With a violent, desperate slash, Mica split open halfway the body of the cyclops that had just swallowed him.
When he returned to the ground, he fell to one knee and leaned on his sword, whose light
solidified
so it wouldn't pass through the floor. Around him lay the bodies and limbs of three of those terrible creatures with broad, headless bodies, whose only eye and mouth were located on their torsos.
“Good! I knew you'd do it!” Rose exclaimed, approaching him.
“I don't know if I can get back up…” Mica complained, aching and exhausted. The battle had been brutal.
“Poppycock.” Rose waved her staff, leaving a trail of purple light around herself that then rushed toward Mica in the form of rain. Each drop of light restored a large portion of Mica's energy and closed several of his superficial wounds. “Good as new.”
“Congratulations, champions. You have faced the creatures that once terrified even the strongest soldiers of the first civilizations that existed before the Empire, and you have emerged victorious.”
Mica watched as the door to Floor Ninety-One opened and sighed. His body felt rested, but his mind was still exhausted. He couldn't see himself making it to Floor Zero. At least not with the urgency with which he needed to get there.
“Let's go,” he said. “Maybe…”
“Yes, yes. Maybe the others are down there. You've said that several times already.”
“Well, sorry, it's just…”
“I know. I'm teasing you.”
With a smile, Rose moved beside him and took his arm.
“The next one will be an intellectual challenge. So you won't have any trouble.”
“And then comes the self-sacrifice challenge. Whatever that means…”
“Are you nervous?”
“How could I not be?”
“I don't know. The previous trials weren't complicated at all. So I can't imagine the one on Floor Ninety being
thaaaat
difficult.”
Mica bit his tongue to keep himself from telling her that they hadn't seemed complicated to her because all she'd done was stand to the side. But it was true that without her healing and encouragement, he might not have made it past the second strength challenge. The Tower provided partial healing after every victory, but it wasn't nearly as powerful as the healing Rose gave him.
However, when it came to the encouragement, he was beginning to despise the girl's almost toxic positivity.
“If we keep going at this pace, we'll reach the end of the Tower in no time.”
“I'd rather not have to go through even half of it. There must be a way to get out of here sooner.”
“Oh, there definitely is,” she said with a little giggle.
“Do you know something I don't?”
“On the contrary. You know something I don't. You were the one who got us out of the school last night, right? I didn't see it because I was inside that disgusting monster's guts. But Cat told me it was you. With a single swing of your sword…”
“No. It wasn't me. It was Tolmoch.”
“But Tolmoch is your Angelino. So it's basically the same as you doing it, right?”
“Well, I guess.”
Tolmoch grumbled inside his mind.
“But I'm not entirely sure. We still don't really know what all this Angelino stuff is about.”
“Hmm. Well, what I mean is that if you really wanted all of this to end, I'm sure no one but you could make that happen.”
Mica didn't answer, and they continued in silence down the staircase to Floor Ninety-One. Although Rose's words gave him plenty to think about, nothing tormented him more than trying to imagine what awaited him on the next round-numbered floor: Floor Ninety, the first self-sacrifice challenge.
“Boooooooriiiiiiing,” María drawled, exaggerating a yawn.
“Could you stop interrupting me?” Hugo complained.
“But you say so much nonsense. Wouldn't it be better to just fill all the bowls and be done with it? Eventually the mechanism will activate and let us through.”
“And do you have enough blood for that?”
“Meh… It was just an idea. That's what you wanted, right? For me to give my opinion.”
“Quite the opposite! I want you to stop interrupting me.”
“Okay,” she agreed, sitting beside the door that would give them access to the next floor once the riddle was solved. “Wake me up when you're done being all nerdy.”
Hugo muttered a couple of curses and focused once again on the challenge before him, wishing Mica were there to solve it.
The room was small and entirely golden, with a raised 39 on two of its four walls. On the wall opposite where María now rested was a complex system of bowls of different sizes and depths, overlapping one another in a vertical tower that extended several levels downward. The structure rested on a glass surface that allowed them to see it completely beneath the feet of whoever stood before it.
When they entered, the mechanical voice of the narrator spoke to them for several seconds about something involving replicating the process of the soul, transferring it into a consciousness, the Three-Night War, and the heroes. It had asked a question at the end, but they hadn't heard it for the same reason they weren't entirely sure what the narrator had been talking about: María and he couldn't stop arguing.
Hugo observed the structure once more. He only had access to three bowls; the rest were scattered in a chaotic arrangement beneath those three main ones.
“Can you repeat the clues?” he asked the air, hoping the narrator would answer him.
“You've already asked three times. It's not going to.”
“If you're not going to say anything useful, then be quiet.”
María's idea had been to smash the entire mechanism with her powers, but Hugo stopped her by reminding her that this was a trial, and if she damaged something, they could end up trapped. Though in the end, it was less persuasion than negotiation. Hugo asked for a chance to solve the riddle, and María told him that if he didn't figure it out soon, she'd proceed with her plan.
“It said something about the Three-Night War, right?” he asked aloud, although more to himself than to María.
“Yes,” she answered anyway.
“Isn't that the same thing it talked about on the previous floor?”
“Yes.”
“And then did it start listing names?”
“I don't know. You wouldn't stop spouting your nonsense.”
“You wouldn't stop complaining that you wanted more fights and not an
intellectual stupid thing
.”
“I already told you how to solve all this. Just admit that you don't know what to do and let me proceed.”
“Wait, wait… Just help me remember. It said something about how so many went to do I don't know what.”
“Yes, and that others went to do something else. Who knows? That voice should be clearer instead of making us play with numbers.”
“It ended with something like
How many were there, blah blah blah?
”
“I suppose.”
“Wait! What if…?” Hugo exclaimed in a moment of realization. He turned toward the three bowls. “Three bowls… Three digits? How many soldiers? Of course!”
He materialized his spear in his right hand, the one that was still usable.
“I need your help,” he said reluctantly. “I can't lift my other hand, so…”
María sighed in frustration but stepped forward to help him.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked, holding his useless hand over the first bowl.
“No,” he replied, but he didn't stop himself from making a small cut across his palm. He felt no pain. “Don't let it all fall. We only need nine drops.”
María gently closed his fist and turned it over, letting exactly nine drops fall into the bowl.
“Doesn't it hurt?” she asked, almost as if the words had slipped out.
“Now nine drops in the next one,” Hugo instructed her, ignoring her question.
She obeyed even more gently. Her expression seemed filled with concern.
“And nine in the last one.”
When the final drop fell into the third bowl, the three of them turned over, spilling their contents into the smaller bowls below. The blood continued along its path as each bowl tilted under the weight of the liquid at precisely the right angle for it to fall into the next bowl, and so on. After about three minutes of the two of them standing motionless and watching the mechanism operate beneath their feet, the blood gathered in one final bowl, and the narrator's voice returned to the room:
“Congratulations, champions. Indeed, the blood of nine hundred and ninety-nine heroes was spilled during the Three-Night War. Nine hundred and ninety-nine, each one remembered by the Empire.”
The two doors of the room opened as the same victory song from the previous floor played.
“Well, you can let go of me now,” Hugo said.
María realized she was still holding his bloodied hand and released it with such a strong shove that it made the anesthetized wound on his arm hurt.
“S-Sorry,” she apologized shyly. Immediately, she turned her back to him and, pointing toward the door, exclaimed cheerfully, “Come on, squire! The next trial awaits us!”
Hugo felt the same breeze that had healed him in the previous room. He looked at his hand and discovered that the wound he'd just inflicted on himself had closed. Then he shrugged and hurried after the girl.
“How did you know the answer?” she asked as they climbed the stairs.
“Well, I thought about the number of enemies we defeated…”
“
I
defeated,” she corrected him.
“Well. The huge number of enemies you defeated plus the small fraction of them that I defeated. And, well, based on the few clues I remembered because a girl wouldn't shut up while they were explaining them to us, I figured that could be the answer.”
“So you guessed.”
“Something like that,” Hugo admitted. “Which makes me think… Having faced that army before let us figure out the answer without knowing the riddle. I really think we're going in the opposite direction.”
“If that's the case, it doesn't matter. Let's reach Floor Forty-Two first. If we don't find anything there, we'll go back down. Either way, these challenges are already solved. I doubt they'll make us face them again.”
Hugo imagined fighting nine hundred and ninety-nine soldiers once more and shuddered.
“Why are you so determined to reach Floor Forty-Two?”
María stopped and pointed at her chest.
“There's a reason I have a forty-two, isn't there?”
“You mean I have to reach Floor Two afterward?”
“Maybe. I don't know. We'll find out at Forty-Two.”
Hugo scoffed, but María's plan made some sense to him somehow, so he didn't argue any further. Either way, they were almost at Forty-Two, since the next floor would be Forty.