About the floor guardian standing in front of him, Damon had been right and wrong about one thing each.
The right: it was true that the floor guardian that stood before him was an NPC to him since she was not a player.
Floor Guardians are non-player characters that are placed in charge of a floor of the Crimson Spire to rule over it and control the affairs of the said floors.
Each floor ideally has its own guardian(s) — formidable characters that supposedly stand as the strongest on their floors.
The wrong: Naaray was very much sentient.
The concept of repetitiveness and the usual single and streamlined action and nature of NPCs was abolished when NERVE apparently perfected everything needed for Nexus Online.
Anyways, what Damon was right or wrong about didn't matter at this moment.
The issue at hand was that he was faced with a floor guardian and unbeknownst to him the status of this woman, he accepted her challenge and set up a process that he was yet to discover its purpose.
Naaray stared at the player without saying a word.
He had accepted the challenge of her floor and as the guardian of the floor, she was bound to assess the player based on the rules of the challenge, whatever it is.
Naaray stretched out a hand towards her left side, revealing even more of her breasts that were hidden.
The pair of ample breasts bounced in front of Damon with the slightest movement she made.
He could not help but steal glances at them as they were just right before his eyes.
Tiny and gleaming crystals gathered in her palm and stretched upwards and downwards, forming a long iron rod.
Damon moved a step back from the guardian extending the distance between the two of them a little further.
Naaray clutched the rod. With the iron staff firmly grasped in her hands, she struck the floor with it.
Bang!
The impact created a sudden onset tremor that shook the entire hall, making Damon lose his balance and fall from one side of the room to another repeatedly.
The hall was slowly being dominated by its darkened half.
The darkness that was initially interwoven with the bright sides of the room began to creep up slowly.
It swallowed the light inside the hall until the wide space went from dimly lit to completely dark.
But that was not the strangest thing yet that Damon was forced to see.
He rose to his feet immediately as he watched what was happening.
'What's going on?' he wondered as he continued to turn around, wary of his murky surroundings.
Crack!
A crack manifested on Naaray's body and she broke apart like an egg's shell.
Naaray split into two and gave way for something to emerge from inside of her.
Her long blonde hair shortened to the level of the ears and gradually turned dark and curly.
The bosomy chest that had stolen all of Damon's attention from time to time shrunk and vanished, transforming into a flatter chest with more prominent ribs.
Naaray had morphed into another being entirely.
By the time the process was over, the voluptuous female that Damon had seen did no longer exist inside the hall.
Standing now in front of him was another person.
It was a man.
This strange man was slender and frail with a bent posture like an old man with waist problems.
He held the iron staff in his hands and looked at the player with his eyes narrowed and a smirk on his face.
The man's eyes had black circles around it, audibly begging for some rest and his skin was paper white but youthful.
His movements were sluggish but his voice...
His voice was deep, reaching the very depths of the wide room and piercing into the core of Damon's soul whenever he spoke.
'What's going on?'
He was still baffled by the sudden appearance of the male individual when the blue notification box flashed in his mind with a notif.
Ding!
[You are now a participating in the challenge of the 1st floor]
"Welcome to the 1st Floor," the pale-skinned man said to Damon, "...the Floor of Riddles."
"I am Symhar, the guardian of this floor."
Damon didn't know when he chuckled.
Not from excitement, but a message in his head to himself that said 'I am fucked'.
He raised a brow in confusion.
"Two floor guardians?"
That was the thought that crossed his mind.
He anticipated then that it was not an impossibility for a floor to have two guardians.
However, it was surprising that such a thing could be seen as early as the 1st floor.
"Floor of Riddles?"
Damon assumed many things about the name that Symhar had just mentioned, possibly a moniker for the floor…. or a hint to what the challenge was about.
He tried to maintain a calm mind and compose himself.
If the challenge was anything like the usual games he played in the real world, then the 1st floor might not be that hard since there were still more floors left for him to climb.