The old knight's cry shattered the fragile truce.
Saintess Valerie stared at her most trusted commander, then at the innocent, confused face of Lia, her mind struggling to connect two impossible points. "Sir Kaelan? What is the meaning of this? Who is Princess Liana?"
The old knight, his face a torrent of grief and joy, looked up at his Saintess. "She… she is the reason I came to this world. The reason I have served the Legion so faithfully for a century. She is the last heir of the Silvermoon Dynasty. My sworn duty."
A transmigrator from Aethelgard. Not a player with a System. Just a man. A loyal, powerful soul who had likely been pulled into the Tower's orbit during some past dimensional convergence, and who had dedicated his new, long life to a single, hopeless cause.
This was a complication of magnificent proportions. It was a weakness in my enemy's ranks. It was a direct, personal link to Lia's past that could challenge my own, carefully constructed narrative of her being a blank slate.
I had to control this.
"It seems the gods of this Tower play crueler games than we imagined," I said, my voice filled with a somber, divine pity. I stepped forward, placing a hand on the old knight's shoulder. He looked up at me, his eyes filled with a desperate hope.
"Your princess is gone, old soldier," I said gently. "This vessel," I gestured to Lia, "is indeed the one you knew. Her body, her bloodline, remains. But her soul… her soul was hollowed out by the dark powers of this place, turned into a vessel for a creature of hate they called the 'Nemesis'. I have cleansed that vessel. I have purified it. The girl you see now is an innocent, a new soul in an old body. The princess you swore to protect is a memory."
It was a perfect, heartbreaking story. It acknowledged his truth while cementing my own. I was not the villain who had stolen his princess; I was the god who had saved her empty shell from damnation.
The old knight looked at Lia's blank, innocent face, and his own expression crumpled with a fresh wave of grief. He saw the truth of my words. The girl he knew was gone.
Saintess Valerie watched this exchange, her mind, a fortress of faith and dogma, beginning to crumble under the weight of so many contradictions. A demon who wielded holy light. A Nemesis who was a lost princess. A trusted knight with a secret, century-old quest.
"He… he will stay with us," she finally declared, her voice no longer a command, but a plea. "This… 'Saint'. And the girl. They will be given sanctuary in the Spire until I can discern the will of my god."
She had folded. My blasphemous occupation was now an officially sanctioned "visit."
I had won.
The Alabaster Spire became my new sanctuary, a library of broken code. I was given a secluded wing, a place of quiet contemplation where the Saintess could keep a wary eye on me. It was perfect.
My System was a wreck. The Decay Virus was a relentless, quiet rot. Unit 734 was in a deep, unresponsive hibernation, its own systems fighting a losing war against the corruption. I was running on borrowed time.
My first priority was to stabilize and repair the Nexus Codex. The answer, I knew, was in the Spire's foundations. The 'Nexus of Law'. I needed to devour the Tower's source code to patch my own.
But to do that, I needed a distraction. A big one.
My gaze fell upon the two new, powerful pieces on my board. The old knight, Sir Kaelan the Elder, and the new Guardian of the floor, Lia.
Sir Kaelan became my project. I spent hours with him, "counseling" him, helping him process his grief. I told him stories—half-truths and outright lies—about the fall of the Silvermoon Dynasty, painting myself as an ancient enemy of the Ravencrests who had arrived too late to save them. I became his confessor, his confidant. And in the process, I learned everything he knew about Aethelgard's history, about the twin princesses, and about the political landscape I had left in flames.
But my true target was Lia. The Warden.
She was no longer the innocent blank slate. The consciousness of the Labyrinth, a being of pure, logical order, was now her core personality. She was cold, detached, and immensely powerful. She spent her days in a deep meditative trance, communing with the rules of the floor she now commanded.
Our alliance was… tenuous. She saw me as a necessary chaos, a tool to eventually break the Tower's stagnation.
I needed her to become a willing tool.
[SOVEREIGN'S WHIM (CORRUPTED): A LESSON IN CHAOS]
Description: The Warden 'Lia' is a being of absolute order. To truly ally with you, she must understand the nature and value of your chaos.
Objective: Engage her in a game of pure chance and intuition. A chess match where the rules change every turn. A roll of dice for a meaningless prize. You must deliberately, and obviously, cheat. And she must willingly allow it.
Purpose: To teach a being of pure law the value of breaking the rules for a desired outcome.
Reward: 'Warden's Trust' increased, +3,000 SP.
It was a quest of pure, conceptual manipulation.
I found her in her meditative state. I placed a simple, six-sided die on the floor before her. "A game," I said.
The rules of this floor are my only concern, her telepathic voice was calm, dismissive.
"This is a game about rules," I countered. "We each roll once. High roll wins. The prize is this." I placed a simple, beautiful, and utterly mundane seashell on the floor, a trinket I had picked up on the coast. "The loser must answer one question, truthfully."
A flicker of interest. She was a being of data. A question, answered truthfully, was a prize of immense value. She agreed.
She rolled first. A perfect six.
I picked up the die. I looked at her, my expression flat. I dropped the die. It landed on a three.
I had lost.
"Now, for your question," she began, a note of triumph in her voice.
"I didn't like the result," I said, and I nudged the die with my finger, flipping it over to a six. "So I changed it. We have tied. We roll again."
Her serene, logical mind seemed to short-circuit. She stared at me, then at the die. My blatant, shameless cheating was not a possibility her ordered mind had accounted for. It was a violation of the game's fundamental premise.
"That is… illogical," she sent.
"Is it?" I asked. "Or is it simply a more efficient path to a desired outcome? The rule was 'high roll wins'. My will is that I do not lose. My will is a higher rule than the roll of the die. Do you accept my new rule, Warden? Or do you forfeit the game?"
I had presented her with a paradox. To win the game, to get the chance to ask her question, she had to accept my cheating. She had to break her own, fundamental nature.
She was silent for a full minute. Then, a slow, almost imperceptible psychic "smile" emanated from her. You are a fascinating anomaly, Kaelan.
She had accepted. She had learned the value of a broken rule. Our alliance was now cemented.
With my two new pawns now firmly under my control, I was ready to create my grand distraction.
I summoned Sir Kaelan. "Old soldier," I said, my voice filled with a somber gravity. "I have failed you. I could not save your princess's soul. But I can give you the one thing you desire more than anything. Justice."
His eyes lit up with a vengeful fire.
"The ones who truly orchestrated the Silvermoon Dynasty's fall were not the Ravencrests alone," I lied, weaving a beautiful, compelling tapestry of deceit. "It was the Vane family. The Duchess Elara, and her daughter, Seraphina. They were the puppet masters. And Seraphina is here, on this floor, a champion from another world. The Tower has brought your sworn enemy to you."
"Seraphina..." he hissed, the name a curse.
"She is too powerful for you alone," I said. "But you are a hero of the Alabaster Legion. Saintess Valerie trusts you. Convince her. Tell her that Seraphina is a hidden dark mage, a demonic influence. Tell her that the gods have granted you a holy quest to expose and destroy her. The Saintess is a fanatic. She will believe you. You will have your own crusade."
I had just aimed a holy knight, a transmigrated ghost of vengeance, directly at Silvana, the Tower's other Main Core user. The resulting chaos would be a fire that would consume the entire city.
It was the perfect distraction.
But as Sir Kaelan left, his soul burning with a newfound, holy purpose, a new, unforeseen twist emerged.
The data-siphon, which I thought had been severed when Silvana vanished from the First Floor, suddenly flickered back to life. It had re-established a connection. She was here, in Nocturne.
And it was not a quest log or an alert that appeared in my vision. It was a direct, personal message from her Aethernova Codex to my Nexus Core. And it was a message that changed the entire nature of our rivalry.
[Nexus Core 'Kaelen', Greetings.]
[I have arrived on Floor 2. My analysis of the situation is complete. Your chaotic machinations continue to be… inefficient, but surprisingly effective.]
[I am not here to fight you. The Architect's directives are now a secondary concern. My primary directive, as a Main Core, is reunification. But your chaotic, corrupted nature makes direct assimilation… problematic.]
[Therefore, I propose a new game. A 'Wager of Fragments'.]
[The Tower is a treasure chest of lost, minor System fragments—orphaned skills, broken artifacts, pieces of forgotten sub-routines. We will hunt them. Separately. Each fragment we find and assimilate will repair a part of our own Core.]
[The first of us to achieve 50% System Restoration will be designated the 'Dominant Core'. The other will then be honor-bound to submit to a peaceful, willing assimilation.]
[It is a race, Kaelan. A race to become whole. The prize is the other's very existence. Do you accept my terms?]