You serious?

Raya: I’ll handle these guys! You just focus on not dying for now Adam!

It didn’t immediately register to me what Raya was saying.

I Augmented my body to increase red blood cell generation and healed my anemia.

I looked forwards and saw Raya’s back facing me as she fought several headless knights at once.

Just what is this situation?

Did you really tell me to “just focus on not dying for now”?

Do you think I’m living because I’m too scared to die?

Who do you think I am?

I don’t need to regenerate my arm. It would use up more than half of my mana and it would take several minutes. Instead I formed a tendril of blood that sprouted out of my stub of an arm and leaped into the air.

Forming a large mallet at the end of the tendril, I slammed down and crushed four knights at once. Naturally, I couldn’t stop my momentum midair so I came down in the middle of the horde. As I fell, several of the knights slashed at me but I twisted my body so that they missed anything that was important.

Adam: –Rivers of Blood

Crouching down I released two blood streams that shredded the surrounding knights. One of them managed to pierce my thigh with a spear but I kicked him away in retaliation.

Pulling the spear out I turned to the remaining suits of armor.

Adam: Raya, no matter what, I am your shield. Even beaten and broken I would rather die than be protected.

I threw the spear in my hand and it pierced a suit of armor as I ran after it. Kicking the imbedded spear, the armor broke into pieces as the rivers of blood swam around me and cleaned up the rest of the knights.

The suit of armor that I had kicked earlier had flown into the nearby streetlamp, causing it to fall onto the floor horizontally. The broken light began blinking on and off slowly, causing us to be completely enveloped in darkness at times.

Raya: And what will that pride of yours get you? We’re a team. If you were strong enough that you didn’t need me then you wouldn’t have lost that arm of yours!

As Raya walked towards me, the blinking light gave one last sputter and then died.

Raya held some electricity in her hand like it was a candle and illuminated a small area around us.

Raya: Just… calm down. I’m not going anywhere.

- - - - - - -

Adam: I miss the sun

Raya: Didn’t you say that I was “bright enough to replace the sun” about ten minutes ago?

Adam: Did I really? I never knew I was such a poet.

Raya: heh…. It’s your world class education speaking.

Adam: ahah…What are you talking about? I’m just a homeless orphan.

After beating up the ghost knights we took a few minutes to rest and regrow our arms then began wandering the labyrinth again. Since we didn’t know if the sea serpent was still there, we decided to walk through the empty city streets. However, it was plain to see that we weren’t making much progress.

Luckily, Raya seems to have developed the same broken humor as me.

Adam: Look! We found it!

Raya: Adam, you’re the best damn navigator west of the Namur Ocean!

The two of us were looking at what must have been our hundredth dead end.

We decided to take a break.

Raya: Can I take a look at the map?

Adam: Knock yourself out.

Sadly, the map was more useless than we had hoped for. The labyrinth city was so big that it was impossible to draw all of the twisting streets, not that anyone would ever try to look down every single one. The map mainly depicted the paths from the main entrances to the exits to the lower floors. There were also some landmarks around them that were listed. Earlier, we had passed by a clock tower but it wasn’t the clocktower that was mentioned as one of the landmarks on the map. We must be far from where the map’s limits are. In other words, we’re fucked.

I leaned back on the stone floor and looked up at the sky in resignation.

Well, we do have one last hope.

Adam: Have you noticed that the ceiling has been slowly getting closer to us?

Raya: Yeah, we’ve been walking towards it for a while now… Plus, you already mentioned it to me a couple hours ago.

Adam: Right… I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning a portion of Labyrinth City Proper being upside down.

Raya: Me neither. Wait, what if we’re the ones that are upside down?

Raya flopped onto her back as she said that and stared at the ceiling pensively, as if gaining new understanding about how the world worked.

Adam: Shiiii man, you right. Like that’s really deep when you think about it. Woah, I guess it really is all about perspective in the end.

Raya: Like, I wonder what happens at the place where the top city and bottom city touch?

Adam: Only one way to find out…

- - - - - - -

After a few more hours of walking, we finally found out.

And the answer is… a shit-ton of monsters!

One billion points if you guessed it!

Raya: Wow, that really is a shit-ton of monsters.

Truly, there was no other way to describe it with something from this world.

Luckily, I come from another world.

It was like looking at an overpacked concert of the world’s most famous musician except that half of the fans were literally on the ceiling. Each monster in the sea of beasts screamed loud enough that we could hear them from miles away.

Raya: What is the point of them acting this way? It looks like they are surrounding that thing over there.

Adam: Yeah, it’s hard to tell from this distance, but it might be an elevator. They must be guarding it or something.

We were watching from about half a mile away on top of a relatively tall building. The fact that I could tell it was an elevator was testament to how large the thing was. It had a large glass window with gold decorations plastered around it. There was a layer of glass that extended above the elevator to what must be the upper levels.

Elevators weren’t common in this world. The only other time we had seen one was when we visited Count Telantra for the first time, but back then we had been blindfolded. I wouldn’t be surprised if Raya had seen other elevators before though, she is the granddaughter of a Duke after all.

Adam: There are two problems here. Firstly, we have to get to the elevator which is clearly heavily guarded. Secondly, we have to figure out how to operate the elevator. It’s possible that we just hit a button and it’ll take us back to the upper levels, but it could just as easily require some sort of key.

Raya: hmmm. I think that if the elevator were designed so that it would be impossible to operate without a key then there would be no need for this many monsters to be guarding it. But it’s still definitely possible… You wouldn’t happen to have a method in which we could sneak past 100,000 monsters?

Adam: hm? Who said anything about sneaking past them?