[Welcome to the 1,792nd floor]
Okay. One could perhaps make the argument I'd overdone it a bit. Turned out "all my strength" wasn't a particularly good idea in the circumstances, and I'd had to halt my destructive momentum with another titanic punch.
I'd been flying so fast it had been dizzying. From my perspective, it had been like someone was rapidly flickering the lights on and off, and it had taken me way too long to realise that was because I was blasting through floors at a rate of several per second, especially considering pretty much the exact same thing had happened with the mountains back down on the first floor.
That wouldn't necessarily have been a problem, in and of itself. I wanted to get as high as possible in the tower to find adequate challenges for my new level, after all. But then new System interface panels had started opening up, bearing messages. Lots of them.
The first couple hadn't been so bad. Just a notification that I'd defeated something called a Nuckalavee, followed by an achievement for killing my first monster. Things had followed that theme for a while, my passing through the floors killing what seemed to be hundreds of monsters just through collateral damage. Probably a shockwave, or something. Unless there were monsters unlucky enough to be standing in the exact spot I passed through. Or so I had assumed.
It was only after a couple of hundred floors that things had started getting a bit more concerning, and I didn't notice it at first. As I was swiping away the dozens of popup windows that kept cluttering up my vision, I noticed a notification and accompanying achievement that gave me pause.
[Defeated Gancanagh x25,286]
[Achievement Unlocked: Ruthless Bastard]
[You defeated an entire enemy settlement in one attack!]
I'd stared dumbly at that notification for an embarrassingly long time. My flight through the floors had probably lasted twenty seconds, and at least a third of that had been spent staring in bewilderment at those two panels.
Gancanagh's were, presumably—hopefully—monsters. Part of the trials and tribulations of the Tower that humanity and any other Climber races had to overcome. The fact it had labelled their settlement an 'enemy' one gave me hope in that regard.
But it did alert me to some unfortunate possibilities. Like, say, the fact that there could be settlements here, and I was moving fast enough to destroy them without even noticing. I'd immediately set to repeating my momentum-halting punch trick, and thus found myself on the 1,792nd floor, according to the final System notification that popped up after I was done dismissing the several-hundred achievements I'd accumulated on my way up.
Chuckling a little nervously to myself, I quickly delved into the Inventory to fetch another set of clothes, since my new threads had been thoroughly torn apart in the course of smashing my way through 1,792 floors of what had presumably been magical rock of some kind. With that done, I paused to have a look around at my new environment.
Desert sands stretched out in every direction, with a hint of luscious green to the… I realised I had no idea of the cardinal directions right now. There was no sun in this place to use as a reference, if that would even work in the first place here. Never mind. Point was, this floor was mostly desert, with the possibility of an oasis in the distance.
Good thing I landed high up on this dune, I thought, crossing my arms and giving an appreciative nod at my environment.
It was only when I looked down and found no dune beneath me that I noticed I was falling through the air from a great height again. The only thing beneath my feet was a cloud I was rapidly approaching. My punch had taken place high in the sky of this new floor, it seemed, and I was currently on my way back down. I don't know how I hadn't immediately noticed that. Maybe the insane momentum of my jump had immunised my inner ear to the comparatively pedestrian sensation of falling at terminal velocity.
Oh well. Not to worry. I know I can halt my fall anyway. If not by punching my way to the ground, then surely there's something in Skills and Spells that can get me down there.
And, having smashed through over a thousand floors worth of rock or whatever, I'm pretty sure hitting the ground from this high won't do shit anyway.
My lips twisted a little bit as I simultaneously tried to grin and grimace.
… I kinda wanna try it.
Well, let's see how I feel once I'm through this cloud.
Plunging through a cloud was nothing new to me, since I'd been skydiving plenty of times before. The dark shapes moving around in there were novel, and did get me wondering how a supposed cloud hadn't been blown away by my mega-punch, but nothing came to bother me, and I was happy to write it off as my imagination. My clothes did get a bit wet, though, since clouds are actually made up of water and all that, but if hitting mountains at a speed faster than sound didn't give me any trouble, cold was obviously a non-issue.
The next problem on my agenda arose once the pale mist around me came to an end, spitting me out into the open air once more. See, there wasn't much in the way of desert directly below my feet. Instead, there was just a rather large hole in the landscape.
Right, I thought. Of course there's a big hole from where I passed through.
For some reason, I'd expected the breaches I'd been making would be me-sized. Barely noticeable. But if the destruction caused in my wake had been big enough to gank an entire town of monsters, it stood to reason I was actually causing a lot more property damage than that.
In this case, the hole I'd blasted through the floor's floor appeared to be several miles wide, and much of the debris kicked up by my explosive entrance were still sailing through the air in great arcs. Rubble was strewn around the lip of the hole for several miles more. The hole itself wasn't quite a perfect circle, a bit too jagged, and part of one edge had fallen in to give it a weird barbed shape. Good effort, though.
It did also have to be noted that the bottom of the hole wasn't visible. There was only a yawning abyss. Total darkness, inky and oily. Which told me that there was actually quite a lot of distance between floors, filled up with rock and stuff.
Damn. How much force must I have generated to go through over a thousand floors of that?
The grimace finally won out over the grin when I considered what the floor I'd started on would look like now, having had to take the full force of my jump when I leaped upwards. However much power had been required to let me shoot straight through that many floors, the bottom floor would have been subjected to many times more than that, right? Wasn't that how physics worked?
I hadn't received any notifications congratulating me for destroying an entire floor, so I decided I was going to take that as a confirmation everything was fine down there.
Now the only problem facing me was how to avoid falling right back down there through the holes I'd made. I could have just repeated my punching trick, using the momentum to propel me to the side of the hole, but let it be known that I'm an adult capable of learning from my dubious mistakes, and so I went looking through the menus for something that could get me out of this with less wanton destruction.
The searched functions I'd discovered let me seek out flight abilities pretty easily. There were lots of options to grow wings, so I filtered out anything that would alter my body. Didn't want to deal with freaky dysphoria shit right now.
That still left me with several thousand options. I could summon animal familiars to ride on, spawn magical vehicles to carry me, manipulate the elements to propel myself. There was too much cool stuff to choose from. I wanted to try all of them.
But in the end, one option stood out. Short and sweet and simple:
[Levitate].
My momentum halted immediately as the Spell took hold of my body on its own. Part of me had worried there'd be some kind of adjustment period before I got a hang of things, since there was nothing in my repertoire that made me better at using my own Spells, but it seemed a Level 1000 SSS-Rank Spell was as much a magical construct as an ability. There was rudimentary intelligence to it, whispering unknowable knowledge into the back of my mind that manifested with something along the psychic lines of, I await your command, Master.
It took the barest thought on my part. Nothing more than a flicker of intent.
And then I was flying through my own power.
My stomach swooped. I let out a holler of joy. This was nothing like the 'flight' I'd subjected myself to back on the first floor. That had been firing myself from a cannon, uncontrolled. This was true freedom.
I soared upwards, going back the way I'd come through the cloud, then kept going, rising higher and higher until the cloud looked like a speck of white dust among the endless ochre of the desert and the black hole marring its centre. I came to a stop, letting my sonic boom catch up with me.
The flight had barely taken a second, and I must have risen a few miles at least. How fast was that? What was my limit? Was there a limit?
I had no frame of reference as I was, but I felt comfortable in assuming Spells typically started at Level 1. Rank was harder to guess, but the bog-standard Levitate probably didn't come at SSS-Rank. How much spent training would you need to get a Spell up to these lofty heights? Months? Years? A lifetime?
It felt a bit like cheating, zooming around like this.
I found I didn't care.
Laughing like a maniac, I launched myself back down towards the ground, angling towards that oasis I'd spied in the distance.