[Your party leader has turned in your mission. Prepare to exit the Floor.]

I sighed as we reappeared in the Neutral Zone. “Our unknown enemy is going to know a few things about my special power now...enough to know I’m hiding something big, at any rate.”

Bruzigan cleared his throat awkwardly. “It’s been on my mind ever since the attack...Lheticus, I owe you an apology. I’ve been the most eager of us to have you share the nature of this special power of yours with us, though I did try to be subtle about it.”

“I noticed,” I said, “which of course only means you failed.”

Arvallei and Anna chuckled at that. Mewi outright snorted. Bruzigan shook his head. “I think I just got it in my head that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as you thought, to be as secretive about it as you’ve been. But if it’s something that’s apparently now caught the attention of the secret enemy...I’ve been underestimating it all along.

If you really think the details are something you can’t risk sharing, we should respect that. I should respect it.”

I shrugged. “It’s going to have to come out sooner or later. Who knows how much of it I’ll have to expose at the Fire Sanctuary? And if we’re going to work together as well as possible, you guys need to know. I’m perfectly fine with sticking to telling all the first chance we get in the Neutral Zone.”

With as keen a sense of timing as ever, the Tower’s usual notification appeared.

[Congratulations on completing your mission.]

[Mission Difficulty: Extreme]

[You have received 20 AP.]

[Your class has responded.]

[+2 AP to Psych Attribute.]

[Select 2 Attributes to receive +5 AP.]

[Select 1 Attribute to receive +2 AP.]

Now that all my attributes were above 100, this amount of AP really was starting to seem a little small. It was effectively cut in half.

My spell book this time was a genuinely incredible find—one of the rarest fire spells in the Floor that it turned out not even Grosstin’s library possessed:

1st Circle Fire Spell

Required Intuition: 101

Mana Cost: 200

Casting Time: 1s

Cooldown: 10s

Creates an invisible, intangible mine at a location within 10 feet of the caster. Cannot be moved once placed. Explodes into a fireball upon physical contact, dealing (357 + 1% Magic Power) damage. Also has a chance to stun those affected by the mine for 1 second, with a success probability of 10% + (Caster’s Magic Power – Target's Magic Power or Energy Compression/5)%

Mentally, I instantly moved this spell to the top of the leveling priority list. Ancillary effects like stun were impossibly hard to come by for Fire mages. If I could level it up enough that the success rate was no longer shit, it’d become a staple spell on the order of Flame Javelin for me. Whether to keep it for myself, or to sell it to Edwin for a fat bonus was going to be a tough decision.

[Analyzing mission...mission analyzed. Gathering data...]

[Data gathered.]

[Mission Rating: 4.1]

[Collating data on your individual performance...performance determined.]

[Contribution Score: 8/10]

[Team’s total Contribution Score is greater than 45. Two additional Group Rewards will be awarded.]

[Individual Mission Rewards]

1) Magic Power Boost Potion set

2) Sontaran Pepper

[Group Mission Rewards]

1) Cash Enhancement Card

2) Shield Reviver Fuel Cell

3) Short-Range Escape Coin x3

4) 3.577 G3 Coins

The rewards this time were excellent. The potion set was a total of twenty Grade 4 potions that would raise my Magic Power by 20% for five minutes, an effect that could stack with Greater Mind Boost, though not with itself of course. The Sontaran Pepper had the same effect as an Agility Potion, but its effect lasted for two entire hours. You needed a very high spice tolerance to successfully ingest it for the effect, but that wasn’t a problem for me.

The Cash Enhancement Card was a lesser version of the extremely rare and coveted Rating Enhancement Card. The latter would raise your Mission Rating by 0.5. The former raised the amount of money in the Mission Reward to the amount it would have been if your Mission Rating had been higher by 0.5. It was still an extremely useful effect, and it applied to the entire party on non-solo missions.

Or in other words:

Increases the cash reward for Floor Mission completion by +0.5 Effective Mission Rating. Can only be used in a Floor Landing.

So since we had six, I figured we should definitely use one on the 8th and 9th floors, even though we wouldn’t know how good the boost we’d be getting was until we cleared the mission. Of course, it was also possible to squander such a valuable card by failing the mission or getting a low rating. What it represented was not a guarantee, but a chance to hit the jackpot.

I still remembered how the pile of cash for getting our highest-ever rating, the 4.6 on the 5th Floor, had basically made every other Floor reward payout I’d ever gotten look like chump change. If the reward for that rating resulted in over a thousand G4 coins...how obscene would the riches from the highest rating possible be? I wasn’t the only one in the party who took a few seconds to drool over the prospect of finding that out.

The Short-Range Escape Coins were probably the least valuable items in our rewards—and they could still end up as lifesavers. They were single use only: throw them to the ground like a ninja smoke bomb, and you would teleport to a random, but always away from other nearby threats, location between 1,000 and 5,000 feet away.

Finally, there was the Shield Reviver Fuel Cell. This was actually an item related to ship combat. Connect the Fuel Cell to a ship’s core when its shields had been knocked out, and they would come back up immediately, expelling all boarders back to the ship or ships they came from.

I definitely hoped that the Firebrand never had to use it, because if we did, it meant we were in a tighter spot than such an item would usually be used in.

Back aboard the Firebrand, I entrusted the fuel cell with General Karl, leaving the decision of who to entrust the duty of carrying it and using it if needed to him.

Then, I decided that since the unknown enemy seemed to have an idea that we planned to go for the Fire Sanctuary soon anyway, that now was the time to inform him about the Firebrand Liberation Fleet’s true mission.