Scarlet

After about twenty minutes of fighting more demons, I make it to the twenty-third floor, where I pause at the top of the stairs.

“What’s that sound?” I mutter aloud as my ears twitch at the sound of some sort of sizzling noise. Kind of like a low fire burning. And I think I also hear some very faint tapping sounds.

I focus on the sounds for a few seconds before frowning.

It really sounds like there’s some sort of fire on the first floor, but shouldn’t that be too far for me to hear?

“Not necessarily,” Tar suddenly answers, “it’s likely that your senses have increased enough to be able to hear that far by now.”

I blink in surprise before staring straight ahead of me.

Wait. My senses will also be increasing as I grow stronger?

Tar appears in front of me with clear confusion on his face as he says, “Of course. Why wouldn’t they?”

Oh.

Well, I guess I was still thinking of the stats a little bit like a video game in the sense that it’s only my physical, magical, and mental strength growing as I level, and not my senses and stuff.

“Whoever made those video games clearly doesn’t know how reality works,” the tanuki says with a huff.

Wait, so how far would a Class II person be able to hear?

Tar floats around in a circle for a few seconds as he seemingly thinks on it before answering, “Someone at the early levels of Class II can probably hear about a tenth of the distance from themselves as you can hear right now.”

I blink again in surprise, only to remember that blood lycans have incredibly good hearing in general. Meaning my enhanced hearing and senses are from my demon side and not because I’m a Guardian.

Anyways, that means that if I’m able to hear some small noises from the first floor while on the twenty third right now, someone like Sylver should only be able to hear something somewhere between two and three floors away from him?

“Indeed.” Tar says before vanishing again. “But remember that it varies from Guardian to Guardian. Remember that your perception capability was Tier A?”

Oh, right. Interesting.

Well, anyways. I’m starting to hear some very quiet voices coming from the first floor stairs, which means the reinforcements have probably arrived.

“Do you think the young miss is okay?” I hear one of them asking – this one being a woman sounding maybe a bit older than me judging by their voice, footsteps, and tone.

“Probably. You’ve seen the videos too, I presume?” a man answers, sounding rather clinical in his words, with the voice of someone at the same age as the first woman.

Then again, determining age is a very difficult thing to do with Guardians, considering that when you level up, your age is stalled for a time. And if you level up multiple times at once, your age might even begin to revert a tiny bit back in the direction of your prime.

Anyways, I scowl at the ground at the thought of those videos, which are once again striking at my pride.

If only they had me in a cooler light. Then I might be okay with them. But nope. Most of them seem to be either calling me cute or calling me terrifying because of my eyes and my blood magic and claws. A rather contradictory mix if you ask me.

And neither descriptions being ones I’m okay with.

“Well, you can be a little terrifying sometimes,” Tar suddenly says, making me scowl at the space in front of me as if he were there, “especially when you scowl like that.”

Deciding to ignore the completely false words of the tanuki in my head, I begin making my way around the twenty-third floor, clearing it of demons until I hear the footsteps echoing down the stairwell stop on the same floor as me.

“She’s on this floor, and it looks like she knows about us,” the woman’s voice says again.

“How would she know about us? We haven’t even informed the ice block about our arrival yet,” a new voice says, one that’s rather androgynous, making it difficult to determine much about them from the voice. Although they do sound a touch prideful for some reason.

“What’s she doing on this floor anyways? Shouldn’t she be on a lower floor fighting the weaker demons, ones closer to her own level?” the deep and monotone voice of the fourth and final person amongst the Guardians says, making my ear twitch in my annoyance. Which seems to be happening from time to time now. As if the habit of my eyebrow or eye twitching is somehow transferring to my wolf ears.

Something I really need to stop, since it makes them look cute. And that’s not something I want.

The last thing I need are more people wanting to touch my ears. I’m already worried that if I try to go out in public I might get people trying to touch them, and I don’t need to add more people onto that list of possibilities.

Not that I’m really the type of person to go out and do stuff anyways.

“Well considering that it looks like the girl’s already cleared out all of the floors below this one, no, I don’t think she should be fighting only the demons on the lower floors,” the woman’s voice returns, making me realize that she’s able to sense everything on a floor somehow.

Are they some sort of team of Guardians, and she’s their scout or something?

“Cleared them all?! What?! How! And are you sure it wasn’t Sylver who did that?” the fourth voice returns with incredulity in it.

“I know because she’s currently finishing off the demons on the twenty-third floor who are all at least around level 22 or so, and because Sylver is currently on the 79th floor right now,” the woman patiently answers him, putting them all into a shocked silence.

I use this time to kill the last demon on the floor before making my way over to the stairwell with a scowl.

“She’s coming here now, and the energy she’s putting off doesn’t seem to be a happy one,” the woman says soon before I open the door of the hallway, revealing the group standing right outside of the stairs in said hallway.