Limitless by John Gold (best e reader for android txt) 📕

next trial is the last, so there won’t be a city waiting for me on the other side. Will there be a seventeenth trial? Will death tell me where my family is?

Current location: House of Hatred

 

This one is a bit like the rage trial. It’s an extensive network of caves, with a demon hanging at each intersection. Yes, hanging. The walls of the caves are made of something like roots, all still alive, revolting, living pipes that pump a nutrient solution to the intersection guards. The latter have grown into the walls while waiting for lost travelers.

Killing the first, second, and third is easy. But with each successive kill, the next one gets disproportionately stronger. After the fifth one, I run calculations between the overall number of guards and the maximum load they place on the nutrient network. It turns out that demons who die distribute their health pool among the rest who are still alive. Because of that, each new opponent I face has more health than the previous one.

The trial is also different from the others in that it’s the first time I come across other people. There are locals who are also giving it a try, though I keep them in front of me, don’t team up with anyone, and just coexist as we all go through the trial. I stopped trusting anyone after the love trial—and that goes double for people I don’t know. Given the wild, barely contained rage everyone is feeling, I’m not surprised there are a couple murders, three attempts, and one group that just completely implodes. That all happens at the first few intersections before we learn how to control our emotions.

After that, I realize that the locals there are part of the trial. You have to work through your differences and hate, working together if you want to win. Now, I switch on my life aura to restore health as fast as it can in the corridors between intersections. Glowing mushrooms appear on the walls; moss and vines grow on the stones under our feet. That also helps with the unwanted emotions.

I feel guilty about a good dozen dead, who heroically covered everyone else’s retreat. When groups trade places fighting especially strong opponents, I fire away using my most powerful spells, killing the defender and doing heavy damage to the guard. Nobody expresses resentment towards me for it, either. I understand their silence better than they can imagine —they’re almost all unarmed, unequipped, and weak, and there I am, a lethal weapon. If I didn’t do it, even more of them would die.

Taking out the last three opponents comes at a high price. They have the most health and do the most area damage, so I do my best to block it. It’s the first time I see heroes rushing out to distract the demon from me, and the first time I see the weakness of my fighting style. My strongest spells all do area damage. None of them work for fighting underground.

When we come up against the last opponent, I have a group of 337 people behind me. And they’re just the ones who survived. We spend four days waiting for the people we lost to respawn and join us, bumping our numbers up to 433.

Demon, Irukai the Personification of Hatred, Level 19950

 

The final demon guard is the king of the entire dungeon. He has six bodies merged into one, with three superior demons five meters taller than my youngest companions serving as his legs. He can see and attack across a 360-degree arc, too. None of my attacks are enough to kill him with one strike—he has almost 80 billion health.

The battle turns out to be the most unusual of my entire life. I stun, paralyze, and curse my opponent while our gallant company does their best to knock his health down. In fact, I don’t do a single point of damage throughout the battle. I’m too busy controlling and weakening our adversary. I use all my shields, not to mention the aura of amplification that’s been gathering dust in my spell book. More than that, I even hand out my last food and potions left over from my blood magic experiments in Crazyman’s Forest. It all goes toward reinforcing my comrades in our hours-long attack.

It goes without saying that the demon has complete resistance to all kinds of damage. Still, neither his resistance nor his sixfold survivability can stand up to the onrushing horde.

As soon as the demon dies, we all feel the hate lift. A joyful shout goes up, and oddly enough, they push me out the exit first.

But my worst fears are realized. Instead of a city, I find myself outside a hall with enormous doors. The carvings on them tell me that I’m about to enter the palace of death, and there is a pair of columns with gargoyle gatekeepers towering in front of the entrance to complete the picture. As soon as I take my first step, the gargoyles fly off toward the doors, which open slowly with a heavy creak. The eyes of the creatures carved into the door gleam. The shouts of hundreds of monsters greet my ears.

Only an idiot wouldn’t be afraid of death. With that in mind, I decide to get my strength and survivability as high as they’ll go before I walk through the door. It may not be much, but it’ll mean I have a little bit of an edge if I have to fight him. Death!

I’ve never buffed myself for three reasons. First, because of my high resistance to mental damage, neither these nor auras really work on me. Their duration is directly dependent on how receptive the subject’s mental body is. In my case, even the strongest buffs don’t last longer than thirty seconds, with an effect so minimal that using them is a waste of time. One exception is divine buffs and debuffs. These make temporary changes to your mental body itself, driving the desired