Of course, the easiest way to clear the mission would have been to hold off on securing the city until the 100th day, but the Tower invariably punished those who used such loopholes, only technically clearing missions, with extremely low ratings. So, if we had to defend the city longer once we captured it, we’d do just that.

This time, our entire team led the charge on the assault. Ormin had arranged for troops and supplies assuming we’d need to besiege the place, but it was soon apparent that this wouldn’t be the case. Mewi and Anna protected our group, Arvallei and I picked off, or in the case of those who didn’t immediately go down, kept occupied the wall defenders, Ri’legh kept watch for any forces trying to sally from the wall and come at us, and Bruzigan was our living, breathing battering ram.

I’d known that Bruzigan was not just the most experienced, but the strongest of us, but his performance in breaching Bartisina’s gates illustrated it like nothing I’d seen from him before.

He’d brought out a mace as tall as I was for the occasion, and was bashing it against the city gate at a rate I never would have expected from him. Ormin was personally directing his forces, and the gate so quickly looked like it was going to buckle that that he sounded a little off guard when he ordered the charge.

The moment the gate fell, not only did a huge number of soldiers gathered attack us from a tight defensive formation, Ri’legh spotted another group, smaller but still large, charging from our right. “They’re trying to cut Ormin and the reinforcements off from us!”

“Shit!” said Anna, “Lheticus, can you handle that group while the rest of us keep the pressure on here?”

I’d stolen a look at the group in question. There were about 200 of them, none of whom I’d be able to one-shot judging from my experience fighting similar troops so far. But I could power through them enough so that Ormin’s troops could adapt and form the other half of a pincer. “I’ll have to pop Explosive Overclocking, but yes.”

“Do it!”

I broke off, and rushed to meet the formation charging at Ormin’s troops from the rear. I cast Lesser Rain of Fire, using it for its ostensible purpose for once instead of concentrating all the power on one target.

Well, it was definitely one hell of a distraction. Fortunately, Ormin was capable enough to take full advantage of the chance. Still, this had cost him and his reinforcements time—precious time during which the rest of my team had to deal with the forces trying to retake the gate alone.

I wasn’t actually worried though, but I did impress it upon them to hurry up. With Ormin’s arrival, the enemy forces holding a defensive position near the gate withdrew deeper into the city. We advanced swiftly but not hastily, Anna using the Light element Sense Life spell to anticipate ambushes and other urban warfare tactics.

There were a few such harassments, but it was soon clear that the vast majority of the remaining enemy forces had withdrawn to the fortified castle in the center of the city.

We couldn’t afford for this battle to become a protracted one. The four towns we’d previously taken barely cut off a quarter of the directions Shirisho reinforcements could come from. We needed to take the city, take the leader and the survivors as POWs, and restore the gate we’d busted down before they could mobilize.

Thanks to our stamina potions, we could keep up the pressure against the enemy keep even though we’d been doing heavy fighting from the start. And thanks to virtual world training, mental fatigue hardly affected us either. The only thing that did distract me was the thought of how much like literal fighting machines we’d become.

The natives were taking notice by now, too. In brief periods of calm in the fighting, Ormin’s troops had unhidden fear in their eyes when looking at us. Well, it could have more so been me. I was the “one man army” of the team capable of racking up truly hideous body counts beyond any of the others.

How many more Floors, how many more Areas of the Tower before I could stop killing people? Sure, they were NPCs who would snap back during the next challenge period, but if I started genuinely thinking that made it totally fine, that wasn’t something I’d come back from.

The answer in the immediate sense turned out to be “sooner than I expected.” After assaulting the castle for a couple hours, enemy bodies had piled up so much, while making so little progress with beating back our forces, that the leader actually surrendered to us without even taking the field himself. He was quite surprised that our terms only involved holding the city for the remainder of wartime.

With the special crew of workers Ormin had brought along, in addition to the battle mages and more typical support personnel, the gate would only take about half a day to restore. A scouting force from Shirisho took a desperate chance at disrupting the repairs, but they were easily driven off.

And so, our Floor mission was on track to be accomplished. Even without my previous warnings, everyone would have been on guard for the Floor to complicate things for us by now.

Eventually, though, something would happen that none of us were prepared for. Not at all.