Hasphien's POV
[ Welcome to Floor 17. ]
[ Seventeenth Task: Survive Floor 17. ]
[ Fiend Count: 84 / 84 ]
The floor didn't just appear—it unfolded, like a piece of ancient vellum being peeled away from the very fabric of reality.
And then I saw it.
A horizon that wasn't a horizon, but a vast, cosmic plane stretching into a terrifying, beautiful infinity. Above and below, distant stars drifted like slow-burning embers in a bottomless sea of black oil, their pale light distorted by patches of voidlight that spread across the ground like liquid glass. Aurora strands, vibrant and ghostly in shades of deep cerulean and violet, curled around the edges of my sight, shifting and shimmering like thoughts half-remembered in the waking world.
My breath caught, the air here tasting of cold ozone and ancient, unbothered dust.
Dad…
My chest thrummed with a heavy, sudden ache. You turned this entire floor into a fragment of the deep universe.
This wasn't just another trial of fast reflexes or structural memory. This was a direct message written in the language of the stars. For as long as I could remember, I had been completely obsessed with the cosmos—with the great celestial bodies, the math of planetary orbits, and the invisible things our human eyes simply weren't evolved to see. Back at home, I used to sketch constellations across the margins of his blueprints, tracing the pathways of dying stars while he quietly calibrated his tracking grids.
He knew. He had always known. He had reached directly into my own childhood wonder and sculpted it into a lethal, breathtaking challenge.
You built a floor shaped like the night sky.
I stood at the dead center of the glass-like expanse, my boots reflecting the miniature nebulae swirling violently beneath my feet. Looking out into the infinite blue dark, I realized then that Dad hadn't designed this place to crush my spirit with fear. He built it to force me to respect what's larger than myself.
I swallowed hard, the absolute silence of the vacuum pressing heavily against my eardrums.
You didn't want me to just win fights, did you? You wanted me to understand how small I truly am… and how that smallness doesn't have to mean weakness.
In the face of infinity, even a single spark is enough to change the dark.
The awe of the cosmic plane was instantly shattered by the cold, mechanical reality of the hunt.
"What enemies are here?" I asked SYSTÉMA, my curved blade drawn, its leather-bound weight the only thing anchoring me to the shifting floorboards of reality. My eyes were still trembling with the sheer scale of the void, but my pulse was already hammering an instinctive warning against my ribs.
[ Fiends Detected: The Eighty-Four Chrythids (Level 17). ]
From the starlit void directly ahead, the first one manifested—not a creature of flesh, bone, or blood, but a nightmare of pure geometry and observation. A massive, unblinking eyeball emerged from the center of a swirling violet nebula, flanked by detached, floating arms that drifted like black seaweed in a dark tide. Its long, jointed hands curled inward, a slow, mocking beckon that felt less like an invitation and more like a command to the universe itself.
I felt it immediately—a localized gravitational pull gnawing at my marrow, dragging me toward that central, lidless stare. My boots screeched against the liquid-glass floor, my leg muscles straining until they burned as I fought against the invisible tide.
Then, the air behind me curdled.
Another Chrythid tore through the aurora strands to my rear, its own gravitational field snapping instantly into place. I was caught in the dead center of a celestial tug-of-war, my ribs groaning under the sudden pressure as my body was nearly torn in two opposite directions. The "smallness" Dad wanted me to experience wasn't a poetic metaphor anymore; it was the raw, physical sensation of being an ant caught between two collapsing stars.
Grinding my teeth until they felt like they might shatter, I clutched the hilt of my curved blade and lunged. The air felt thick, heavy, like moving through deep, pressurized water, but I forced my momentum forward, carving a silver path through the central iris of the eyeball ahead.
It didn't bleed. It glitched.
The creature let out a distorted, electronic shriek as its geometric form fractured into a cloud of glowing cosmic dust. But there was no time to breathe. The pull from the Chrythid behind me grew sharper, heavier—like invisible iron chains tightening around my chest, threatening to collapse my lungs.
It wasn't just physical pain; it was a psychological weight. It was the kind of crushing pressure that makes you feel utterly insignificant, like standing bare-chested before the same raw power that ignites galaxies.
Another Chrythid surfaced directly from the liquid-glass floor, and now I was caught between two competing singularities, their gravitational forces equal and opposing. My joints popped. My vision tunneled into a dark smear.
With a desperate surge of strength, I didn't fight the pull—I used it. I leapt upward, allowing their dual gravity to slingshot me into a high-velocity spin. Midair, I became a whirlwind of silver steel. My blade carved through both at once in a single, wide horizontal arc. Their shrieks echoed across the floor—a haunting harmony of dying frequencies—before fading into the absolute silence of the void.
The air rippled violently, the very fabric of the glass floor buckling beneath my feet. Four Chrythids emerged from the darkness in a perfect diamond formation, their combined gravitational pull far more lethal than the last. My bones rattled in their sockets, a sickening vibration that felt like the force itself was trying to tear my atoms apart from within.
"So… each wave doubles," I spat, my voice sounding small and raspy against the sudden roar of the cosmic wind. "And the pressure multiplies."
I slammed my blade deep into the liquid-glass ground, the steel shrieking in protest as I used it as a desperate anchor against the relentless tide. I stayed low, my teeth clenched as sparks of pulverized stardust scraped across my face like white-hot embers. My muscles screamed, fibers tearing under the weight of a thousand imaginary suns.
[ Fiend Count: 78 / 84 ]
The numbers flickered in a jagged, bleeding red across my vision. Six down. Seventy-eight to go. And the gravity wasn't just rising—it was tightening like a noose.
The four Chrythids floated in their lethal diamond formation, their massive central eyes completely unblinking. They pulled from four cardinal vectors—North, South, East, and West—turning the space around my body into a medieval rack. My joints began to separate, the skin across my chest stretching until it felt ready to tear away from the bone.
"I can't just cut them blindly," I wheezed, the air barely reaching my trachea. "I'll be ripped apart before the last one even falls."
I forced myself to steady my breathing, closing my eyes for a fraction of a second to feel the invisible currents traveling through the room. Their gravitational forces overlapped like rogue tides colliding in a storm. There was a rhythm to it—a microscopic pulse where the opposing pulls aligned and briefly canceled each other out.
If I moved at the exact millisecond of that alignment...
I roared, ripping my curved blade from the liquid-glass floor. Instead of resisting, I dashed straight toward the Northern Chrythid, diving directly into the teeth of the crushing force.
My blade flashed—a silver streak against the purple void—cutting the entity clean in half. The sudden loss of the Northern anchor caused the remaining gravity to warp violently sideways, a whiplash effect that nearly snapped my spine. But I didn't fight the imbalance; I twisted with the momentum, using the violent tug of the Southern Chrythid to accelerate my swing. My weapon trailed behind me, a lethal comet tail that split the second one apart.
The two remaining Chrythids shrieked in a dissonant, digital harmony. Their pull multiplied instantly, a desperate attempt to crush the intruder. I staggered, my uniform boots dragging across the starlit floor, leaving glowing ruts in the glass. My vision blurred into a smear of nebulae and static.
If this was the pressure of Level 17... what was the Labyrinth preparing me for? This wasn't just a dungeon anymore. This felt like a training ground for a battlefield beyond worlds—a place where the laws of physics were merely suggestions, and only the strongest wills remained intact.
The internal pressure was becoming a physical enemy. My HUD flickered, the warnings bleeding into my vision as the SYSTÉMA struggled to map the sheer amount of gravitational data I was fighting.
[ Warning: High muscle strain detected. ]
[ Overclock Meter: 12% ]
"Not yet…" I hissed, the words feeling like lead in my mouth.
I didn't just move; I detonated. I launched myself into a reckless, high-velocity spin, the curved blade becoming a silver blur that shredded the last two Chrythids of the wave. Their digital cries fractured the cosmic silence, a jagged sound of breaking glass that dissolved into nothingness.
But the Labyrinth didn't give me a single second to breathe.
The next eight Chrythids didn't just emerge; they colonized the entire horizon. Their massive central eyes glowed with a predatory violet light, pulsing in a synchronized, rhythmic beat. Each of their detached hands twisted and clenched in unison, and I felt the fabric of the floor—the world itself—bend under the strain.
My knees buckled instantly as gravity stacked, layer upon suffocating layer, crushing me toward the liquid-glass floor. It felt like an invisible mountain range had been dropped onto my shoulders.
[ Fiend Count: 74 / 84 ]
I could barely pull air into my lungs. My curved blade shook in my hands, the metal vibrating with the same frequency as my failing muscles. If I stayed still, I wouldn't just lose—I'd be compressed into a single point of matter. Crushed into nothing.
"Move!" I roared at my own limbs, forcing my body forward. One step. Then another.
The pull stretched my joints until they felt like violin strings tightened past the breaking point. Every heartbeat was a spike of pure, white-hot pain.
The nearest Chrythid pulsed, its violet iris expanding to fire a gravitational anchor directly at my chest. I didn't dodge; I dove straight under the beam, dragging my blade upward in a brutal, vertical arc that used the floor's own tension to accelerate the strike.
The shriek split my ears as the creature crumbled into violet sparks. In response, the remaining seven flared brighter, their collective gravity doubling in a spike of sheer, vengeful force. The floor beneath me actually cracked, spiderwebbing with white light.
[ Fiend Count: 73 / 84 ]
The pressure was no longer just a weight—it was a grinder. My vision was swimming in a sea of violet static and cold, unblinking eyes. I needed more. My blade, as sharp as it was, felt like a toothpick against the crushing gravity of the cosmos. I couldn't outrun the physics, so I decided to become them.
I twisted my torso, feeling the agonizing stretch in my obliques as I caught the intersecting pull of two Chrythids. Instead of fighting it, I leaned into the vacuum, slingshotting myself into the narrow gap between them. I turned their own repulsive force against each other, watching as the invisible tethers tangled. My blade carved through both in a single, fluid stroke, their digital cries echoing across the void before being snuffed out.
The sudden loss of those two anchors caused the remaining force to snap like a rubber band. I was dragged violently toward the final five of the wave, the acceleration pinning my arms to my sides.
"Good…" I wheezed, the copper taste of adrenaline and injury coating my tongue. "Line them up."
I didn't resist the pull. I tucked my chin and spun, letting the stacked gravity hurl me forward like a falling star. I was a projectile of silver and spite. My blade cleaved a third, then tore through a fourth without slowing down.
The impact was brutal. My body slammed hard into the starlit ground, the liquid-glass floor refusing to give an inch of cushion. Vision flashed a blinding, searing white. The iron tang of blood filled my mouth, hot and thick, as my lungs fought to remember how to expand.
[ Fiend Count: 69 / 84 ]
The numbers pulsed. Sixty-nine. I was winning, but the floor was starting to win, too. I rolled onto my back, staring up at the shifting auroras. My Overclock meter was creeping higher, and the remaining Chrythids were beginning to merge their forms into something much, much larger.
Five more Chrythids burst into being, their massive violet irises igniting as they took their places, orbiting the survivors like a secondary, malevolent constellation. Their combined pull was no longer just a physical pressure—it was a localized storm, a singularity so dense it began bending the very light of the auroras around them.
The liquid-glass floor beneath my boots groaned, the surface warping into violent spirals as if the world itself were being sucked into their collective gaze. My chest heaved, each breath a jagged struggle against the vacuum. I wiped the blood from my lip, my eyes darting between the floating nightmares.
"So… that's the game," I croaked, my voice barely audible over the low, rhythmic hum of the gravity fields. "Every wave doubles. Two, four, eight, sixteen… until all eighty-four are screaming at once."
The realization made my stomach twist tighter than gravity ever could. The math was a death sentence. If I was already bleeding—if my joints were already screaming and my Overclock was climbing—how was I supposed to stand against dozens?
I looked at my blade. It was chipped, reflecting the dying light of the nebulae. I wasn't just fighting monsters; I was fighting an exponential curve.
"If you wanted to teach me how small I am, Dad…" I looked up at the closest eye, my grip tightening on the hilt until my knuckles turned white. "Message received. Now let's see if I'm small enough to slip through the cracks."
[ Overclock Meter: 21% ]
The Chrythids howled in unison—a soundless, violent vibration that rattled inside my skull like a trapped bird. Their detached hands stretched wide, fingers splaying in a coordinated ritual, and suddenly, the concept of "up" and "down" vanished entirely. My body was no longer my own; I was flung upward, a ragdoll caught in a crossfire of gravitational anchors, pulled in every lethal direction at once.
I clenched the hilt of my blade, gritting my teeth so hard the pressure threatened to shatter the enamel.
"Then I'll cut until my body breaks!" I roared into the vacuum.
I didn't wait for a stable footing. I twisted midair, abandoning balance for sheer velocity. I swung wildly, a silver gale in a violet storm, as the swarm dragged me deeper into the crushing heart of their formation.
For what felt like hours, time dilated. I lost track of the waves. I swung my curved blade—sometimes mindlessly, driven by pure survival instinct, sometimes with the ruthless, surgical precision Dad had seen in me during our logic lessons. I was a blur of motion against the backdrop of infinity.
As long as my heart kept drumming against my ribs, I kept moving. As long as my fingers could still curl around the leather grip, I kept cutting down those cursed, unblinking eyes.
The battlefield was no longer a clear cosmic plane. It was drowned in drifting, glowing stardust—the pulverized remains of the Chrythids I had slain. Their shrieks still rattled in my marrow, haunting echoes that refused to fade even as their physical forms dissolved into nothingness.
At last, the crushing weight eased. The storm died down to a rhythmic, steady pulse.
Only two remained.
I hung in the air, suspended by the weak, dying pull of the final pair. My breath came in ragged, burning hitches, and the Overclock heat was beginning to haze my vision. I looked at the last two eyes. They weren't beckoning anymore. They were watching. Waiting.
[ Fiend Count: 2 / 84 ]
They hung in the void opposite each other—two colossal eyes blazing with violet flame, their countless arms writhing like black suns. The pressure they exuded was nothing like the earlier waves. My blade trembled in my hands, not from weakness, but because the air itself warped, pressing against me with the weight of a collapsing world.
"This… this is different."
Their gravity didn't just pull—it crushed. My skin split at the edges of my forearms, small lines of blood running down toward my wrists. My body wanted to fold into itself, bones grinding under invisible chains.
The two Chrythids roared, their combined pull locking me firmly in place. It was as if the universe itself had conspired to drag me apart. I forced a single step forward, each muscle screaming, and leapt. My blade sang as I drove it clean through the first Chrythid's eye.
Its body fractured, shrieking as it burst into cosmic ash.
[ Fiend Count: 1 / 84 ]
The silence lasted only a heartbeat, a vacuum so absolute it felt like the universe was holding its breath. Then, the last Chrythid swelled. It didn't just grow; it expanded exponentially, doubling in size—then doubling again—until it loomed over the entire horizon like a dying sun. Its detached arms multiplied into a forest of reaching, grasping limbs, and its gravitational pull magnified a hundredfold.
The physics of the floor shattered. My body was yanked upward with bone-snapping velocity, then slammed back into the liquid-glass floor hard enough to crater the starlit ground. The impact sent a massive shockwave of white light rippling across the cosmos.
I spat a thick mouthful of blood, my vision swimming in a sea of gray as I struggled to rise.
"So… the last one inherits the strength of the fallen," I wheezed, pushing myself up with trembling arms. "Dad really had a weird obsession with exponents... from the Gnawlings on the first floor to this."
The creature's central eye flared a violent, blinding purple. The pull intensified, dragging at my very soul, trying to peel my consciousness away from my frame. Veins bulged along my neck and forehead, throbbing with the pressure of a thousand atmospheres. My curved blade, once light as a feather, now felt heavier than a mountain range.
"Fine…" I staggered, my boots grinding into the edge of the crater as I lifted the hilt with both hands. The gravity was so dense I could see the light of the distant stars bending toward the Chrythid's iris. "Then let the stars tear me apart—at least I'll die moving forward."
The Chrythid let out a final, reality-warping pulse. I didn't even have to step; the gravity dragged me forward at terminal velocity, my body feeling like it was tearing at the seams, my skin hot with the friction of the void.
[ Overclock Meter: 61% ]
I wasn't a boy anymore. I was a kinetic slug—a weapon of pure, redirected momentum aimed directly at the burning heart of the star.
I roared, the sound tearing through my throat as my curved blade ignited. Silver arcs of light, raw and jagged, spiraled around the steel as I poured every remaining drop of my essence into a single, world-breaking strike. I didn't just swing; I became the edge of the blade.
Steel clashed against the void.
The impact was a physical shockwave that stalled the gravity of the room for one frozen microsecond. The Chrythid shrieked—a sound of dying universes that vibrated through my very DNA. Its enormous form trembled, the violet iris fracturing as it tried to swallow my blade whole. The pull intensified one last time, a desperate, crushing surge that threatened to tear my limbs from my sockets and drag me into the abyss with it.
Base physics demanded that I break. But I didn't stop. I couldn't.
With a final, agonizing twist of my core, I carved upward. I felt the resistance of the gravity-core snap like a taut wire. The blade split the eye in two, cleaving through the nightmare of geometry and observation.
The explosion of starlight was blinding. It wasn't fire; it was pure, unadulterated data and light, a supernova that swallowed the liquid-glass floor, the auroras, and the stars themselves.
Then, there was only silence. A silence so heavy it felt like it had its own weight.
I lay in the center of the crater, my chest heaving, staring up at a sky that was finally, truly empty.
[ Fiend Count: 0 / 84 ]
[ Floor 17: Cleared ]
[ Overclock Meter: 52% — Emergency cooldown initiated. ]
The violent tension in the air dissolved, the spiraling constellations slowing their frantic spin until they settled into a calm, majestic canopy. The liquid-glass floor beneath my boots didn't shatter; instead, the deep violet storm clouds parted, revealing a breathtaking celestial panorama—a peaceful, endless ocean of stardust that rippled softly with every breath I took. The void wasn't aggressive anymore; it had transformed into a quiet, starlit sanctuary.
I collapsed to one knee, panting, my blade buried deep into the glowing ground to hold myself upright. My body shook violently, my vision dimming at the margins from pure exhaustion, but the view was mesmerizing.
"That… was only Floor 17…?" I whispered, my eyes reflecting the soft, beautiful shimmer of the newly formed scenery.
[ Reward: Gravity Alteration (Ability) — Allows the user to alter the direction of gravity in a controlled area. ]
[ Attribute Points: +38 ]
"An ability, huh? So the Labyrinth doesn't just hand out items and passive skills—it grants active abilities too."
[ Affirmative. ]
"But… how can I use it if I don't have mana?"
[ Upon entering the Labyrinth, the host is subjected to its passive REWRITE. This allows the host to bend the laws of nature themselves. Thus, even without a natural mana core, the host may wield abilities granted by the Labyrinth. ]
"Then… I can use this outside the Labyrinth as well?"
[ Affirmative. As long as SYSTÉMA remains integrated within your frame, the ability will function. ]
[ The Artificer modified SYSTÉMA specifically so you could bend existing architectural rules through its framework. ]
I tightened my fist, the tattered linen binding I'd wrapped over my palm creaking in the absolute stillness. My eyes traced the jagged ruts I had carved into the starlit floor—scars left on a living fragment of the universe.
Somehow, even with him gone, Dad was still here.
He wasn't speaking through a holographic recording. He wasn't guiding my blade with a ghostly hand. He was just... existing. He was in the weight of the gravity, the math of the waves, and the deliberate beauty of the void. He was the silent architect of the space he had created for me to grow.
In the ringing quiet between the stars, I felt it—not a command, but a whisper of a trail. It was like he had left a hidden pathway through the data scraps for me to follow, a map drawn in the language of experience rather than ink.
I raised my hand toward the sky, reaching for those endless, distant cosmic lights. For the first time since the light swallowed me back at the house, I wasn't afraid of their vastness. I didn't feel small in the way a victim feels small.
I appreciated it. I respected the scale of the challenge.
Because somewhere out there, in that shimmering cosmic sea, Dad had trusted me. He had trusted me enough to stop holding my hand—to let me bleed, let me struggle, and ultimately, let me discover the strength to survive it for myself.
I wasn't just a survivor of Floor 17. I was his legacy.