186 Under the Tower

With the exit sealed behind us in the narrow tunnel I dug out, the first thing that needs to be done is to deal with the lack of oxygen. Thanks to the Void Essence I don't actually need oxygen, but Wanjing is struggling so I begin creating a bit of clean and breathable air for her. Once that's taken care of I widen the tunnel to give us some more space and begin moving down at an angle to prevent us from free falling our way through.

"So how far down do you think we need to go?" I ask.

"Going by the map, it's a little hard to say, but I would think it be somewhere around half the length of the Tower above ground," Wanjing says.

After around five minutes of digging, I say, "I'm gonna dig to the side to try and find our current location."

Shifting our course I flatten the path and make a turn to the left and it doesn't take long for us to arrive at what looks to be a wall. Clearing out all the dirt around us, we do confirm it to be a wall, but after checking it out for a bit it doesn't look like there is anything further down as the wall comes to an end. As I go to poke a small hole to check the situation and try to find out which floor we're at.

Seems to be a desolate hallway, not too unlike the second floor. With no one in sight, I open up the hole more to allow us to slip through before sealing it back up.

"So do you know where we are?" I ask.

"No, according to the layout on the map, the floors are mostly symmetrical so it's hard to tell which one we're on without access to the stairwell."

"Then as long as we find the stairs we can head straight to the bottom floor?"

"No, each set of stairs are located in different locations, probably for security reasons. We can either try and take our chances by digging further, but who knows where we'll end up, or we can take the stairs on each floor," Wanjing says.

"I'd rather we take the stairs, it was already lucky for us to even arrive here, so let's--" our conversation is cut short as a door nearby opens and a few people come out.

For a moment we just look at each other before Wanjing says, "Teacher, your luck is awful."

"Yeah... I know," I respond as we immediately run down the three people who left the nearby room.

Wanjing jumps at takes down one while I spit out my bat and throw it towards one of the people running knocking them down as I chase after the last remaining one. I create an iron ball and throw it at his head, but just before it makes contact, he manages to press some kind of button on the wall and injects some of his Divine Energy into it. Although I do manage to knock him out, a siren could be heard from the moment he pressed the button.

Without any time to deal with the mess we made here, Wanjing returns to my shoulder as I begin to bend the light around us again and make a run for it. It was lucky we could enter the underground floors on our first try, but history has once again found a way to repeat itself. It didn't even take thirty seconds for the floor to be flooded with a bunch of armed guards as we pass by several dozen while either looking for the stairs or an opportunity to hide.

Luckily we do find the stairs before I need to rest, but like always, there's a catch. The so-called stairway isn't really a stairway, but a teleportation array that leads to the next section, and the one we found goes up... I'm getting real tired of this shit. We already confirmed that the underground sections weren't directly beneath each other but this makes things significantly more difficult. With any more time left, I decide to make another hole in the wall and create a new tunnel and just hope for the best.

"What do we do now, Teacher?" Wanjing asks.

"That's obvious my good student, I have no fucking idea. We got found, and the only path we found goes up, and we have no idea how to reach the other areas without relying on blind luck."

As we are trying to think of a solution, I get a message from the System, [Hey, hey~, looks like you've encountered some fun~. If you cause some mayhem and spread around the F.E.C.E.S. then the ever-reliable Serabane-chan will save you~.]

Since when the fuck could she use the System like this? And has she just been watching us this whole time? And apparently this shit she gave us actually does have a meaning behind the name.

"Teacher, did you get a message too?"

"Yeah, I didn't know she could do that, but just knowing that she's been watching our suffering for her own amusement pisses me off. What's worse is that we probably have to do as she says if we want a clear way out while achieving the original objective. Screw it, I'm gonna transform and lay off some stress."