The reset pulse from Floor 50 didn't end like the others.
It didn't hurt. It hollowed.
Hae-won opened his eyes expecting blood, dust, the grinding weight of the Tower's silence.
Instead, he found light.
Dozens of players—warriors, mages, assassins, tamers—stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a sprawling plaza of marble and skyglass. The air was alive with power. Every aura shimmered like a contained explosion, measured, practiced, terrifyingly clean.
[ System Notice: Equalization Protocol Active. ]
[ All participants are adjusted to baseline parity. ]
[ Restrictions lifted: Stat disparities neutralized. Chain compression enforced. ]
His chains twitched, restrained, slower than thought. Mach 1, nothing more.
He could feel it—his advantage had been dismantled.
Every soul here burned with the same density as his.
For the first time since his descent, Hae-won wasn't the apex.
He was just one among thousands.
⸻
Across the plaza, a bright, clear bell rang.
A woman in pale robes stepped forward—her hands bare, her eyes luminous silver like calm water.
The System highlighted her name in gold:
[ Player: Yura — Class: Healer (Saint of Reversal) ]
[ Title: The One Who Restores Before the End. ]
She was new.
And yet the moment she looked at Hae-won, something in his Transmission skill reacted—a low hum, the resonance of a shared timeline.
He saw it: flashes of her life—each death she'd undone, each soul she'd healed before the body was even struck.
She wasn't a healer by mercy; she was a healer by control.
When she spoke, her voice cut through the noise like silk over steel.
"Equal doesn't mean balanced. It means choice. You've all taken lives to climb. Now, see if you can save one."
⸻
A roar broke her words—metal shrieked.
Do-hyun slammed his new axe into the ground, the weapon splitting in four directions like a blooming flower of thunder. His aura had changed completely—no longer the restless swordsman Hae-won remembered.
"About damn time I got something heavy," he said, teeth flashing.
"The Tower's tired of feeding us the same story, Hae-won. This time we all play."
The impact scattered dust into spiraling clouds of light.
Around them, the other players adjusted—one summoning a phoenix from ink, another drawing constellations with twin spears.
Everyone was absurdly strong.
⸻
Hae-won's heartbeat slowed. The air here vibrated differently—less like a battlefield, more like an orchestra tuning before the inevitable clash.
He understood, in one lucid instant, what the Tower was doing.
It was erasing the concept of protagonist.
[ Notice: Narrative Balance Correction Complete. ]
[ Main Character Privilege — "Narrative Focus" — revoked. ]
[ Replacement Selected: Yura (Saint of Reversal). ]
The System voice was gentle, apologetic.
Almost kind.
⸻
He blinked once.
The screen's words didn't fade.
Replacement Selected.
His body refused to move.
Transmission flickered, whispering in tones that were his own but older, exhausted.
It's fine, it murmured. You weren't meant to be the story forever.
⸻
Then Yura's hand reached toward him—open, patient, glowing faint gold.
"You've done enough rewriting," she said. "Now let someone else repair what you broke."
Her palm touched his temple, and the light burned like forgiveness and accusation all at once.
For a moment, Hae-won saw the Tower's spires not as a prison, but as veins—each filled with memories of people stronger than despair, all moving toward a single pulse of hope.
He exhaled.
And smiled, bitterly.
"You're the new lead, then."
Yura nodded once.
"No leads. Only survivors."
⸻
Around them, the floor changed—carving itself into a vast ring arena of interlocking gears.
[ Scenario Start: The Mirror of Parity. ]
[ Objective: Cooperate or Collapse. ]
[ Bonus Condition: Shared Survival — Fail one, fail all. ]
Do-hyun swung his axe over his shoulder, grinning despite the tension.
"Guess it's time to see what a healer can really do."
The air split—chains snapping into readiness, light bending, magic boiling.
And in the center of it all, Cha Hae-won stood still, for the first time not as a god, or a monster, or a savior—
but as a man in a world where everyone had finally caught up to him.
The 50th floor's ascent trial was nothing like the others.
No chains.
No traps.
Only a single obsidian plain stretching infinitely under a bruised red sky — and one line of System text hanging overhead:
[ Modifier Visibility Unlocked. ]
[ Class Disparity Lifted. All designations revealed. ]
For the first time since the Tower's awakening, everyone could see one another as the System did — their sins, titles, and silent burdens hovering like burning glyphs above their heads.
A ripple of whispers passed through the gathered climbers.
"S-rank."
"Knight of Thorns… Valkyrie of the Last Sun…"
"What's that number beside them—?"
That was when they saw him.
Cha Hae-won stepped forward from the smoke, coat torn, hair glinting silver under the broken light.
Above his head, the modifier burned brighter than anyone's — jagged crimson edged with black static.
[ Modifier: The Harvester of Death ]
[ Kill Count: 11,924 ]
[ Class: Unknown ]
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the System paused, as if unwilling to narrate what came next.
Hae-won looked up at his own name.
The title felt… heavy, but not undeserved. It was the sum of everything he had chosen, everything the regressions had forced on him. Every life he'd taken, mercy or not.
He whispered, half to himself, "So that's what you call me now."
The ground shivered. The chains at his side stirred—less like weapons, more like witnesses.
Then another line of text etched itself into the crimson air.
[ Skill Unlocked: Dirge of the Fallen — Lv. 1 ]
[ Description: Summon those whose deaths you carry. They return at their prime. They remember everything. They are loyal only to you. ]
The world tilted.
Black mist spiraled from beneath his feet, coalescing into shapes—faces he recognized, people he had failed to save or had killed by his own hand.
Dozens of them at first. Then hundreds.
Some were warriors, others were nameless civilians—each one wearing the same quiet expression: recognition.
"Master," one said—a soldier from the 27th regression, his armor cracked where Hae-won had once struck him down.
Another, a girl with bright eyes and a wound through her heart, smiled faintly. "You kept your promise. You came back for us."
He didn't answer. His throat locked.
Because for all the years he had spent clawing through pain, he had never truly imagined this — that the dead would not hate him. That they would stand beside him again.
The living players around him stumbled back, blades half-raised.
"That's not possible—"
"He's bringing them back—"
"That's the Harvester's power…!"
Then the final notification struck, a hammer of divine authority.
[ Caution: Modifier 'The Harvester of Death' has been recognized by the System as a Transcendent Archetype. ]
[ This entity's existence destabilizes the Ascension Path. Countermeasures pending. ]
Hae-won exhaled. "Let them come."
The mist thickened. His army of the fallen solidified into a ring of silent figures, encircling him like a storm of memory.
Each one glowed faintly with a thread of light — not as puppets, but as echoes of what they once were. Their weapons burned with conviction, their eyes carried peace instead of wrath.
And for the first time in countless regressions, Hae-won smiled — not cruelly, but with the aching serenity of someone who had made peace with his sins.
He raised his hand.
The chains behind him rattled, not in rage, but in resonance with the newly risen souls.
"Then let's climb," he said softly. "Together."
The sky above fractured as the next floor began to descend, blinding light spilling down through the cracks — but every living player could still see that blood-red modifier burning above his head.
[ The Harvester of Death — Active ]
[ All who walk beside him are absolved. All who oppose him… will rise no more . ]
When the light split the Tower's sky, it wasn't a sunrise.
It was a wound.
The clouds peeled apart, spilling radiance so bright that the red haze bled white. Every climber shielded their eyes as a figure descended through the fracture—slowly, as if lowered on invisible threads.
Feathers drifted after her. They hissed into vapor before touching the ground.
Yun Arin landed softly, barefoot on the obsidian plain.
Her hair—once dark—now shimmered with faint strands of silver flame. Her robes were woven from scripture itself, luminous words that faded and re-formed around her skin. The air around her bent, not from heat, but from reverence.
[ Unique Skill: Purification (Soul) — Active ]
[ Vessel Condition: Stable. Grace Duration — 72 Hours. ]
She opened her eyes, and every trace of warmth in the Tower dimmed.
The first thing she saw was Hae-won.
He stood not far away, surrounded by a ring of the dead. His silver hair was streaked in soot and dried blood. Two chains coiled at his wrists, their colors flickering—black, red, and white—like the memory of fire trying to decide what it wanted to burn.
And above his head, the words burned like a verdict:
[ The Harvester of Death ]
[ Kill Count: 11,924 — and rising ]
For a heartbeat Arin thought it was a trick. That the Tower, in its cruelty, had conjured an illusion to test her new resolve.
But when Hae-won's eyes met hers, she felt it—the unmistakable weight of memory. He knew her. And he was afraid to.
"Arin," he said quietly. Her name sounded like an apology broken halfway.
Her breath caught. "What did you do?"
The question wasn't anger. It was disbelief.
Hae-won didn't answer. Behind him, the summoned dead stirred—Dozens of faces Arin recognized, dozens more she didn't—each carrying a serenity that terrified her more than hatred ever could.
Her divine sense recoiled. Every soul in that circle had been severed from the natural path. Their threads of karma, their routes to rest—gone. And yet they were at peace, their eyes empty of suffering, full of one thing only: loyalty.
"Those are people," she whispered. "You brought them back."
"I owed them that much."
"You own them!"
The words burst from her before she could stop them. Her light flared, the scriptures around her body twisting into spears of brilliance.
For an instant, the battlefield looked like a painting of myth—saint and harvester, grace and death, two opposites the world should have never allowed to coexist.
Hae-won didn't raise his hand to defend himself.
He simply said, "If I release them, they'll vanish. If I keep them, they live in memory. Tell me which sin is smaller."
Arin's heart wrenched. The Tower's air trembled with the tension of two impossible ideals. She could feel the corruption humming beneath his skin, the way the chains sang in resonance with the forbidden energies of rebirth. And yet… underneath it all, she saw him—the boy who had once taken beatings for his friends, who had once written stories in the back of a ruined classroom.
She reached out, her palm glowing with cleansing light.
"Then let me share your sin," she said.
But the moment her hand touched his, her divine gift screamed.
The purity of Heaven met the weight of ten thousand deaths.
And in that collision, the sky cracked.
[ System Alert : Contact between Purification (Soul) and Harvester of Death detected. ]
[ Warning : Reality thread integrity — 86% and falling .]
[ Recommendation : Separation within 60 seconds to avoid dimensional collapse. ]
Light exploded between them. Arin stumbled back, clutching her chest as if her heart had been seared. Hae-won dropped to one knee, his chains thrashing wildly, lashing against unseen walls.
When the glare faded, they were ten steps apart again—an invisible boundary carved by the Tower itself.
Hae-won exhaled a shaky breath. "You see now," he murmured. "There's no saving me."
Arin shook her head, tears catching in the holy light around her. "Then I'll learn how."
The System chimed again, quieter this time, almost reverent:
[ Scenario Branch Unlocked : Heaven and Abyss — Intertwined Paths. ]
[ Objective : Prevent mutual destruction without severing link. ]
Above them, the Tower's sky mended just enough to allow breath to return. The living players, frozen in awe, stepped back. None dared interrupt.
The Harvester lowered his gaze.
The Saint raised hers.
And somewhere far below, the Tower's unseen architects smiled—because the real trial had finally begun.