Chapter 197: Rush (I)
Uhtred’s mind immediately kicked into gear.
The objective given by the host was simple: climb to the next floor within ten minutes or die. Yet, as his eyes flitted across the vast, endless floor, there was no visible staircase, ramp, or portal to reach this so-called next floor.
Aside from the billions of alien bodies pressed tightly against him on the ground, there was nothing else around.
He looked up immediately. The sky above was a vast, featureless expanse of bright, source-less light. There was no obvious doorway up there either.
Wait... if there’s no way up, can’t I just create my own way?
Just as the idea formed in Uhtred’s mind, several figures across the massive floor began to ascend. Aliens whose bodies naturally catered to flight — winged aliens, floating gaseous entities, and mechanical thruster-equipped races — began moving upward immediately.
In fact, it wasn’t just them. Others who had reached the same realization were also scrambling to find ways off the ground.
Without wasting a single second, Uhtred did the same.
He leapt into the air, pushing off the tightly packed bodies of aliens surrounding him. On the ground, moving was nearly impossible, but now that he had kicked into full competitive gear, he didn’t care who he stepped on.
He shoved violently against them, sending several alien bodies tumbling over. Some crashed into the panicked crowd, instantly stampeded by the surging horde, but Uhtred didn’t spare them a glance.
He launched himself upward, and before gravity could drag him back down, he willed an extremely dense, compacted layer of air directly beneath his foot.
Pushing off it with brute force, he launched himself higher.
The spell was surprisingly difficult to maintain, requiring intense focus. Creating a solid, compressed surface out of thin air that could bear his full weight without any anchor was far from natural.
Doing it once wasn’t so hard. Doing it in rapid succession, however, was something he had never attempted before. Yet, despite the difficulty, he managed to stabilize his rhythm.
He needed to time the spell perfectly, dispersing the platform at the exact moment he lunged from it, and creating the next where he would land.
Once he established a steady momentum, he adjusted his trajectory, heading straight toward Diya.
The other members of the human ascender squad had spotted Uhtred immediately and picked up on his strategy. Those whose attunements leaned toward pure elements tried to replicate his movement.
Isolde Castiglione, who had previously only demonstrated her frost abilities, revealed a new element this time, kicking up a powerful gust of wind beneath her feet.
It turned out she actually wielded more than one element.
She launched herself off the ground from the middle of a dense alien cluster. Several frantic creatures tried to grab her legs to haul themselves up, but Isolde spun like a corkscrew mid-air, channeling her frost magic to sever their prying hands and limbs before they could latch on.
When she tried to replicate Uhtred’s air platforms, however, the technical difficulty became clear. He had made it look effortless, but in reality, it wasn’t.
She gritted her teeth, channeling a heavy burst of essence to form a broad platform. It required immense focus to hold her weight, and only when she was confident it was stable did she dare jump to create the next.
As a result, her ascent was far slower than Uhtred’s. Still, compared to the many who were still in the ground, she was moving already.
As for the other human ascenders, Zara had already taken to the air. Her spatial magic allowed her to move in short bursts.
She darted through the crowd in a sharp zig-zag pattern, stepping on alien heads and shoulders to build initial momentum before launching herself upward.
Mid-air, her hand slashed forward, cutting a tiny tear in the fabric of space. Jumping through the rift, she reappeared several feet higher in an instant.
Before gravity could pull her down, she released a focused burst of repelling spatial force from her palms, propelling herself further upward toward another tear. It was an unrefined, energy-intensive method of flight, but it did the work.
Across the vast floor, the same frantic ingenuity was playing out. Black Sun, Hassan Al-Malik, King Alexei, Antoine Blanc, White Raven, and Perfection had all observed Uhtred’s movement and adapted quickly, deploying their respective skills to rise toward the featureless sky.
For those who had no means of their own, they found ways to latch on to others and hitch a ride dangerously.
To Uhtred’s surprise, even Diya, whom he was heading toward to assist, began executing a transformation that caught him completely off guard.
He had prioritized reaching Diya first because he knew she was only a Healer Mage. She had learned deadly ways to use her power as a weapon, but he still assumed she had no way to fly on her own.
It turned out he had severely underestimated her growth over the past year.
Before Uhtred could reach her, his eyes narrowed as a hideous transformation began unfolding across her body. Diya’s face twisted in pain as two massive, bloody mounds erupted from her shoulder blades.
She grabbed onto a frantic alien standing beside her, a creature losing its mind in the mounting chaos, and drained its body without the slightest remorse or hesitation.
She used the alien’s physical mass as raw fuel to force the rapid mutation her body was undergoing.
Within seconds, two massive wings sprouted from her shoulders. They initially looked raw and bloody, but in the next breath, dense layers of dark feathers erupted across the muscle tissue, covering the exposed red flesh.
Diya looked up, meeting Uhtred’s surprised gaze. Then, with a powerful beat of her newly formed wings, she launched herself into the air, leaving the surrounding aliens completely stunned.
They scrambled backward, horrified by how casually she had dissolved an entire living being to force a physical transformation onto her own body.
A few lingering aliens snapped out of their shock and reached for her legs, attempting to drag her back down or hitch a free ride into the sky. Before they could touch her, Diya fired off several surgical biological spells, severing their arms at the joints.
She beat her wings powerfully, ascending until she leveled out alongside Uhtred.
"You weren’t the only one hard at work over the past few months," she said with a confident smile. "We’re in the Tower, Uhtred. I’m not some damsel in distress who needs saving. I can pull my own weight."