly filtering through the gravity reversal, started to jog a bit as well.

As expected, the end of the road led to a reversal, and that reversal led us to a floor with no pits--instead, the opposite side also would let us flip to the ceiling. The enemies were not getting any tougher, so we just continued on, easily clearing this floor and getting to the next flip unharmed. Almost as soon as we got there, we spotted another sign: "FASTER!"

We obliged, watching the progress of the Caesarian horde above and behind us. We weren't going flat out yet, but it was uncomfortable. The end of this floor had a pit, and that simply had us swivel around to the underside of the platform again--at the end of this, doubtless, was the exit, finally.

A final sign was waiting for us, though. "RUN!"

We ran, with me carefully watching Louise's stamina as well as my own. By about halfway through the floor, my own footing slipped, and I just picked up the two of us with Telekinesis and finished the sprint that way.

There was a "Safe" sign by the exit, complete with a line painted on the ground, and we paused on the other side of that. The line of Caesars continued sprinting on the last stretch towards us, stone-faced and with weapons threatening, not bothering to slow as they approached the line. That was incredibly unnerving, bringing to mind, again, the Terminator's stone-faced emotionless pursuit, but I trusted that any explicit rule of the Dungeon would be maintained. And finally, as the first Caesar dashed across the line, his sword coming up...

...he poofed into smoke, as did every Caesar that followed him.

"OOOOH MY GOD", breathed Louise, sucking up huge lungfulls of air. "That was SO stressful."

I started to agree, but it just turned into a laughing fit that I couldn't quite explain. It seemed contagious, though, as Louise joined in. We fell over on the ground, the measured outflow of air associated with laughing making it difficult to breathe deeply enough to catch our breaths, but we managed.

And once we had a few minutes to get some water and clean up, we moved on.