"So, what type of quest were you two offered when you guys went to Floors One and Two?" Jass whispered to Bonehead and Sam.
"For Floor One, because I was late to the party on killing the Floor Boss, my only requirement was to use various ingredients to concoct a couple of poisons using them as a base," Bonehead answered as he lounged atop a large boulder, as he watched Sam and Esmerelda carefully edit the ward focus Deacon found on the tree that was a focal pillar over Jeremiah Heart's base.
"Floor Two was pretty normal, I think," Bonehead said, eyes still fixed on the distant town where Deacon had spotted Jeremiah, and if Deacon's estimations were correct, they were four kilometers away from it. "Sam and I were a party of two, and we tore through the five waves without much trouble."
Then a look came over him, causing him to turn to Deacon, who was hidden on one of the very same tree's branches, watching for any movement within the ruined town or for any patrols coming close. "We didn't find the hut you told us about, the one that led to the Hidden Quest. We spent like half a day trying to find it, but we didn't see a lick of it. You sure you weren't just high or something? The fog there really fucks with your mind."
High up in the tree while being relatively close to the rest of his Party, Deacon's brows furrowed as he continued to watch the town in front of him, which was protected by various wards and contained various loot for them to steal.
"I'm certain that it's there, I got an achievement for it called Finder of the Hidden I after discovering it," Deacon replied, taking out his most recent Status Page and folding it to only show everything below his stats.
"Could be just a one-off Hidden Quest," Sam chimed as he was in the middle of editing the ward focus, while Esmerelda was keeping the mana and structure of it from releasing a signal to the creator of the ward. "While Hidden Quests are hidden–"
"Durr, Hidden Quests are hidden, durr," Jass interrupted, straining her voice to be more like Sam's.
Almost immediately, everyone in the group, except for Sam, who let out a sigh of defeat, broke out into chuckles, all of whom were quite grateful for the Silencing ward that Sam had placed around them so they could chit chat while time passed.
"Anyways, back to what I was saying," he said, giving a pointed look to Jass, who held up her hands, signifying that she was backing off. "Some Hidden Quests are one-time things, I've read as such when poring through some books and documents in the Family Archives. When I've visited other noble houses with my family, and got permission to enter their archives, I've read similar things."
"Does that mean that it's gone forever?" Deacon asked. "There was a crap load of books and journals inside the hut that I wasn't able to read because I wanted to go help Goth Mommy Moriah and clear the Floor."
"She was a Goth Mommy!" Bonehead exclaimed, shooting off the boulder he was lounging on and quickly scaling the tree Deacon was on, and grabbing a fistful of his cloak, much to the amusement of his fellow party members. "Proof, do you have proof?"
Smirking at Bonehead's reaction, he reached into his Spatial Sling Bag and pulled out the photo of Moriah that he kept just for this moment. Passing it to him, Bonehead grasped it eagerly and stared at it silently for a good few seconds before his skeletal body went limp, causing Deacon's arm to shoot out and grab him by his robes to prevent him from falling to the ground.
Deacon's right arm still held on to Bonehead's limp form as he turned back to face the mud town, chuckling along with the rest of the group at Bonehead's obvious weakness towards goths.
"Did you set that up to mess with Bonehead, or were you being truthful about the hut?" Esmerelda asked.
"Both," Deacon smirked. "But the journals I read did sound really interesting. Apparently, Moriah mentioned she was a Tier 6 at one point, then a couple of chapters later, she mentioned that she was just below god tier."
"Tier 6?" Jass repeated in confusion. "The highest Tier I've heard of is Tier 2."
"That's what she said in the books, and when she went to go get a one-up on the Three Sister Fates, in order to complete the spell, she used her own lifeforce to fuel the spell, which I think killed her… And I assume that from there something happened, and the System and Tower did something so that she became a part of it."
"But if that was the case," Sam said, pausing for a few seconds to concentrate on a certain section of the ward focus. "… Then, why aren't you dead? Regardless if she was weakened, I assume the fighting knowledge of a Tier 6 would have killed you a thousand times over."
"I dunno," Deacon admitted, pulling up Bonehead's limp form back onto the tree branch. "… ah, wait, I do. The quest that automatically appeared in front of me said that she was trying to use me as her host body and that I had to defeat her before the timer ran out. She looked really affected by whatever she did to the Three Sister Fates, to bind them once more without having to use her lifeforce as the spell's power source."
"… You're right, those books would have been useful to go through," Sam said, gesturing for Esmerelda to help him out with isolating another section of the ward focus. "Why would the System and Tower lie to us about this stuff now, when they never had before?"
"... Maybe if we go higher up the Tower, we can also reach Tier 6, or maybe we become gods or something once we escape it," Jass offered, before asking, "Was there anything else that was mentioned in the books?"
Deacon scratched the tip of his nose for a minute, debating whether he should try and drop hints to his friends about what his Father had told him about the Multiverse.
"… Hello? You there, Deke?" Jass asked, looking at his back in confusion as she was watching the ground area around them.
"Oh, sorry," Deacon said, pulling himself out of his thoughts and deciding to toss out a detail that might potentially screw him over in the long run. "Yeah, I caught mentions of something called Multiverse. Have you heard about it before?"
"Multiverse?" Esmerelda repeated, before looking completely lost in thought, bombarded by the sudden rises of emotions that the spirits were sending her.
Sam looked similarly lost in thought, but continued to manipulate the ward focus to allow a gap for them to go through. While Jass asked, "What does that mean?"
"I dunno," Deacon answered. "There were just a couple of mentions of it in the journals when I read through it, but no explanation on what it was."
"You think it was some adjective or descriptor of something?" Bonehead suggested, having regained his bearing a couple of seconds after Deacon had placed him back atop the same branch as him.
"No, the way it was mentioned in the journals made me think that it was a thing, or a place, rather than it being a descriptor of something," Deacon answered. "But it could have also been something I mistranslated while reading through it."
"How could you mistranslate something in the Tower?" Bonehead asked. "If it was created by design by the Tower and not after it became a Floor, the Tower translates it automatically to us."
"Oh, really?" Deacon replied, getting a nod in return from Bonehead and a shrug from Jass, who was just as bad as him when it came to sleeping in academy lectures that didn't involve combat or anything physical or magical.
I guess I'm not some sort of savant when it comes to languages, then, Deacon thought to himself. "The more you know," he said.
"… Got it," Sam said with a final twist of his Mana Carver on the ward focus as a second later, a 2x2 meter gap within the wards that protected the town in front of them was created, leaving whoever who'd created the ward and all those inside it unaware of what they'd done.
The moment the gap within the wards was created, any more words that were about to be said between them were dropped, and the five of them slipped on their masks and through the gap and rushed towards the town, using the cover of night to hide their forms.
Jass crouched near the front, keeping one hand on the hilt of her glaive and the other dragging gently through the wet dirt for balance, her steps silent. The soft glow of a nearby torch flickered off her cheek as she glanced over at Deacon and nodded him forward to take the lead just as they were about to enter the town.
They kept wide of the main road and instead went through the buildings that looked just like they were about to collapse. In one building in particular, they all took out their Presence Dampening potions Bonehead had brewed and downed them quickly, and almost immediately, they felt each other's presence practically vanish.
Once they handed Bonehead the empty bottles, who quickly stored them away, Deacon, who was watching guard, raised a hand to them as he heard footsteps nearby. "Movement. Four. Right."
Deacon stayed crouched at the front, his fingers tapping twice against the worn wood of the collapsed windowsill. Two more fingers, this time closer to the floor.
Sam and Esmerelda had a manabolt ready on their tongues, Bonehead having pulled out a potion bottle that was holding in a homebrewed knockout gas within it, while Jass and Deacon readied their fists.
And, just as the patrol neared the back of their almost collapsed building, Jass's hand shot forward, catching the nearest one by the collar and yanking him in with one brutal tug. He didn't even get out a yelp before her palm clamped over his mouth and her knee drove into his gut.
Deacon's hand also shot forward just as quickly as he wrenched the guy into the building and down to the floor, where he put him in a sleeper hold so quickly the patrolling cadet barely had a second to fight back before he fell asleep.
Esmerelda and Sam's manabolts shot forward, impacting the other two in their throats, and causing them to choke before they could even shout. Bonehead lifted up the cork of the knockout gas bottle he was holding, and blew its contents in their direction.
A second later, after the guards inhaled and were choking on the knockout gas, they passed out onto the floor outside the building.
Pulling their bodies into the building and away from sight, they quickly checked if they had any communication devices on them. When they didn't see any, they gave each other a small nod before going into the next building.
"Two. Patrol. Ahead. One Left. One Right," Deacon signaled to them before twirling a finger around. "Loop. Around."
Sam, Esmerelda, and Bonehead peeled off from the group and headed to the right, ducking behind collapsed, large chunks of mud walls and equally large rubble, while Jass and Deacon stayed low and moved along the other side of the crumbling building they ducked into for cover.
They looked at the guy just a couple of meters ahead of them, who was sitting on a chair and looking split between staying awake and falling asleep.
Jass pointed at the guy and then at herself. Deacon gave her a thumbs-up.
She broke from cover, and before the guy could even realize the danger he was in, her cloth-covered hand was around his mouth, her other arm locking around his neck as she dragged him into the building Deacon and she were hiding in.
He tried to put up a fight, but even though his Strength stat was higher than Jass', he wasn't able to fight off the effects of the tranquilizer-soaked cloth she stuffed in his mouth and kept shut.