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1072 Words
Three years after he entered the fifth floor, he finally felt the Genesis Energy in his spirit reach the point he could take the fourth floor exit reward. It actually surprised him as the information jolted him from the stupor he had fallen into in the last few years.
Packing up his things, he pulled out his flying sword and immediately flew out of the ruin and through the nearest two, to find a boss rift he had found cleared when he was exploring.
Thankfully, the distortion was still there, and he entered it without hesitating.
He didn’t care about rewards or skills. He just wanted his Concept to break through to Tier 15.
When he reached the third level of the floor, he found a team battling a ghost like boss and waited a respectful distance as they finished the boss off. When he was sure they had gone through the distortion, he followed up and walked into the distortion as well.
He wasn’t even given the opportunity to take the floor challenge as he didn’t have enough Genesis Energy, but he didn’t care.
The instant he appeared in the safe room, he readied his shield for an attack that never came.
Spreading out his spiritual sense and looking with eyes, he saw that most everyone was keeping to themselves, and was either wounded and recovering, or bartering with the trader who had set up shop.
Ignoring it all, he ran at the crystal pillar in the center of the room.
Alvin almost didn’t believe it when his finger touched the pillar, and he was given the option to exit or head deeper.
He had expected someone to attack him or try and rob him, despite no one being near enough to do so.
As he disappeared, he felt a list of his passed floor rewards being offered and let out a breath, seeing he both had access to and could afford the floor four reward.
Mentally selecting it, he felt the Genesis Energy he had painstakingly gathered rush and swirl into his cultivation cores, filling and then shattering the bottled Concept he had used to break through to Tier 10 so many years ago.
Even as the Genesis Energy settled into place, he was given the option to choose his exit destination, and with a feeling of relief he never knew he could feel, selected the Empire’s moon.
Appearing on a random street, he knelt and let out a sound that was somewhere between a cry and scream, venting the last thousand years of frustration.
With a thought, he pulled out an essence stone and absorbed the energy to his spirit and immediately crunched with it, breaking through to Tier 15.
Even as his AI was inundated with offers from celebration halls, he just took a moment to take everything in.
He was immortal.
He had all the time in the world.
Looking at his hand that had started to show the signs of wrinkles and age he was keenly aware of despite his gauntlets, he threw his head back and started to laugh.
Valerie clenched her armor-covered fist and punched the orc in the face.
Metal met flesh, and the flesh of the creature exploded.
Taxing Skills was one of the five most annoying floors for a Paladin candidate, thanks to the block on [AI] usage, but she knew what was important, and it wasn’t rushing ahead and killing everything for Genesis Energy.
Oh, the Genesis Energy was important, vital, even. But she wasn’t gathering it for the rewards, even though she took each one from the floors she passed.
As a Tier 12, they weren’t so expensive and were quite useful.
But her entire purpose of entering Minkalla was to have the set of armor protecting her bind to her as a growth item, which had thankfully been forced by the fourth floor reward.
The Paladins were one of the most elite forces the Corporations had to offer. While the Chosen were their answer to the Sect’s Young Masters and the Monster Collective’s Alphas, the Paladins were an entirely separate military unit based on two extremely valuable resources.
The first and most obvious of the two was the hyper-advanced magitech power armor she wore almost like a second skin. It was a wonder of modern engineering, handcrafted by entire teams of the greatest crafters the Corporations had, up to and sometimes including CEO JR himself, and formed entirely from the very best natural treasures, Talent-made materials and fused into a single, beautiful and cohesive whole.
The second resource were the remnants of a Talented crafter who Ascended ages ago that could create rechargeable custom mana stones, with each able to hold an insane amount of mana for their size. They were integral to the function of the armors at higher Tiers, when they could burn upward of millions of mana every second.
She didn’t have any of those crystals with her, of course. Not only were they worth far more than everything else in the suit combined, which already cost exa-credits to produce, but they failed the single most important requirement for the entire suit.
Everything had to be below Tier 15.
The goal of the armor, after all, was to bind to someone and turn into a growth item.
And as it was a single item by design, if it did bind, it would bind as a whole.
Valerie had trained for nearly five hundred years before getting this chance, and she wasn’t going to squander it.
She wasn’t the first pilot of this particular suit. Her power armor had been into Minkalla twice before her entrance and had been said to be outright cursed from a double failure to bond. But Valerie had been the one to bind with it. Even if she hadn’t gotten a floor that automatically bound it to her, she was sure it would have happened anyway. From the moment she was encased in the seven-foot-tall armor system, she knew they were destined to work together.
Using her shield, she blocked the next blow and drove her vibro knife through the orc’s armor.
Stepping out and down, she shattered another’s leg before firing her mana cannons at the remaining two creatures.
She could have killed all the orcs from a distance, but melee combat had shown a small but historically noticeable tendency to increase the chance of binding to the power armor.
- Writer
