“What are you saying?” he forcefully calmed himself.

“A bomb exploded in the house. Madam, she is bleeding all over. I brought her to the hospital but what should I do?”

His heart almost leaped out. Before he even got time to process what had happened his phone started ringing, one call after another.

‘Something has gone wrong.”

“Azfar, what the heck is happening?” he dialed the number, ignoring all of the incoming calls.

“Multiple bomb blasts, sir. We were barely able to avoid one just now.”

He could hear the chaos ensuing from the call and it only made his heart clench. He quickly called others and most of them reported the same thing. His brain turned, there had been no threats recently and the recent operations had gotten rid of the terrorists from their roots.

He forced himself within work, running away from another problem that had occurred.

He quickly found a similarity in the blast locations, all the areas were understaffed due to the operation and the value of the land was set to massively improve due to the future projects that were due to start. He found another similarity, all the commanding officers of those areas sympathized with his ideas.

“Damn.”

He was stuck. His fingers flew on the keypad as he dialed the number he least wanted to.

“I leave her in your care for now.” before his brother could say anything in reply he cut off. The time was quickly running out.

“All of you stop and return to your posts, immediately,” he announced after starting a conference call. He did not allow them to question, forcing them to accept this time.

“Azfar, I will be leaving the charge of the group to you. Lay low for now.”

“But sir, surely they would not handle this so brutishly.”

“The CM and IGP have already.”

He sat on his chair, spinning it while he thought of where he had gotten wrong. They had been concocting this plan for years after gathering like-minded individuals. The brightest he could find and supplied them with all the information. It would have rid the province of its biggest disease.

‘Where did we go wrong?’

He could hear the chaos outside and let out a deep breath and made a call.

“How is she?”

“Stabilized but the doctor says that madam has gone into a coma.”

He nails a bit harder into his hands.

‘Oh God, I leave her into your hand.’

The door was slammed open. The noise reverberated in the room and his eyes snapped open, his mind was back in the forest.

***

This place made sure he remembered his mortality all the time. Being able to cast spells and becoming nearly superhuman meant nothing. He was no lesser immune to death than he was before, rather his fragility was only further affirmed.

The smallest of the wounds became bigger if not taken care of immediately, becoming more and more fatal until they would start actively interfering in his survival. He was weak, he was fragile and so it did not matter how much he had adapted to these monsters he kept himself alerted to any changes that might occur.

One skirmish after another, he kept fighting the monsters. He threw one of the disks, and the archer, still airborne, was hit and he pulled the trigger. The explosion was just powerful enough to pause its forwarding momentum, the gravity did the rest as the burning, screaming monster crashed into the ground with a splat.

The barrier appeared in front of him, having a rectangular shape it shielded him from the front. It was radiating an orange hue. He focused and it began shrinking becoming smaller and the color changed as it became smaller. He kept practicing with it.

He lit up a torch and grasped a big ax and struck the base of the tree. The recoil spread across his arm and after it was dispersed he struck again. Once it was deep enough he restarted the process at the height of one meter from the bottom cut and in the end, he got a huge piece of wood.

He started processing the wood, further cutting it into smaller pieces. Taking a block he started hollowing it from the insides. Once the process was done he took a block that could fit inside the hole and started the etching process. Once it was done he filled the hole with the shrapnels and set the inscribed block inside the hole. After making sure it was airtight, he repeated the process.

Despite all the preparations, he de not feel well. The 10th floor had been a hell, especially, at the end. He still shivered, thanking God for the miracle that had happened allowing him to survive. That massive monster had been a constant worry in his mind and now he would see whether his preparations were of any use.

This time he did not start the fire. Though the start would become much faster and easier, the end became that much more difficult. With the fire spreading, with the trees breaking and the branches falling from the sky.

He shivered as the memories were clear in his mind. He had been running nonstop while creaking from the sky was easily hearable. Then the first one snapped, crashing with the massive trunks that further broke them into pieces. Like a dominos effect, snapping echoes out. His heart almost had given him a heart attack then and there.

***

It took quite a while to restock as he kept creating one thing after another. During this, he kept being bothered by groups of monsters that kept wandering in this place but after the intensity of the past few floors, he instead felt refreshed by the slow rate at which he was being attacked.

There was no fire raining down from the top, no trees were breaking that started a dominos effect, and there were no highly concentrated pockets of monsters where he would be attacked constantly without being allowed to rest. Compared to that it did not faze him.

He kept on creating the bombs until he had more than one thousand of all shapes, sizes, and power. These could not be compared to even the most basic of the bombs. Still, he kept improving them, making them more powerful with each iteration.

The fights were slow. The time in between each encounter was big, something that he had now became unused to. It made him constantly be on alert, jumping at the slightest of the winds that suddenly created noise that caused him to attack.

Running through tight places with the monsters chasing him, a small and the improved version was enough to take out a whole group of fighters. The archers too now felt cute to him. He had improved his accuracy by killing thousands of them and was at a level where his attack seldom missed.

He kept taking due rest making sure he was in his top condition and it was a wise decision. Killing and killing and killing. He was sure he had long gone past the limit of the previous floor but there just seemed to be no end to this. Calculating the bombs he had used up he was sure he had killed more than five thousand of these monsters.

Even though the fights were effortless compared to before he had never let down his alertness. Becoming complacent now of all places when he was the predator instead of prey was the last thing he wanted, it would just be a repeat of what had already happened. This made him mentally exhausted and even though he made sure to rest, it kept piling up requiring him to increase his duration of rest.

A big blast echoed through the forest followed by a few smaller ones and then there was silence. Monsters rushed over from the nearby but despite inspecting every nook and cranny they found nothing, forced to return empty-handed.

He offered his prayers and recited the Quran from what he could remember from his memory. Surprisingly, he could recall a lot more than he should have. His memory too seemed to have become much better than before.

Once enough time had passed he crawled out of the hole. He wandered around collecting the damaged weapons from the now-dead monsters. They would be crushed to be used as shrapnel.

The cycle continued, he ambushed, he rested and he practiced. The number of deaths steadily increased as he leisurely wandered through the forest. It was a completely different world and he wondered just why he had been so stupid as to create some many problems for himself.

One, twice, thrice, and counting. His bombs were repeatedly depleted. It allowed him to get a rough idea of how many he had killed.

There was one topic that was consistently present in his mind, when would he get out. He kept praying, hoping to finally be allowed to escape from this hell but he had already resigned himself by now.

***

His head moved, eyes looking around. Even though he had just finished a fight he did not stop to rest like usual. His steps quickened as he felt the unease grow. A gust of wind passed through the forest. They were so normal that his mind automatically filtered them out. He took in large gulps of air and started jogging.

Sensing himself becoming unstable he became even more cautious. He pinched himself, the sudden pain helping to disperse his thoughts and allowing him to focus on his senses.

It was dim, barely audible but he heard it. The noise he had become familiar with. His head turned up above and he started scanning the trunks.

The noise became more and more audible and he gasped. A flame appeared above his palm, its size multiple times the normal with its color-changing of orange. It flew above. He pressed the outer shell from all sides making the insides excited and unstable. Midway it exploded, a swarm of fast-moving orange sparks rushed at the massive body that was falling

Its neck bulged and a blast of air erupted forth, most of the sparks exploded and the blast continued straight at him, uninterrupted. He threw himself away, barely dodging the blast radius.

Screaming filled the air as the impact tore apart the forest floor. The air became chaotic and he threw himself asides saving himself from another blast.

He felt the vibrations from the ground. His head snapped back, it had landed. He tried standing up but his legs buckle. He turned towards the massive entity. He quickly took out a massive block of wood from the storage and threw it, tucking his head within his arms afterward. One, two, three. He pulled the trigger.

Intense heat, his heartbeat quickened while his body braced for the impact. Nearly the same instant he felt himself flying while pain erupted from all parts of his body. He crashed against the trunk and his vision blackened out.

When he came back everything was silent and his vision was swimming. Everything appeared double. He tried moving his head but an intense pain struck him.

While he was trying to suppress the pain within he felt his vision darken. The intense stimulus had jammed his brain and before he could even think he was picked up and then again crashed into the ground. The only fortunate thing was that his head did not directly crash into the ground because despite his state he somehow cushioned it with his hands. It did not make anything better though.

With the last bits of will, he connected with the barrier and pumped it with all of his reserves. As the massive amount of energy left his body he went into a shock and became unconscious.

***

Subtle but constant, the vibrations slightly brought him back to consciousness and the rest was done by the intense pain. It was incomparable to even when he was burning within the fire, instead, that felt nothing compared to this.

What he was feeling was indescribable. He could not move, could not utter any sound. Within the soundless world, he could only see as the white-colored barrier slowly dimmed. Each time it did, he felt subtle vibrations through the earth. Despite the looming danger though, he could do nothing his mind had slowed to a crawl and it was slowing even further. He could feel the death nearing.

‘Not like this.’