Chapter 8 - Chapter 7 - I'm so gonna die here

While I had no idea where I was in relation to the mapped out area of floor 87, all I had to do was move away from the source of the howl that I heard earlier. It would probably also help if I moved along the battlefront between the two monster races [Citrosian] and [Hydra Wolf]. My hypothesis was that if the [Floor Master] was towards the exit, the [Citrosian Queen] and [Hydra Wolf Overlord] would probably be towards the left and right sides of the exit, which being as far away from each other and the [Floor Master] as possible. In other words, by moving directly away from the direction of the howl, and along the battlefront, I should be heading directly towards the entrance to floor 87 - which meant that I could enter floor 86 from there.

Engaging all of my speed, I spread my [Sense] and flew as fast as I could, taking care not to enter areas that deviated from my path. After taking a lot of twists and turns while trying to keep in mind my position relative to where I had come from, I heard that familiar mechanical voice again.

-Conditions have been met. [Navigation Lv.1] has been acquired.-

I received this announcement thankfully, grateful that I would no longer have to burn so much brainpower in order to keep track of my position. In fact, I had been straining myself so much that my [Thought Acceleration] skill, which had been active ever since I got it, had levelled up to 2. To go on a bit of a tangent, I could never figure out what the dividing line was between skills that needed mana and skills that did not. While my combat skills certainly needed mana, none of my other skills ever seemed to need mana. Yet, I did not have enough of a sample size to understand the hidden classifications between skills that needed mana and those that did not. Perhaps it was only skills that exerted an effect on the external world that required mana, and only the skills that concerned myself had no mana consumption cost. And perhaps those skills relied on my mental resources instead. Truth be told, having slept for only about an hour or so and keeping so many skills active at the same time was definitely very mentally taxing, but it also seemed that simply being able to auto-regenerate mana was keeping me afloat.

This was very confusing. The only truly "toggle-able passive" skill I had was [Flight], which I could almost just forget about because it was so automatic, but I could also disable it. Perhaps, having an skill meant that it was much less taxing on me? And the other skills were using up a hidden mental resource that seemed to be slightly replenished by [MP Auto-Regeneration]. I thought about this as I flew, being able to focus less on [Sense] and [Navigation] now that I had the skills to back up my mental processing.

Well, while it bears thinking about, for now my main goal is to leave this floor. Wait, isn't that...?

Flying up to a five-way fork in the road, I recognised this formation from the map that was given to me from the [World Handbook]. I smiled slightly, feeling like the hellish mental pressure being in such a dangerous area had eased up slightly. At this time, the mechanical voice rang out once again.

-Conditions have been met.