Awakening: I Ascend As A Legendary Ranked Necromancer-Chapter 38: Two weeks.

"Is there no end to them?!" Temur snapped, swinging his sword in a wide arc, biting into leathery flesh as green blood sprayed, and heads followed, rolling like balls across the floor.

"Just keep doing your work!" Litha growled as she snapped, throwing another bolt of blue-hot light that burned the monsters to cinders. "Oh shit! I’m not supposed to burn them!"

But some of them were already blackened mess twitching on the ground.

I sent sharpened bones coated in my Unholy magic into the horde of monsters, piercing their flesh and the moment they struck, I activated the power sealed inside the bones.

There was a low hum of vibration that pulsed from each bone, sending invisible ripples outward and in a shockwave into the bodies of the monsters.

And the next moment the monsters collapsed as if the strings of a puppet had been cut, they lay there twitching.

The bones came from a monster that used paralyzing magic, and when I used [Dance of the Bones], I could draw out the last remnants of power still trapped within them.

That was what I used to force the monsters into paralysis.

"I’ve captured the ones we needed alive," I said, raising my voice. "We can stop now!"

The monsters were called Grotor. They had lime-colored skin marked with brown stripes, shaped like lizards but as large as grown men. Long claws, sharp teeth enough to tear flesh from Awakeners. They weren’t usually hostile, but they were still monsters.

The rest of the Grotors finally retreated when we stopped cornering them, slithering back into their cave as fast as they could.

Before the paralysis wore off, we moved fast. Thick ropes went around their legs and torsos. Temur and I tied the live ones while Litha collected the dead.

Litha scowled at the blinking Grotors. "I’m getting tired of doing the same thing every week. We need to fight real monsters, not these D Iron ones."

"Technically, we’re not fighting," I pointed out as we dragged the bound monsters toward the metal carriage and dumped them inside. "We’re just doing our job."

We had climbed to Floor 101 two weeks ago and finally tasted what life as real Climbers was like. The uncomfortable truth was simple, Guilds and associations ruled the Tower. Unless you had a sponsor or serious personal wealth, joining one was almost mandatory.

I’d looked into the advantages of Guilds. The biggest was access to Zones. Almost every Zones belonged to a Guild or association, and they were extremely reluctant to rent them out to outsiders.

Any newly discovered Zone was claimed long before an individual could even dream of touching it. Most new Climbers had already joined Guilds, but I was still weighing my options.

The biggest downside was freedom. Everything you did would be regulated by contract.

Litha snorted. "We’re doing our job, but I hate it. And why is everything so expensive anyway? If this is how things are as we climb higher..."

She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. If every floor was like this, how were we supposed to train and grow stronger?

"At least we still have work," I said. "I heard some Climbers got caught stealing by the Tower Guards yesterday."

Temur shook his head. "Well... there’s a guild for thieves and assassins too."

Litha sighed, her stomach growling. "Let’s go before the monsters convince themselves they can fight us again."

Temur grunted. "Those ones? They’re getting more docile the more they’re farmed."

We loaded the remaining monsters and climbed onto the driver’s seat. The carriage, pulled by two powerful horses, rumbled into motion.

The Zone had twisted the land into rocky terrain with sparse vegetation. Caves dotted the area, filling most of the landscape. It was a small, open Zone, not one buried in an ancient temple or ruin.

At the gate, three guards dressed in black with an emblem waved us through without ceremony. After two weeks of coming here every day, we were a familiar sight and they don’t need to stand on long ceremony for long.

The moment we left the Zone, the air turned crisp and sharp. The ground softened, rich soil replacing stone, and vegetation lined the road as we headed toward town.

Temur sighed when the town came into view. "I miss Eldrida. The food, the view, I want to go back to that place, it’s far better than this!"

Litha rolled her eyes, though she smiled. "You want to go to the capital where we’ll spend seven times what we spend here."

I winced. "We spent three days in Eldrida, the capital of this floor."

"And the hotel costs alone ate all the monster cores we hunted," Litha added. "Good thing we still have what you brought back from the test, or we’d be finished."

She’d slapped her own head when the test ended, realizing she hadn’t stocked up on orc bodies. Temur claimed he’d been too wounded and too busy fighting for his life to haul corpses. In the end, I’d been the one carrying most of them back.

Now we couldn’t afford to rent a Zone, and no Guild was willing to rent one to us anyway. The work we were doing now was for a clothing association.

The Grotor were valuable for that trade. Their skins made high-quality leather with a distinct lime color, and an acid in their guts was used as a softening agent.

The association owned the Zone and ran a leather business. We were hired to hunt and deliver the monsters. And since the Zone was a domesticated one, it wasn’t a very difficult thing to do.

The town lay far from the capital and was dominated by weaker Guilds focused more on businesses. The Climbers here were a mix of ordinary humans and Iron-Bronze Awakeners.

We headed toward the association to drop off our haul and collect the day’s pay, just like we had every day for the past two weeks we came here.