Chapter 401: Eighty-Ninth Floor, Waiting Room (1)
[23 hours 59 minutes until the rest period ends. Please take a rest.]
The familiar sensation of weightlessness faded, and I emerged from the darkness back into the waiting room. Even then, a dull ringing lingered in my ears.
The echo of climbers shouting at the top of their lungs and the thunder of the Kosharks’ hooves pounding against the earth still clung to me like an afterimage.
Everyone had completely ignored the tower’s message and had just shouted, almost to the point of screaming. That had just been a celebration of victory, but had been something else entirely. It felt markedly different from any trial we had overcome before.
Rather than it being about four species uniting to overcome an enemy hundreds of times their size, the fact that no one had died was the real victory. Despite the confusion, the chaos, and the overwhelming odds we had faced on the surface, we hadn’t lost a single person.
The climbers apparently credited that entirely to me.
They weren’t wrong. Everyone had done their part, but without me, it would have been impossible—even without the Apostle of Decay showing up. I had deliberately let through only as many enemies as they could withstand.
In the end, all that praise was directed at me, and even after returning, the afterglow lingered. I didn’t mind it.
The rewards aren’t anything to laugh at, either.
Although the tower had described it as only the preliminary reward, destroying the factory had raised all my stats by twenty. I didn’t particularly care about achievement points, but stat increases were a different story.
With how high my stats were, twenty extra points resulted in a far greater buff than it would for other climbers.
I had received plenty of stat boosts before, but this hidden mission had given them on a different scale entirely.