Mila
Mila couldn't figure out what unnerved her more, Aalam again casually murdering everyone else in the challenge, the ease with which he took out tens of thousands of monsters, or the fact that, even before the introduction of magic, he probably could have created a pandemic capable of wiping out all of humanity with relatively little effort.
Sure, it made sense. Destruction was always easier than creation or saving, and Aalam had created cures for the world's worst diseases. It was thus obvious he could create worse ones. She'd just never really thought about it before.
Now, though, he wasn't completely sane and had even more dangerous capabilities.
What worried her most, however, was not Aalam, but herself. She was having too much fun.
She and Aalam had always made a good team. He was great at long term and out of the box thinking, but execution details were not his strong suit. They were, however, hers. And, while he was good with science and engineering, her strengths had always been people and languages.
This dynamic had continued with the introduction of magic and the rather amazing results they'd had in this second trial, but there was a danger if she wasn't always on top of what Aalam was doing. And, from experience, she knew it was easier to get complacent when she was enjoying herself.
Still, that was no reason not to go after easy rewards. She'd noticed all thirteen of the living Rollie-Pollies were on the first floor, likely dealing with the aftermath of all the young Rollie-Pollies dying, so she and Aalam hurried to the second floor and quickly cleared out the floor's four subsections.
Sadly, however, there wasn't much new. The terminals in these subsections each had more than one recipe, and the recipes were available in more than one language, including one called Universal Standard, but they were all recipes they'd found on higher floors. All the crafting artifacts on the floor had been destroyed. And they didn't find any special crafting resources lying about.
The most important parts of the second floor, however, were two locked rooms, rooms the natives hadn't been able to open because they were species locked to humans, but which she and Aalam could easily open as a result.
The first was filled with rare crafting resources of all twelve elements and Aalam literally started jumping up and down with excitement, seemingly now having enough resources to build a custom weapon for himself to use during G and F ranks.
The second room, however, contained something even better, several refrigerators filled with fruit, twelve of each kind, and, touching them, the fruit were impressive.
Jem-Hadari Vitality Fruit (G-Rare)
A special fruit bred by the Jem-Hadari to boost the stats of their children aiming to be warriors before advancing to F rank
Effects: Permanent boost to Endurance by +2, Toughness by +2, and Vitality by +2
Requirements: None
Jem-Hadari Mana Fruit (G-Rare)
A special fruit bred by the Jem-Hadari to boost the stats of their children aiming to be mages before advancing to F rank
Effects: Permanent boost to Magic by +4 and Soul by +2
Requirements: None
Jem-Hadari Mental Fruit (G-Rare)
A special fruit bred by the Jem-Hadari to boost the stats of their children aiming to be psychics before advancing to F rank
Effects: Permanent boost to Perception by +2 and Spirit by +4
Requirements: None
Aalam immediately pulled out one of the mental fruits, which looked kind of like a blueberry the size of an apple, and started eating. Meanwhile, Mila instead tried a vitality fruit, which looked more like an apple-sized raspberry.
It was quite tasty, somewhere between a grape and a banana, very sweet, and Mila belatedly realized she hadn't eaten in over a month of subjective time.
When she finished it, she felt her qi reserves increase and her body change ever so slightly, not yet accustomed to the effects of increased Vitality and Toughness, but it felt good and she reached for a Mana Fruit, which looked like an orange, yet turned out to be incredibly sour.
Aalam, unlike her, didn't seem interested in taste—or maybe the Mental Fruit was the best of the bunch—as instead of trying one of the other two types, he started eating another Mental Fruit.
When they both finished their second fruit, however, Aalam didn't look satisfied and instead fell on the floor, thrashing and screaming.
Mila's first thought was the second fruit he'd eaten had been poisonous, but that didn't seem likely, and her second thought, that eating two of the same type of fruit in a row caused side effects, didn't make much sense either.
It was only then she realized what was happening. Aalam's uniqueness made his Spirit stat 12 times as effective. Even though he'd told her one of his abilities increased the effectiveness of his Soul stat, it seemed very unlikely to her Aalam would have the normal healthy limit of his Spirit being three times his Soul. He'd just pushed his Spirit stat up by 8, with no changes to his Soul stat, and it was likely he'd gone over whatever his healthy limit was, causing the disastrous result she was seeing.
Quickly, Mila grabbed a Mana Fruit and transformed Legacy of the Weaponsmaster into a knife, which she used to cut the fruit into pieces. Then she pushed one of the pieces into Aalam's mouth and held his lips closed, forcing him to chew.
That first piece seemed to alleviate some of his symptoms, so she fed him another, then another, and then another.
When he finished the last piece, he seemed fine, exhausted and drained of mental energy, but healthy.
"That was caused by your Spirit being too high for your Soul, right?" Mila sat down on the floor next to where he was still lying and looked down at him.
Aalam didn't say anything, but he nodded.
"What's your ratio, for future reference?"
"One to one." Aalam groaned slightly as he rose to his feet. "My Spirit stat went just one over Soul and that was the result."
Mila started taking out the fruits from the refrigerators and putting them in two of the specialized Epic bags of holding she'd found earlier, ones designed to keep food just as fresh as when it was put in. Then, when all the fruits were put away and she'd given Aalam one of the bags, she helped Aalam, still slightly groggy, back up to the fifteenth floor and their temporary base in the control room for the lab's air filtration system.
There she watched the hologram for a few minutes, confirming all thirteen remaining monsters were still on the first floor, and something in her mind clicked.
Congratulations!
Your Law Egg of Hologram has advanced to middle grade.
Your soul is affected by your understanding of Law.
Agility + 2, Perception + 2, Magic +4, Spirit +2, Soul +2
"Stay here for a bit and recover. I'm going to go check out what's happening on the first floor."
Mila left him there and then quickly made her way to the closest stairwell, making it all the way down to the second floor past the several hundred insect carcasses still on the stairs and the nest between the third and second floors.
The stairs ended there, none of the stairways leading down to the first floor, so she had to take the alternate way down, the ramping hallways.
The major hallways on each floor of the lab all curved at their ends and then ramped either up or down, wrapping back to another floor, but not always the one directly above or below. So, if looked at carefully, there were actually only four large hallways in total in the entire lab, likely existing in the past so vehicles could easily transport materials and people between floors.
Again wrapping herself up with her Law Egg of Obfuscation and using Artifact Activation on her cloak, Mila walked down one of the ramping hallways from the second floor to the first as quietly as possible, soon finding herself in a large open room.
From the map, she knew the first floor was shaped differently than all the others. It didn't have large hallways or subsections, as it wasn't used for crafting and usually barely had people in it. Instead, there was one large main room where the moss now growing throughout the lab had originally been isolated, and the four hallways of the lab started on that room's north side. Then to the west, south, and east were the species-locked doorways to where the three types of Jem-Hadari fruit were grown.
Mila came out of the west-most of the four ramping hallways exiting the main room from its north side, and the main room now looked like a pigsty and smelled like one as well, as it was covered with dried excrement and mostly eaten insectoid carcasses. To the east and west were large doors, still locked, the orchards hidden behind them isolated for years, but to the south, directly across from Mila, the doorway to the room which had held the Jem-Hadari Vitality Fruit orchard was open and Mila could see in.
The room had large bush-like trees, what looked to be three unripe vitality fruits growing on each one, and they appeared to be placed at least seven meters away from each other.
Mila was also able to confirm Rollie-Pollies looked a lot like armadillos. They had furry undersides and armored tops, but with three pairs of legs instead of two, less elongated faces, and no eyes. Also, they were seven meters long and became 5 meter diameter spheres of death when rolled up.
From her vantage point, she could see four with gray armor and one whose armor looked almost golden, the D rank. Thankfully, they were all distracted, digging into the ground in the room and burying small forms which looked to be their young, all killed by Aalam's Creeping Death.
She sent the image to Aalam and he asked, "Do they seem weaker to you?"
"It's hard to tell," Mila messaged back. "I'm not close enough for an aura scan and I don't have a good enough baseline to compare against anyway."
"This looks like an ideal opportunity." Aalam's telepathic message sounded excited. "See if the door to that room can still close as I make my way down there. If it can, you will trigger it to close while I throw some bombs in from the ramps. Then we both rush and open the western doorway and hide inside."
Mila thought the plan was risky, but it seemed a lot less risky than anything else they could come up with later, and she knew Aalam would go after the D rank, so she agreed. As Aalam ran down from the fifteenth floor, Mila slowly made her way around the room to the western side of the open southern doorway, making it there without drawing attention. Then she took a deep breath.
Law Egg gained - Calm
Your soul is affected by your understanding of Law.
Spirit +8, Soul +4
Through a quick inspection, Mila confirmed the door was still working, then she waited for another ten minutes until Aalam made his way to the bottom of the westernmost ramp. She pressed the button at the side of the doorway, starting the quick process of it closing, and then Aalam telekinetically threw 24 grenades and what looked like one of the mental fruits into the room through the gap.
The plan didn't work flawlessly, however, and one of the Rollie-Pollies flew out of the door before it could fully close. Aalam was dashing toward the western doorway, running next to the wall, but the Rollie-Pollie went full speed at him, and, even though Aalam tried to jump out of the way, it smashed into his legs, crushing them completely from thigh to feet even through his robe's automatic shield.