Floor Two had taken him the better part of twenty minutes, three shallow cuts along his forearm, and a grudging new respect for how quickly the Tower's illusions could turn genuinely lethal once they stopped pretending to be gentle.
He'd cleared it. Barely, by his own private accounting, though the floating text hadn't seemed to care about margins.
Floor Three began with heat.
Ren felt it before he saw anything — a thick, dry warmth pressing against his skin the instant the corridor dissolved around him, carrying the unmistakable mineral tang of superheated stone and something sharper underneath it, metallic and faintly sweet, like blood boiled down to its component parts.
When his vision adjusted, he found himself standing on a narrow stone ledge overlooking a cavern so vast his mind initially refused to accept its scale.
