The room felt like a trick, it was too easy and he never felt in danger a single time. He scratched his chin trying to puzzle it out, if the panther bat monster was an illusion, then everything else in this room could be an illusion as well. He stood very still and focused on just his magic senses, at first everything was what it appeared to be, but then after really focusing for a while he noticed the problem with the illusion. To all of his senses the illusion was perfect, even his magic senses, which is how he noticed the flaw in it. Living things' magic always feels imperfect, it's a bit messy, kind of like each person having the same magic ingredients but they are all put together and mixed without measuring. So now he could tell reality from illusion, and it turned out that the tree was real. All he could see was a stump from where he had hit it, but with his magic senses he knew it was the real monster in this room.
Without knowing for sure how smart it was he decided to pretend to be hurt and limp over and sit beneath the tree with his back up against it. He closed his eyes again and did his best to project his smash skill into reality without moving, so far he had only managed to do it strong enough to break twigs. He wasn't trying to do damage however, he was trying see if his magic senses were correct, so he focused it to a point and pressing his will into an image of what he wanted to happen while tapping into the skill, a small thud was heard over his head but in a place where he could see no tree. The illusion flickered and the cat was back and it was about to start the suppressing sound attack but before it could, Eli grabbed his bone mace and swung it above his head with a heavy magic smash behind it.
Everything shook, the illusions dissolved and he saw the tree for real, and it was not pretty. The real tree was grey and black with no leaves and a black, foul smelling sap. With his senses returned, he could feel a slight tug on his vitality where the sap was on his skin, he hadn't lost much but with all those distractions, it could easily win. He could feel himself being slowly sucked away now and he didn't like it, so he went to swing another smash and the suppression sound kicked up again and now it was obvious it was coming from the tree. This was a stronger version of the suppression and if Eli had to guess he would guess that it could be even stronger because it no longer needed to mask its source. He wasn't completely debilitated, but he was probably weaker than he was before the system and he could barely hold his heavy bone mace.
With great effort he slowly swung his mace at the tree, using earth node magic, and some of his internal magic as well. The hit knocked him back to the wall and his bones crunched as he hit, his hand and wrist were gone from the hit being too strong for his weakened stats to manage. He barely was able to move, but he looked up and there was a large hole in the middle of the tree, the suppression sound stopped and the drain on his vitality stopped. As his magic stats returned, he focused his will on his vitality to help with healing as he tried to figure out what this floor was about. The other floors were kind of what you would expect for a team of beginners, the first floor punished you if you didn't have a plan or try to gather information about what you were fighting quickly. The second floor punished complacency and rewarded bold moves and nerves of steel. This floor just felt like trickery, if you are going to have a trick floor that probably kills you, then it should be the first one, Eli thought to himself and chuckled.
He was going to be healing for a while, so he thought maybe he could try healing with his own magic again and maybe that would get him that first body upgrade. He felt the magic his body was using to heal and tried to add just a small wisp of his own magic and it ate it up and started drawing on his magic, really fast at first but he pressed on the connection and slowed it down. His healing stopped because his magic wanted to replace the good parts of his body first then go on to repair and improve the damaged parts. This seemed to drastically slow the process of replacement since it wasn't trying to do it all at once allowing him to do this without being totally drained of magic in under a minute.
The downside to getting this upgrade over with is that he had to just lay on the ground, broken ribs, broken shoulder blade, fractured hip bone, a missing hand, and mangled legs with all the associated pain. This was another time where he had to focus on his drive to get stronger, not for its own sake but strength to fight evil, not comic book evil, but the human capacity for evil. This wasn't a good motivator because of his lack of personal, visceral connection to the goal, but it will do for now, maybe if he ever falls in love, that person can be his drive, Lambert seemed like a good candidate for this, but not now. His motivation for power, his need to protect them could take him to greater heights. For now though, he would just have to do what he can with what he has. He let some of his more dark and locked up memories of terrible things he has seen flood his mind and drive him to stay awake and complete this process.
It seemed to take several hours to replace the good parts of his body with the improved version, now it went after repairing him, building back stronger. This seemed to go even slower and the pain would get worse as it was repaired then start to feel better afterwards. He was struggling, hour by hour, forcing himself conscious through the pain as his hand was rebuilt, as his ribs were mended. Eventually it was all complete, it felt like about half a day, but it was done and the pain was gone, in fact, he physically felt the best he ever had, but magically he felt like a raisin. He had to focus to only allow as much magic as was needed to regenerate health, not letting it take more magic than he could regenerate to be used to remake his body. Even when he got distracted, too much would be used and he would have to focus even harder to maintain a balance. But it was over and he had some much nicer abs to prove it.
"Your Body level has increased from level 0 to level 1"
"Your physical body has improved slightly based on your stats."
Eli started at the window and said, "explain please," while rubbing his abs to get used to them.
"System Help - Body level"
"Body level applies a percentage of your stats to your physical body."
"Body level affects strength, reaction and vitality."
"So, physical stats up by a non-magical percentage, this means that when illusionist noise trees try to suppress me it won't be as effective, got it, thank you" Eli said with a dry mouth and scratchy throat.
He supposed it was time to move on to the next part of this floor, however there was a problem. The exit he had seen earlier was an illusion and now he could only see where he had come in, he even walked that way a bit to still see the pillar of ice from before. So now, he paced the room again and couldn't find anything, but when he looked at the tree something about it made his eyebrows raise. The next area had to be underneath it, Eli reached back for a smash and hit it breaking more of the tree apart and revealing a trap door underneath it. He cleared the door of the rest of the tree and reached down and opened the door on the floor. It didn't seem like a good idea to drop down into a room like this, that's just asking to get ambushed.
Instead of jumping into the insta-death ambush door, he decided to throw the whole tree down there first, just to give him something to land on. After about half the tree he heard a bunch of noise, not anything he could make out but echoes of grinding and some kind of faint roar. Continuing to throw things through the death hole in the floor, until he literally had nothing left to toss in, even having gone back to the entrance tunnel and grabbing everything his strength would allow him to carry and tossing it in. There had to be a 6 foot pile of debris at the bottom of the hole at this point, not jumping in after all that work was not something he could make himself do. So, he jumped in.
He started falling in complete darkness, so he lit himself up and right away saw what this was, just as he thought a death hole. The door in the floor dropped about 30 feet straight down in a 5 foot wide tunnel, then it opened up and there was a giant bat like creature with its mouth open ready to chomp down on anything that fell in. This would explain the insanely loud creaking on the door, it was to let this guy know something was coming. But it wasn't going to be an easy meal, he swung his mace to change his position mid air and he pushed off the tunnel wall to crash into the other side with a smash. His hard hit into the stone knocked a large amount of big boulders free and they started heading towards the bat-like creature's head.
The creature closed its mouth and tried to get away but the falling rock was too numerous and some fell on its wings taking it down to the ground which was quite a ways further down. Eli landed on his debris that he had thrown down before which was a wide pile of wood and stone only about a foot high. It would seem that the monster had dodged most of what he tossed down here, but not all of it. The bat-like cat-like monster had just landed and it was obvious it was not happy having taken a bunch of hits from boulders and might have even swallowed some. It rolled on the ground and finally got itself upright, and faced him drawing in breath, Eli needed to react quickly and tried to run behind one of the big boulders that had fallen but didn't get there in time as the noise made his vision go white.
This new noise attack was harsh, it seemed to disconnect his cells and atoms, basically disintegrating matter that's exposed to it. His skin was being eaten through on the parts of him that were facing the monster, with the front of him having his muscles exposed and bleeding before he could get to cover. After getting behind the boulder the monster took a breath and started to circle him trying to get it on him again, his hiding boulder was being torn apart and turned to extremely fine dust and blown away. This was only going to get worse as time went on, the ground around him was also being disintegrated, so he decided that something needed to happen right now or he wasn't going to make it.
Eli was missing most of the skin on the front of his body and blood was running down him almost like a second liquid skin. He stepped into its attack, mentally touched his blink skill and imagined himself in the air right behind its head, then he blinked. As soon as he opened his eyes he swung down with his mace into the back of the monster's head pushing his will, magic and node into the swing as hard as he could. The monster didn't even seem to notice that he wasn't there anymore and was just keeping the screeching going as hard as it could. Then its head exploded in mist, gore and blood covering a large area in front of it and they both fell to the ground.
With his ribs showing from the attack he took and his right arm dangling from where it had fallen apart, he was spent and needed some rest. The disintegration had weakened his body so that when his attack stuck his right arm from the elbow down had simply fallen apart. With his body weakened he knew he had to put a lot of magic into that attack and it had worked but again his arm was toast. All it will take is fighting an enemy that can dodge or survive his attack and he would be defenseless, probably getting him killed. He would have to save an attack like that for a finishing move or maybe just keep his blink hidden so he can use them together. He would need to strategize on that later, now he needs a nap, he has been awake for days at this point.