Ocean Blue

The sound of ocean waves crashing rang in his ears constantly, as did the chirping of seagulls in the distance.

Winston looked on towards the horizons where he saw three floating islands silently hovering in the air. The gentle waves washed over the small wooden boat he stood on, rocking it back and forth with the flow of the water. A thick stench of salt lingered in the air.

Winston wore a black suit, consisting of black pantaloons and a low hanging tailcoat, under which was a white linen shirt. Atop his black haired head, was a half top hat. His eyes were clouded with strange colours as he peered out into the horizon, a signature for his spirit vision. On his face was a smile.

"What was the plan again?" Someone asked from behind him. Winston turned his head slightly, gazing the the speaker from the corner of his eyes. It was a man with dirty brown hair, sitting down onto the edge of the small boat. His eyes were sleek and held a slight edge and in his hands rested a large red spear, the handle of which was embossed with various strange and alien symbols. The man wore a simple t-shirt with predominantly red colouring to go along with streaks of white running vertically. Below, he wore dark coloured pants. It was none other than Zarhan Zulasekail.

"Attack." Winston chuckled and put a hand into his pocket; then he took out a bright blue coin and twirled it around his fingers.

Zarhan raised an eyebrow. "I remember it being a bit more complicated." He said.

"No need to use too much of your brain. We just need to secure the island." Winston shook his head.

"Can't you get us there any faster?" He asked.

"Bored already?" Winston chuckled. Zarhan clicked his tongue, not answering. Winston shook his head. "Amon, Anaak and Laure are approaching from the other ends. If we mess up the timing, it won't be ideal."

Zarhan clicked in tongue again, turning his head away. "You're no fun. We can take care of it either way." A chuckle sounded in response to his comment.

"Patience my friend." He said. "It is a virtue of greatness. Besides, proper preparation had been done to device this strategy. Going off course would not be right."

As of right now, they were taking the test of the 12th floor! It had been 5 months since their ascent to the third floor and they rapidly climbed through the floors.

The idea was simple, they would speed through the floors until the 21st, where they would become E ranked regulars and would not have any issue for points and would not be on a deadline for tests, a plan that Winston had no issues with.

Their group was mostly united still, except for two major differences. The first was the fact that Khun and Rachel had chosen to split up from them at the 5th floor, something Winston was honestly thankful for. Staying with the yellow haired girl was infuriating for him, as was putting up with her act.

There was also the fact that the mysterious patron she had behind her made Winston always at edge. It even made his promotion to sequence 7, which was the barrier of the mid sequences, somewhat dangerous since his emotions were riled up due to stress of being under constant observation and led through coincidences.

After the last test on the 2nd floor, Winston had always been on the edge for any strange coincidences that could be happening around him. Thankfully, he did not notice anything unusual since then. But that didn't make it any better for the situation. As much as he wished to get rid of the root problem, which was the freckled girl, his intuition made him well aware of the dangers that could cause. And so, he persisted.

The second change among their group was the separation of Rak and Paracule from their group on the 7th floor, for reasons that Winston could not begin to comprehend.

Rak's thinking was too complicated for him to understand clearly.

Another thing worth mentioning was his promotion to the next sequence, along with the necessary digestion he could do.

The Sequence 7 in the pathway to the Divine marked the area of the mid sequences, a barrier which when crossed offers conceptualization of some of the beyonder abilities. Of course, the conceptualization was not so powerful at this point, at best, a mid sequence could be considered as a small army on their own. With the real strength in the Divine path coming along when the beyonder reaches the barrier of a demigod, and even further than that, an angel.

Thought that was still too far in the future.

The best thing about these couple of months was the fact that his acting had bore significant results, propelling his digestion to about 87%.

Sequence 7 of the Fool Pathway was the Magician. A sequence that significantly enhanced dexterity, flexibility, balance, and his spirit vision. Along with that, it was the Sequence which brought along the most abilities out of the three. In essence, it offered 9 unique abilities, or 'spells' that could be performed without any concentration of spirituality.

The spells included damage transfer, a spell that allowed him to transfer damage from any part of his body to the other, turning fatal wounds like heart punctures into a hole in one's hand. It was worth noting that any wound could be transferred only once and the damage couldn't be transferred to inanimate objects or other people.

The next was flaming jump, which allowed a magician to jump through the spirit world by entering into flames to appear in a distance of 30 meters, though the range had been extended to 100 meters due to his overwhelmingly stronger spirituality and potion digestion. And to go along with flaming jump, Magicians possessed flame control which let them ignite things nearby and some immunity to flames up to a certain extent.

The next was air bullets, which was a bullet of compressed air that a Magician can fire at will using a trigger sound, like a finger snap or mimicking the sound of a gun from one's mouth.

The next one was paper figurine substitution, the most important ability of a Magician, as Winston would argue. It allowed for a Magician to substitute themselves for a paper figurine, avoiding any sort of damage and even avoid curses. After a paper figurine substitution, the Magician would soon appear somewhere nearby.

In essence, it was the basis of a Fool Pathway beyonder's cockroach like resilience in the mid sequences!

After that, there were powers like illusion creation, which allowed him to create wide scale illusions due to increased spirituality, drawing paper weapons and bone softening.

All of them made way for the Magician sequence to be one of the best milestones in the Fool Pathway!

As for the next Pathway, which was the Error, its sequence 7 was aptly named, Cryptologist. By far, the best thing this sequence had given him was the knowledge of mysticism and the ability to 'decrypt' knowledge through small bits of it. It allowed him to finally experiment with ritualistic magics and gave him the ability to make usable charms, although they weren't too great.

The sequence was named as so because to the ability of Decryption, which essentially allowed them to recreate and Reverse engineer any knowledge and process through which mysticism could somehow be related, going so far as to even allowing a cryptologist to decrypt the honorific names of deities.

It significantly increased physical ability along with finally providing minor conceptualization to both 'Deception' and 'Theft'. Now, he could 'steal' any object from someone as long as physical contact was maintained, along with being able to mask his intentions and lead his opponent through 'Deception'. It was something Winston was exceedingly happy about.

And finally, the Sequence 7 of the Door Pathway, which was named Astrologer. It was the Sequence Winston was the most disappointed about. The entire powers of an astrologer, which was related to divination through star gazing was essentially useless in the tower because the stars were artifical.

Though it provided him improved spirituality, intuition and anti divination properties, it couldn't compare to the other two sequences.

Regardless, Winston was happy for his progress. The acting for a Magician was essentially easier than the other two, it only included him preparing extensively for a test and being over the top with a performance. And with the ranker watching over a test, it offered great feedback. The next thing was the Cryptologist, which was covered with his research of shinsu and ritualistic magic, boosting his capabilities to the next level through digestion!

Through the combined effect of these two pathways, his digestion had been boosted even though he hadn't actively focused upon these things in the past months.

The waves swept underneath and the clouds ahead were replaced by others. At that point, they reached closer to the floating islands.

Winston prepared himself to board the islands as he saw the other boat, atop which Amon, Anaak and Laure were mounted arrive as well.

"Finally! Some action!" Zarhan exclaimed and Winston nodded in response.

The test they were given was named 'Holding the Line' and was a team test, like most others.

It had an extremely simple premise, which was to occupy an area and defend it for 40 minutes after the start of the test. The thing that made it complicated was the small tweaks made in between. The entire map was a large ocean, amongst which small and large floating islands were kept silently in the air.

Each floating island gave a variable amount of points after being occupied for a time of 10 minutes; which was divided as 2 points for the small ones, 5 points for the intermediate ones and 10 points for the especially big ones. As such, the strategy that came to mind in such occupying tests, which was to seize an area at the last moment could not be applied here.

To further the difficulty, each island, depending on its size, was defended by a variable amount of robots called as 'sentinels.' The sentinels would attack the 'invading' team, meaning if an island was unoccupied, the invaders would only need to fight off the robots. However, if it was occupied, they would need to fight off both the robots as well as the regulars holding the line; making it even more important to take hold of an island beforehand.

Along with that, each team was given only four small wooden boats to traverse the entire ocean, with all of them being spawned at the same spot at the starting of the test.

The teams had no idea about their location and could only do speculation about it and the amount of islands each category held was not specified, neither was it specified which type of island was at which position in the sea with each island being marked only as an 'X' on the map.

However, with the help of Winston's wayfinding abilities, they had managed to locate the general direction of two large islands; prompting them to split up into teams of two.

Winston gazed at the top of the group of islands, finding two ocean blue flags waving at the top. His eyes narrowed dangerously as his smile seemingly widened.

"There seems to be people up there." He said. Zarhan's ears perked up as his words landed. He broke into a cheerful laughter.

"What 're we waiting for then?! Let's go!" He said. Then, shinsu rushed through his legs, making them stronger and more robust. His legs expanded and with one tremendous effort, he blasted off into the air.

Whoooosh!

The boat heaved in the water as Zarhan pushed it back. The middle of the boat took a noticable dent at this moment.

Winston remained perfectly still, not at all minding the rocking boat.

His eyes travelled to the other side, where the others were planning to go up. He saw Laure propel the others up using baangs and float up as well.

Seeing that, he pressed slightly upon his half-top hat and snapped his fingers.

Snap!

Crimson flames erupted around him, covering him whole, and he disappeared within them.

~~~

A/N: And so, Winston makes his appearance. Also, I'm working on a patreon to offer 10 advanced chapters, though it hasn't yet been completely set up. I'll also try to upload advanced chapters for my JJK fanfic onto there so after I set it up within a day or two's time, you people can check it out if you wish.

Also, throw some stones! We must get the fic on top of the ranks!

Cheers~~~