Chapter 177: Survival Plan
Kael stayed seated long enough for his breath to stop rasping like sandpaper. The ache in his legs dulled from "about to fold" to "still functional," and his shoulders stopped feeling like they were hanging off hooks. He didn’t move until he was sure the tremor in his hands was gone.
The blue bar in the corner of his vision crept back toward full, steady and patient in a way his body never was. Internal energy returned like a tide. Natural energy returned like a debt collector, slow, grudging, and with interest.
Once he finally felt the bar fill out, he let himself think again.
With his breathing returned to normal, and his energy bar complete again, Kael, began thinking up a plan.
A plan on how to leave this floor.
He didn’t romanticize it. This wasn’t some heroic "final boss" moment where people rallied and shouted and became friends.
This was logistics under pressure.
A checklist with blood on it.
"Collaboration is impossible." He thought the Sun Clan didn’t like him, and whatever remained of the Snake Clan was already in hostility with him.
Even if either group had wanted to work with him, it wouldn’t have mattered. Trust wasn’t something you patched up with a handshake after you’d fed a third of their men to a basilisk and a third to the electric chair, and then used zombies as a smoke screen for the rest. He’d made enemies on purpose, and now he had to live with it.
As for the few stragglers left on the floor that didn’t belong to either side.
They were nothing but dead weight.
Kael had seen enough of them, people hiding, people staring, people waiting for someone else to die first so they could scavenge. Desperation made everyone selfish, and the Tower rewarded selfishness like it was a virtue.
Men or women, all sorts of climbers here were solo climbers.
He pictured them scattered across the ruins like rats in different holes, each one convinced they were "playing it safe," each one one bad night away from becoming a corpse with a core inside.
"Not to mention," Kael thought, "I’ve only seen one woman so far on this floor." he frowned as he realized that the only woman he saw was the one who died on the first day.
The thought drifted in uninvited, weird and uncomfortable, less about gender and more about the Tower’s cruelty. It wasn’t "fair." It wasn’t "balanced." It just ground people down. Whoever survived did so because they got lucky, ruthless, or both.
"Though, I doubt it’s of any relevance..." he sighed as he realized he was getting sidetracked with useless stuff.
His brain was trying to latch onto anything that wasn’t "fight a fire djinn in a shrinking death zone." He shut that part down. Observations were fine. Distractions were lethal.
He looked at his right arm.
The Fire Rune was absolutely useless in the upcoming fight.
To use fire to fight a creature of flames is nothing but stupidity.
He’d learned that the first time the basilisk shrugged off [Burn]. Ifrit was literally built of the stuff. Throwing flames at it would be like trying to drown a fish. The only reason he kept the Fire rune at all was because he didn’t trust the floor to stay "only Ifrit."
Monsters would get shoved inward, other climbers would get shoved inward, and he’d need something quick for targets that weren’t immune.
He imagined a zombie lunging at the wrong moment, or a goblin thinking it could get a free stab while he was focused on the boss. Fire was still fire. It still ended things quickly when they were flammable.
"My only other offense rune is the Darkness Rune, and that one is a rune I don’t fully understand..."
He flexed his fingers inside the gauntlet. Darkness felt like holding a knife you didn’t know how sharp it was, or whether it cut the enemy or cut reality itself, and let the enemy fall through.
Not to mention, he doesn’t fully know its limits and its prowess.
It was strong, yes. It was horrifying, yes. But strong didn’t mean controllable. Strong didn’t mean reliable. And he didn’t have the luxury to "experiment" mid-fight when a single mistake meant being cooked alive.
"And I can’t rely on anyone else but myself," he said as he pulled out the map.
That was the anchor thought. The one that never lied.
The Ifrit was obvious in the map.
A single red dot, quite larger than other monster dots, bright red and moving slowly.
Even on the map, it looked heavy. Not "big" like a crowd, but "big" like a problem that didn’t belong among lesser problems. The dot’s movement was steady, purposeful. Not wandering like goblins. Not swarming like zombies.
The Ifrit moved like it owned the streets.
In fact, it wasn’t even that far from where he was.
"Hmm... I can check it out, I think," Kael thought as he stood up.
Not to fight. Not yet. Just to see. He didn’t want to walk into a boss fight blind again. He’d done enough blind walking lately. He wanted angles. Patterns. Weaknesses. Anything.
He began moving through the building and got out from the exit door, checked his map once, twice, then crossed the road when he noticed that no green or Red dots were around.
He moved like he always did now, head down, steps chosen, eyes flicking between reality and the map. The city was full of dead corners and broken lines of sight. Every doorway could hide a goblin. Every shadow could hide a climber. Every open stretch could get you seen.
A few Zombies were further down the street from both ends, but not close enough to take note of him, so he rushed up ahead.
He didn’t sprint. Sprinting made noise and made you visible. He moved fast enough to be gone if they turned, slow enough not to draw attention. The helmet muffled the wind in his ears, and the leather armor made him feel sealed off from the world, insulated. Like he was a man inside a suit rather than a man inside a city.
After doing that, street crossing, building entering for three more blocks, Kael reached an area where he could feel the heat of the atmosphere change.
Even through ninety-nine percent resistance, heat still had a presence. It wasn’t pain, more like pressure. The air thickened. It carried that dry, baked smell of stone and soot and something metallic, like a furnace had been running for days, and the city was the metal inside it.
He remembered the sensation of his hair singeing. The way the pit had sucked mana out of him like a drain. The panic of realizing a rune was too close to flame and his hand was about to become meat.
He still remembered how close to death he was when he stole the Fire Rune from the Ifrit’s lair.
That memory didn’t come with fear anymore. It came with a cold clarity: don’t do that again unless you have a plan to survive it.
And right now, he needed to formulate that very plan, not to survive the Ifrit, but the floor itself.