For the sake of working with Neptune and dealing with my own problems, I decided I needed to finish clearing Nihonium. After fulfilling my promise to Plumbum, I holed up in Nihonium and went home in the evening.
Three days later…
“Ooh…” I looked at the stats on my portable status board and shuddered with emotion.
I remembered how I’d started off.
I’d measured my stats after watching Emily do it and despaired when I saw mine were all Fs. But today, I’d raised them all to SS.
It was even more emotional because I’d built them up one seed at a time.
Now I could do it─I could finally meet Nihonium. Looking back, she was the one who’d led me to the magic fruit that taught me Repetition.
I returned to the mansion and used the warp room to return to the room before the spirit’s chamber.
There, I faced the fifteen-foot-squared cube of rotting flesh. It was every bit as eerie as before. I circled around and used the odd status board on it.
Stats appeared one after another, and every SS-rank stat glowed.
HP - SS
MP - SS
Strength - SS
Vitality - SS
Intelligence - SS
Willpower - SS
Speed - SS
Dexterity - SS
Luck - SS
Once all of them had been displayed, the flesh heap melted away and was absorbed into the ground.
I backed off and waited for it to finish.
“Another zombie dragon?!”
Once it was gone, a zombie dragon appeared in its place. It looked just like the other ones on B9; its size, presence, and miasma were the same as well. Nothing differed save for the number 9 above its head, which was a counter I hadn’t seen before.
I’d expected this to open the path leading to Nihonium’s chamber, so this was a little bit of a letdown.
“Either way, guess I’ll just kill it. A counter of nine means I have nine moves─”
Suddenly, alarm bells went off in my head.
It was nothing but instinct.
Instinct and intuition, the general instant decision-making that comes from a wealth of experience, had made me stop myself from attacking.
Lately, I’d been increasing my number of attacks to match the zombie dragons’ counters to cultivate better judgment, so I’d considered killing this one in exactly nine moves.
Nine. That counter wouldn’t come up without reason. Not now. The number nine couldn’t possibly be meaningless here, in a chamber that symbolized the whole of Nihonium.
Killing in nine moves was a bad idea. Probably a very bad idea.
“…Repetition!” I defeated the zombie dragon with my ultimate farming magic, the perfect representation of a one-action kill.
The counter went down by one. In its place appeared a three-headed dog zombie. This one’s counter was an 8.
“I knew it!”
I evaded its biting attacks and summarized the situation in my head. Nine floors, nine kinds of monsters, a count of nine. With each kill, the counter would go down by one, and the next would appear.
Defeat them all. Show the fruits of your growth.
That was the intent that I sensed from this.
“In that case─whoa!” I’d prepared to defeat the three-headed dog zombie through my usual homing round method, but I quickly realized that it would count as two attacks. I used the Bead of Time on the dog zombie, fired a homing round, and rushed in. The head I’d chosen was the correct one. Its counter went down by 1, and it disappeared.
Counter: 7. Electric mummy.
Counter: 6. Poison zombie.
Counter: 5. Red skeleton.
These I insta-killed without issue.
Counter: 4. Mummy.
“That’s right. I needed two moves for these, too!”
Like with the dog zombie, I splashed the Bead of Time on it and killed it with my now-quite-strong growth round before burning the bandages left on the ground to finish it off.
Finally, I defeated a mummy, zombie, and skeleton with ease. I’d killed all nine monsters within the nine counts.
After a short wait, a gate appeared. This was what I’d been waiting for: the entrance to Nihonium’s residence.
The air changed. I instinctively knew that I was right.
I took a deep breath and went through the gate. Beyond it stood a regular-sized woman in a kimono─the same one I’d met in figure size before.
“I have been waiting for you.”
She was the spirit Nihonium herself.