Silence in the Library

Ignatius raised [✵Sarexia's Gauntlets], the fully powered version which he'd equipped upon entering the Eternal Tower, and parried the Black Book's attempted grab attack.

The monstrous hand screamed louder as the huge book which contained it was hurled against the wall, knocking many other ordinary books to the ground. It flipped over, looking almost like a huge hermit crab on the ground: hand for a body, book for a shell.

It raised its index finger and pointed at Ignatius, casting a spell which sent a dozen books flying like hurled rocks right at him!

"For king and country!" Siegmund roared, and threw himself between the attack and his friend. The books pelted his bulbous armor, sending him staggering but dealing very little damage to him.

Ignatius grinned. "Good job," he said, then leaped across the passageway and slammed a [✧Sacred Fist] downward into the book which protected the hand.

The heavy cover of the book cracked down the middle, sending a tornado of razor-sharp pages upward! They slashed Ignatius a dozen times in a mere moment, but due to the level difference between them, each hit dealt only a single point of damage.

Had it been a party of Level 1 characters attacking the Black Book, this would have been a devastating AoE that would have severely punished an imbalanced melee party which eagerly attacked without any thought of defense.

As it was, however, Ignatius just slammed the hand into dark crystal dust before it could scurry into a new book to gain a new "shell," killing it.

A glowing [✯Skill Gem] dropped. The particular shape of the star indicated that it was Rare, which meant it was probably a very good drop, but Ignatius wouldn't know its identity until he took it back to a town to have it identified.

After picking up this Skill Gem, Ignatius turned and raised his arms in a defensive position, wondering which direction the Librarian would come from.

"Good work, my friend!" said Siegmund in a breathless voice. "However… I have a growing feeling of unease. I think something is… watching us."

"Yeah," said Ignatius. "If you see it, try to get in melee range as quickly as possible."

A low-whispering hiss filled the corridor. Some of the books which were scattered on the floor had fallen open, and their pages flitted in response to the whisper, as though an evil wind had passed through the labyrinthine corridor.

Siegmund tilted his head. "Do you hear—"

Then it was there.

A pair of spidery arms reached out from one of the empty portions of the bookcase, a slot where a book had been ripped free. It came from right behind Ignatius, and he couldn't cast [✧Balance] quickly enough to prevent the grab.

"No shouting in the library!" an insectoid voice rattled in his ear, and then it dragged Ignatius through the hole in the bookshelf.

The hole was much smaller than his body, but the effect was magical, and this didn't matter.

His bones turned almost to powder as his body was crushed and squeezed through the gap as wide as a single book, and then he was being pulled through a tunnel of spider webs, his body forced into a snake-like tube of pulped meat.

He saw, through gaps in the interdimensional web which linked the Librarian's domain to the Library Labyrinth itself, the cocooned corpses of the hundreds of adventurers from Path of the Immortal's lore which had been snatched up by the spider monster in the ancient past.

Despite knowing exactly what was happening, and that he was in no real danger, primal panic filled Ignatius's heart, and he writhed uselessly in the grip of the monstrous, thorny arms as they dragged him swiftly along. His ears were filled with the moans of the people trapped eternally in these cocoons, people who had been turned into a kind of undead, so that their torment would never end.

Then Ignatius was free, hurled through another bookcase into a passage of the Library Labyrinth he hadn't yet visited. He gasped in shock and relief as his body magically reformed itself from crushed bone and pulverized flesh, letting him stagger back to his feet and take in deep breaths of the library air.

After a few moments, his heart returned to a normal rate, and his hands stopped shaking. Ignatius finally looked around and swore as he realized he had no idea where on the floor he was. Though he spat the curse with vehemence, he couldn't hear his own voice, nor any sound, and he knew that Siegmund would be experiencing the same thing.

That was the main reason the Librarian was a threat to even higher-leveled players: its main function was to split the party and be immensely annoying by applying the "Silence" debuff on every character it abducted.

And, as in many RPGs, this "Silence" effect prevented any skills from being used.

Ignatius staggered as he took his first few steps. Most people weren't aware how much their body used sound to help orient them in space, nor were they aware that becoming completely deaf was such a disorienting experience. Even though Ignatius knew what was happening, he couldn't simply force his virtualized mind to ignore its basic functionality…

…So he took careful steps, feeling as though his head was spinning, until he became more used to the silent state.

After a few moments, Ignatius ran through the options for what to do next.

He could simply leave and try again. Hopefully, he'd find another version of Floor 1 where the main challenge came from basic fights, not an annoying "puzzle" like this one.

However, unless he found the stairs to Floor 2, he'd lose all the Essence and items which he'd found on this floor—which meant forfeiting the [✯Skill Gem] he'd looted from the slain book.

Even if he couldn't use that Skill Gem effectively as a Monk, which was fairly likely, Ignatius could still sell it for a good amount of Essence. Therefore, he didn't want to throw it away so easily.

But that might be the only option. Because if he didn't just leave now, Ignatius had to find the stairs to Floor 2 before his Hunger Clock ran out.

He checked it and saw that, due to the time spent checking menus, walking, and fighting, he had nine minutes remaining out of the original fifteen.

He had enough food to last another five minutes on top of this, since he'd bought the foods which gave the biggest damage and movement speed boosts that were available to him, rather than buying foods which provided the biggest time bonuses.

After all, Ignatius had planned on using Siegmund to—

He froze in place, an idea suddenly rushing through his mind. If he summoned Siegmund…

'Yes,' he thought. 'That might just work!'

Ordinarily, the best way to fight a Librarian was to fight back-to-back with a party member. The Librarian always came out of the bookcases which served as the walls for the Library Labyrinth, and it always tried to grab a player and deposit them far away from their party.

Ignatius and Siegmund were now separated. In fact, Siegmund had probably also been abducted and dragged through the web dimension before being thrown somewhere else.

However, Ignatius could easily summon him with the simple blowing of a whistle.

'I feel stupid for not realizing the obvious solution before,' Ignatius thought, growing more and more excited. 'But before that, the first step… is getting caught again!'

Though it was a horrific experience, Ignatius sighed with relief as the Librarian appeared a minute later and snatched him by the throat once more before dragging him through the magical tunnel and dropping him in a different portion of the library.

'You damn abomination!' Ignatius thought, laughing silently in the dead air. 'You've played right into my trap!'

He ignored the small amount of damage the dragging had caused. It would have been very dangerous for a Level 1 character, but not for him. No, the waste of time was the biggest problem here.

But it didn't matter.

At Ignatius's right hand was a bookcase wall with a book removed from it every couple of meters.

Ignatius now knew exactly where he was again.

He drew Siegmund's whistle from his inventory and blew it.

Nothing happened.

The silence in the library reigned supreme—at least, regarding sounds produced by Ignatius. If he was the one to use it, Siegmund's whistle was useless.

Ignatius cursed again, but his words were stripped of their sound, eaten up by the curse upon him.