NOVEL WEB B1 | Chapter 18
Within one of the Three Rooms of the Tutorial
Akari Yamamoto lets out a light grunt as she sends off a wave of water to crush four Sentinels floating in the air in front of her. Each of a different metal. Saving the group of teenagers in front of her.
But she doesn’t stop to help them any further. Instead she continues right onto the next block in front of her before floating into the air atop the block. All the way till she reaches the next block.
Akari has two priorities for her time within this tutorial. The first is to level up as much as she can, and the second is to find the girl who had woken up from the coma and joined their room.
She wasn’t able to get a good look at her before, but from the look she did get, the girl looked just like the young miss from when she was younger and still in high school. Excluding the inhuman features the girl had.
And there’s just something about the situation that bothers her.
Because the young miss was also in a coma.
So Akari goes from one place within the room to another, hunting down any monster she sees with her powerful water mana manipulation skill. A skill that let Akari become a water mage in the first place.
And as Akari moves through the room, she can’t help but feel tension building within her chest. Just at the mere thought of losing her place in society. Of how badly this new System’s Initialization will screw with everything.
It won’t completely topple the current regiment of the world, because those with powerful root skills will still have their dominantly powerful root skills. But new people, both evil and good, will rise up and turn society on its head.
That’s what Akari is worried about.
And that’s not even considering the monsters Chaos’s clone kept suggesting would be on Val after the tutorial.
Akari keeps moving from one block to another, killing one monster after another, and occasionally asking any enforcer she runs into if they’ve seen the girl who woke up from her coma. But no matter how long she searches, she never finds the girl.
What she finds instead tears a hole in her heart as she hears one enforcer named Rachel Harris describe how she saw the girl falling off of the blocks into the void below. And for some reason, Akari feels some tears stinging at her eyes despite still not fully believing that it’s the young miss.
After all, how could it be her? The girl in question looks seventeen years old while the young miss is twenty. The girl also has large wings and glowing red eyes, whereas the young miss has no inhuman ability related features.
Akari almost immediately jumps down from the ledge, using her water magic to lower herself down deeper and deeper into the room. And as she gets further down, her hopes of finding the girl alive slowly fade away, only barely carried on by the fact that the girl has wings.
But after going down for an entire minute, she ends up slowly running low on both mana and water energy. So she’s forced to shift her travel method to using the floating blocks. Especially since she’s still having to deal with monsters that she passes by.
She continues going down further and further, her hope slowly diminishing with every passing minute, until she finally stumbles on something… strange.
A random ledge built into the wall of the room with a large pattern etched into the floor and some sort of portal at the center of the pattern. And the moment her eyes land on the portal, a System Message appears in the center of her vision. One that looks different from any other System Message she’s seen thus far.
♢ Class E Gate: The Hall of Goliath – Recommended level: 10 – Users Inside: 1 – Status: Sealed ♢
Akari frowns at the Gate before gradually making her way over to it from the block she’s currently on. But when she tries to get within ten meters of the Gate, the thing lets out a bright flash of light that sends her staggering backwards as a red System Message slowly moves across her vision and the System’s female voice echoes in her head.
{WARNING --- ONE DAY HAS PASSED SINCE THE GATE’S OPENING. NO NEW USERS ALLOWED INSIDE UNTIL CURRENT USER/S ARE DEAD --- WARNING}
The mind of the League of Enforcer’s Adjudicator immediately freezes as everything is laid out before her.
The girl has wings, and only a single person is inside of this Gate. It means there’s a good chance it might be her, if no one else has entered it in the last day. And that means the girl may be in danger and I can’t do anything to help.
Akari immediately begins to pace back and forth, wondering what she should do.
She has no idea how long the Gate will take to clear, or if the girl will survive clearing it in the first place. And the longer she stays here, the less time she’ll have to level up, and the less likely it’ll be that she’ll retain her position as the Adjudicator once she returns from the tutorial.
So she takes a deep breath and tries to consider everything she’s seen so far.
The girl falling wasn’t the only thing the woman said happened. She also saw her fighting against an Iron Sentinel before falling.
And the Ashley Sinclair that Akari knows wouldn’t be able to do that.
Not without an ability.
Akari takes another deep breath before nodding to herself, finally deciding that the girl can’t be her. Then she decides to rest here for a little while to recover her mana and water energy, following which she will return to hunting monsters.
Ashley
I end up resting on the block for several hours, just letting my health, mana, and chaos energy slowly recover before I finally start moving again. With the end result of my break leading to me regenerating seven bars of chaos energy, along with the two from my level-ups. I regenerated all of my mana. And I regenerated a quarter of my health capacity.
All in all, I end up with a tiny bit over three quarters of my health, full mana, and about half of my chaos energy.
So I fly through the blocks towards where those moledrills finished killing each other off until there were only a few remaining. Then I try to take them on one by one in an attempt to find some sort of weakness.
And find their weakness I do.
As it turns out, their weakness is when they’re turning around. If I hit them when their triangles aren’t spinning, I can knock the triangle out of its main body. Except that I have to start with the smaller triangles because the larger ones are harder to knock out. And thanks to Resilient Structure, I know that the more damaged they are, the easier it is to damage them.
So best to start with the easy parts to break off and move on through the harder parts.
And soon enough, I finish dealing with the moledrills.
Leaving the water elemental turrets as my next monster to tackle.
I really hope they give me a ranged skill.
Several seconds pass as I fly up towards them, only briefly glancing at the timer as I do so. A timer that tells me that it’s getting close to having been two days since the start of phase three of the tutorial.
Meaning there’s a little over five days left.
Probably not enough time to defeat all three mini bosses.
Then again, I probably won’t be given the chance to do that anyways. Since there are bound to be other people fighting those mini bosses any time now. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re defeated before I even finish my mini boss. What with me doing this one solo.
My thoughts end up getting cut off when I suddenly smell water while at the same time hear some sort of whooshing sound. So I instinctively move to the right before a large pulse of water shoots straight by where I was just at.
Steaming hot water.
I immediately turn towards the direction the hot water came from before finding one of those blue triangles spinning incredibly fast in circles while gradually slowing down with a small amount of water being generated in front of it. An amount that is gradually growing smaller with every passing second.
Well, here’s hoping the thing gives me that skill.