"Damn cursed fucking rabbit. Better watch your back, I'll skin your ass alive and boil your damn bones if I ever catch you," Kael could only mutter insults under his breath, the words leaking out in a steady stream like steam from a cracked pipe.
His voice was low, more vibration than sound, because even now he couldn't shake the suspicion that Torrac might be listening the way a landlord listened through walls, just waiting for the tenant to say something actionable.
Kael kept his eyes moving while he spoke, scanning corners and the edges of broken rooftops as if a tuxedo sleeve might peek out from behind the rubble.
He knew that there was a big chance for the rabbit to be listening to him. The Tower had already proven it could freeze time, tear open space, and yank people into conversations like they were being dragged into an office for disciplinary action.
It would be childish to assume it couldn't also keep an ear on its problems. But the fact Torrac didn't show up was enough to make Kael curse some more anyway, because silence didn't mean safety, and it definitely didn't mean forgiveness. If anything, Torrac's absence felt like a promise that the rabbit had decided to let consequences do its work for it.
He felt defeated, like he got scammed and couldn't do anything about it. It wasn't just anger, it was that particular, nauseating kind of helpless frustration you got when you realized the deal was rigged from the beginning and your signature was already on the paper. The worst feeling to have when your life is on the line. In a place like this, where every decision was expensive, being forced into one felt like having your pockets turned inside out in public.
A path of magic, where many heroes and climbers he seen outside the tower used. Casting powerful spells, levitating, using lightning and more. All of that was simply denied to him by being forced to use the Rune. The images came uninvited, flash memories of other people's confidence: hands raised, chants spoken, reality bending because they knew the language.
He'd watched that kind of power with a mixture of awe and bitterness before. Now it wasn't even a distant fantasy. It was a door slammed shut in his face, bolted from the inside, and labeled "Tongue of Gods" like that made it respectable.
He didn't want to use it, but thinking back, it was the only way. The rune that lowered his presence gave him stealth like ability, which was the only reason he escaped the groggy goblins.
He could still feel the sensory muffling in the back of his mind, like a phantom numbness that hadn't fully faded. It had worked, brutally well, and that was the problem. He hated that the Tower's answer to survival was always some form of self-maiming.
Regardless of the fact that it saved him, it also made him feel like he lost an arm. Not literally, but in the way losing an option felt like losing a limb. You didn't notice how much you relied on it until it was gone.
Kael took a deep breath as he watched the red sky. The color was wrong, heavy and stained, like someone had painted the heavens with dried blood and called it atmosphere. It didn't move like a normal sky either; even when clouds drifted, they felt too slow, too deliberate, as if the Tower was rationing motion the way it rationed mercy. There was no point in reminiscing or hoping for a change.
"Probably if I climb higher I can remove this shit…" he muttered, more to anchor himself than because he believed it with certainty.
He remembered that back in the normal tower, someone at the floor 20 could remove the runes from your body, the only issue is you lose all your progress in other crafts and whatever you learned. A full reset of sorts. He'd heard it like a cautionary story, the kind climbers told each other to scare rookies into choosing carefully.
It was a steep price, but now he could actually feel the weight of that choice in his bones.
Progress meant nothing if the progress was in the wrong direction. A reset was terrifying, but so was being stuck forever as a man who could only use magic inwardly like some sealed furnace.
But that might be better than being stuck with a system that after so long no one in the tower could figure out, or at least make use of better than magic.
That thought sat ugly in his chest. If nobody had cracked "Tongue of Gods" properly, then either the system was garbage… or it was powerful in a way most people weren't surviving long enough to understand.
Both possibilities were bad. One meant he'd been crippled for nothing. The other meant he'd been shoved onto a path that would demand a lot more suffering before it paid out.
The problem is it calls itself the Tongue of Gods, signaling that it is indeed powerful, but how can something this weak be powerful? The stealth skill for example only lasted a few seconds, and not only did it muffle him out of existence it also muffled his own senses.
He could still remember how it felt to run with his hearing cut down to his heartbeat, with sight washed toward gray, with touch separated from the ground by an invisible layer. It had saved him, yes, but it also made him clumsy, dulled, half-blind. A power that robbed you of your own senses felt like a joke wearing a crown.
If all the runes acted that way then they're more trouble than good. A fire rune for example would spew out fire but might potentially burn the user as well.
'Talk about double edged sword.'
He pictured it too easily: a desperate climber activating a rune in panic and getting cooked by their own salvation. The Tower loved that kind of irony. It wasn't even irony to the Tower, probably. It was just the most efficient way to filter out anyone too reckless to read the fine print.