Chapter 146: Extravagant Mediocrity

“You think Travis is okay?” Anna asked as she stirred the massive pot of gruel. It was mostly salt, tough barley and bits of preserved meat from the wagon’s stores, and it smelled absolutely amazing. They’d parked the caravan on top of one of the massive towers for the night. Will wasn’t sure if he could keep the snakes holding up the caravan on task while he was asleep. “He’s probably still alive.” Will said with a shrug. “The main problem these things present isn’t their lethality, it’s their numbers. As long as he doesn’t slit his own wrists or hide in a basement with only one way out, he should be just fine.” “Decoys who survive past the 4th Floor have a much higher life expectancy.” Loth said, studying hundreds of dying insects all standing on a checkerboard. “G-17,” She muttered, consulting a notepad before fiddling around with her barrel. Breeding insects resistant to the 8th floor’s unique environment. “How come not dying?” Will asked, having difficulty looking away from the writhing insects. “The System, probably.” Loth said, pointing at her rows of dying insects. “These things don’t have Classes collecting and processing Miasma into Stats, Abilities and Charge. “There’s also a possibility we dying, albeit at a substantially reduced rate. Insects tend to die to environmental toxins far sooner than something bigger, like us. If that is the case, the difference may also be magnified by our Resistance. We should probably keep an eye on the caravan members with the lowest Resistance, just in case.” “And get off the Floor as soon as possible.” Will said with a nod. “That would probably be wise.” Will turned his attention to Alicia. “How’s our surroundings, Alicia?” The blue-flame eyed archer startled a bit as she noticed Will’s attention on her. “I’ll check.” She whispered, setting a bowl of gruel down beside her and peering into the thick purple haze far beneath them. “The ones on the ground don’t seem to know we’re here. They aren’t as thick since Travis led them off.” She said before turning her gaze to the stone floor beneath them. “The building has a frame of Blessed Steel blocking my view, but I can move…” She carefully paced along the ceiling, looking down as she did. “Up till about the halfway point there seems to be only a handful of corpses in the building, but I’m not sure if they’re undead or not: They aren’t moving. Below the halfway point, there’s a few dozen undead moving around.” Will glanced at Loth. “Wanna go for a walk?” Loth raised a brow before glancing at her barrel full of insects. “…Yes.” Will picked Alicia and Loth to come with him, leaving June in charge of the caravan while the three of them looked for a way down. They located a steel door that seemed to be locked from the inside. Loth tapped it a couple times before using her trapmaking kit to punch a hole in the door near the lock, then peeling away a ridiculously thin layer of steel revealing the mechanism behind it. After that it was as simple as pulling the bolt back, and they were inside. They were on a grey stone staircase that wound around in a blocky spiral. Will leaned over the railing and stared down, noting that the staircase went all the way to the ground floor. From what he could see, anyway. “This is the most direct way for them to get to us.” Will mused, the sight of the bottom lost in the purple haze. “I can make it less direct.” Loth said, tapping her claws thoughtfully against the metal railing. “Take out a few flights, and they’d never get to us. Or at least, not in a reasonable amount of time.” “Can you do it quietly?” Will asked. Loth frowned, considering. “Unlikely, but I can quietly rig it to collapse should they start to come up it. Best of both worlds.” “Please do. I’ll take Alicia to check out the top floors.” Will whispered. “Maybe there’s some loot.” “Haven’t made traps with my own hands in a hot minute.” Loth said, rolling back her sleeves with an eager grin. “Sometimes it’s nice to get back to basics.” She went down a flight of stairs, muttering to herself and pulling a small hand-drill out of her pack. “Keep an eye on everything,” Will said to Alicia. “I want to know if the zombies downstairs start moving or if Loth gets into trouble. The kobold might still be wearing her Cuirass of the Cruel Tyrant, which was excellent at damage soak, but without her insects she was significantly less powerful in a straight fight. Alicia nodded, her eyes casting her face in a faint blue light in the dark. It was enough for Will to see by, actually. Maybe a year ago it would’ve been impossibly dark in here, but Will’s Acuity had truly become something outrageous. The blue-eyed archer was nearly blind as a result of seeing through nearly every substance save a few of the most resilient materials such as Blessed steel, so she placed a hand on his shoulder in order to avoid tripping over debris or running into a wall that she couldn’t see. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. “Twenty feet.” Alicia whispered after a few minutes, pointing at a wall ahead of them and a bit to the right. Will scanned the wall, finding a doorway to the left. Will crept forward, conscious of Alicia’s hand on his shoulder. He tested the knob and found it to be rusted into an immoveable mass. Taking a note from Loth, Will formed a Phantom Snake’s armor into a tiny blade and carefully removed the lock, gently placing it down beside the door. After some consideration, Will did the same to the hinges and simply placed the door to the side. Will poked his head through the doorway, towards where the corpse Alicia had been pointing to. It wasn’t in the hall that stretched down the length of the building, so it must be in one of the rooms further in. Will mentally drew a line from where she first pointed, stretching twenty feet forward, stopping… Will locked in on one of the rooms in the middle, creeping up to it, repeating the process of silently removing the door. Faster this time, because he knew what he was doing. Inside the room was a corpse, not mummified like the others, but skeletal in nature, slumped against the desk in front of them. Their clothes were in a pile around them, strange wool things that seemed like they might’ve been loose-fitting even before they had become a skeleton. There were several pots in the corner of the room and withered plants sticking out of them. Hanging from the ceiling was a strange white object shaped like a miniature cloud with a metal grate on either side of the cloud. It had some writing on the side, but Will couldn’t read it. He ran his fingers over the material and tapped it a few times with his finger. It felt like that resin toy Climber the younger kids in the orphanage would cling to. The desk was odd. In Will’s experience, anyone who had a high enough position to warrant a desk would have at least a solid one. Will tapped it with his finger, scratching away a bit of sawdust. This one seemed to be made of….paper-thin steel and sawdust? On the desk in front of the bones was a cube of resin and glass whose purpose Will couldn’t even begin to guess. He couldn’t Identify it just by touching it, so at least it wasn’t a Relic. Will cautiously tapped the skeleton. It collapsed into a pile of disconnected bones and the dust of dead fungus. Will suppressed a sharp inhale as he took a step back. “What’s wrong?” Alicia whispered. “Just remembered something.” Will said, looking at the stains on the floor where fungus had consumed every soft tissue of the corpse before expanding in every direction, looking for more to eat and finding nothing, eventually withering to dust. This was exactly what would’ve happened to him if he hadn’t made it out of the Trial room. The thought sent a cold sweat sweeping across his skin. With the skeleton on the floor, it revealed what had been in the skeleton’s lap. In the seat beside the hip bones was a framed portrait of a happy family. It was severely faded, but Will could make them out. Will found himself wondering. If every Floor represented a thousand years, like the rings of a tree, one could determine the tower’s age… Nobody knew for how many Floors existed. In all that time, how many times had a society risen to the pinnacle of power only to be cast down again by their own greed? Or was it The Tower, enforcing some kind of Divine Law? Will picked up the picture and placed it back on the desk. There was no treasure in the room aside from a nonmagical ring, no servant’s quarters. If anything, this was the servant, with how their room was so tightly packed together with all the others. Will didn’t see a bed anywhere. Worked. There were huge gaps in Will’s knowledge that he simply couldn’t fill in with conjecture. If these were the servants, where were the lords of these enormous towers? It was human nature to want to live above others, but they were already on the highest floor. “Do you see any rooms that are bigger than the others?” Will asked Alicia. “All I can see is the Blessed Steel frame of the building, but If I had to guess…” Alicia pointed into the distance, the way they’d come. Will nodded and the two of them headed that way. They wound their way around the staircase, checking in on Loth, who gave them a thumbs-up, before going through a series of doors to arrive in a massive room that seemed to stretch on forever. The room was subdivided up into even smaller compartments, each barely more than the width of a man’s arms. Each compartment housed a cramped desk and a single chair. It was as if someone had been tasked with cramming as many scribes as possible in as small a space as possible. They eventually find the lord of the tower…It was disappointing. The lord’s room was in the corner of the building on the top floor. it had a fancier desk, a toilet, and an attached room with a dilapidated couch and a small bed, both of decent quality before millennia coated them in dust and picked them apart. On the desk there was a gold-plated figure of a man with a smiling face and a fancy headdress, his arms held out to the side, the two hands acting as scales that things could be placed on to weigh them against each other. Will thought. Like all the other desks, this one had a box on it that did…nothing. There were several rusted-out file cabinets against the back wall, and a strange stick made of Blessed steel leaning up against the wall beside a little white ball. Sure it wasn’t cramped, and was decently comfortable, but it wasn’t the kind of lavish excess that Will would expect from anyone who could afford a place this grand. Fountains, food, furniture, entertainment. Sure, maybe the lords of these people practiced frugal humility, but that wasn’t Will’s experience with human nature, and it wasn’t his experience with the supposed leader of their entire society who had escaped this Floor to the one beneath them at the end of the Coil. It was more like whoever had held this office had been a steward. Another servant given small luxuries to set him above the rest…but still a servant. Whoever owned this outrageously impressive building didn’t even stoop to living in it. Will thought. It made a certain sense. There were literally hundreds of these towers, but they solely housed servants. The chances of them landing on one that had some kind of hidden secret were slim to none. “So, what’s the deal with you and Reggie?” Will teased, relaxing as they began heading back. There were no undead within earshot for them to worry about, and Will hadn’t been able to chat with Alicia since nearly the first time they’d met. “Is dating covered in the Party bylaws?” “What’s the deal with you and sleeping on Anna’s thighs?” Alicia whispered back. “Cuz it’s super comfy. You should try it sometime.” A sudden gasp brought Will’s attention back to Alicia. The archer was staring straight up at the ceiling, her mouth hanging open. “What?” Will asked. “Something’s happening above. One of the -THERE!” Alicia shouted, pointing. Through the floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the hall, Will caught a glimpse of a body falling through the darkness.