Conflagrate

It was the lack of anything happening for over an hour that made us finally let down our guards. Clearly, we were a large enough group that the smaller threats of the Tower avoided or ran from us. Sometimes we killed the fleeing creatures, and sometimes they got away safely, but in either of those cases the gains of experience were meager and so the monsters we encountered over the first hour or so of our march did little to either help or hinder our advance. Artemis called for a halt after about ten minutes later.

This finally gave me a moment to do something I should have done as soon as I saw Anna's name on that blackboard. In the panic of the realization I had kind of forgotten that I was a fucking wizard now, mighty of wisdom and spell. In fact, I swore at myself for not trying to do this earlier with all of my friends from back on Earth, just in case they were here. I cast the pseudoportal spell focusing on Anna first.

The Guild members nearest me all leaped back in fear as what appeared to be an orb of solid fire erupted in our midst. What the f-

As the flames went out, I saw her standing amidst them. She was wearing all black and looked ragged, and when she saw me she mouthed "Alex!" with a shocked look on her face, but since the portal didn't transfer sound, all I could do is mouth back "I cannot hear you." She smiled and exhaled and let her arms down in joy, but stiffened right back up as, apparently, more monsters were approaching her. She blasted the room with another fireball. Apparently she missed a creature behind her- some sort of a goblin which was running at her with a vicious looking short-sword, so I cast the icicle spell from my hitpoints. It hurt, but with my new abilities it was nowhere near as debilitating as before. She apparently heard it, turned around, showed me two thumbs up and mouthed 'thanks'.

She didn't look good exactly, but she was happy to see me. There was a haunted look in her eyes and blue circles underneath, but she had all of her limbs and was still fighting. I grabbed a map from Artemis and showed Anna the direction we were going in. She cross-referenced with her own journal and gave me two thumbs up. Then the spell fizzled.

I tried the spell on my other friends, but either they were on another plane, or… Well, it didn't bear thinking about. As far as I knew the other sectors may also count as separate planes for the purposes of magic here.

I stood back from the casting and looked back to the Guild. Artemis was just getting the rest of the Guild going and we resumed our walk 'East'. Artemis joined us in the front of the group.

"Don't use up all your mana, we don't know what's coming. Is your friend alright?" she said. "Yeah. Looks like she's got her shit together. What's our plan now?" I said. "Clarence, how is the map developing," Artemis said. "It is getting rather obvious, Artemis," Clarence said. "It is?" I said. "The crossings. At first it was quite subtle, but the angles are becoming less straight," Artemis said. "Well, that definitely means something," I said. "We might expect such a change if we assumed that either the halls are converging, or that the Tower is funneling its inhabitants towards a specific direction," Clarence said. "Probably both," I said. "What do you mean?" Artemis said. "I just get the feeling that whenever the Tower could be doing one of several things, it's usually because it's doing them all and saving on resources. Besides, that's what this whole game is about today, right?" I said. "So you see this as a game, Mr. Vorhal?" Clarence said. "It is a game. But I don't mean to make light of it, I take games very seriously," I said. "It has game-like elements, but it's a torture chamber for kidnapping perverts," Artemis said. "So was Takeshi's Castle. Or Big Brother. The Tower thinks of itself as a game, or, rather, whoever created the Tower thinks of it as a game," I said. "I am inclined to agree with your reasoning," Clarence said. "Well, that just leaves us with two options," Artemis said. "Yeah, play the game, or try to break it," I said. "I've been going along with this shit for two days now, man. I'm so fucking tired of doing what it wants us to," Artemis said. "I- I know what you mean," I said. What I said was true, I did know what she meant. What I didn't say was that I wasn't feeling the same way. I wasn't having fun, but some of that excitement I'd had back in the first hour, before everything had gone to shit had returned. I wasn't just surviving anymore, I was succeeding, and I was overtaking most of my peers. Hell, if it wasn't for my worry about my friends, I could downright get into the competition of it.

It's a lot harder to want to stop playing when you start winning.

It was at that point that we realized that we had passed through a crossing without stopping and scouting out the side passages like we meant to, so that the flanks of our group were exposed to whatever would be coming down them. There hadn't been anything for an hour and I'd apparently grown fucking full of myself.

The shout "Incoming!" came at the same instant as an explosion.

"Shit, shit, shit," I said. "Fuck, Alex, block of a passage," Artemis said. "Which one," I said. "I don't fucking care, left," Artemis said, and yeah, it didn't matter. We didn't know which side the attack was coming from, so it'd be a coin-toss anyways. I went left, expending three out of four of my invisible barrier charges from the staff, almost entirely sealing off the path that direction. "The wall's on the left, form up to the right!" I shouted, and saw Artemis along with the rest of the front line fighters moving to do just that.

I pressed through the group to see what was happening, and it soon became obvious that I'd made the wrong choice. The enemies were approaching from the right side, relative to the direction we were walking initially, so 'South'. Of course the cardinal directions were completely arbitrary, as none of us had a compass, but that is how our map was oriented.

"Fucking shit," I said, as I saw what was approaching us. There were about two dozen of them. They were wearing some Mad Max post-apocalyptic biker leather gear. They carried large shields that looked more like doors than anything, and when they laid down the shields at an incline against the floor, they could use them to aim with rifles and hand bombards at us. And they were people. I suppose I should say they were humans, and that I should always have treated the intelligent creatures of the Tower as people, but it had been a lot easier to dismiss them as monsters when they were green, red or covered in scales.

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As I moved towards the front of the Guild, I left people clutching bloody shrapnel wounds and screaming behind me and unleashed the last barrier sort of mid-air, blocking off the most direct line of fire, just as a barrage of shot was fired. The impact wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared. I heard Hannah groan in annoyance. A serious advantage to the barrier was that, while it did transfer damage from the shield to us, it did so by transferring the impact all across our bodies, so while a bullet could definitely kill me, if its impact was reduced to 10%, split between me and Hannah and then diffused all over my body, it just felt like being hit by a slightly damp down body pillow over and over again, instead of ripping me apart.

"Cannon," Hannah said. "Fuck," I said, as I saw one of the men in the advancing group load a cannonball into a hand-held cannon the size of a meaty thigh. If that hit us, I wasn't nearly as confident we'd be shrugging it off. I called the command word for my book and it flew open in front of my eyes.

"Ranged volley!" Artemis shouted behind me, and a torrent of arrows, stones and javelins flew over me from behind. Our volley mostly hit the shields and was diffused, but the cannoneers had to retreat behind the cover of their shield wall. "Who are these guys?" Hannah said. "I don't know, but I'm not letting them kill us," I said. But my voice wasn't steady. These were people, for fuck's sake. Could they be another group kidnapped and teleported to this Tower like us, now thinking everything they faced here must be an enemy by default. As I saw the fuses of several of the cannons be lit, I cast oil and fire upon their heads.

The screaming started like I expected, but it didn't last long. From within the ranks of the human soldiers stepped out a man in resplendent full plate armor and even over the near hundred feet of distance I could make out, somehow, supernaturally, the two runes branded on his forehead, which, as usual with the apprentices of the mysterious creator of the Tower, I could understand despite them not resembling any symbol I had ever seen before. The brands on this ones face said Toothless Traitor. He looked like a human man with blond hair, but that was just about as much as I could tell from the distance.

Stepping out in the open from the group he held up his hands and chanted a sequence of syllables. I didn't recognize them exactly, but they felt familiar, and when the spell took effect, the screaming stopped instantly, as the burning fighters stopped feeling the fire or being hurt by it. I knew then that this spell must have been a group version of my fire protection spell, and I wanted it. Indeed, I wanted group versions of all of my support and defensive spells, I mean, how useful was that?

Unfortunately for the fighters behind this treacherous apprentice, while the fire had stopped hurting them, it did keep burning, and seeing as how all of their firearms appeared to be blackpowder rifles and muskets, the quickest of them threw them to the ground, while six or seven of the slower ones lost their fingers in localized explosions and started screaming with bloodied hands, even as they fell to the ground.

I was going to engage in some further tactical spellcasting, when I heard the sound of a screaming roar behind me, barely recognizing Zack's voice as he screamed with vocal chord snapping intensity and charged towards the disorganized troops set against us. Only a few steps behind him Hannah followed, and then the rest of our front line advanced. Thinking quickly I splattered my invisible barrier with conjured oil, so that they wouldn't run into it.

Zack outpaced everyone else by half, getting there within less than five seconds, while even Hannah was some thirty feet behind. With his scream unbroken, he leaped belly-first into the scattered, but recovering pike wall, grabbed a spear as it hit him in the belly and used it and his inertia to pole-vault over the front line of the enemy. I didn't know physics all that well, but I was still pretty sure that that was not how anything worked, and yet, as I looked on stunned for a second, helmets, shields, blood and teeth began flying up in the air behind the shield wall blocking my view.

I jogged towards the fight as the rest of our melee fighters joined, too afraid of friendly fire to try any other offensive spells as first Hannah and then the rest of the guild impacted the shield and pike wall. Apparently, while our ranged fighters seemed very primitive in comparison to the gun-wielding enemies, we had outgrinded them on melee stats and skills at least, as the shield wall shattered. I didn't even get a chance to face off against the enemy spellcaster before the fight was over.

Zack limped out from behind the enemy lines with the severed head of the enemy commander raised high above his head, even as he was covered in bruises and wounds that should have at the absolute very least slowed him down, and probably, realistically killed him. Just as I saw his state, I heard Bjorn- the big bearded dude with some magical healing ability- swear under his breath as he rushed towards Zack and the rest of the wounded.

I found myself quite useless in the aftermath. I handed out the rest of my healing potions to our injured, and it seemed that with that nobody was going to die here. That should have been miraculous, but everybody in the Guild had levels and actual combat experience. Most of them, surely, would not have followed my fatally risky path of pumping everything into my mind attributes. Any rational person would have put as much into their resilience as possible, and it seemed that just about everyone had done so, at least enough that a few bullet wounds and a bit of shrapnel wouldn't kill them too quickly for a healing potion to work.

Of course, it was somewhat possible that I only understood how risky it had been to put points into my mind attributes before improving my survivability because of how high my mind attributes were now. But probably not. I had trusted Chum's advice and my own admittedly childish desire to learn magic. And it had worked out. And it was undeniably cool.

It took me a few minutes to realize that this hadn't been an utter slaughter, and then I quickly understood that no, of course it hadn't. I'd incapacitated several of the enemy before the charge, and with the possible exception of Zack it wasn't like our side was blinded by murderous bloodlust. So when I saw Artemis leading half a dozen captives back towards me and the rest of the ranged and support people, along with our own tired and injured, I shouldn't have been surprised. I guess it was that this meant that the other side hadn't been blood-crazed lunatic monsters either. A willingness to surrender indicated reason and a survival instinct.

"This fucking sucks," I said. "We defend ourselves. They're not the first intelligent enemies we've had to fight," Artemis said. She turned to the captives and as I looked them over, I saw that while they were certainly human the haircuts, the dress and the weapons didn't quite resemble any I had seen on Earth. The men had shaved a lot of the front of their head, which you didn't often see outside monastic orders on Earth, but they also wore earrings of some metal I didn't recognize. What had appeared to be post-apocalyptic style black leather and stud armor, looked more like the scales of some giant creature upon closer inspection, and, most oddly of all, they all had two distinct bumps on their foreheads, almost like horns about to burst through.

"So, who the fuck are you?" Artemis said.

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