If I hadn't already figured out that something wasn't right here, my impact with the mountain would have spelled it out for me in big, glowing letters.
They would have read: WHEN A HUMAN BEING AND A MOUNTAIN COLLIDE AT GREAT SPEED, THE MOUNTAIN IS NOT SUPPOSED TO COME OFF WORSE.
But that's exactly what happened. I couldn't be too mad about it, since the alternative was my body becoming a red smear about one twentieth of the way up the great rock, but it had implications I didn't like much.
Anyway, it went like this: thoroughly distracted by my ridiculously high stats that not even the most dedicated gamer on Earth could grind to in an average lifetime, I hit the mountain head-first before the possibility had even occurred to me. In my defence, I was moving very fast. Too fast to react, obviously. So fast that it felt, to me, like the world went dark for a second, like someone had flicked the lights off then back on again. So fast, I didn't even really understand what had happened until I looked back with a frown.
That was when I saw the tallest mountain in the range that had previously been hundreds of miles from my starting point receding behind me. More importantly, the upper half of said mountain was now toppling towards the ground in agonising slow-motion, since the lower half had been reduced to rubble, throwing up an enormous cloud of dust and debris.
Achievement Unlocked: Moving Mountains!
You destroyed an entire mountain in a single move!
Reward: Tectonic Annihilation (SSS++)
Spell already owned.
Luckily—or unluckily, depending on your perspective—I didn't get long to dwell on that baffling scenario for one simple reason: the mountain I had crashed into was not a solitary rock standing alone in the middle of nowhere. It was part of a what people generally refer to as a range.
The ensuing moments were deeply unpleasant.
No matter how many mountains I crashed through, my silly little monkey brain seemed unwilling to accept that my fleshy human body was going to continue drilling straight through these giant formations of stone like they weren't even there. Looking ahead, seeing mountains rush towards me over and over, smashing through them, the light flickering on and off like a strobe, my subconscious mind seemed unwilling to drop the certainty that this next mountain was going to be the last one, and I was going to make an unpleasant transition to puddlehood post-haste, no matter how much evidence to the contrary was on show.
Naturally, I spent all of this time screaming. Exhilaration, terror, awe, panic, triumph, and mortal dread were having a royal rumble throw down in my psyche, and I couldn't rightly tell you which one of them was winning. Exhilaration piledrived terror into the canvas, only for panic to launch a flying drop-kick from the top ropes, countered by awe with an RKO out of nowhere. The commentators surely didn't know what to make of the bout. I sure as fuck didn't.
My eyes were wide open throughout, of course. There was never a chance of me closing them, even if fear won out over thrill. I knew I couldn't miss a moment of this.
Eventually, the last mountain crumbled behind me, and I found myself soaring through the open air again. Looking back, it seemed like half the mountain range had been reduced to rubble. Below, I realised I hadn't actually escaped the mountain range at all; I'd risen above it, great snowy peaks steadily falling away beneath me, fairly close at first, but the gap grew with every second.
Achievement Unlocked: Landscaper!
You single-handedly rearranged an entire landscape!
Reward: Devastating Earthquake (SSS++)
Spell already unlocked.
I was kind of surprised how quiet it all was, but then again, perhaps I shouldn't have been. I was definitely travelling faster than the speed of sound. I knew what that looked like from the sky—a friend of mine had managed to secure a ride-along on a jet for me, a few months back.
The ground below me was blurring by way faster than that. In fact, I was pretty sure my little rearrangement of the mountain range hadn't even slowed me down. And I'd been hitting the mountains closer to their base than their peaks at first. I'd surely drilled through dozens of miles of rock.
When I'd leaped from that little hill I'd started on, I'd been angling myself slightly upwards with the intent of hurdling a little bump in the grass in front of me. And even after crashing through so many mountains I'd lost count, I was still rising, keeping that upwards momentum.
A giddy feeling started bubbling in my chest, and I let it rise through my throat, then out through my mouth. If the resulting laugh was a little unhinged, at least there was no one around to hear it and hurry away from me while keeping their eyes averted.
By the time the laughter ran its course, my grin threatened to escape the bounds of my cheeks. I spread my arms out wide and whooped at the top of my voice. My eyes were wide open, unblinking, taking in the world.
"This is incredible!" I yelled, flapping my arms and flailing my legs in glee. It seemed the positive feelings had won the royal rumble.
Just how far would this one jump take me? How much space did this so-called Eternal Tower have? It had said there were quadrillions of souls in the first floor, right? That meant it had to be an absolutely enormous space.
How many jumps would it take me to clear the whole thing? I couldn't bloody wait to find out.
~~~
An hour or so later, the novelty of flying through the air in a straight line was rather starting to wear off. For a while, watching the scenery flash by below had been more than enough entertainment. Seeing the world go from forest to mountain to desert to ocean back to forest again was fun at first, as much for the awe at the strength it had taken to make this leap as anything else.
But I kept rising higher and higher, to the point that the details of the ground far below started to look like little more than smudges of colour. Worse, I discovered that rising high enough in the air lead to my progress relative to the ground appearing slower, even though I wasn't really slowing down.
I had to slow down eventually, right? Surely? Physics or whatever. Infinite acceleration simply wasn't possible.
But, as I'd already noted, this situation was distinctly supernatural. Physics didn't have to apply. Not in the way I understood them to function. We were dealing with metaphysics now. Magical science, bitch. The rule book had been set on fire and chucked out of the window the moment I went from freefall to a black void with nothing in between.
Thus, it was entirely possible that I wasn't going to slow down without outside intervention. Or inside intervention, I supposed. I didn't imagine there was much up here that was going to be able to slow me down. Even the clouds were far below me at this point.
So. I had to stop myself somehow. If I wanted to stop, that was. Losing my momentum would mean falling, and I was quite a long way up. Considering I'd just smashed my way through a few hundred mountains without getting a scratch on my godly bod, that shouldn't have been much of a concern. Hell, I'd been freediving before this Eternal Tower nonsense started up.
But, well. Monkey brain. Heights scary. Doubly so without a parachute. Even wreaking untold destruction on an ancient geological formation wasn't enough to overcome the primal fear of falling from a great height.
And that just made it better. Fear was the emotion from which adrenaline was born, and there was nothing I wanted more.
Once I'd realised that falling from this height would be scary, there was no other choice.
I had to do it.
I had a good idea how I was going to do it, too. If I was strong enough to launch myself for what had to be hundreds of miles like this, quantified as Level 99999999999-plus or whatever the hell that absurd number was, then there had to be more I could do.
That jump hadn't even been full strength. My intention had been little more than a burst of energy to carry me over a mound of dirt that was barely a foot tall.
Grinning, I made a fist and cocked my right arm—my strong arm—back, loading up a punch that put all my upper body strength into it, just like Vassy from that shady gym in Russia had taught me. It was a little awkward because I couldn't plant my feet and was essentially punching over my head, but that was fine.
I rotated my upper body as I swung with all my might, mentally and physically throwing every bit of strength I had into the motion. The world slowed down.
Aiming for a random point ahead of me, I punched the air itself.
And came to a complete, instant stop.
The effect was cataclysmic. A sound louder than any clap of thunder roared out. Below, the clouds raced away as the supersonic shockwave of my attack scoured the skies. Further down, I saw the rocky formations I'd been flying over flatten. The ground went from a craggy grey expanse to a perfect plateau that stretched for miles around. It was like seeing a crumpled piece of paper returned to a pristine sheet, straight out of a brand-new ream.
I blinked at the sight, then winced. Hope there's nothing living down there. If there had been, there definitely wasn't anymore. Oops.
Then I started falling, of course. My punch ploy had worked perfectly. The all-too familiar swoop in my stomach came first, closely followed by the rapid acceleration of my heart as it climbed up my throat. Adrenaline began pumping, throbbing in my veins like my entire body was a stubbed toe.
Grinning, I tucked my arms close to my sides and straightened out, aiming myself downwards.
Air rushed past my face, icy and sharp, raking over the exposed areas of my skin as I plummeted at somewhere around 200MPH. I barely felt it.
Exhilaration suffused me, wrapping me in its loving embrace, and I whooped with joy. I started kicking my legs like I was swimming the breast stroke, accelerating past terminal velocity, doubling it, tripling it, quadrupling it. Soon, the sound of the wind faded again, and I was sure I'd passed the sound barrier once more.
The ground was far away, but rushing closer every second. The artificially cloudless sky my momentum-halting punch had created meant I could see for miles all around. There was no curvature to this place. Just flat expanses in every direction, with jagged lines of mountain ranges far off.
Soon, the ground was close enough to make out details. Or, well, lack thereof. I didn't really understand the physics behind it, but it must have taken a truly absurd amount of force to flatten the ground so thoroughly, especially when I'd been easily several miles in the sky when I'd done it.
A chuckle escaped me. This shit was so ridiculous. And awesome.
As the ground got closer, I had to make a decision. Erring on the side of caution and telling myself I would be able to do more death-defying activities in the future, I started throwing out weaker punches to slow my descent. Didn't want to risk crashing into the ground at great speed on the off chance that the invincibility with which I'd smashed through those mountains was some kind of gimmick.
Slowing myself down was tricky, taking some trial and error as I accidentally launched myself back upwards a few times, but eventually my feet touched down on the ground, having managed to bring myself to a stop only a few metres up.
I'd quite thoroughly messed up the smoothness of the ground for a few miles around, turning it back into a cracked mess of rock, but meh. Whatever.
A new panel popped up, glowing golden text proudly displaying a new message.
Achievement Unlocked: Migrator!
You flew over 10,000 kilometres in a single trip!
Reward: Flight of the World-Traveller
Spell already unlocked.
I could only laugh. Ten-thousand miles. What the shit.
"I think it's time I gave you a closer look," I said as I reached out for the white panel.