James had to go down there.
He realised this himself, and that was why he activated his Night Vision and started down the stairs.
The fact that he had been down the stairs for almost half a minute seemed to tell him how deep he had reached. There was a door in front of him. The door seemed to be made of iron, it was a very suspicious door with no visible back.
Grasping Clarent tightly, James kicked the door open, his strength too great to be stopped by such a door.
After entering the door, he saw the blood pool around.
The dried blood stains around were at least 30 times more than the blood stains that would have formed when James had almost died, it was very, very clear that this was a torture chamber.
With slow but quick steps he made his way to an area where the blood was getting thinner and thinner and then he saw a cage. The cage was huge, it would be absolutely normal to say that it was almost 5 metres long.
After watching the cage carefully, he realised that a woman was sitting in the cage, covered in blood.
Seeing the woman, James stopped where he was for a few seconds and then tears began to flow from his eyes.
"You found me..."
James paused and stared at the bloodied woman as the thin female voice rose from the field.
"Elanor..." he said calmly.
Still, the answer he expected in return did not seem right at all.
"Watch out for them. They came, they slaughtered my entire family, my entire home, my entire lineage, my entire people, every one of them, turning them into horrible monsters."
These words shocked James once more as if they had snapped him straight to attention and made him ask the question:
"Who are they?"
"Shapeshifters. Necromancers. Please be careful, please save them."
These words seemed to have touched James' heart deeply, he felt as if he had seen a friend he hadn't seen for a long time.
James took a deep breath and paused as if he was about to say something when he saw that Elanor had removed a necklace from her neck and was holding it out to James.
"Please take this, I'm sure it will protect you," Elanor said and that gave James enough confidence.
"I'll...I'll save you, I promise...." said James suddenly and with that, Elanor and every single one of the flames around them stopped.
[7th Floor Completed = Find the Real Elanor
Level 8 unlocked. The rating of the deep battle has been unlocked.
15,000 Gold earned].
The 7th Floor was completed, quite quickly.
James suddenly fell to the ground with that, his mental strength had indeed strengthened tremendously, but what he was going through now seemed a little difficult to him, Elanor was a girl who seemed to be almost James' age, and her being in such a state seemed to remind him of how difficult life was.
Elanor must have been through the same thing a billion times by now, being on the 7th floor itself, while he was inside this tower, playing at being a god.
It might have been real, it might have been like a memory that could change, but one thing was true...Elanor was acting like a real person....as if every letter of every word had caressed James' heart.
"I have to save her...." said James suddenly and with a light step he moved forward. He had to go through one of the two passageways that had appeared in front of him, even if he was scared for a few seconds to move forward with his current minor mental damage, he also realised that retreating at such a level would set him back from the others in the future.
He made his way to the 8th floor passageway and suddenly he was through it.
James was about to find himself in a much more complicated situation than he had imagined.
He could not even imagine what was about to happen.
When he passed through the passage, he found himself in the ballroom he had just been in, and the people around seemed to be real people this time, not ghosts.
Yet James realised very clearly that some of the people around him were different from the others. He didn't even want to lift his eyes to look at them, his stomach felt disgusted by them.
"Shapeshifters..." thought James, he had enough perception to recognise them.
These abominations were a race of monsters that had existed in the tower's early history but were later wiped out by the union of Erebus and Ra.
They were a dangerous race, and a visit to Chaos by Erebus himself had led to the acknowledgement of their extermination and a definitive acceptance from the creator himself that they had been destroyed.
This meant that James was in a way involved in the [bridge of truth and lies] inside the tower.
Like on the 6th-floor mission, he seemed to be able to see through the curtains. It was like he had a pair of eyes that could see through illusions. It must have been something strange like he could see the colours of graded cards. Maybe it was a strange ability, but it was in his favour that this ability worked this way.
With a few steps, James began to walk around, often greeting people respectfully and talking to them.
He even tried to get close and talk to them.
He had recognised some of the women from their ghostly forms on the previous floor, he had even seen the woman he had first asked a question of, but neither Elanor nor any other Rosewell family member seemed to be around. In fact, except for Elanor, he didn't even recognise the others.
Still, he thought that he might have a purpose to save each of them, after all, Elanor had asked him to, it was a big gap for the 8th floor's mission, he might be dealing with a different subject, but he still had a purpose to take the woman's words seriously, James thought to himself.
"Members of the Rosewell family entering the lounge."
With a sudden voice, the door in the room where the stairs to the ballroom were located opened and four people entered.