Demonic Skeleton God-Chapter 99: Floor 9

Flain focused on the frequencies emitted by his surroundings as he walked: the frequency shifted slightly, as though the width of the platform beneath his feet was changing.

In his mind’s eye he saw the bridge narrowing, twisting. He sketched an idealized outline in his head: thirty-centimeter-wide strips stretching into the distance, with sharp turns. He could imagine what would happen if his foot landed outside that line.

’If the frequency is lower, the air inside the bridge is denser—that’s the center. If it rises, I’m heading toward the edge,’ Flain analyzed, and suddenly he sensed a second, slightly slower frequency in the room.

He stopped and leaned in to listen. He recognized two layers: a finer frequency and a metallic one.

The diffusers resonated with the metallic frequencies. Flain stepped back to avoid the interference, then continued carefully along the center path.

Time passed, but Flain paid it no mind. He concentrated on his body’s internal feedback: micro-adjustments of balance in his ankles, subtle head movements to better perceive the frequencies.

Like in a calculation, with a fraction of a second to spare, he adjusted his back foot on the push-off and his front foot on the landing. Time sped up: three-quarters of the way down, it took him to discern whether the echo coming in from the left or the right had the correct amplitude.

Flain was frustrated that these long obstacles were eating up so much time—the limit here was three hours, and he was certain he’d already spent at least an hour and a half.

Halfway across the bridge something strange happened: the frequencies around him fell silent for two seconds. The space above the overhang filled with stillness, as if Flain’s phantom pulse had vanished before he even stepped.

Flain halted. ’Signal out of range... might be a trap,’ he thought.

He rose onto the balls of his feet, weighing the option of gauging distance by an accelerated fake heartbeat, but decided otherwise.

He tuned into his false breathing: slow exhalations and inhalations, using them to shape the deafening silence.

That waiting stillness was broken by a faint spinning whisper, reflected off the structure of the illusion—Flain directed his attention to the outer edge of the silence, and the bridge’s layout reappeared in his mind’s eye.

The final four steps were a battle with uncertainty: the frequencies turned wildly chaotic, as though the bridge had transformed into a cascade of accelerated noise. Flain ran his mental algorithm: filter out the chaotic frequency using the movement signal of his foot. It took a split second, but he succeeded again—the target position stabilized.

When he made the last step, the surrounding darkness vanished. He looked back and saw that he had been walking on a winding, crystal bridge surrounded by emptiness. Ahead of him, stairs led up to the 9th floor.

This floor was quite difficult for Flain, though not as challenging as the 5th and 4th floors. The worst part was how much time it had cost him.

Flain began slowly walking toward the final floor before the big finale.

When Flain reached the ninth floor, he found himself in a narrow, old tunnel. In the air, Flain sensed the smell of burnt wood.

He began slowly walking along the walls of the narrow tunnel. The air was dense, evoking in him memories of a part of his body that no longer belonged to the living – and yet, Flain felt the peripheral tips of false nerves tighten.

Flain immediately began analyzing the facts: it was very hot in the tunnel, Flain felt pulsing whispers coming alive from the walls, the beating of a false heart, as if it were beating furiously, desperate to escape his bones.

Flain didn’t feel good here at all, he felt as if he were under the influence of some kind of drug.

He looked ahead at the twenty-meter-long corridor, the stone tiles under the flickering light appeared to shift into glowing embers. Step by step, he measured his own breath: inhale for four, exhale for six. He counted silently – "one... two... three... four... five... six," until the movement of his false lungs seemed absolutely mechanical, devoid of emotion.

Flain continued walking, fully focused, as he doubted the ninth floor would be easy.

He perceived how a part of the heart in his chest compressed, the kind that would normally stir into manic pulses.

Now he transformed it into pure will. Will became his only shield against panic. Flain had a cool head and was far from panicking, but for some reason his body was in a deep panic, which he fortunately managed to suppress in time.

Flain walked on and felt that something had appeared close to him, and when he reached it and saw it, his eyes widened.

There stood his mother – or at least how he imagined her, for he had never seen her – the mother who had rejected him on the path to perfection – she stood in flames, hands reaching toward him, weeping. Flain’s brain registered a slight increase in pulse. He felt a surge of rage, wanted to unleash it, after all...

At first, he prepared his mind to suppress the reflex. To push it down. But then he stopped, managed to tune into the frequencies emitted by the tunnel.

Flain felt he shouldn’t suppress it – but neither should he act rashly. He would have liked to bash that bitch’s head in and force her to beg him to kill her, even though he knew it was just an illusion. But Flain was held back by the fact that it could cause a failure, and Flain certainly didn’t want to repeat the eighth floor.

But that brake wasn’t enough to hold Flain back. His whole body was red with rage, and in his eyes swirled a chaotic, deadly emptiness.

He closed his eyes – and in his thoughts something appeared that he had long forgotten, a book he had studied back in his original world: a stoic book, which strengthened reason over emotion without suppressing emotion when calming down failed. Flain realized that when the inner storm quiets, the outer flames strike less. He imagined his mind as a calm surface of a lake during a brewing storm.

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Little Flain held and struck hard at the rock, trying to find another deposit of radioactive iron. At the moment, he was essentially mining alone from the slaves, because no adult slave could fit into such a small opening...

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