"Babel... It's far more spectacular than I imagined."
Staring up at the colossal structure piercing the clouds, Lucian couldn't help but marvel. The ancient architecture was vast and towering, standing immortal for a millennium, exuding an overwhelming aura of history.
After briefly admiring the view, Lucian stepped into Babel alone.
Directly beneath the tower lay a massive, abyssal crater. Sunlight failed to penetrate the depths as Lucian descended the spiraling staircase. Magic stone lamps embedded in the walls cast a soft glow over the path. The stairwell was incredibly broad, easily wide enough to accommodate an entire marching army.
In the ancient past, monsters would endlessly surge out of this hole. The armies of Orario would hold the line right here, butchering the hordes to prevent them from breaching the surface. That changed when Ouranos—one of the very first gods to descend—took his throne upon the dark altar beneath the Guild. Through his ceaseless, divine prayers, he forcibly suppressed the will of the Dungeon.
Thanks to his divine intervention, the monster surges ceased, allowing the labyrinth to be categorized into the Upper, Middle, Lower, Deep, and Ultra-Deep Floors. The lethality of the monsters scaled gradually the deeper one ventured. This entire system of controlled chaos was built upon the back of Ouranos's eternal sacrifice.
Honestly, the people of this world should have erected shrines to him and bowed three times a day. Even if the Dungeon itself was technically a byproduct of the gods, the collective pantheon couldn't be blamed for the actions of an individual entity.
Lucian soon arrived at the First Floor. From this point onward, monsters would begin to spawn.
Crack. The distinct sound of fracturing stone echoed through the tunnel as a fissure snaked across the wall. In the oppressive darkness of the cavern, the noise was bone-chilling.
The cracking intensified until the wall burst open, revealing a grotesque, 60-centimeter-tall creature crawling out from the stone. It had sickly green skin, bloodshot eyes, and a twisted, nightmarish face. It was the quintessential fantasy mob: a Goblin.
"[Combat Deployment: Ransotengai]."
As Lucian whispered the command, the magic activated. In perfect alignment with his pre-established rules, a phantom eye materialized above his head. Simultaneously, invisible threads of pure mental energy shot out, violently piercing and binding his own physical body.
Every muscle fiber was artificially linked, his pain receptors were forcibly dampened, and his vision split into a dual feed. One feed provided standard first-person sight, while the other granted him a top-down, omniscient perspective.
Like a player manipulating a video game avatar, Lucian used his sheer force of will to snap his body into an optimal combat stance.
Controlling myself like a game character is infinitely superior to relying on my weak, out-of-shape meat suit, Lucian smiled.
With two distinct control systems and dual perspectives, he could exploit his body's maximum combat potential without any biological limitations. He might not be a trained martial artist in real life, but he was a terrifyingly efficient gamer.
While [Ransotengai] visually manifested as a puppet show operated by mana strings, its core mechanism was a customized character template rule engineered by Lucian.
"[Slime Armament: Hand Sonic]."
The dark fabric of his coat writhed violently. A section of the Slime Armament that had previously consumed raw steel morphed into a wicked, jet-black blade extending seamlessly from the back of his hand. It was a direct homage to Kanade Tachibana's signature skill from Angel Beats!, just color-swapped to black.
"[Combat Deployment: Three Secrets and Five Methods—Cloud Soaring]."
Lucian instantly accelerated, his movements violently defying human biomechanics as he closed the distance and cleanly decapitated the Goblin.
"Easy enough."
As Lucian's blade sliced through the air, a fountain of black blood erupted from the stump, splattering everywhere. However, inches before the gore could touch Lucian, it splashed uselessly against an invisible barrier of compressed air.
The [Three Secrets and Five Methods] was Lucian's custom-built combat doctrine, comprised of three secret arts and five elemental magic spells.
The first secret was [Divine Walk], optimized for rapid, long-distance traversal.
The second was [Cloud Soaring], designed for hyper-agile, short-distance maneuvering. It allowed him to execute physically impossible contortions and even halt his momentum entirely mid-air. With this technique, terminal velocity was irrelevant; as long as he triggered the skill in time, he could instantly cancel his momentum and eliminate fall damage completely.
The third was [Wall-Clipping]. When combined with [Cloud Soaring] in enclosed spaces, it birthed a terrifying, glitch-like assassination style.
The Five Methods corresponded to the foundational elements: Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth. While technically classified as 'magic', the naming convention leaned heavily toward ancient Eastern philosophy. It wasn't too jarring, but perhaps referring to them as 'Affinities' was more accurate.
"[State Reversion]."
The Phantom Butterfly flickered into existence. Its time-reversal magic washed over him, instantly erasing the microscopic muscle tears and joint stress caused by his inhuman movements.
Executing high-speed dashes and unnatural contortions that far exceeded his base stats carried a brutal physical toll. However, [Ransotengai] inherently 'reinforced' his body with mana strings, and whatever damage bled through was effortlessly wiped away by the Phantom Butterfly. He kept the muscle memory and the experience, but discarded the physical wear and tear.
Goblin EXP yields are garbage. Converted to a stat point, that wasn't even a thousandth of a point, Lucian checked his system notifications, groaning internally.
Lucian's combat arsenal was built upon three primary pillars: [Ransotengai] for physical override, the [Three Secrets and Five Methods] for mobility and elemental strikes, and [Glory Manifestation] for overwhelming brute force.
His three utility functions were [Spirit Status Acquisition], [Material Reserve], and the [Teleportation Network].
[Spirit Status Acquisition]
[• Gain Experience Points by terminating enemy life signatures.]
[• Experience Points can be allocated directly to base stats.]
[Material Reserve]
[• Spatial Inventory System.]
[• Can store and retrieve items instantaneously.]
[Teleportation Network]
[• Can log specific spatial coordinates.]
[• Allows instantaneous teleportation to logged coordinates.]
Every single one of these abilities was built upon the foundational coding of [Rule Creation].
[Spirit Status Acquisition] was a literal RPG leveling system. As long as he killed enemies, he farmed EXP, which he could manually convert into raw stats. [Material Reserve] was a standard game inventory, and the [Teleportation Network] allowed for fast travel.
Veteran adventurers wasted hours navigating the completely harmless Upper Floors just to reach their farming zones in the Deep Floors. The Teleportation Network entirely eliminated that tedious commute. The biggest logistical nightmare for major Familia expeditions was hauling supplies, a problem permanently solved by the Material Reserve.
Adventurers were strictly bound by their innate talent limits, causing their growth to stagnate at higher levels. [Spirit Status Acquisition] not only drastically accelerated his leveling speed but fundamentally shattered his absolute potential ceiling.
The future is looking bright. Lucian was immensely satisfied with how broken his custom loadout was.
"Eat up," Lucian murmured.
As the Goblin's corpse slowly disintegrated into ash, a black tendril whipped out from Lucian's heel, snatching the dropped magic stone shard and absorbing it. The Slime Armament leveled up by consuming raw magic, making magic stones its perfect diet.
"[Divine Walk]."
Wrapped in a faint aura, Lucian shot forward, his posture breaking the laws of physics as he engaged a hyper-speed sprint. He blurred into a streak of light tearing through the dark tunnels.
The EXP drops and magic stones in the Upper Floors were pathetically small, so Lucian didn't waste time farming. Following the officially mapped routes from his memory, he blitzed straight through the beginner zone—Floors 1 through 6—without a single hitch.
Any monster foolish enough to block his path was instantly met with a seamless transition into [Cloud Soaring]. Before they could even register his presence, they were decapitated by a blindingly fast short-range burst.
In an impossibly short amount of time, he reached the 10th Floor—a speed that even a Level 2 veteran would find difficult to match. And here, he finally encountered an enemy that couldn't be one-shot. Standing three meters tall, the hulking monstrosity roared. It was an Orc!
. . .