Chapter 33: Twelfth Floor Intermission

The twelfth floor testing grounds was getting busy again, far busier than hit had been over the last decade. The last ten years had been a rather dead period, with very few Saints coming through to challenge the higher parts of the tower. It had left Adrian worried, as generally a dearth of Challengers meant that something extreme had gone on within the eleventh floor world.

Seeing the increase in footfall was a relief for Adrian, because it meant that whatever issue the floor had experienced had been solved and as such there was less work for him. He had been situated on the floor for over a century and was used to the comfort of it, but he was not particularly happy about being forced to work in testing in the meantime. He doubted any of the Adjudicators really liked the job. They spent their days testing thousands and thousands of fools and children, only for most of them to die or just settle down on a slightly higher floor. It was thankless, unrewarding and frankly, if it was not for it being a requirement of climbing the last five floors in the tower he would have never agreed to it. It was simply too irritating. There was only time to usher through and watch over Challengers in the millennia that he had to sit and watch people climb the tower. There was no real time to improve on his mana purity, or to try and pick up one of the paths. He simply had to spend all his time administrating the swarm of people coming and going on the twelfth floor testing ground.

It was not always boring being an Adjudicator, but for the most part, it was the slowest thousand years of his life, and he had only lived for four. He just sat at the entrance of the testing floor and looked at the various people coming through, before arbitrarily deciding if he was going to let them go up or not. There was no real rhyme or reasons for the tests, other than boredom, so he tried not to mull over them or even create detailed tests. He just picked a criteria like the name of the youngest person in any group of people and then told them to stay in a room for the amount of weeks equal to the letters in the person’s name. Before it had been if they had green eyes they could go up immediately but if they had any other they had to stay in a room for six weeks. He felt this was a lot less arbitrary, even if it was still a bit ridiculous.

There was a flash beside him as a group of people entered the floor. Covered in bone piercings and leather armour, they immediately stood out amongst the groups of tattooed and unwashed people who walked through his halls generally. A man walked up to Adrian and looked down at the seated Immortal, from his lofty height. Adrian looked up and smirked. He was a small man, but not a pushover by any imagination, and the gaunt stick that was trying its best to loom over him was not intimidating him in any sense of the word.

“Yes? You’re not the first, nor likely the last Gi practitioner walking through these halls, so I’m just letting you know that you people have tried to do the whole looming creepy intimidation thing before. What do you want?”

“I am Arutha Pendraeg the sixth, headhunter of Avalon and scion of the first Prophet of Avalon,” the tall man began.

“I don’t care,” Adrian interrupted. “What do you want? Just tell me of you can walk back out that door right now”.

“Insolent,” the gaunt man muttered under his breath. Adrian smirked, Avalonians had such a great sense of self importance, it was fun to get under their skin. “My team and I are looking for a boy, he would be about sixteen years old by now, dark hair, red book? Accompanied by a wolf and a boy with white hair. If you’ve seen them you must tell us immediately. It’s imperative that we find them as they stole an artifact from the daughter of the Grand Lancelot and he is sparing no holds on getting it back”.

“Well...” Adrian stopped. He hated Gi practitioners. They made his skin crawl and he always felt dirty after talking to one, but he did have to admit that their masters were powerful, as powerful as Immortals in some respects, even if they did not have the capabilities to live for eternity. “The boy doesn’t ring a bell. Have you got any other information about him?”

“Sir, if we find out you’re lying to us there will be hell to pay, but if you help us we will reward you greatly”.

Something inside Adrian snapped at those words. He had spoken to many Gi practitioners in his time, as they regularly climbed the Tower for whatever reason their bizarre religion required, but none of them were as arrogant as this gaunt giant that stood before him today. “I have told you I don’t remember, and now even if I did I wouldn’t tell you”. He stood up and looked at the group of gaunt oddities that followed the rude man. “Learn some humility when you’re talking to your elders and betters, boy. It’s time for you to leave”.

He waved his left hand across his body and the group behind this Arutha were shunted through the glowing doorway that was the entrance to the floor. Quickly, before the man even had a chance to react he shoved his right hand out and then towards the door, buffeting the rude hunter back through the doorway.

Sitting down, he smirked. “Idiot,” he said, before going back to attempting to compress his mana even more than it had been before. As he began he stopped, realising that two boys matching the descriptions of Arutha had walked through his doors, months previously. He shrugged his shoulders and began compressing again. It was not his problem.


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