“Ah, thank you, Flow. And good morning to you, Elach.” Shar said with an awkward smile, her mouth splitting apart for a split second before fusing together once more. “Today’s the day, which means we must be fully prepared to spend a week in the wilderness if we can’t find another way to ascend to the twenty-ninth floor.”

Elach stepped in beside Shar as she moved to make room for him at the overcrowded table. She handed him a bundle of twine and directed him to tie up a tarp that they’d picked out last night. “So what’re we supposed to do for a week? I don’t think it’ll be that hard to survive, especially since we can take whatever we want through the threshold, so there’s gotta be more to it.”

“I agree.” Shar grunted as she ripped a cloth sack along the seam. “The instructions from the guidebook have been incredibly detailed up until this point, and continue to be for the twenty-ninth and thirtieth floors, but the survival floor has only a single paragraph describing it.”

The guidebook was a little too detailed for Elach’s liking. Thanks to its writings they’d cleared six floors in two days, none of which had provided anything near a challenge. Not even when he’d separated from Shar to speed their progress up; the Issi beasts that had attacked him went down without a struggle. Anything that wasn’t intelligent or powerful enough to free itself from his Issi chaining technique died without knowing what had doomed it. And considering that floor twenty-three had forced them to navigate a giant hive of squirrel-sized hornets, he’d doomed a whole lot of Issi beasts.

Shar pulled a knot tight and yanked it twice to test its strength, nodding in satisfaction when it held. “I have been trying to come up with a solid plan all night, attempting to use the lack of information on the floor as a hint to what the floor will entail, and I think I’ve come up with something that we can safely use.”

“Let’s hear it, then.” Elach said after Shar didn’t immediately launch into her plan.

She took a deep breath and set down the knife she’d started fiddling with, resting her palms on the table and leaning into them. “I looked into some… records.” She hesitantly said, and Elach rolled his eyes.

“More clearance level nine?” He asked in a mutter, but didn’t look over to see her answer. He already knew. “I’m guessing you checked how long Prisoner took to clear floor twenty-eight?”

“Yes, exactly. And unfortunately, he was absent for exactly one week. If he couldn’t get through sooner, then we don’t have a chance.” Elach felt her sigh more than heard, the table shaking as it traveled down her arms. “Every moment we don’t have that man with us is a moment the Gilded Night is in danger.”

“You sure put a lot of stock in Prisoner. Is he actually that strong?” Elach asked.

“The Emperor personally commends his strength.” Shar stated with an undertone of uncertainty. “Which makes him, and by extension, you, dangerous. A power that has managed to go overlooked is terrifying, and to be completely unknown even more so.”

“He seemed more weird than strong to me.” Elach chuckled. “So, what’s your plan? Unless ‘we have to clear the floor anyways’ was your plan.”

“It was not.” Shar said. “From looking ahead at future floors, a survival floor appears only once in a group of twenty floors. And it only appears as the last, second-last, or third from the last floor in its group. If it is not the last, the floors after it are quite different from the ones before. Look.”

The guidebook slammed onto the table as Shar excitedly flipped through it. “Take our situation. The floors we’ve cleared up until now are a constant with the forest, wind, and height motifs of this group of floors. After that we have the survival floor, then two final floors before we ascend pillar groups once more. The first of which has next to nothing to do with anything that had come before it, and the latter which has no comparisons whatsoever.”

Elach followed Shar’s tapping finger and read the brief overview of the twenty-ninth floor. “The winds have died down and the forest is nothing but a fleeting memory. Something is devouring everything that this beautiful place stands for, and unless it is stopped, passing through will be impossible. The destroyed portion of the citrus cone forest holds the clues you need to find the creature, or creatures, responsible.”

Shar flipped over four pages of instructions and maps, then tapped on the description of the thirtieth floor. Elach read this description to himself, feeling Flow listening in on his thoughts as they came. ‘You’ve found the creature’s lair, near a small city with enough lights to spill out and blind the rest of the world piece. It retreats there during the night, when the city lights are too bright for its overly sensitive eyes, while devastating the citrus cone forest during the day. End it.’

“Do you see?” Shar asked expectantly, her slit mouth curling into an excited smile.

He thought he got the gist of what Shar was insinuating, but if he didn’t ask, he wouldn’t know for sure. “I think so. Whatever we did before the survival floor is going to factor into what’s on that floor, right?”

Hands curled around Elach’s forearm, and he lifted his eyes to meet Shar’s. “That’s the exact same conclusion I came to. So we need to craft a smaller version of each of the strategies we used on the other floors, as it seems to stand that we’ll be seeing them again on floor twenty-eight.”

“But we also need to prepare for being unprepared.” Elach pointed out. “If we go there and find that it’s nothing like the other floors, we don’t want to be caught with our pants down.”

“No, we don’t.” Shar agreed. “Which is why we’re packing so heavily. If it turns out to be a simple ‘survive seven days and nights’ scenario, we hunker down and create a small fortress of our own. But if it is what we expect, and we’ll have to make use of all the other floors’ knowledge, we can stow away the less mobile parts of our baggage and move light.”

Elach tried to find another flaw in Shar’s logic, but he knew less than her about how the pillar worked. For all he knew she could be telling him exactly how it worked, but hiding it as a hunch. He shrugged off his doubts and finished packing while discussing the little details with Shar, feeling Flow buzzing with excitement as they hopped around the preparation lodge. One week, and he’d get to see Prisoner again.

And, just maybe, he’d finally understand what was going on.

Getting into the twenty-eighth floor was simple. An underground tunnel led to a long rope that, when climbed, let out onto a round platform that was built around a tree much like all the others. Except this one was lime green, and it had a powerful Issi field around it. Elach pressed his hand to the barrer and felt it pushed up with an insistent force, as if he was touching a waterfall that cascaded upwards. Shar hauled herself up moments later, reaching out a hand that Elach grasped onto to help pull her the rest of the way up.

“It’s certainly different.” Shar said with a smile in her voice, looking down on the treetops from the lone monster that towered over the rest. “Red and green have been added to the mix, and some colours have leached onto nearby trees. Oh, and look, they have textures aside from smooth now!” She gestured down at a tree that was mostly yellow, aside from a crown of green that snaked down it in small veins. “That one has ridges, and there’s another that has a myriad of bumps, and that orange and red one has a rounded tip instead of a sharp one!”

“I didn’t think you’d get so excited over slightly different trees.” Elach chuckled. Shar’s enthusiasm was almost as infectious as Y’talla’s.

“I’ve never seen anything like these.” She gestured broadly down. “All the others I could find somewhere to purchase, but these are completely new to me.” Her tongue darted out of the corner of her mouth, making the long trek along her face. “I wonder how they taste.”

Elach flourished his hand, a chain wrapping around his palm with the motion. “We have an entire week to kill. Let’s go find out.”

His feet slammed down next to a lumpy green tree with swirls of red along the bottom of the cone, a scent like boiled feet smacking him in the face when he took a deep breath. Flow carried Shar down half a minute later, who dropped down into the zone of awful smell with a scowl etched onto her face.

“Maybe it tastes better than it smells?” She offered, and before Elach could get a word out, she’d split the tree right down the middle. The peel slid off to reveal a translucent white fruit inside, wrapped around a spit of the swirling wood like a popsicle. And the smell was unbearable.

“Oh, eternals, that is horrible!” Shar laughed, wrapping red mist around herself to mask the stench. Elach didn’t have any abilities that let him follow suit, and his shirt could only block so much of the vile stench. It was as if a decomposing corpse had been drenched in the strongest citrus perfume, and was then set upon by maggots made out of rotten cheese. “Though it could still be delicious…”

Elach opened his mouth to talk, and retched as the scent invaded him. “Oh, no. Uughh… you’re not seriously going to put that in your body, are you?”

Shar shrugged helplessly and dug her fingers into the massive fruit, scooping out a handful of jelly-like flesh in a spray of clear juice. Elach had to hold in his breakfast at the intensified aroma, but Shar didn’t seem to be affected in the slightest. She split her face to reveal her mouthful of shards, taking a small nibble out of the translucent glob of fruit that smelled like death.

“Hmm.” She murmured as she chewed. “I wasn’t expecting this much Issi to come from a fruit, but this rivals most recovery tonics. It tastes like I assume food from the hells would taste, but as a medicinal additive, it could carve out a significant niche.”

“If you could even get it down without vomiting.” Elach muttered, barely opening his mouth as he spoke. The air was tainted. Shar stepped closer with her handful of sickfruit, and he backed away the exact same number of steps. “Don’t get closer with that evil. I’m warning you. I’ll chain out of here.” Elach said in a panic, shooting glances over his shoulder as Shar pressed forward with a smile. “I mean it. You’ll be all alone here, with your sickfruit, and you’ll miss my company so much that you’ll start crying.”

His back hit something slightly soft, and he panicked. Shar closed in, her grin showing that she was enjoying this far too much. “Alright, you win! I won’t run! Just throw that stuff away! Please!”

“I’m not suffering that taste alone.” Shar laughed with a malicious grin, her Issi mist circling around Elach’s torso. It felt like his existence was on edge, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end just like before something awful happened. She ripped a smaller chunk off the glob and held it between two fingers, closing in on Elach with the piece of solid disgust now inches from his covered mouth. “We have to find this tree’s seeds, and the scent stopped affecting me once I ate the fruit. It’s just a moment of suffering, Elach. You can do that, can’t you?”