Broken

Chapter 43

For the most part, clearing a maze styled instance wasn't any more difficult than any other instance- in theory- but in practice, they were annoying. Mostly for the obvious reason: it was a damn maze. Getting lost or turned around was par for the course, and that was made all the more likely when the maze was filled with jungle-like foliage. It crowded us in to the already tight corridors, and even hid several corridors, causing us to miss them.

It made for a long and frustrating couple of days. Luckily, one of the Northern Paladin trainees was an aspiring rouge class, with several trap disarming, and locating skills, that let us get by those without any major issues.

As we fought a variety of smaller, jungle-like monsters, sporadically mixed in with larger than 'earth normal' bugs, I tried to get a good read on what Primordial water skills actually looked like. unfortunately, Jamie never broke them out for us to witness. I did see him show off plenty of other skills. Most magic was difficult in these close quarters- probably why he never whipped out the Primordial skills- making it hard to not hit allies. Still, Jamie managed to use his fire skills to great effect, without torching any of us.

Side-eyeing the other guild aside, the two guilds mostly kept to themselves outside of battle. But there was no helping at least a little conversation passing between both parties. The rogue trainee of the Paladins was particularly chatty. At least with me she was. We were two of three woman in this instance, and the other female Paladin had a bit of a nasty personality, and mostly seemed interested in sucking up to Jaime.

However, I didn't think it was so much that the girl- apparently she was called Cat, though <Honesty> informed me her actual name was Kristine Lautermen- was mostly interested in the overly brawny Chaos men. I supposed I couldn't blame her; they were quite the eye candy, even if many of them had some pretty severe personality defects.

"This is, totally, my fourth big instance in the last month!" Cat complained, swatting a vine out of her face. She was short with auburn hair tied in a tail at the back of her head, and a pair of dark green eyes. "They are running us ragged I tell you."

Giving in to her chatter while Alex smirked in silence next to me, I said: "Why is that?"

"Apparently, our head honchos want to focus more on climbing the tower, so they need to get more of us lower-tiered members to scale up. Some of us will stick around here, clearing the instances, but I hear that if we show real promise that the guild master might even take us into the tower with the main strike team!"

It seemed that the Northern Paladins were working with the same mindset as Chaos. Though, the Paladins were already well established in the tower, and were among the groups who have reached the highest so far. Titan Fall Tower has been scaled up to the twenty fourth floor the last time I checked, and the Paladins were right there at the forefront. All over the world, the highest floor reached in a tower was level twenty-seven I believed.

No one knew how many floors there were in total, though conspiracy theorists speculate anything from one-hundred floors, all the way up to infinite. I really couldn't speculate myself, but I was currently acutely aware that I was in the middle of preparing to climb it myself. That still hadn't fully computed in my brain just yet. Then again, I've had a lot to process over the last couple months.

"Why the sudden rush?" Alex ventured to ask, his curiosity having him engage with the chatty woman at last. "The Northern Paladins are among the leading groups the world over for climbing towers. In the top fifty for sure, and in the top five in Canada."

Cat shrugged. But another of her team mates butted in with an answer. "I hear it's because of the raiders in Spain." He said in a hushed voice, clearly not wanted Jamie at the head of the pack to over hear him. "A guild there claims that they are close to breaking through to the twenty-eighth floor in their tower. The higher ups feel like they have to hustle or risk falling farther behind."