I Become the Strongest with Infinite Skills Level

The battle lasted longer than any of them expected.

The guardian of the lake was not simply powerful — it was patient.

It attacked in waves, pulling back into the water each time Ethan pushed it away, then returning with a different angle, a different speed, a different pressure.

It was testing him. Learning him. And for the first time in a long while, Ethan felt something other than the cold weight of his hatred fueling his movements.

He felt focus.

Pure, clean, and sharp as the edge of Bloodblade Ashura itself.

Every swing Ethan made carried more than anger. Every step he took was not driven by the image of Telmarian soldiers burning through his memories.

For the first time, he was fighting because he wanted to move forward — not because something behind him refused to let go.

The creature seemed to notice this shift.

In the final exchange, Ethan did not chase the guardian when it retreated beneath the water.

He simply stood at the edge of the lake, his breathing steady, his sword lowered at his side. He waited.

And when the guardian rose one last time — not with claws raised, but with its massive head bowed low toward the surface — Ethan understood.

The fight was over.

The guardian sank slowly, its enormous body dissolving into pale light beneath the water until nothing remained except soft ripples fanning outward toward the shore.

The others stood in silence for a long moment, processing what they had just witnessed. Gareth exhaled and lowered his weapon. Serena pressed her fingers to her temple. Kael crossed his arms and looked at the lake with an expression that was somewhere between exhausted and deeply impressed.

Milo was the first to speak.

"Is it dead?"

"No," Ethan said.

He was still watching the water.

"It passed on," he continued. "There is a difference."

Nobody argued with that.

The group made camp again near the edge of the treeline, away from the destroyed ground where the battle had torn up stone and earth.

The lake had calmed itself back into that same impossible stillness, as if nothing had ever disturbed it.

Fires crackled quietly. Kael was already asleep within minutes. Gareth sat sharpening his blade. Serena treated a cut on her shoulder in silence.

But Ethan did not stay with them.

He walked along the edge of the lake, following the curve of its shore until the camp disappeared behind the trees and the sounds of his companions faded into the gentle noise of the forest.

The moonlight reflected cleanly off the water here. The destruction from the battle had not reached this far.

Everything looked exactly as it had when they first arrived — peaceful, still, and exactly the kind of beautiful that did not belong inside a dungeon.

Ethan stopped walking when he noticed the light.

It was small at first. A single pale glow hovering just above the surface of the water, no larger than a lantern flame. But it moved deliberately, drifting toward the shore as if it had been waiting for him to arrive. Ethan kept his hand near Bloodblade Ashura but did not draw it. He watched.

The light drifted closer, and as it did, it expanded slowly — not growing larger exactly, but becoming more defined. More specific. A shape began to form within it.

And then a figure stepped out of the glow and stood on the surface of the water.

She was small — barely reaching Ethan's chest in height — and her appearance was something that his mind could not quite settle on.

Her clothing was made of something that looked like layered petals, translucent and soft, and her wings — four of them, thin as paper and veined like dragonfly wings — caught the light and scattered it across the water in moving patterns.

She looked at Ethan without surprise.

As if she had known exactly where he would be standing.

"You survived the Watcher," she said.

Her voice was light but grounded. Not ethereal or dreamy. Just quiet.

Ethan studied her carefully.

"The guardian," he said.

"The Watcher of the Lake," she corrected, without any irritation in her tone. "That is what it was called before this dungeon was built around it. Long before any of this existed."

She gestured vaguely at the forest, the water, the impossible sky above. "It did not choose to be a guardian. It simply could not leave."

Ethan said nothing.

The fairy tilted her head, studying him the same way the guardian had studied him — with that same careful, measuring interest.

"Most who reach this lake are killed before morning," she said. "The ones who survive the Watcher tend to run. You are the first in a very long time who stood still after the fight ended."

"Running seemed pointless," Ethan said.

The fairy smiled — small, and quietly amused.

"My name is Lyris," she said. "I am bound to this floor as the Watcher was. I cannot leave. But unlike the Watcher, I was placed here with a purpose."

Ethan waited.

Lyris moved across the water toward the shore, her feet just barely touching the surface, leaving no ripples as she approached.

"There is something happening in the upper floors," she said, and her tone shifted — quieter, more careful.

"A disturbance. Something that began small and has been spreading downward through the levels for years. I have felt it growing. The creatures on the floors above have been changing. Becoming more aggressive. More coordinated. As if something is directing them."

"The dungeon is not supposed to work that way. Monsters do not organize. They do not plan. But something is making them do exactly that."

Ethan's eyes narrowed slightly.

"What is causing it?"

"That is what I need you to find out," Lyris said simply.

She reached into the folds of her petal-like clothing and withdrew something.

She held it up between two fingers — a small crystal shard, no longer than her thumb, that glowed with a faint interior light.

"There are three monitoring stones placed on floors forty through forty-two," she said.

"Each one records changes in dungeon behavior — creature patterns, energy shifts, structural anomalies. They have not sent a signal to me in eleven months. Something is blocking them. Or they have been destroyed. I need someone to climb to those floors and either restore the stones or bring me whatever information they have recorded."

She looked at Ethan steadily. "I cannot send someone weak. The changes in those upper floors make them far more dangerous than they should be at that level."

Ethan looked at the crystal shard in her hand.

"And in return?" he said.

Lyris did not hesitate.

"I will give you a sword."

She turned and raised one hand toward the center of the lake. The water responded immediately — not violently, not explosively, but with the kind of slow.

The surface parted like a curtain being pulled aside, and from beneath the water, rising without a sound, came a blade.

It was long and narrow, almost slender compared to Bloodblade Ashura's aggressive width.

The metal was a deep, storm-grey color that seemed to shift slightly in the light — sometimes darker, sometimes with a faint silver edge running along its length.

The handle was wrapped in material the color of midnight, and at its pommel was a single pale stone that pulsed once as the sword cleared the water's surface.

Ethan stared at it.

He did not reach for it yet.

"Its name is Veilcutter," Lyris said.

"It was forged for someone who never came to claim it. It has been waiting at the bottom of this lake for a very long time."

She lowered the blade so its tip rested on the water's surface.

"It does not cut flesh well. It cuts through barriers — walls of energy, seals, hidden protections. Things that should not be able to be broken. If what is happening in the upper floors is being concealed, this sword will find the concealment and open it."

Ethan was quiet for a long moment.

He looked at the sword. Then back at Lyris.

"The mission," he said. "The monitoring stones on floors forty through forty-two. Find them, restore them, or retrieve the data they have recorded."

"And if they have been destroyed," Lyris added, "then find what destroyed them and bring me proof of it. A piece. A mark. Anything."

Ethan nodded once.

"I accept."

Lyris held the sword out across the water toward him. Ethan reached out and took it from her hands.

The moment his fingers closed around the handle, the pale stone at the pommel pulsed again — slow and quiet, like a heartbeat settling — and then went still.

The weight of Veilcutter was different from Bloodblade Ashura. Lighter, but not in a way that felt fragile. It felt precise. Like the difference between a hammer and a needle.

Lyris stepped back.

"You will know when to use it," she said. "That sword is not for killing. Do not try to use it that way. It will not cooperate."

Ethan glanced at the blade, then secured it carefully alongside his other weapon.

"One more thing," Lyris said, and her tone shifted slightly — something that was not quite concern, but close to it.

"Whatever is organizing the monsters in the upper floors, it is aware that someone is climbing. It has been aware for some time."

Her large eyes held his steadily.

"It knows about you, Ethan. I do not know how. But when I reached out through the dungeon's currents to find a climber capable of this task, the disturbance responded. It felt me looking."

She paused. "Be careful. Not just for your sake. For the people traveling with you."

Ethan said nothing for a moment.

Then he turned and looked back toward the treeline, toward the direction of the camp where his companions were resting.

"I understand," he said.

Ethan stood alone at the shore for a long moment.

His hand rested on Veilcutter's handle.

He thought about what she had said.

He looked up at the ceiling of the dungeon floor, high above, where the artificial sky was beginning to lighten at its edges with the pale grey suggestion of a false dawn.

Then he turned and walked back toward camp.

There was a lot to tell the others.

And floors to climb.