CHAPTER 37 Solo speedrun

CHAPTER 37 Solo Speedrun Powered Armor and the Delete All Button

I landed on the hard floor. The fifty-first floor hit me with a sterile, biting chill. I found myself standing in gigantic, echoing halls of the Forgotten Necropolises. Everything around me was hewn from perfectly smooth, pitch-black obsidian. The darkness here was dense, almost physical, and the air carried the sharp, metallic taste of old rust.

I yawned shortly, stretching my arms as my shoulder joints popped with a dry, satisfying crack. It was time to verify the hard boundaries of my newly upgraded foundation.

"Power Limit at thirty percent," I issued a quiet, mental command to my soul.

The thick, heavy chains binding my Astral Core loosened slightly. A sudden, silent wave of raw, blue power shot from my chest. The air in the corridor literally hardened under the sudden pressure, the barometric force rising so drastically that the solid obsidian rock beneath my boots cracked with a dull, dry snap. The passive gravity of my Vessel pressed against the volcanic glass, leaving a series of shallow, geometric depressions in the floor.

I decided on a completely solo speedrun for this ten-floor stretch. I had left Shnee back at the Golden Griffin to let her Vessel fully regenerate and rest after the grueling, thermal marathon of the ash canyons on the fiftieth floor. A pragmatic evaluation of the situation on a common-sense level suggested that a solo sweep was the fastest and most economically efficient solution. Without Shnee by my side, I had absolutely no brakes. I didn't have to monitor her energy pathways, worry about her safety, or restrict the explosive output of my area-of-effect kinetics. I could unleash the full, destructive tonnage of my mind without worrying about collateral damage.

The small, white spider Kaede was already waiting on the edge of my high collar, her legs twitching with a frantic, nervous excitement as she peered into the black darkness ahead.

"Szefie, no i jak? Szykujemy jakiś rozpiździel?" she asked in our native Polish operational cipher, her high-pitched, squeaky voice echoing quietly through the silent stone hall.

"Easy, kid. First, let's secure your parameters," I replied with complete, relaxed nonchalance.

I pulled my hands out of the pockets of my black coat. I focused my intent, allowing a single, microscopic droplet of sapphire Sapphire Slime to seep from the pore of my right index finger. Instead of wasting mana on large, unstable constructs, I applied a precise, high-pressure compression of my will. The slime slowly flowed over Kaede's white, fuzzy back, wrapping her small silhouette like a layer of liquid glass before instantly hardening to the density of solid black diamond. It formed an impenetrable, sterile shell over her chitin, completely protecting her without limiting her mobility at the joints.

"O kurwa, wjechał pancerz wspomagany!" Kaede squeaked in absolute delight, jumping up and down and doing miniature backflips on my shoulder. "Czuję się jak pieprzony Iron Man! Szefie, te pathways dają mi takiego kopa energetycznego, że mogłabym wejść w zwarcie ze smokiem i przegryźć stalową halabardę!"

"You are to sit deep in my ear canal and act as a silent, tactical radar," I cut her enthusiasm short, pushing her gently back beneath my collar with my finger. "Zero squeaking, zero unnecessary chatter. Just clean pinging of targets and dead zones. Understood?"

"Taktyczny radar online, szefie. Gotowa do roboty!" she reported dutifully, settling into her warm nest.

I slipped my hands back into the pockets of my black coat, assuming my usual, relaxed stance, and walked forward.

The floors from the fifty-second to the fifty-eighth turned into a single, brutal, and fully automated speedrun.

Our war machine operated with terrifying, mechanical efficiency. My upgraded Vessel remained exceptionally stable, the newly reinforced throughput of my mana weaves easily handling the continuous generation of kinetic shockwaves. I didn't play with fencing, nor did I use any complex, theatrical spells.

Every time a tight formation of Obsidian Guardians tried to block the corridors with their massive glass shields and cleavers, I didn't even slow down. I simply released a short, concentrated wave of telekinetic pressure, a raw spatial ram that slammed into their center of mass. The collision didn't make a soft sound—it was a dry, deafening crash as their geometry-carved bodies exploded into thousands of sharp, black obsidian shards.

"Szefie, z góry! Trzy sztuki spadają z sufitu!" Kaede's sharp, tactical warning pinged directly in my left ear.

I didn't even look up. I focused my will, expanding a passive gravity barrier around my silhouette at thirty percent of my core's capacity. The air within a three-meter radius around me instantly thickened to the density of solid concrete. The three descending guardians hit the invisible pressure cushion with a dull, muffled thud, their downward momentum completely neutralized in a fraction of a second. The sudden, monstrous overload of their own weight simply shattered their stone joints, burying them in their own tonnage on the floor.

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I walked over them without a single pause, my heavy boot heels systematically crushing their purple essence cores in the dust.

Chrup. Chrup. Chrup.

The true, unpolished hell of the dungeon, however, was waiting for us on the fifty-ninth floor.

The sterile, black obsidian corridors abruptly ended, giving way to a claustrophobic, damp network of organic caves. The walls here were formed of pulsating, purple tissue that throbbed with a slow rhythm, coated in a thick layer of toxic mycelium that glowed with a sick, greenish light.

And from the thousands of narrow crevices in the walls and ceiling, the local fauna began to crawl out. They were multi-armed, chitin-armored mutants, their jaws dripping with highly corrosive green acid. They moved with a rapid, irregular, and rwana speed, their numbers so massive they intended to simply swamp me and suffocate my Vessel under a mountain of flesh.

"Szefie, kurwa, wszędzie tego pełno! Ściany się ruszają, odcinają nas od wyjścia!" Kaede yelled in panic, her small legs clenching tightly against my skin beneath the collar.

"Changing parameters," I muttered coldly, keeping my hands pushed deep into the pockets of my coat.

I stopped in the middle of a narrow basalt bridge, surrounded by hundreds of approaching monsters. My energy pathways purred, and the sapphire reactor in my chest opened its valves to thirty percent. Instead of forming a traditional blade, I allowed a massive, thick wave of Sapphire Slime to pour out from my expanded pores, right beneath my black coat.

I focused my will on its structure. I didn't form any static shields. Instead, I activated my tactical tendril mode, spinning the liquid mercury of mana directly in the damp air of the cavern.

Dozens of blue, diamond-dense tentacles—massive, razor-sharp sapphire tendrils—materialized around me, roaring with kinetic energy. They moved independently, guided by my active perception, forming a circular, spinning dome of absolute destruction.

It was a sterile, industrial liquidation. The sapphire tendrils shredded, sliced, and pulverized every mutant that entered my zone, turning their chitinous armor and flesh into a fine, black mist of soot and gore, leaving only the pleasant clink of perfectly extracted purple cores falling to the stone floor. I strolled forward at a relaxed pace, telekinetically pulling the floating crystals directly into the bottomless pouch at my belt.

"Man... that is literally a Carnage mode," Kaede stammered in awe, her black eyes wide as she watched the tendrils dismantle the horde.

"Just clean engineering, kid," I replied indifferently.

We broke through the final blockade and entered the monumental boss chamber of the sixtieth floor.

The room was a vast, circular arena carved from dark basalt, but the system had decided to throw its entire hand on the board to stop our speedrun. Instead of a single boss, a literal army was waiting for us. Hundreds of elite obsidian constructs and mutated multi-armed giants stood in tight, military formations, their purple eyes burning with an intense, anomalous mana.

"Szefie, system chyba całkowicie oszalał! Jest ich tu z kilkaset! Otaczają nas! Co robimy?! Szykujemy macki?!" Kaede squeaked, her powered armor flashing warning red in my ear.

"No," I replied calmly, a broad, predatory smile slowly creeping onto my lips. "A waste of time and resources. My modernized Vessel requires a hard, limit-testing run of its maximum throughput before we return to the surface. Prepare yourself, kid."

I slowly pulled my right hand out of the pocket of my black coat.

I took a single, deep step forward, bending my knee and firmly stabilizing my center of gravity on the basalt floor. My energy pathways flared with a sudden, blinding intensity. Deep within my chest, the sapphire reactor let out a low, bass roar, pumping a monstrous, concentrated charge of energy directly into my right arm.

The entire limb instantly covered itself in the thick, deep-black, and light-absorbing coating of Gōtai. But I didn't stop there. I focused my mind to the absolute limit, compressing a massive wave of telekinetic force directly over the black shell, creating a high-frequency, vibrating Kinetic Glove. The air around my hand began to warp, distorting the light and producing a high-voltage hum that shook the stone dust from the ceiling beams.

"Time to clean the room," I muttered coldly.

I drove my black, reinforced fist directly into the center of the basalt floor.

BOOM!

The sound of the detonation was so deafening, it was as if an explosive charge of a battleship's artillery had detonated inside a closed metal box.

A massive, circular shockwave of sapphire current and kinetic pressure erupted outward from the point of contact, tearing the basalt floorboards into a million sharp fragments. The ground-rupturing wave expanded across the entire arena in a fraction of a millisecond, ignoring their armor and system shields, penetrating directly through their structures like a tectonic earthquake.

The entire sixty-floor army simply evaporated. The elite guardians and mutated giants were leveled to the ground, their bodies losing physical resonance, disintegrating into a massive, swirling cloud of gray soot and harmless ash that choked the cavern with its own echo.

The vast arena drowned in a sudden, smoking silence.

I stood up slowly, extinguishing the Gōtai and letting the black coating smoothly absorb back beneath my skin. My hand was perfectly clean, free of any blood or ash.

Using my telekinesis, I caught the boss's massive, fioletowy essence core in mid-air as it fell from the soot, tossing it directly into my pouch along with hundreds of smaller crystals. My Vessel felt perfectly stable, the newly zabetonowana pathways absorbing the massive recoil of the strike with the smooth ease of a heavy industrial engine.

"Stary... to był dosłownie przycisk 'usuń wszystko'," Kaede babbled in absolute shock, her small legs shaking against my ear. "Ty po prostu rozpieprzyłeś całe pięćdziesiąt pięter lochu jednym pieprzonym tąpnięciem!"

"A necessary optimization of space, kid," I replied with a relaxed, brazen chill, slipping my hand back into my coat pocket and turning toward the return portal. "Why waste calories fighting them one by one when you can simply reset the entire room? Let's go. Elena should have a hot, high-protein meal waiting for my Vessel."

We stepped onto the platform of the Sapphire Prism of return, and the space folded inward with a quiet, electric hiss, carrying our silhouettes back to the warmth and safety of the Golden Griffin.