Waking up around noon, Sam didn’t need to worry about waking Dia this time; she wasn’t in the room. Looking around, he saw a notification in the corner of his eye. Checking it out, he found that the Ascendant system had given him 3 points to spend, but as usual, it didn’t specify what triggered it or where this was going.

  Right now, it was just metaphorical free levels. He put the three points in Spirit, bumping it to 70. This lifted his health to 370, his Energy and hands he could create to 70, and the Aura points to 28. On top of this were secondary effects like Static Charge, so it was a good upgrade.

  He felt a bit weird at how it was becoming routine to get these points. He wanted to know more, but this was ‘just how it was’ at the moment...

  Getting up to go through his routine, he found her in the living room with Elara. Dia was inspecting Elara’s fangs, seeming to find it very entertaining that she could move them back and forth in her mouth.

  “Zar!” she exclaimed as she saw him; she put Elara down on the table before running over. “Elara frak morr!” She used two fingers to simulate fangs on herself, ignoring that she also had fangs. She moved the fingers back to simulate how a snake’s fangs can bend back.

  “Yeah, many snakes can move their teeth; it’s neat,” he smiled back at her, encouraging her eagerness. “I think all fanged snakes can. Not sure, to be honest. And now that I think about it, there’s a lot about your biology I know nothing about.” Peering past Dia, he looked at Elara, who had coiled up on the table, allowing her to lift her head higher.

  Elara tilted her head to the side with a curious look, her small forked tongue tasting the air.

  “I mean... I don’t mean any of this rudely; you’re quite smart, can even do math and consider complex things like how phones work, but do snakes have that kind of brainpower? And you can talk, so you must have vocal cords... also something snakes don’t normally have.” He looked at her with confused and interested eyes.

  She tilted her head the other way. “I don’t know. I haven’t considered my anatomy before or how I’m different from other snakes.”

  “I mean, in a way, it doesn’t matter, you’re still you, but I’m kind of curious now.” He smiled a bit hesitantly.

  “I don’t know how I can show any of that. I can open my mouth, but I think that’s about it.” Elara smiled back, seeming happy to be the main focus of his intrigue.

  “I don’t have any snake knowledge, so thanks, but I doubt it’d give me any good info,” he smiled back. “Instead, have you considered what you want to use your money on?”

  “Oh... no,” she answered hesitantly. “My needs, or rather, my wishes, are simple. I don’t need much. I like being useful to you, and if anything, I like to hunt.”

  “Well, I can take you on hunts whenever I can, but that doesn’t cost... anything, to be honest.” Scratching his head, he moved towards the bathroom. “It’s your money to use as you want; if you want to give it to me, I won’t say no, but I prefer that you use at least some of it on yourself. Perhaps some skills or items you want.” Nodding towards the room tablet before he closed the door, he hoped that she would take a look and find something.

  Doing his business, he came out fully dressed and geared to find Dia sitting on the sofa with Elara on her lap. Dia was holding the tablet to give Elara easier access to scroll and tap on it with her tail.

  “Anything good?” Sam asked as he walked over.

  “Not really. Some spells could be interesting, but my Spirit is zero, and I don’t want to invest in that.” She was scrolling as she answered, looking at the tablet more than Sam.

  “Ah, well. We can check again in a while; the availability of skills changes from minute to minute,” Sam replied as he moved for the door. “I have a few things I need to sell off. Thought I’d go get some food at the same time. You want to come?”

  “Dia want!” Dia replied eagerly, placing the tablet on the table and bringing Elara as she ran to Sam. They all got ready to leave and went to the lobby. The trip down only took a minute, and the,y found themselves in the queue to sell things, waiting. He sent a text to Janik about meeting up, getting a reply, and he agreed to meet in the mess like normal.

  Like always, he placed the things on the table.

  “I also have a bunch of Cores and Crystals. Do you want me to spread them across the table here?” He asked, not wanting to just dump 100 items across the place.

  “We can do them in batches,” the middle-aged man behind the desk confirmed. “Do a few at a time. I’ll scan them and move them, and we can do it that way.” He smiled.

  Sam nodded and started with the cores, exactly as the man had stated. They did a few, got them registered and did the next batch as he moved them to storage behind the desk. The process took a while due to volume, but it was manageable. Once all the Cores and Crystals were scanned, Sam moved on to the old armour and weapons.

  “Ok, that all comes up to $4 919 500. Should I deposit that to your account?” His smile was practiced, and he didn’t react at all to the sum.

  Sam briefly wondered what kinds of sums this man was used to seeing.

  “That’s fine, please do.” Sam nodded and left the desk once everything was done. The group set their target to the mess hall, got some food and sat down to eat and wait.

  As they waited, Dia opted to scoot closer and sit against him, enjoying just sitting there. Sam took to scrolling the marketplace with Elara, seeing if something new and interesting had come up.

  “OH!” Sam exclaimed as he saw an Appraise C, hitting buy on it had the app working for a few seconds before displaying an error, listing that it was out of stock. “Wow, that was fast...”

  Janik had explained this before, but it still went much faster than he expected. Seeing a resource-pool boost skill for 5 million, the process repeated, but this time, he got it!

  He felt good about at least getting the resource pool boost. It wasn’t amazingly powerful, only 20%, but it would be a scaling bonus that would improve everything. Elara continued to browse and hit buy suddenly as well. Sam was so busy trying to do the mental math to find out how much his Energy pool would increase by 20% that he didn’t notice Janik until he suddenly sat down.

  “Mornin’“, he cheekily commented at 1 PM.

  Sam chuckled at the dry, dumb joke. “Morning to you as well. Are you ready for some rushing?”

  He had vaguely planned that he wanted to get done with the 3rd Floor as soon as possible. It was a boring and annoying Floor, being all underwater and barren of people. He wanted to get to a place with more activity and more intrigue in a different way.

  “Oh, you think you can blast through the rest of the Third Floor? I doubt I’m gonna be much help, and what was it?” While talking, he took out his phone and scrolled a bit to find something. “Ah, yes, the boss of the last dungeon, a bit under 3000 health, 300 Defence, and capable of doing 420 damage with secondary effects.”

  Sam thought about it for a second. “To be honest... That doesn’t sound too bad... I forgot to calculate elemental damage yesterday, and I was ‘gifted’ some points. I also just got a new skill I’ll pick up after that’ll increase my Energy, meaning that once it’s all done I...”

  Using his phone’s calculator to get all the math going, he calculated his new Energy and the total damage he could do with elemental considered this time. “Let’s see... 84 hands, using the Psi-weapons... Add electrical and fire damage, but halved for Elemental Resistance and Defence, not cunting crits and whatnot: 3 502 damage.”

  Janik sat there with wide eyes.

  “Oh, if I manage to sneak up on it, add 50%.” Sam smiled widely, feeling surprisingly good about his numbers.

  “Ok... first of all... wow...” He was at a loss for words. “That’s all kinds of terrifying...”

  “A bit more if I focus Aura on boosting weapon damage.” Sam continued to stack things, though he didn’t bother re-doing the math if he was to keep Invisibility going as that would remove 10 Energy, so 20 hands. Though these would be Psy-weapons, it still added up.

  “Yes, yes, I get it.” Janik raised his hands defensively to get him to stop. “You’re amazing, and I’m not envious at all.” Ending with a deep sigh, Janik thought about it for a moment.

  “It sounds like this can be done relatively fast. Though we’re somewhat under-levelled, you have the damage output of a large group on your own, and it’s not like we need to come with you, like on the Second Floor.”

  “Pretty much, yes,” Sam confirmed. “And you might be under-levelled now, as we get to the Fourth Floor and start doing things there, you should catch up soon enough. At least up to about the same level, or one below.” He added the latter due to how scaling math worked.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Though Dia was in a cheating situation, and Elara would be, by default, a bit behind, Janik would catch up to a level or two below him and somewhat stay at that distance. At least for a while.

  Janik continued to think about this for a few seconds. “Yeah, I’m liking this. It’s not like I want to put you in extra danger, but... if you use your aura thing to defend yourself, you have good armour, perhaps invisibility and... idiotic damage level, I don’t imagine this being a true danger for you.”

  Sam nodded. The highest damage Janik mentioned before was 420. Putting Aura in the HP barrier gives him 140 extra health; his Defence was 80, and his current health was 370. Tanking one of those hits would leave him with about 170 health. The real danger was a lucky critical hit...

  But grinding up ten more levels with the progression on the Third Floor was unacceptable in Sam’s mind.

  He understood how the scaling and progression of the Tower were scaled against the Players, having them take more and more risk... but feeling it on himself like this made it much more real.

  “I’m good to go now, just get this over with, with how I am currently, I feel fine,” Sam stated with confidence, though he also tried to keep arrogance in mind. He didn’t intend to die because he thought too much about his abilities.

  “Well, in that case, let’s go,” Janik replied as he got up. “I always wanted to go to the Fourth Floor, it sounds cool.”

  Sam knew the rough gist; he had been reading about things before he became a Player, and it’s not like he had been reading less since. The Fourth Floor was composed of floating islands. Bridges or flight was the only way to get between them. Nobody knew how far up or down the area went as the winds would tear drones or people apart.

  “I don’t see a problem with that, I feel pretty fed up with the Third Floor anyway, so let’s get this over with.

  They left the mess hall and, with a stop at the Marketplace handout station, Sam got his resource boost Skill Crystal, and they moved back to Aetheria. This time, Elara came with them. They landed as normal on the top of the island, and Janik pointed downhill behind them.

  “We’re going this way,” he was looking at his phone as he continued. “We’re going down here, and we’ll take the bridge there to the diving spot.”

  Sam looked at where he was pointing, and he had briefly seen the bridge before but not properly looked at it. It was a long floating bridge constructed in the ocean. It went out like a massive pier, large enough to let two large cars pass each other on it, made of concrete and metal it reached out a considerable distance.

  “At the end,” Janik started explaining as he walked down, motioning for the others to follow. “There is a diving spot where we go down to the entry portal some distance underwater.”

  “I suppose that means that Elara won’t be coming with us.” Sam smiled at his reptile companion. “I suppose you’ll be waiting, then.”

  “That’s not a problem, I can hunt,” she looked back at him, not seeming to mind at all.

  “That’s true. Your v.nom is quite dangerous at the moment, so I’m sure you can handle whatever you want. Just be careful.” Sam replied. He knew her venom was terrifyingly potent, but she only had 82 HP and zero defence. Considering her level, she was quite weak defensively.

  It did make him wonder if he could get her something defensive at some point.

  “Well, it shouldn’t be long,” Janik commented to get Sam’s focus before he continued. “It’s an arena-style fight. There are a few other creatures you need to kill in there, but once they are dead, you disturb the crown, and the Brine Colossus will wake up.”

  “The Brine Colosus?” Sam asked, prompting Janik to explain more.

  “It’s a massive humanoid of rock and coral, Then it’s not too different from any golem except underwater and coral?” Sam summarized.

  “Yeah... kinda,” Janik agreed to the abstractification. “A bit weirdly put, but it’s not wrong. When we enter, we’ll be underwater the whole time, The next problem is that the emergency exit function won’t work there. This is true for most of the Dungeons here on the Third Floor, but we’re somewhat skipping them.” Janik smiled, surprisingly satisfied as they walked.

  Sam stopped himself from replying with arrogance. He couldn’t help but feel that things would go well and be easy, but getting too arrogant was how a lot of Players found their swift end.

  Before he knew it, they had arrived at the bottom of the island. The walk to the water's edge still took some time, even if the man-made roads made it faster and easier.

  “You can wait around here if you want, or you can come with us to the end of the pier,” Sam stated to Elara.

  “I’ll wait around here. I can swim, but I don’t want to hunt underwater.”

  Sam nodded; this made sense to him. Snakes were often surprisingly good swimmers, but it would probably not be the same. He crouched down and let her use his arm as a bridge to the ground. “That’s fine, we’ll pick you up on the way back.”

  Slithering down to the ground, she stopped on the way towards the tree line before turning around with an odd snake-smile. “Good luck.”

  She disappeared into the foliage right after.

  The others continued onto the pier, it was like most piers Sam knew about on Earth, a concrete platform with metal railings. The walk to the end was surprisingly uneventful. No people, a few birds and the odd underwater creature swimming in the depths, but nothing came to the surface and nothing affected them.

  If nothing else, it was a pleasant walk.

  Finally getting to the end, they found themselves standing at a large circular area with a hole in the middle. The hole was fenced in except on one side where stairs were going into the water. Some signs pointed down with some information about this being the End dungeon of the Third Floor. The information also repeated what Janik explained about the no exit and the process of how to manage the dungeon, referring to the guide app.

  One of the signs explained that the circle was placed directly above the entry portal, which was straight down by the entrance of a cave. They would have to swim for a short while to get there.

  Crouching down and feeling the water, Janik shook his hand to get most of it off as he got back up. “The water’s not too bad. Should we just go right away?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Sam replied, taking out his mask and making sure it was charged up. Doing the same for Dia. “If everything goes well, we might be out of there in an hour.”

  Getting ready and jumping into the water, they made their way down. Sam decided to help them on their way to speed up the process. he had 84 hands now, after all, so it was an easy thing to divide them up. They could talk through the masks, so it wasn’t a problem letting them know and pulling them down.

  It didn’t take much time for them to end up at the ocean bottom. If Sam had to guess, they were around 30 floors down. It became incredibly dark at this depth, light consumed by the water and most colour faded.

  “This was much further down than expected, I wonder how they found it originally,” Janik explained as Sam despawned the Psyhands of him.

  “Probably just thousands of players swimming about and someone happening on it?” Sam didn’t see any other good ways of doing this, as the portals were hard to see from a distance, even in the air. And now they floated in front of the shallow cave with a weird haze in the opening. A standard Dungeon entrance.

  “Dia,” Sam started as he turned towards her. “You don’t need to come if you don’t want to, since we can’t exit, in case some-” Sam wanted to give her a chance to wait, since she was a Companion tied to Sam, she didn’t need to risk herself in the Dungeon, but he was interrupted.

  “Dia coming!” She replied as if it was an order, with no option to discuss.

  Sam expected this kind of answer, he just felt that he should give her the option. “I suppose we enter, then?”

  “Yep, no need to wait,” Janik answered as he swam over to the entry portal, Sam and Dia following.

  The familiar window opened, and seconds after, they disappeared in a white flash.