Time Shift

Chapter 10

It was approximately twenty hours of intense and constant use of her power, or powers since her power could change anytime, and Faerite was exhausted from it. So far, she only used fire, lightning, air and water, and that was fortunate. She tried counting the number of Bigfoot monsters she had killed, some even with powers. She stopped after two. One beast she fought in particular had control over fire, which was easy, if many more Bigfoot monsters hadn't been persistently surrounding her with claw attacks, to which she easily protected herself and cut off all of their arms, except when she used fire. It was simple, but being constantly under attack for more than ten hours made it a lot more complex and difficult than it used to be twenty hours ago.

She swung her arms and sent four beasts flying away from her. Five more were approaching her from behind, but she sensed it and jumped up higher than most humans can, thanks to her air boost she had to quickly invent. It was similar to the water jets she had used to fly up to the top of the tower, but the way air behaved was a lot different from water. It was less heavy and had more free will than water, which tended to be annoying sometimes, since Faerite had wanted to throw a condensed air boomerang at a beast, but she estimated wrongly and the boomerang went further back instead of curving into the beast.

She was tired. She was really tired. But the adrenaline barely kept her from sleeping. Her mind was going blanker every minute. Once, she was fending off three beasts at once with lightning, but when one more beast came from the side, she could see it, but she didn't do anything. The beast would have dismembered her left arm if she hadn't heard the roar from her left.

She was around the tenth floor now. The top floor was apparently the two hundredth floor. If she took twenty hours to descend through a hundred and ninety floors, then she would need roughly another hour to clear the floor, and it was only if she was as alert as before, and now, she was extremely tired. All this information was received from the angelic voice, and with each floor cleared, she was sure the voice was male, though she hoped that it was a woman.

"Where are we?" Faerite asked, as she cleared the tenth floor.

"You are at the tenth floor, and the next floor is the ninth."

"Why do I have to put up with this?"

"You can't escape either."

Faerite growled at the voice, to which it disappeared. She muttered curses as she struggled to move down the steps of the next staircase. Halfway, she sat on a stair step and rested her eyes on the wall. Besides being tired, she was hungry and thirsty. She could drink the water by extracting some from the water vapour, but she couldn't. She had lost her control of water since the hundredth floor.

"No," the voice echoed throughout the stairway. "Protectors do not take rests. You need to keep going."

"But do protectors fight for twenty fucking hours, and are all protectors this weak?" Faerite cursed at the voice. It never gave an answer.

She hauled herself up and forced herself to walk down the steps, then met the same Bigfoot beasts. She stopped counting after two.

"Damn it. I should stop doing that," Faerite said as she summoned two sparks on two beasts, setting them on fire. They ran around, howling like wild animals, and rammed into other beasts, making a chain of beasts catching on fire. She laughed at the beasts, then pulled up a solemn face and made more sparks on the beasts. She rarely used fire. She would always rejoice when she could control fire. Lightning was more frequent, but its flaw was that the user had to charge up before using it. Air manipulation was probably Faerite's second most favourite power to use, since she could use it in any way that she could.

A fireball came this way, but she just dispersed the fireball into two, each half floating on each her palms. She threw them at two more beasts and they were caught on fire. She walked forward like a zombie, wading through the dying beasts and only focusing on the Bigfoot with powers. It threw another fireball, but she extinguished it in a split second. She was worn out, but she was trained to dispel any element of her own. When she tried to burn the beast, she couldn't.