In Horace's opinion, whoever designed this tower's difficulty settings deserved a pat on the back and then a good, solid kicking. Because the Ogre was an absolute bastard of a creature. And it was only level forty.
He landed on the fifth floor and stared up at it. With his new clarity of mind — his Intelligence sitting comfortably where it was — he could say with some confidence that it looked like an overinflated balloon with delusions of grandeur. Arms too long, legs too short, head too wide, chest like a barrel someone had stuffed another barrel inside. Everything about it was wrong in that specific, deeply unpleasant way that said nature had not been consulted during the design process.
None of which stopped it from being an absolute bitch to fight, as he well knew.
He didn't wait for the protection circle to drop. The moment his feet hit the floor he was already moving, calling upon two skills simultaneously.
The first was Blade Dance. He felt the residual Arcane Mana he'd been shedding snap into motion around him — a glass-like vortex, barely visible, orbiting his body in tight, lazy arcs.
"One minute." He muttered, and started counting down in the back of his head.
The second skill was already building at the tip of his sword. En Pointe gathered mana there in a dense, shivering ball, compressing it, focusing it down to a single point. At the same time he reached out with Manakinesis and shaped the residual mana beneath his feet into a solid foothold — not large, just enough — and launched himself forward off it, blade pulled back, body low.
He covered the distance fast. The Ogre was already turning, that horrible speed beginning to build in its too-short legs, but he was already past its reaching arm and driving in toward its knee. He stabbed forward and felt En Pointe release — the compressed mana punching outward in a focused, needle-thin burst that bored clean through the joint, opening a gap just wide enough for his blade to follow.
He drove the sword through and kept moving, using the momentum to carry him past the beast entirely. Just in time. The Ogre's massive hand slammed down onto the exact spot he'd been standing a half-second before, cracking the stone floor hard enough to send fragments skittering across the chamber.
He turned and watched it drag the disabled leg forward, its weight thrown badly off. Then, working carefully with Manakinesis, he reached out and twisted the residual mana traces he'd left behind in the wound — agitating them, compressing them against each other the same way he'd learned to corrupt mana against the spider's webbing on the floor above.
He watched the knee. For a moment nothing happened.
Then the flesh around the wound began to darken. To pull inward. The Corruption was slow, but it was working — spreading through the joint like rot through old wood. He grinned at that. Ogres were undeniably powerful, their Endurance monstrous, but resistance to Corruption was a different matter entirely, and this one clearly hadn't developed any.
"Fantastic." He breathed, already readying the next part.
He planted his feet and began forcing mana into the blade in great, heavy pulses — more than he normally would — letting it build past what Arcane Enchantment consumed and accumulate along the edge. He thought about what wind felt like, the concussive outward pressure of it, and tried to push that quality into the gathering Arcane Mana the way Chromatic Strike had once done it randomly. He had a proficiency in Mana Manipulation now. It was time to actually use it.
The blade hummed. The air around it felt slightly wrong.
He charged. The Ogre swung its arm to intercept and he twisted into the blow rather than away from it, letting the overhead slash carry his full bodyweight as he brought the blade down across the outstretched arm in a single hard arc. The Blade Dance vortex struck simultaneously, the orbiting mana slamming into the limb from multiple angles, and the arm came apart into ragged tethers of flesh and dark ichor.
The Ogre lurched, off-balance, its ruined leg buckling further under the shift in weight. Its remaining arm swung wide — desperation rather than precision — and he stepped inside the arc of it, close enough to smell the thing, and pressed his blade flat against its chest.
All that accumulated mana, all that compressed, agitated, wind-threaded Arcane energy sitting along the edge of the sword — he vibrated it. Fast. Faster than he thought he could manage. Until it didn't want to be still anymore.
"Boom." He said.
The detonation was not small.
The Ogre went down faster than he'd expected, honestly. Which was a welcome change. He stood in the settling dust and silence, breathing hard, and let himself appreciate the fact that his skills and proficiencies — and the frankly painful amount of experience he'd accumulated getting here — had turned what previously killed him in seconds into something he'd handled in under a minute.
Then its body began to dissolve, and everything stopped.
Not slowed. Not dimmed. Stopped. The dust hung motionless in the air. The faint drip of ichor from the Ogre's ruined arm froze mid-fall. The world simply ceased.
"So." A voice sounded from everywhere and nowhere at once. "Do you mind explaining why I noticed a temporal anomaly in the tower I created, child?"
Horace whipped around, looking for the source.
At the edge of his vision, blue particles gathered — condensing, sharpening — into the shape of a humanoid figure. They stood at around five feet, dressed in a pristine white coat with the number 1 embroidered over the left breast, sweatpants and a sweatshirt visible beneath it. Casual. Almost absurdly so, given the circumstances.
Their head was covered by a mask.
It was the mask that unsettled him most. Black, smooth, and across its face a large spider had been rendered in stark white — eight legs spread wide, reaching toward the edges.
Horace stared at it.
"...Hi." He said.