Things eased off a little after the first day. It wasn’t long before Anna and I went back to drilling separately—we needed to synergize with the whole team even more than with each other, so it wouldn’t be good to get us too used to working as a duo.

After the 3rd day, the arrangements for an expert Chef to bring out the Elurian Avocado’s Intuition boosting properties were complete. Even though my dislike of avocados made it barely more pleasant than training, it was still a gourmet meal so I did my best to enjoy it. I was instructed to take my time with this meal—some of the benefits would be lost if I “processed” it too fast.

In the end, it wasn’t that bad. After all, avocados weren’t really an ingredient that could be made the main focus of a meal, so the emphasis in preparation was more along the lines of ensuring the other ingredients didn’t dilute its stat-boosting property. And the bonus was more than I’d expected—10 whole points. Even Bruzigan was surprised and impressed, saying it was a rare result.

With that much Intuition, I was able to add some more interesting fire spells to my repertoire—Fiery Deflection, Flame Javelin, and Firestorm—the last of which was the least Intuition intensive AOE Fire spell. Bruzigan also instructed them to add the weak spell “Control Flame” as well. It was a total joke as an attack—my ways of using ordinary fire such as with my Firewall maneuver weren’t going to keep being so effective for long—but casting it was apparently excellent for training one’s “mental power,” the Psych stat that allowed mages to do new and interesting things to spells once released, a key component of the Psionic Pyromancer class.

After a week had passed, Mewi had made good progress on the attribute enhancing training courses. It looked like he would enter the 1st Floor around the same time I entered the 2nd. At that time, the custom Combat Suit the pro-federation Alliance had prepared based on my class, attributes, and damage-dealing team role was finished. Edwin sent a representative, a woman, to go over it with me.

[FAS-05 Suit: Lheticus]

Silver

Mana +1000

+1 Exploding Fireball

+1 Exploding Fire Arrow

Special Passive

Enhances the potency of mind-affecting spells, increasing the success rates by half.

Special Active

Doubles damage and mana cost of Fire spells for 5 minutes.

Cooldown: 12 hours

“It’s also fully loaded with potion and pill injectors that will automatically take effect when your mana, health, or stamina need refilling. The balance of supply is weighted toward mana potions, of course. And, as you see from the Storage passive, it incorporates a higher grade External Mana Battery than the one you found, with a capacity of 100,000 points. With this suit, plus that helmet, you’ll be very well kitted out.”

What followed was more training to get used to fighting with my equipment on. The hardest part was adapting to the Amplifier Helmet’s HUD. It gave me my full range of vision, but it was still easy to get distracted at first. Well, if I’m going to be a superhero, at least I won’t be a stupid looking one. The flame motif is cool and appropriate, and they even made sure the suit matches the helmet!

“But am I really going to need THAT much mana so soon?”

“Maybe not so soon,” they admitted, “but it’s a matter of forward planning. Your spells might not be quite so taxing now, but later on you’ll get into the mind manipulation aspects of your class, and the mana costs of those spells tend toward severe, as do the Intuition costs for learning them.”

“Very thoughtful of you. I’m impressed. At the entire ‘combat suit’ concept, actually. All these abilities and the restoring item delivery system thing as well? This whole thing is game breaking as hell, and that is a compliment.”

She looked nonplussed for a moment. Not everyone can appreciate such lingo, I guess.

“Grosstin is expecting great things from you, as a member of the alliance team.”

“I’ll do my best to deliver.”

“That’s exactly what we’re counting on, Mr. Lheticus.”

Training continued. Three days before the minimum deadline for me to enter a floor, Mewi entered the first floor. An hour later, I sighed with relief to see him appear in the High difficulty exit room for Floor 1 in the Pantheon. He looked almost as run ragged as I’d been after my Extreme run, but he smiled and gave a thumbs-up when he saw me.

By then, I had leveled up Lesser Fireball and the normal Fire Arrow to the maximum of 10, and everything else to 6 or more. Lesser Fireball gained a jump in damage as its special bonus, and Fire Arrow’s defense-piercing improved. Combat training at night was also down to mostly standard drills for an objectively sane amount of time, with most of the rest being taken up by studying for the second floor. The next round of the survival game, it turned out, had potential to get pretty complicated.

We also went over my time in the first round. I left some things out, like the heavy use of Power of Imagination to take out an entire gang, but when I got to the part about AzurePrincess, Bruzigan frowned. “You’ve picked a troublesome route for yourself, Lheticus,” he said, “the Extreme mission for the 2nd floor can be tricky, but it’s not really a problem. The 3rd floor though, is made easier for you by AzurePrincess, which is a huge negative modifier to your rating. It gets even worse on the 4th—she turns on you and makes the final round much harder than it would have been. It’s still possible to survive, and even clear the mission, but I doubt it’s possible to score above a 2.0, on either the 3rd or 4th Floors.”

“You sound as though you’re very familiar with this problem.”

Bruzigan nodded. “One of your teammates that will be joining us after you clear the 2nd Floor also found the AzurePrincess route. He made up for his losses by selling very detailed information about it to his faction, who sold it to the rest of the alliance. He thinks that it’s the Tower’s idea of a warning, to beware what looks like an easy way to clear its missions.”

“So, what you’re basically saying is...I’ve totally been scammed!” I facepalmed. It really was a mistake. The Tower may have been video gamey in a lot of aspects, but it definitely wasn’t inclined to give its challengers a truly fair chance. The fact that a Throskart viewer that was willing to help a challenger out actually showed up, regardless of in-scenario justification, was something I should have viewed as suspicious from the start.

Somehow I’d led myself to believe that the Tower was being benevolent by having that element in the scenario. That was a mistake I’d need to not repeat.

“Now, back to preparing for the 2nd Floor. The way AzurePrincess ‘tests’ the challenger, we don’t know if it varies between challengers or not, but I suspect...”