Universe's End

Chapter 213: The Climb Pt. 1

Popping through the portal, Rory and Zoey temporarily lost their bearings as they found themselves transported. Stumbling through, it took Rory only a moment to ground himself as he looked around.

“Well, ain’t this something.”

“Whoa,” Zoey said as she likewise got her bearings. “Trippy.”

They were in an endless skyline, a plain blue expanse above them, with an almost fog-like white beneath them. In the distance, impossibly far away, and yet somewhere within the same realm of ‘existence’, seven needle-like spires rose so high that the tips seemed to almost bend toward the glowing orb in the sky, a single sun.

As for their location, they were also on one of the needle-like spires. They were at the lowest point, a platform jutting from the side, and a glance backward showed nothing but an endless drop behind them. Ahead of them was a pathway that seemed to wind its way up the massive spire, a mountain path made by a sadist.

“Fun,” Zoey said as she crossed her arms. “Can you get a sense of how far away those other spires are?”

“No,” Rory said, which was an answer in itself. Usually, if he could see something, he could make at least a basic assumption for how far away, but it was as if space meant nothing here, an inch or a thousand miles one and the same.

“Want to take a bet that our Kingly fucker is at the top?”

“Good chances,” Rory said, agreeing with the obvious.

“Then we should probably get a move on.”

The climb was a test of patience, Rory had realized early on.

Usually, when one climbed a massive spire, one would expect monsters or traps or something.

Nada. Nothing. Zilch. They spent months, if not a little over a year, climbing the winding road upward.

All that, to reach only a single third of the way up.

One year, four months of climbing later, thankfully, they didn’t seem to hunger or dehydrate during the climb; they finally found something new. Rounding a side of the spire, their feet stalled out as they came face to face with a big fuck off-sized gate blocking their path.

“Finally,” Zoey sighed, her voice hoarse after weeks since they’d last spoken. “Most boring adventure to date.”

“Please don’t jinx us,” Rory sighed.

“Jinxes don’t exist, that’s superstitious crap,” Zoey responded, waving it off.

“We literally are in a magical universe with Eon overseeing shit. It’s not superstitious.” Rory retorted.

“I… fair,” Zoey said, surrendering the point. “Anyway, gate?”

“Gate,” Rory agreed as he inspected the oversized gate. The two didn’t even bother trying to slip around the gate; that sort of obvious ploy would have gotten them smacked down for sure.

As Rory looked closer at the gate, several things became apparent.

First, the gate was a puzzle of some sort.

Second, it was a puzzle revolving around ‘circuits.’

Third…. Rory already knew this would take some time.

Just for good measure, Rory touched the gate as an influx of information was dumped into his mind with a grunt.

“Damn,” Rory muttered.

“What is it, Puzzle Master?”

“So, some of this has been translated into Zoey speak-”

“Not sure what you mean by that.”

“-but basically, it’s a twenty-by-twenty grid with varying circuits that must be formed. We’ve got a certain amount of ‘moves’ allowed to form a circuit, after which…. Something? Something should happen.”

“What’s something?” Zoey asked.

“No idea, that’s why I said something. We get forty ‘moves’ to form the connection, and a limited number of ‘connectors’ of varying types, straight line, quad connection, etc.”

“Uh-huh,” Zoey said, beginning to lose interest. “So… the problem?”

“I don’t know which of the ‘wall nodes’ is active or not. So I have to brute force it, testing each connection one by one.”

“Aren’t you Mister Cognition? Shouldn’t that be easy to figure out?”

“I thought I was the Puzzle Master?”

“Multiple titles,” Zoey said, responding easily to the banter.

“Well, to answer the actual question, we’re talking about a degree of permutations that is baffling. Plus, it could be multi-stage.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I might be at this for a while.”

“Alright, so we wait. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that once I officially start, I have a feeling life isn’t going to be so peaceful.”

“Monsters?”

“Monsters,” Rory confirmed.

“Fuck, well, I guess I’ll keep them off your back. So, tell me when you’re ready.”

“Ready.”

“Okay, I didn’t actually expect you to say that instantly,” Zoey rolled her eyes. “Give me a moment to ready myself.”

“Need any gems?” Rory asked.

“Nah, not like I’ve used any of the resupply you gave me before we left.”

“Right, right,” Rory nodded as he took a breath. “Good to go now?”

“Good to go, just needed the mental preparation,” Zoey laughed as her shield appeared alongside a one-handed crossbow that rather niftily could be slotted into the top of the shield like a mobile turret.

“Three…. two….one,” Rory counted down before he mentally ‘inserted’ himself into the puzzle door.

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While Rory focused on the door puzzle, Zoey felt a slight tremor through the spire. Given how large the spire was, that meant a quite sizeable amount of energy had just been mobilized.

Holding her position behind Rory, Zoey felt the march, the thunder of feet nearing them. Not even questioning where they’d appeared from, Zoey waited.

“Well fuck,” Zoey sighed as they finally appeared, visible further down the spire and quickly rounding their way up the pathway.

Monsters. A fucking lot of monsters. Hundreds, thousands, how many was impossible to tell, an endless horde. The only good news was that the front of the crowd was low-tier sevens, with the stronger monsters much further back.

Yeah, crossbow ain’t doing shit.

Dropping the crossbow back into her inventory, Zoey hefted her shield from where she had nestled against a groove in the ground below. In her right arm, a mace appeared as she gave it a twirl. She wasn’t the weapon expert that Rory was, but you didn’t spend as much time with someone called the Architect and not pick up some general weapon skills.

Both literally and figuratively.

Descending only a hundred feet of path away from Rory, Zoey took a deep breath, readying herself as the first of the endless horde appeared. Throwing herself forward as soon as they had appeared, her mace began to sweep about.

“Grind Down the Weak,” Zoey called out, activating the skill. It wasn’t an ascension skill, just one she had picked up over the years. If her durability was higher than her opponent’s, as well as her tier, and she was using a bludgeoning weapon, she could add the ‘difference’ between the two as a sort of secondary conceptual damage, or whatever explanation Rory would prattle on about.

In ‘Zoey-Speak,’ the bigger the durability gap, the better she could splatter them.

Unlike Rory, who couldn’t gain combat skills, Zoey had plenty of random one-off combat skills. Most were essentially useless, at least against powerful foes where only her best was worth bringing out, but against fodder? Something like Grind Down the Weak was perfect for fodder; it was in the god's damn name.

And so, Zoey fell into a battle-trance, stemming the eternal tide of monsters for how long, she wasn’t sure. Minutes? Easily. Hours? Probably. It was only when days had begun to pass that Grind Down the Weak felt as if it were doing less and less, the monsters having reached high tier seven, that she finally dismissed the mace back into her inventory, a new weapon replacing it, a two-handed axe that she held one-handed, her skin turning steel as she swapped her attributes.

“Alright, back to work.”

Rory was mystified and intrigued all at once. Spending Eon knew how long working on the circuit, Rory had realized something.

It wasn’t a circuit; it was a skill structure. Rory hadn’t realized it at first because of how ‘empty’ it had been, but as he slowly filled the puzzle in, the similarities became undeniable.

A skill structure, or is there maybe some fundamental bedrock foundation of concepts, and this is merely how my mind interprets it?

Either way, Rory found himself mystified and intrigued because whatever ‘skill’ was baked into the gate, it was rather confoundingly complex. Yet, it was expected to be solved in forty ‘connections.’ Complex, but stupidly efficient.

Skill alterations, Rory had dabbled in the ‘art,’ but it was very much an art, then a science, from what he understood. What seemed true in one place wasn’t always true in another. Sure, the rules were always ‘standardized’ within a ‘region’ of a skill, but those rules would go out the window the minute you moved on. Only the guiding concepts remained anchored.

As time went on and Rory made progress, dedicating every available mental thread to the effort, he examined the growing ‘web’ structure of the skill.

Chain. It’s a chain concept.

On its own, it wasn’t even really a ‘skill,’ in fact, it was basically useless for real-world application. In the context of the gate, the ‘chain’ structure would facilitate the connections that bring the gate down.

Or something along those lines, it was difficult to explain in words things he was understanding through conceptual ‘resonance’ like a blind person describing what they ‘saw’ in their mind when explaining words.

While it was typically useless in real-world applications, Rory did find potential lessons, mostly in understanding what a ‘chain’ even was. He’d often projected chains of pneuma in the past to bind monsters, but against powerful monsters, such chains were easily shed.

But, using this, when applying a magic circle to the projection of chains, he could mentally envision the ‘structure’ of the chain concept within the very runes of the magic circle, which would-

Getting distracted.

Putting aside thoughts of what he could do with such discovered knowledge, Rory instead focused his attention solely on the gate. With all his mental threads dedicated to figuring it out, he couldn’t spare any to keep himself aware of what was happening in the ‘real’ world. Not that it mattered much, he had complete faith and trust in Zoey.

Starting, restarting, and doing it all over again, Rory progressed not through sudden, easy epiphany but purely by mechanically grinding the process out, trial and error done hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times.

Until, at least, the final piece was clicked into place and Rory sensed something akin to a grinding of cogs deep within the structure.

“Bingo!” Rory shouted as he finally withdrew from his work, turning around to check on Zoey.

Well, I must have been busy for some time.

Blood and gore painted everything

for hundreds of feet down the winding pathway.The artist? Zoey, of course. She was utterly drenched; it was impossible to tell how much of it was from her and how much of it was from the monsters.

Currently, she was scuffling with three base-tier-eight monsters. They were utterly average, not alpha variants or anything even remotely close. The fact that Zoey was struggling to keep up, her body being used as a punching bag as she barely kept to her feet, told Rory she’d been at this for some time.

Sighting the monsters, Rory already had his staff out as moments later, three metal rails shot forward and instantly ended the beasts with well-placed projectiles to their heads, the resulting exploding heads preventing any regeneration shenanigans.

“Having fun?” Rory called out to Zoey, gifting her a moment’s reprieve, the endless sea of monsters that had been holding back out of sheer space limitations already surging forward once more.

Rory knew Zoey was tired when she said nothing, instead just flipping him the bird.

Right, that’s the sign to get going.

Fwiphing his hand like he was a certain friendly, neighborhood hero, a thread of pneuma lashed forward, snagging Zoey as Rory heaved back, yanking her away from the rushing tide of monsters.

Hauling Zoey over his shoulder, as tier eight, the weight of a small human woman and her admittedly heavy armor, was nothing more tiresome than a small purse, Rory turned around and charged forward, through the gate which had seemed to dematerialize. The horde of monsters attempted to give chase, but where the gate had been ‘lowered’ for Rory and Zoey, the same wasn’t true for the monsters. Slamming into the gate, the monsters howled, as instantly a wave of disintegration passed through the horde. It was rather dramatic, and in Rory’s opinion, a little over the top, but that didn’t stop Rory from watching.

When the wave of disintegration finally passed, Rory dropped Zoey like a sack of potatoes as he whistled.

“Nifty,”

“Ow,” Zoey finally muttered from where she lay.

“Oh, you’re alive.”

“Ow,” Zoey muttered once more.

The fact that she wasn’t already beginning to heal told Rory just how much she’d exhausted herself. Seeing no reason to force a march, he dropped to the ground next to her, cross-legged.

Sitting with his chin in his hands as he waited, nearly three days passed before Zoey finally drunkenly raised herself to a seated position.

“I had to fight for a week straight,” Zoey glowered at Rory.

“That’s how long it took me?” Rory asked, surprised. “Huh, didn’t expect that. They didn’t seem that tough at least.”

“There is a quality to quantity,” Zoey grumbled. “I don’t even know how many I killed. And the worst part? Not a lick of ascension energy. They weren’t even real monsters, they were... I don’t know, projections, sort of like what you do. But for all intents and purposes, still monsters.”

“That’s rough, buddy,” Rory said with a sagely nod.

“Screw off.”

“I’d rather not,” Rory said as he looked over the side.

“Did you at least get a good reward out of it?” Zoey asked, clearly referring to his experience tackling the gate.

“Ehhh, sort of, not really? More like I think I picked up the blueprint of a concept to add into other stuff potentially.”

“So, no uber rare material or item?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, fucking figures. I miss the days when I got handed shit for free. Ever since I started hanging out with you, it’s like Eon has gotten stingy.”

“It’s because I can make better stuff with the raw materials given than what you’d be gifted.”

“Don’t bring logic and facts when I’m trying to whine,” Zoey jabbed a finger into his side as she slowly stood up. “Alright, I’m good to go.”

“You sure?” Rory asked.

“Yeah, took a while for my durability to ‘reboot’ after being so thoroughly exhausted.”

“Understandable,” Rory said as he rose a second later. He’d experienced similar before, such as when he pushed his cognition too far and was sentenced to brain prison in his mental palace.

“If that gate was what, a third of the way up?” Zoey asked, glancing back at the gate and how far they’d climbed relative to the spire. “Want to place a bet we’re going to see some sort of roadblock every third of the way?”

“Seems like a good guess to me.”

“God damn lovely,” Zoey bemoaned. “Next gate? You handle any monsters. I don’t care if it takes me three months to solve whatever puzzle it is.”

“Really? You’d want to spend three months on one puzzle?”

Zoey’s face darkened for a moment as if she’d suddenly bitten into something better.

“On second thought, I’ll stick with the monsters.”