The air smells like concrete dust and fear.
It always does.
I know this smell the way I know my own heartbeat—better, actually, because my heartbeat has surprised me before. Floor 1 never does. The moment consciousness slaps me back into existence, before I've even opened my eyes, I'm cataloguing: recycled oxygen with a faint mineral bite, the particular dampness of a space that has never seen sunlight, and underneath it all, that smell I have no name for but recognize instantly. The smell of people who understand, for the first time, that they might die today.
Reset 9,847.
I open my eyes.
The Great Lobby of the Tower stretches out before me, exactly as it has 9,846 times before, and I take exactly 1.3 seconds to confirm what I already know: the arched ceiling sixty feet above, grey-white stone lit by sourceless ambient light, the four massive pillars arranged in a perfect square, the three hundred and seventeen other people blinking and gasping and stumbling around me like newborns learning what it means to have a body. I've counted them before. The number doesn't change much—some resets it's 312, once it was 341, the average hovers around 315—but the configuration shifts. Who stands next to whom. Who falls to their knees immediately. Who looks around with that specific brand of wide-eyed calculation that usually means they're either going to do something smart in the next ten minutes or something catastrophically stupid.
Today: 317.
I file this away and check myself over with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done exactly this 9,846 times. Both hands, ten fingers, legs work, core's solid. My body resets perfect every time—no scars, no damage, the same twenty-four-year-old body that got pulled into this tower for the first time when I was twenty-four and has stayed twenty-four ever since while I aged three subjective years inside this place. I run my tongue over my teeth. All present. My reflection in the nearest pillar's polished stone surface shows me what I already know: short fade, dark brown eyes, the lean build of someone who has spent years learning to fight rather than years in a gym. I look tired. People always say that when they see me. You look tired, man. You sleep okay?
Funniest joke in the universe.
I roll my right shoulder—habit, not necessity—and orient toward the center of the lobby, where the System notification will appear in approximately forty-five seconds. Forty-seven if there's a deviation. I've timed it.
Around me, the chaos of first contact unfolds.
A woman in nursing scrubs grabs a man in a business suit by the arm, and his face cycles through confusion, irritation, and terror in about four seconds. A pair of teenagers—maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen—are clutching each other, and one of them is already crying in that way that's more shock than actual tears. A broad-shouldered man with military posture is doing what I'm doing: observing. Taking stock. He won't remember this, but he's done it before. Reset 6,112, he made it to Floor 47 before an ambush took him out. Good instincts, bad luck, and a tendency to trust the wrong people. I've watched him die eleven times. In this life, if he's where I think he'll be trajectory-wise, I have no use for him.
I check that thought the way you'd check for glass in your shoe. Not unkind, exactly. Just: accurate.
— ✦ —
"What's happening?" someone asks near my shoulder. Young voice, tight with panic. "What is this place? How did I—I was just at work, I was just—"
"A tower appeared," I say, not looking at them. "You were sucked in. Everyone here was. We're going to get an explanation in about thirty seconds."
Silence. Then: "How do you know that?"
"Lucky guess."
The light changes before I finish the sentence—a shift from ambient to something brighter, with a blue-white quality that makes everyone squint. It pours from above, from everywhere and nowhere, and in the center of the lobby, hovering at eye level, a massive panel of text materializes out of empty air with the sound of a struck bell.
The System announcement. I have it memorized. I could recite it backwards. I have recited it backwards, during reset 4,201, as a private game to stay sane. My personal record is getting through 70% of it while simultaneously holding a conversation with someone who was panicking.
I read it anyway. Old habit.
WELCOME TO THE TOWER.
You have been Selected to participate in the Ascension Trial. This is not a request. This is not a punishment. This is an opportunity.
The world above has changed. The world outside is no longer safe for human habitation. The Tower exists to protect you, to challenge you, and to offer you a future.
Rules of the Tower:
1. You will ascend 100 Floors. Each Floor presents a challenge that must be completed before advancement.
2. The System will provide: Quests, Skills, Inventory, and Notifications. Listen to the System. The System is your ally.
3. Should you die within the Tower, you will be returned to Floor 1 to begin again. Your memories will reset. Your Skills and Items will reset. You will begin fresh.
4. Should you successfully clear Floor 100, you will be granted one Wish of sufficient scope to reshape the world. Use it wisely.
5. You are not alone. Others climb with you. Cooperation is encouraged. Cooperation is not required.
Good luck. The Tower believes in your potential.
I watch the announcement fade. I watch everyone else watch it fade. I clock the specific expressions: the dawning horror of the people who understand immediately what 'your memories will reset' means, the confusion of the people who are still stuck on 'the world outside is no longer safe,' the dangerous brightness that sparks in certain eyes at the words 'one Wish of sufficient scope to reshape the world.'
That brightness. I have come to hate that brightness. I have worn that brightness. In early resets, that brightness was all I had.
Reset 1: I thought it was amazing. An adventure. I powered through the first thirty floors on adrenaline and wonder and a natural aptitude for combat that served me well until it wasn't enough. I died on Floor 33 to something I wasn't fast enough to dodge. I woke up on Floor 1 and thought it was a fluke.
Reset 2: I went harder. Smarter. Made it to 51.
Reset 47: First clear. Three years inside the Tower, fighting and climbing and losing people I'd come to care about, and I stood on Floor 100 and made a wish that felt like the only wish that mattered. Save everyone. Let them all remember. End this.
Reset 48: Floor 1. Everyone forgot. Including the woman I'd—
Never mind.
The point is that I know exactly what that brightness in people's eyes costs them. I know exactly what it feels like when it dies.
— ✦ —
"Okay," says a voice, loud and carrying. "Okay, so let me just—can I get everyone's attention?"
Here we go.
I turn toward the voice. She's standing on the base of the leftmost pillar, having climbed up about two feet to be visible above the crowd. Mid-thirties, short natural hair, wearing a blazer and slacks that suggest she was in some kind of meeting when she got pulled in. Her face has the kind of bone structure that reads as authoritative even when she's clearly terrified, and she's projecting confidence with the specific brand of controlled desperation I recognize as someone who leads because otherwise she'll fall apart.
Diana Mercer. Reset count this is the fourth time I've encountered her in the first-wave lobby crowd, which is statistically interesting. She has a tendency to organize, to rally people, to become the de facto leader of whatever group coalesces around her in the early floors. She also has a tendency to sacrifice herself for others on Floor 23—the Flood Chamber—in a way that is tactically unnecessary and emotionally devastating to whoever has bonded with her by that point.
Including me, once. Reset 4,891. We'd made it to Floor 62 together before she got pulled back to 1 by a failed checkpoint. When she showed up on Floor 1 of 4,892, she didn't know me. I didn't tell her. Watching her try to figure out why she felt comfortable around me while having no context for it was an experience I've filed under things I don't think about while sober.
"My name is Diana," she says, steadying herself against the pillar. "I'm a crisis counselor. Which means I've had training in exactly this kind of situation—mass panic, disorientation, shock. And the first thing we need to do is not panic. Can we agree on that? Not panic?"
A few people nod. A few people are definitely panicking. The teenagers are still holding each other.
I watch. I do not move toward her. In another reset, in a kinder version of me, I might walk up and give her information she doesn't have. Tell her about the floors ahead. Tell her the Flood Chamber has a drain valve behind the third pillar on the left. Tell her she doesn't have to die on Floor 23.
I've done that. It doesn't help as much as you'd think.
More practically: Diana Mercer is not relevant to my current objective.
My current objective is singular, specific, and the most ambitious thing I've attempted in 9,847 resets.
I'm going to destroy the Tower.
Not clear it. Not survive it. Not wish upon its completion. I'm going to find the mechanism that sustains it and take it apart, floor by floor if I have to, and let whatever is outside come rushing in and deal with us the way it always should have. Because here's the thing they don't tell you in the welcome announcement: clearing the Tower doesn't save you. The Tower loops intentionally. Every time someone clears Floor 100, every time a wish is made, it feeds back into the system that is making the world outside progressively worse. The Tower is eating us. We are rats running a wheel that powers the cage.
I worked this out around reset 7,200. It took me seven thousand lifetimes to understand what I'd been doing every time I got that wish granted and watched the world reset to what I thought was a fresh start.
I've spent 2,600 resets trying to find the off switch.
— ✦ —
The military man is watching me.
I glance toward him, then away. He's logged my movement toward the east wall. He has the look of someone filing information. In reset 6,112, he'd been an Army Ranger—Maxwell, he'd called himself, no first name ever offered—and he'd made Floor 47 partly by being excellent at pattern recognition.
I don't want to be someone's pattern right now.
I change direction, moving toward the south wall instead, hands in my pockets, affecting the body language of someone who is wandering aimlessly in shock rather than executing a precise search grid. It's a specific performance. I've had 9,846 opportunities to practice it.
A hand grabs my arm.
I don't react externally. Internally, a whole system that I've had a very long time to develop and that has absolutely zero chill goes into instant threat assessment: grip strength medium-low, position is from my right and slightly behind, no body heat at my back suggesting they're not immediately close enough to be a physical threat. Not aggressive. Scared.
I look.
The person holding my arm is young—early twenties, maybe younger, with the particular wiriness of someone who doesn't eat enough and doesn't own a mirror. They're wearing a hoodie that's about two sizes too big, and their eyes are the specific shade of wide that means they've decided I'm the person they're going to latch onto and they are not letting go until further notice.
"You said 'lucky guess,'" they say. "When I asked how you knew about the announcement."
I look at their hand on my arm. They don't let go.
"Mm," I say.
"That wasn't a lucky guess. You were already facing the center of the room before the light changed. You were calm before the announcement, during the announcement, after the announcement. You're calm right now." They hesitate. "I do that—I notice how people are positioned. Where their attention is. My therapist says it's an anxiety thing but I think it's just—I notice. And you knew."
I look at them properly for the first time.
"I'm a quick study," I say.
"Uh huh." They let go of my arm, apparently satisfied with having gotten my attention. "I'm Priya. Priya Nair. I was a graduate student. Library science."
"Kyon," I say. Just the name, nothing else.
"Kyon," Priya repeats, like she's archiving it. "The announcement said memories reset when you die. It said skills and items reset. But it didn't say anything about personality." She looks at me steadily. "You seem like someone who's been here before."
The interesting thing about this observation is that it's completely correct.
"That's a strange thing to say to a stranger," I say.
"I know. But if I'm right—" She stops. Reorganizes. "If I'm right, and you've been here before, and you remember it, then you might be the most important person in this building. And if you're going to pretend you're not, I'd like to know why before I decide whether to walk away."
I look at her for a long moment. I have learned, over approximately ten thousand lifetimes, that there are very few things worth being surprised by. This person, right now, surprises me slightly.
"You're perceptive," I say.
"Library science," she says again, like that explains everything. "Information retrieval. Pattern recognition. It's kind of the whole job."
Over her shoulder, Diana Mercer is still organizing the crowd. Maxwell is still watching me. The teenagers have stopped crying and are listening to Diana with the specific attention of people who have found a port in a storm. The System is going to push first quests in approximately ninety seconds.
"Walk with me," I say.
— ✦ —
Floor 1: The Forest
The first quest drops while we're moving.
[QUEST: First Steps]
Objective: Exit the Lobby and proceed to Floor 1.
Reward: 10 System Points, Basic Skill Selection (Tier 1)
Time Limit: 30 Minutes
This quest is identical in every reset. The time limit is a lie—the doors don't actually lock, and people who've explored the lobby in a few of my runs have confirmed that the 30-minute countdown does absolutely nothing when it expires. The Tower is patient. The Tower wants you to move forward. That's the whole design. Get people moving, get them engaging with the System, get them invested in the climb.
The Tower is the world's most sophisticated psychological trap.
Priya reads the quest notification—it pops for everyone simultaneously—and then looks at me. "Floor 1. So the announcement wasn't a metaphor."
"It wasn't a metaphor."
"And you've been here before." Not a question anymore.
"Walk first," I say. "Talk while walking."
We're heading for the east wall. The crowd is beginning to move with Diana's organized efficiency toward the large double doors on the north side that lead to Floor 1's entrance corridor. Maxwell is moving with them, but his attention keeps cutting sideways—toward me, toward the edges of the lobby, toward whatever he's decided is more relevant than following the crowd directly.
The third alcove from the right.
I press the specific point on the stone panel—low, near the base, a spot that looks like damage but is actually a pressure release—and the panel swings inward on ancient hinges that don't make a sound.
"How," Priya says.
"Because I've done this before," I say, reaching into the alcove and closing my hand around the shortsword's hilt. The grip is wrapped leather, worn to perfect softness over some span of time that can't be measured by anything the Tower acknowledges. The balance is exactly what I remembered: the weight settling forward just slightly, wanting to cut, designed by someone who understood that a sword is not a blunt instrument.
Priya stares at it. "You just knew that was there."
"Yes."
"How many times have you been here?"
"A lot."
"How many is a lot?"
I consider. "If you stacked the years end to end, significantly more than recorded human history."
Silence.
"Okay," she says, very carefully. "Okay. And you haven't—what, you haven't fixed it? You haven't escaped?"
"I've cleared Floor 100 forty-seven times," I say, checking the sword over, running my thumb along the flat of the blade. Sharp. The Tower stocks it well. "Each time, I made a wish. The world reset. Everyone forgot. Including me, the first time, until something changed and I started remembering."
"What was your wish?"
"The first time? Save everyone. Broadly construed." I slide the sword through the makeshift belt loop. "The next forty-six times, variations on the same theme. Stop the Tower. Free the people. Go home."
"But it didn't work."
"It's not designed to work." I look at her. "Come on."
We move toward the north doors, joining the back of the crowd's drift, and I let the motion of it carry us while I calibrate. The shortsword's presence is already comforting in the way that familiar tools become comforting—not the satisfaction of a perfect weapon, but the simpler satisfaction of a known quantity in a world of variables.
"So what are you doing this time?" Priya asks. "If the wish doesn't work."
"I'm going to break it."
"The Tower."
"Yes."
"And what happens then?"
"Something I haven't dealt with yet."
She processes this. "Something worse than the Tower?"
"Almost certainly." I glance sideways at her. "The Tower exists because the world outside it became uninhabitable ten thousand years ago. Magic or a nuclear event or some combination of both—I've pieced together fragments across many resets—turned the surface into a wasteland. Demons came through dimensional tears. Mutated humans who survived outside. Toxic air, toxic water. The builders of the Tower created it as a refuge. As a sanctuary." I pause. "Then they designed the loop to make it self-sustaining. To keep people inside forever. To protect us from what's out there."
"That's..."
"Monstrous and well-intentioned simultaneously, yes."
"But clearing the Tower feeds the wasteland."
I glance at her sharply. She meets my eyes without flinching.
"You inferred that from what I said," I say.
"You said each clear generates a reset and makes things worse. You said breaking the Tower means facing what drove humanity to hide. If clearing it doesn't fix the outside, and the builders designed it to loop forever, then the only mechanism that makes sense is that the loop energy goes somewhere. Somewhere outside." She shrugs, and it's a very controlled shrug, the kind that's hiding something. "It's the logical structure."
"Yes," I say. "That's correct."
"So your plan is to break the cage and then deal with everything the cage was protecting us from."
"My plan," I say, "is to break the cage and then figure out the rest."
A beat.
"That's either the bravest thing I've ever heard," Priya says, "or the most insane."
"In my experience, those aren't mutually exclusive."
— ✦ —
The corridor between the Lobby and Floor 1 is thirty meters long, wide enough for ten people across, lit by the same sourceless light as the Lobby. The stone here is older-looking—deliberate aesthetic choice on the Tower's part, or genuine age, I've never been certain. Floor 1 smells different from the Lobby: organic, alive, the green bite of actual growing things overlaid with something earthier and slightly wrong.
Floor 1 is a forest.
That's the design: an enormous enclosed space, rough hemisphere, maybe a kilometer across, filled with dense forest that would look natural if not for the stone ceiling five hundred meters above and the faint grid-lines of light that run along the forest floor at intervals, marking paths. The trees are real. The animals are real. The creatures that hunt among them are emphatically real and emphatically dangerous in a way that nothing on Floor 1 should quite be, which is a choice the Tower makes to communicate early on that it is not playing around.
The quest for Floor 1 is standard: navigate the forest to the far side, locate the Floor Guardian, defeat or circumvent it, proceed to the elevator that takes you to Floor 2. Time limit: 24 hours. Reward: 50 System Points, skill level advancement.
I've done this 9,846 times. I know every path, every shortcut, every creature territory, every spawning point of the rare items that appear in the root systems of specific trees. I could run this floor blindfolded. In fact, I have—reset 5,902, as an experiment in sensory calibration. I made it to the Guardian in forty-three minutes.
Around me, the crowd of 317 is spreading out into the forest's entrance, and the social dynamics are already beginning to crystallize. The people who gravitate toward Diana are moving with her organizational energy, a loose group of maybe thirty. Maxwell has found two others with military bearing, and the three of them are having a conversation that involves a lot of gestures at specific trees, probably planning perimeter security.
I watch. I do not intervene.
"The forest," Priya says, beside me.
"It's real. All of it. The Tower doesn't do illusions on Floor 1—it saves those for later floors where the psychological impact is more targeted."
"What's in there?"
"Floor 1 level threats: oversized wolves, some vine-based immobile things that grab at ankles if you walk too close, a few mid-tier insects with paralytic venom. Nothing that'll kill a cautious person in good health. Nothing that'll hesitate to kill an incautious one." I glance at her. "Pick your Skill Selection before we go in. You'll want something with practical application."
"What are you picking?"
I've thought about this on and off for the past few hundred resets. "Structure Sense," I say. The skill exists, it's buried in the Tier 1 selection under a tab most people never open because it's categorized under 'Utility' and everyone goes straight to 'Combat' and 'Support.' "It's minor now. But it scales."
"What does it do?"
"Lets you feel the... texture of constructed spaces. Anomalies in architecture. Inconsistencies in design." I pause. "I'm looking for something specific in the Tower's structure. I need every advantage."
Priya is quiet for a moment, and I can see her processing—running the logic, building the picture. "And you want me to—what? Help you look?"
"I want you to exist," I say. "Be useful. Don't die. If you can do all three, you might be relevant to what I'm doing."
She raises an eyebrow. "That's your recruitment pitch?"
"I don't recruit. I'm telling you facts."
"You need someone with good pattern recognition who won't die early."
"I need not to be alone," I say, and then I stop, because I did not mean to say that.
That was not a calculated disclosure.
That came from somewhere that I keep carefully sealed for good reasons, and I feel it like a physical thing—the words landing in the open air between us where I can't take them back.
Priya doesn't react the way people usually do when they catch me being accidentally human. She doesn't look surprised, or sympathetic in that pitying way, or eager in that way where they think vulnerability means they've found a lever. She just nods, once, the way you nod when someone states a logistical requirement.
"Okay," she says. "I'll pick something useful." She pulls up the System menu with the ease of someone who intuitively understands new interfaces—another mark in her column. "Analytical Eye. It says it highlights structural and systemic anomalies in the environment."
My head turns toward her. "That's a Tier 1 skill?"
"It's under Utility, sub-tab: Cognitive. Most people probably skip it."
"Yes," I say. "They do."
I look at her for a moment—this person who appeared in a lobby I've been through 9,846 times and who found a skill in a menu that almost no one opens and who asked me, within fifteen minutes of meeting me, exactly the right questions in exactly the right order—and I feel something that is not quite hope, because I burned through hope's fuel reserves somewhere around reset 3,000, but is perhaps the chemical precursor to hope. The substrate. The possibility of it.
I turn toward the forest.
"Stay close," I say. "Watch where I step. If I stop moving, stop moving. If I start running, run the same direction."
"Comforting," Priya says dryly.
"You wanted honesty."
"I wanted honesty, not a rehearsal for a funeral."
I almost smile. The muscles for it are still there, vestigially. "The wolves in the first kilometer are territorial but avoidable. We move in thirty seconds." I check the crowd distribution again. "Do you know anyone here? From before?"
"No."
"Good."
"Why is that good?"
"Because," I say, and I watch Diana Mercer organize her group with the specific efficiency of someone who doesn't know what's waiting for her on Floor 23, "people you know before the Tower are a liability. You spend resources keeping them safe. You make decisions based on them. You—" I stop myself again. "You don't need extra anchors."
Priya follows my gaze to Diana. "She seems capable."
"She is."
"Is she going to die?"
I look at the forest. "Everyone dies eventually."
"Kyon."
"Floor 23," I say, because apparently I've decided to be honest today, which is a deviation I'll have to monitor. "If she doesn't learn the drain valve. She takes a hit someone else should take and she doesn't come back from it."
Silence.
"And you're not going to tell her," Priya says. Not an accusation. An observation.
"I've tried," I say. "Not this reset—in others. It doesn't land the way you need it to. She doesn't have the context." I exhale. "And I'm not running a rescue operation this time."
"What are you running?"
"A demolition job."
I step into the forest.
— ✦ —
The first three hours of Floor 1 move the way they always do when I'm running alone or near-alone: fast, precise, quiet. I know this terrain the way I know the lobby, the way I know my own hands—mapped and memorized, every deviation from the path catalogued across thousands of iterations. The oversized wolves I mentioned are in their usual territory markers; I route around them using a game trail that veers fifteen degrees south of the main path and brings us out ahead of their hunting range. The vine-plants are easy to spot once you know the smell, a faint sweetness that doesn't belong to any natural flower, and I steer us wide.
Priya moves well. Quietly, naturally, without the self-conscious placement of feet that marks someone trying to be quiet. She was athletic before the Tower, I'd guess—the kind of athletic that comes from a sport requiring lateral movement, maybe soccer, maybe martial arts, something that built the instinct for weight distribution. She doesn't ask questions while we're moving, which means she's either paying attention to what I'm demonstrating or she's trusting me completely, and either outcome is currently acceptable.
Around the ninety-minute mark, I stop.
We're at the base of a specific tree—old-growth oak, enormous trunk, root system spreading like a hand over the ground. I've found things in this root system before. Not always; maybe one in eight resets. But enough to warrant checking. I crouch by the largest root, run my fingers along the inner curve where it meets the earth.
There.
Not an item this time—something older. A carving in the root itself, or rather in the stone that the root has grown around. The root has been here long enough to incorporate it. The carving is maybe three inches across, a symbol I've seen in thirty-seven previous resets across different floors, always in slightly different contexts. It's the same symbol that appears on Floor 43, carved into a stone marker that everyone thinks is decorative. The same symbol that shows up on Floor 71 in the floor plan of the Guardian's chamber. The same symbol I've been unable to fully decode despite having cross-referenced it with everything I've learned about the Tower's architecture over several thousand resets.
My new Structure Sense skill pulses faintly, and the carving seems to glow at the edges of my perception—not actually, but the cognitive representation of sensing something structurally anomalous.
"What is that?" Priya's voice, directly over my shoulder. She's crouched beside me without making a sound.
"Part of what I'm looking for," I say. "Does your Analytical Eye—"
"I see it," she says, and there's a shift in her voice—something sharpened, focused. "It's showing me... it's like looking at a load-bearing wall. Whatever this symbol represents, it's structural. It's integral to something larger. My skill is flagging it as part of a pattern."
I go very still.
"Say that again."
"Part of a pattern," she says. "The skill is telling me this isn't an isolated element. It's connected. There's a network." She pauses. "Do you want me to describe what I'm seeing?"
"Yes," I say. "Every detail."
She describes it slowly, methodically, the way you'd describe a complex image to someone who can't see it—not quickly, not impressionistically, but with the careful specificity of someone who understands that precision matters. And as she talks, I'm cross-referencing, running the description against thirty-seven resets of data, against everything I've built and hypothesized and destroyed and rebuilt, and something is clicking into alignment that has never quite clicked before.
The symbol isn't a location marker. It's not a signature or a decoration. It's a node. It's a network node, one of many, and if Priya's skill is identifying a network pattern from a single node—
If her skill can trace that network—
If she can see what I've been trying to map by dead reckoning for four hundred resets—
"Priya," I say.
"Yeah?"
I look at her. She meets my eyes without flinching, the way she has since the lobby, this person who materialized in a reset I walked into expecting nothing new and is holding, in her perception, a map I've been trying to draw for what is subjectively the better part of a decade.
"How do you feel about heights?" I ask.
"Manageable. Why?"
"Because Floors 3 through 8 have better access points to the upper structure. And I want to see how many of those nodes your skill can trace before we hit the Floor 2 transition." I look back at the carving. "If I'm right about what this is—if the core is networked through the structure the way I think it is—then we might be able to map it. The whole thing. And if we can map it—"
"You can find the off switch," Priya says quietly.
"I can find the off switch."
She's quiet for a moment. Around us, the forest breathes, ancient and artificial, constructed with perfect care to feel natural, and somewhere in the middle distance a wolf calls to something that answers back, and the Tower hums beneath our feet with the patient energy of something that has never expected to die.
"Is it going to hurt people?" she asks. "Breaking it."
I expected the question. "Yes," I say. "Probably. The Tower is a sanctuary, whatever else it is. Breaking it means people have to face what's outside." I pause. "But the world outside isn't getting better. Every reset makes it worse. There's a version of outside—I've done enough research—where humanity has something like a chance. It's not safe. But it's a chance." I look at her. "Versus this, which is an endless loop of surviving inside a machine that's eating everything we have."
Priya is quiet. The forest breathes.
"Okay," she says, finally, the same way she said it in the lobby. Decision made, filed, moving on. "So what's our first move?"
— ✦ —
I stand. The shortsword settles at my hip. The Structure Sense skill pulses faintly, and across the root system of an ancient oak tree in a constructed forest on the first floor of a tower that has trapped humanity for ten thousand years, a symbol I've been trying to read for the better part of a decade glows at the edges of my perception with the first real suggestion of an answer.
"We finish Floor 1," I say. "We do it fast, and we document every node your skill can identify on the way through. And then we go higher." I glance at her. "And you don't tell anyone what we're doing."
"Not even the organizer lady? She seemed—"
"No."
Priya looks at me steadily. "You don't trust people."
"I've had reasons not to," I say. "For a very long time."
Something moves behind her eyes—not pity, I'd have cut that off, but something more like comprehension. The look of someone filing a fact about a person that changes their understanding of who that person has been. "Okay," she says, for the third time. "Then just us."
"Just us," I agree.
I turn and walk deeper into the forest, and I don't let myself think about how that phrase—just us—lands in the hollow place in my chest that has been empty for a very long time.
I don't let myself think about it, because I know, with the certainty of ten thousand lives of experience, exactly how this kind of thing ends.
And I can't afford to.
Not yet.
Not until the Tower is ash.
— ✦ —
The Elder Hart
We reach the Floor Guardian at the 3-hour, 12-minute mark.
It's a stag—it's always a stag, on Floor 1—except that 'stag' as a descriptor implies something natural and proportionate, and this creature stands twelve feet at the shoulder, its rack of antlers spanning fifteen feet and glowing with the System's particular blue-white light that indicates an enhanced creature.
[Floor 1 Guardian: The Elder Hart | Level 15]
It guards the transition point, a clearing at the forest's far side where the stone elevator waits to carry climbers to Floor 2.
Around the clearing, I can see two other groups have arrived ahead of us. Diana's cluster of thirty, minus three people who didn't make it through the forest—I'd seen them going wrong on the main path, too loud, too clustered, drawing the wrong attention, and I'd made the calculated decision not to intervene—and Maxwell's trio, now joined by four others, who are maintaining a professional perimeter at the clearing's edge.
The Elder Hart paces.
It always paces. It doesn't charge until provoked, which gives groups time to organize. It's also not actually that hard to kill if you know its pattern: it telegraphs its charge attack with a specific head-dip three seconds before executing it, and its left side is slightly slower due to an old wound that has never been explained and never healed across any reset I've seen. The antlers are the real threat—not the charge itself, but the sweep on the recovery.
Diana's group is strategizing in urgent whispers. Maxwell's group is already positioning, spread tactical, but their positioning is optimized for a creature that charges directly, which means they're going to eat the recovery sweep.
"You're going to walk up to it," Priya says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"The twelve-foot magic stag."
"It telegraphs the charge. I know the timing."
She looks at me. "And if something's different this reset?"
I consider the question seriously, because it's a serious question. "Then I improvise," I say. "I've gotten good at that too."
"Comforting."
"When I move, go right. Stay by that root cluster." I gesture. "Don't watch the Hart. Watch me, and move when I wave."
"Why am I watching you?"
"Because I'm going to be the interesting part."
I walk into the clearing.
The effect I was counting on happens: everyone stops talking. Maxwell's trio goes tense. Diana looks at me with an expression that is 40% confusion and 60% the specific alarm of someone who watches another person walk toward a twelve-foot mystical combat stag with the energy of someone running an errand.
The Hart sees me. It stops pacing.
We look at each other across fifty meters of forest clearing.
I go fast.
The Elder Hart charges. I move with it—not away from it, with it—taking three running steps to get inside the angle of the antlers and then doing something the creature genuinely cannot accommodate: I am very close to its neck, moving with its momentum rather than against it, and I have a shortsword with excellent balance and I know exactly where the vertebrae are because I have, in a very literal sense, killed this specific creature nearly ten thousand times.
The whole thing takes approximately fourteen seconds.
The Hart drops. It makes a sound that is more surprised than pained, if it's possible for a forest Guardian to sound surprised, and then the System prompt pops:
[Floor 1 Guardian Defeated!]
[Reward: 150 System Points, Skill Advancement: Combat]
[Floor 2 Elevator Now Active]
The clearing is silent.
Diana's group has that very specific silence of people who have just watched something they don't have the framework to process. Maxwell is staring at me with an expression that has entirely abandoned its earlier neutrality. Priya is right where I told her to go, by the root cluster, and she's watching me with the same attention she's given everything since the lobby: precise, cataloguing, not reactive.
I clean the shortsword on the Hart's flank—habit—and straighten.
"Elevator's active," I say to no one in particular. "Floor 2 isn't harder, but it rewards groups over individuals. You'll want your strongest people on point and something like a healer in the rear." I glance at Diana, because she'll make use of the information and the others won't, or not as well. "Floors 1 through 25 are about establishing team dynamics. Whatever hierarchy forms in the next six hours is going to determine who you're still working with on Floor 26."
Diana stares at me. "How do you know that?"
"Research," I say.
I walk toward Priya and the elevator without waiting to see if anyone follows. I can feel Maxwell's eyes on my back the whole way.
"Fourteen seconds," Priya says, low, when I reach her.
"Sloppy," I say. "I was showing off."
"Why?"
"To make someone watching me think I'm operating on instinct rather than knowledge." I glance back at the group. Maxwell is speaking quietly with one of his people. Diana is reorganizing. "Someone with military training and good pattern recognition is dangerous to my plans if he figures out what I'm actually doing."
Priya looks at Maxwell. Then at me. "Misdirection."
"Mm."
"Is everything you do that calculated?"
I think about it. I think about the hollow place in my chest, and the fact that I said need not to be alone to this woman I've known for four hours, and the way that the symbol in the root system made something click that has never clicked before.
"No," I say honestly. "Not everything."
The elevator doors open. We step in. The doors close behind us, and for a moment it's just us and the hum of ancient machinery and the blue-white light of the System indicators, going up.
Ten thousand resets.
And something new has begun.
— ✦ —
— End of Chapter 1 —
Next: Chapter 2 — "The Flood Chamber (And What Diana Doesn't Know)"
In which: Floor 23 approaches, Priya's skill maps three more nodes, Kyon encounters the first sign that this reset is different — and something in the Tower's structure answers back.