No one had ever mapped out the full expanse of the First Floor before.
There were many settlements to be discovered. Some of them were created by Alice and others were created by various pioneers who sought to make inhabitable spaces for their respective parties. After all, up until now, finding parties was a crucial component of climbing the First Floor.
'Well, I'd say this is less of a party and more of an army by now.'
Thousands of people were divided, experiencing their own respective adventures across the First Floor. Some people may have been fighting swarms of carnivorous flesh. Others could've been tackling the challenge of dismantling the joints of bone behemoths.
Whatever they were doing did not matter now. As long as they were still alive, and had the will to keep surviving, they all ended up in the same place. The Accursed Port.
By ringing the bell on his own, Worthy had initiated the final stages of the First Floor, which was already beyond the point of repair. The bell tolled three times, and thousands of people descended from a rift in the sky and began populating the Prime Settlement.
Anyone who was not within the boundary of the city was transported inside. Meanwhile, those on the wall remained where they were. Though, they must've been shocked to see the entire length of the settlement's ground forces vanishing, only to reappear randomly throughout the settlement. Fortunately for them, the power behind the wall-mounted artillery suddenly picked up greatly after a black fluid poured out of the wall.
The defenders who were not transported had no time to stop and understand what was happening, because they had to keep their wits about them. Monsters remained pouring in from the sky, but were quickly being intercepted by a string of beams unleashed by the artillery, unlike anything they'd done before.
Although the beams also struck the advancing army of a million abominations, it only served to delay them temporarily. After a while, the abominations reached the wall and slowly, but surely, began a long crawl up the mountainous height of the rampart.
Meanwhile, Worthy was left to bask in the full scope of what had just unfolded. The Tower had sent an announcement to everyone, not just him, but to every living person left in the Tower who was transported.
[Climbers, you received an objective: Clear the First Floor.]
[Destroy the heart of the demoniac deity, and you will receive a tremendous bounty. Fail, and all life will be lost.]
Until now, there was only one meaning to clearing a tower. A person completed all of its challenges, climbed to the highest floor, and had their wish fulfilled. After that, the existence of the tower would persist until all of its mystical energy was used up, whatever that was. It was not rare for easy towers to crumble after dozens managed to make it all the way to the top. That was a part of what made them so mysterious in the first place.
Still, as far as Worthy knew, the entire foundation of the First Floor relied on the existence of the Blood Marauder, who swallowed the world before the tower existed.
'No, I have no evidence that the tower didn't exist. Alice made a gateway, and that she might've been born in a tower for all I'm aware of.'
Even if the world Alice was in existed inside of the tower, it didn't change anything. The Blood Marauder and its fragments were the challenge of the First Floor. An endless sea of blood terrors that sought only to consume and learn threatened those who entered to have their wish fulfilled.
By finishing off the deity, who stubbornly persisted after death, there would no longer be any challenges in the First Floor. Even if the swarm continued living after the Blood Marauder was completely dead, they would be finite in number and eventually go extinct.
They were being tasked with thoroughly cleansing the First Floor. There would be no challenge, and thus, it's possible there would be no means for anyone to escape if they were to enter.
Maybe there wouldn't be a First Floor to begin with, once every possible challenge was cleared.
That was why the Tower did something it'd never done before.
It grouped up every person on the Floor, giving humanity an army, and declaring that they must defeat a deity or die. What a cruel twist of fate. The task they'd been given was far more difficult than hunting for random, powerful monsters and killing them until a gateway emerged. It was outright impossible.
Furfur was a meager fragment of the Blood Marauder that used its sinister ability to possess others and tamper with their minds. Before his sinister power, and without the aid of War Reaver, the entirety of the Prime Settlement was quickly absorbed into the embrace of the pink fog that followed the entity. Closer to the heart of the Blood Marauder, there were bound to be Enlightened foes who were much stronger than the Demon of the Mind. Before such terrible might, they'd be crushed without a chance to defend themselves.
Esme, whose body was in the middle of a continuous process of regeneration, looked petrified on the ground beside the child.
Reaching out his hand, the child went to grab hold of her pair shoulder, and winced when their skin met.
"Ah! Damn, you're hot!"
Her flesh was impossibly hot, like she'd just been pulled from a vat of magma.
"Wait, not that way! Sorry!" The boy panicked and corrected his speech.
Whatever battle had unfolded in the heart of the Bone Mountain, it clearly was not something a child like him was meant to survive. In fact, there might not have been any survivors other than War, Esme, and Walkyr. Now that they were divided, without the assistance of the healer, their bodies were likely breaking apart wherever they'd been transported, rendering them as good as dead. In a more hopeful circumstance, they might only be crippled.
'Huh? I hope Mr. Cross is alright, I haven't seen him at all.'
Through labored breaths, Esme looked at the child and mustered her voice to speak. It looked like it was agonizing, like her throat had dried.
"W—What… going… on…?"
"Ah! Don't speak!" Worthy hurried to stop the woman from speaking. He never thought he'd see the healer in such a sorry state.
"Listen, I can't tell you what happened. I climbed a bell tower and rang a bell. The bell tower was like, right beside us before!"
Explaining everything to her would be a hassle, because there were still many things he didn't understand himself. Even though he'd pieced some things together, it wasn't enough for him to give any answers to others. Everything was based on assumptions and logical… reasonable deductions.
"You can't speak right now, so I won't ask what happened inside of that monster… Ah!" Worthy realized he had the tools to help the woman. Reaching into his satchel, which he'd been keeping a firm grip on ever since he slammed it into the bell, the child's hand dug around.
He shoved her arm deep into the bag, to the point where his shoulder was almost within it.
Delving into the disproportional space, Esme must've thought the child was going to do a magic trick. She'd rarely seen him truly reach for anything in that bag of his, so she was rather speechless, for reasons other than being unable to speak clearly.
Finally, he found what he was looking for. He pulled out a large, silver canteen of water. There was a rune engraved across the canteen, which was filled to the brim and beyond with water.
Just like how the backpack had a disproportionate space, so too did the water. Within it, the child had an almost infinite amount, which he hadn't even needed to use thanks to the unnatural means in which the Tower suppressed their need for food and water.
Of course, something Asterie brought up before came to mind. Though one might not have needed to eat often, consuming luxury meals was a good way to build an appetite (a deep craving at that), and that was what made one feel hungry. WIth that desire to eat would come all the effects of hunger with it.
Worthy handed the canteen to Esme, "Here, Ms. Esme. Drink as much as you want. I don't think it can run out. Even if it can, I could refill it later with a lot more…"
She was already downing wave upon wave of water from the canteen, like she'd been dying of thirst. She very well might've been, judging by how hot her body was.
Worthy watched as the woman quenched her thirst, drinking from the bottle for minutes at a time. By the time she finished, many people had already reached the wall and were moving to help stop the advance of the swarm outside.
"Ha!" Refreshed from the drink, Esme felt like she was in heaven. It was like she'd been dragged from the depths of a fiery abyss and then thrown into a cool oasis, relieving her body of the wrathful heat that once ate at her mercilessly.
"You're a life saver, Kid! Between War and whatever the hell that thing is, I didn't think I'd ever feel the fluids in my body evaporate."
"The thing?" The child asked, seeking more information about whatever was inside of the mountain of bones.
Esme nodded, taking another swig from the seemingly endless canteen. "Yeah. There was something crazy in there. It was messing with all of our Rewards, and it especially foiled War's enchantments. That was… an experience. The longer War fought it, it simply ate the energy and converted it into fuel. After some time, none of our help was doing anything, and a lot of people died due to the intense heat it started emitting."
'That explains why she's burning up. It doesn't explain what the hell that thing is, though.'
Seeking more clarity, the boy spoke again, "Well, what was it exactly?"
Esme stopped drinking from the canteen and studied the boy for a while. She looked him up and down with an expression that slowly melted into a compassionate one.
Now that he could see her eyes properly, Worthy could see the look of primal fear behind them. Whatever was at the core of the Bone Mountain, it was not something that humans should've set their eyes upon. It was ungodly, and the woman's lips quivered when she pieced the words to describe it.
"The Devil himself is in there, Kid. I don't even know how I would explain what I saw, but it shouldn't have existed."
"...The Devil…" In short, the Bone Mountain was undoubtedly something more dangerous than Furfur, at least physically. It suppressed many of War's ways of damaging it, and so the man was forced to simply continue fighting it, since if he did not, it would crash into the wall and render humanity's survival from thereon impossible.
There were some things better left unknown. If Esme couldn't describe it, then he'd just have to see it himself. Well, maybe not, sense it seemed like he'd have died just from being too close to the battle. Even Walkyr, with all his formidable runic markings, had no choice but to take a brief break once in a while, escaping the Bone Mountain to see what was happening outside, in a much cooler climate.
Sighing, the boy reached out and took the flask from her hand.
"Hot!" Flinching, the scorching heat had transferred to the steel exterior of the flask and burned the child's hands. Loudly, it clattered to the ground, and Esme could not suppress her laughter. The healer reached her hand up and slowly applied her healing to the young man's hands.
Esme looked relieved to look at the child. She was, as a matter of fact. There was something refreshing about the innocence of youth occupying the same hell as her. It gave her hope.
There wasn't a lot of that nowadays.