Floor 2 (1): Caffeine Candy and the Man-Eating Flower

Having hung up on the Association President, Hong Yeon-hwa wearily scrolled down the Awakener profile glowing on her tablet screen.

"Finally, it's done."

Having her information entered into the database was proof that her Awakener registration had gone through properly. It might have only been a provisional registration, but for the Association, simply pinning down the identity of a Lunatic-difficulty climber was a critical matter in itself.

"Still, where on earth did that freak of nature crawl out from?"

The provisional measurement had stamped her with a B, but the Association's internal estimate put the girl at S-rank. A total mana pool that towered over the A-rank average. Mana control more refined than most veterans could manage. And on top of all that, a monstrous track record of clearing the Lunatic difficulty solo.

"And yet she's got production-type skills too..."

Normally, a production-type class couldn't climb the Tower at all without someone else carrying them. They had almost no skills that could be used directly in combat, after all. And yet this little runt called Kim A-yeon had cleared Lunatic difficulty alone, production skills and all.

It was a bizarre situation that defied common sense entirely. From the Association President's perspective, it must have been enough to make him tear his hair out. At this rate, what little remained of his scalp might shed a few more strands for good.

"Well... his problems are his problems."

Still, she had her own work to do. Muttering that to herself, Hong Yeon-hwa dragged her exhausted body toward the training grounds. Just like her Association duties, taking down the Floor 20 boss was a priority she had no leisure to shelve.

"There's nothing better than firepower... except even bigger firepower."

As always, explosions knew all the answers. And to grind the Floor 20 boss into paste, she needed firepower greater than what she had now.

Every trait, every skill, all tuned for nothing but firepower. She split her brain in two with Parallel Execution and slammed it into overdrive with Overclock. While her own body burned, she endured the heat with Fire Resistance and kept the calculations running. All of it, every last drop, in service of a single goal: stronger firepower.

Yes. She was, in the purest sense, a lunatic.

Though these days, a slightly more presentable kind of lunatic.

"Inferno."

Arriving at the training grounds, Hong Yeon-hwa stirred her mana with a voice drained of energy.

Vmmm...

A current of mana that began at her heart and spilled down her arm, stretching toward her fingertips. The mana released there traced intricate equations through the air, sketching out the circuitry of an enormous magic circle.

Parallel Execution. Overclock. The two traits flared to life one after another, and a fever like a boiling brain began to cook her skull from the inside.

But it was fine. She could take it. After all, she had Fire Resistance.

Vmmmm...

The mana screamed in place of her overworked body, vomiting out a low resonant hum. The equations carved themselves faster, faster, until the circle was complete — and then another layer of equations folded over the finished ring. Once, twice, three times...

By the time five magic circles lay stacked upon one another, Hong Yeon-hwa felt something strange.

"...Hm?"

The flow of mana was smoother than usual. No — not just the mana. Her mind was clear, too. At this level of overclocking, she should have long since gone foggy, her thoughts blurred like a windshield in mist...

VMMMMM──

In that instant, her mana roared like a sports car engine. And the magic circles began stacking at an exponential rate.

"W-wait a second...!"

Five layers. Six. Seven... The circles multiplied beyond her control without pause.

Krrk, KRKKRGG──!!

The ten-layer magic circle finally buckled, shrieking under a load it could no longer bear.

"St─"

Sensing that something had gone very, very wrong, Hong Yeon-hwa tried to cancel the spell.

...And failed. Catastrophically.

KWAAAAAANG──

The training grounds blew apart. A pillar of flame clawed at the sky. In an explosion like a small tactical nuke touching down, the shockwave arrived a beat late and blasted her glasses and hair off her in a single flash.

"......"

Thud.

Her legs gave out, and Hong Yeon-hwa crumpled where she stood, a total wreck, muttering into the scorched ground.

"That little brat..."

What the hell did she feed me...?

Meanwhile, at that very moment, in a convenience store on Floor 0.

Beep!

"......"

"......"

Swoosh.

"......"

"......"

The convenience store clerk stared down at the girl in front of him with the expression of a man dying to deliver a lecture.

"...Leave your money in and come back with a guardian."

"Why?!"

Like that's gonna fly, buddy. Use your common sense.

And so my attempt to buy alcohol with an Awakener registration card sank without a trace.

"Carbon, Carbon... you lied to me..."

No, it probably wasn't a lie, technically. An Awakener registration card worked as a substitute ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠for ID out in the world, just like a driver's license. It was just that this particular clerk turned out to be an exceptionally by-the-book young man with a stick up his Confucian ass.

"I don't look that young."

Even accounting for the baby face, surely the most generous read was high schooler? Not that anyone sensible would sell booze to a kid they suspected might be in high school. Honestly, was this guy not being a little too rigid about running a business inside the Tower? It's not like I was actually a high schooler.

"It's not like I even drink alcohol??"

...Hmm.

Okay, I was buying it to drink it. To work on an alcohol-based trait grind, I'd have to actually get the stuff down my throat first. It was just that, thanks to Drug Immunity, I wouldn't get drunk off it.

"Tch... I hope you wake up with a vicious kidney stone someday, you bastard."

Having hurled ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the most malevolent curse imaginable at the clerk with maximum spite, I puffed my cheeks out in a sulk and pulled up my status window.

"Status window."

Fash──!

I hadn't managed to buy the booze, but thanks to the skill I'd picked up recently, my status window was looking a little fuller these days.

Now, about the Awakener registration—

I tapped the Inventory entry among the list and pulled up the skill's detailed description.

An A-rank skill, Inventory.

A chopstick-sterilizer feature that those scumbag Tower devs had shoved behind a DLC paywall. I immediately decided to test the thing, pointing the skill at the aluminum cans sprawled across my floor.

"Inventory."

Fash!

Something flowed out from my chest, much like when I used Transmutation, traveling down my arm and pooling at my fingertips. I hadn't realized it before, but this had to be that so-called power called mana.

The mana gathered at my fingertips let out a low hum, and before long it began swallowing up the aluminum cans littering my room, one by one.

"Whoa, whoa."

Better performance than I'd expected. I'd assumed it was just a skill that opened a little portal in midair, nothing more. But with cans popping into storage at a single touch, it honestly felt like playing Minecraft. No fumbling with Tetris-style item management like some Escape-from-Tarkov clone, either.

Fash!

I used Inventory a second time, summoning one of the stored aluminum cans into the air. And at the same moment, I hit the can with Transmutation, reshaping it into a spike.

"Transmutation!"

CRUNCH!

Just as I'd hoped — a metal spike erupting upward from midair like it had been launched from a launcher. After summoning and reforming a few more, I had a rough feel for the skill's effective range too. By my reckoning, somewhere around two to three meters?

'A radius of 250 centimeters is the reach of these hands...'

I had no idea why, but the lyrics of some ancient geezer pop song floated into my head. Maybe the range really was set that way because that's literally how far a hand can reach.

...Well, whatever. The chronic weakness of the Transmutation skill — its pathetic range — was now more or less solved. In an excellent mood over the satisfying performance, I grinned and fired up the Awakener community right away.

"Uhehehe."

Something this good wasn't meant to be enjoyed alone. Good things are meant to be shared, or so they say.

Comments piled up by the dozen in the blink of an eye. The reactions were exactly what I'd predicted, and I kept refreshing with a contented little smile on my face.

Ding!

"Whuh?!"

But then, out of nowhere, a notification chime. With a shriek closer to a scream than a yelp, I flung open my inbox to check the freshly arrived message.

Right on schedule, there it was — a message from BurntCowIsCarbon, aka Hong Yeon-hwa. Except unlike the composed figure the Association had on file, something about her state was very much off.

Had she been possessed by the legendary twitchy-eyed kid or something? Completely blindsided by this massive curveball, and too flustered to even notice that my post had just gone trending, I watched the one-woman rampage of Hong Yeon-hwa, A-rank Awakener, unfold before my eyes.

"Wh-what the...? What's gotten into her...?"

She looked like she was one step away from a full-blown awakening as the Grand Bishop of some witch cult, and I scrambled to retrace my steps and figure out why exactly she was having a seizure.

Don't tell me... this candy...?

A caffeine candy made with my Transmutation skill. Thanks to my immunity, I'd barely felt any effect from it myself — but this was a candy packed with the concentrated caffeine of a good ten cans of energy drink.

Crunch, crunch.

'...Ugh, what even is this? Why is it so greasy?'

And she had crammed it straight into her mouth. Several pieces at a time, no less. Come to think of it, common sense dictates that even an Awakener's body rebels if you chug energy drinks by the dozens, right...? It was frankly a miracle she hadn't bolted for the Association bathroom to go ARGH-ARGH-GAAAH by now.

"......"

Well, she was still spitting out memes with all her wits about her, so evidently it hadn't done her body any harm. And for whatever reason, she looked genuinely happy, so that counted as a win... right?

Having apparently burned through her allotment of madness for the day, she was finally coming back to her senses and talking like a person. I gave the raving woman a reasonably honest explanation of the candy.

Probably because she'd finally grasped the true nature of what she'd been scarfing down, Hong Yeon-hwa rounded on me with the full force of her recovered energy.

"...How am I even supposed to explain this one?"

Well, you see, it's a caffeine candy made by condensing a few dozen cans of energy drink? And how does one condense it, you ask? ...Kneaded by hand, lovingly, by yours truly?

'This is basically Indian street food...'

Another fascinating day of street-vendor cooking shows. A bio-concentrator absolutely infused with the taste of Mom's home cooking — that signature sauce flavor, insane, right? As for the hygiene standards, think of them as shattered clean through the floor.

...Anyway.

I couldn't be bothered to give Hong Yeon-hwa a long, rambling, clause-by-clause explanation of the skill, so I hastily changed the subject and slammed the message window shut like a man fleeing the scene of a crime.

"Phew."

Now, then...

"Time to head on up, I suppose?"

Floor 2.

Vmmm──

"Ughck..."

Riding out the floor-transition motion sickness I could never seem to get used ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to, I opened my eyes to the same verdant forest scenery I'd left behind on Floor 1. It wasn't exactly the same place, though — the arrangement of the trees was subtly different. And there was no open plaza with the sky laid bare overhead, either.

"So this is Ellinia, not the Forest of Training..."

Not that Ellinia was much better. The canopy swallowed the sunlight whole, making this place gloomier still. Evening must have been falling, because the shadows felt even creepier for it...

Rustle!

I ran a hand down the gooseflesh on my arm and scanned my surroundings — and how long had I been doing that when, unlike on Floor 1, I picked up the presence of something off in the distance right away? Cautiously, I crept toward the source of the sound, and before long I laid eyes on its owner.

"...A flower?"

It definitely had the shape of a flower. Except its bud was bigger than a full-grown adult man, and it was lined with teeth, opening and closing like a mouth over and over. Its stalk, meanwhile, thrashed and coiled in every direction like the tentacles of a monster out of a magical girl show.

Gurgle... gurrgle...

"......"

And then came the sound — the sound a plant had absolutely no business making — oozing out of that blood-red blossom.

Unable to bear it a second longer, I opened the Awakener community on the spot.

Sure enough, the moment I posted, the comments came pouring in. But thanks to the gallery's proud traditions, not a single soul actually answered the question. Maybe I shouldn't have baited the title like that.

That was when it happened. A new comment, arriving with my refresh.

"Oh...?"

The username had a certain "this guy actually knows his stuff" energy about it, so I reflexively replied to that fixed-nick commenter.

"Ugh."

Dammit. More than three lines. And did he pawn off all his spaces or something?

But there was no information in the world more useful to me right now, so I forced down my reading-comprehension meltdown, strained my glazing eyes wide open, and ground through SpeedVegan's explanation when—

SHAAAAAANG──

A rush of split air thundered toward me out of nowhere.

A thick bundle of vines came hurtling straight at my face.