The coliseum erupted as Aaric stepped into the arena for his fourth match.
Twenty thousand climbers filled the stands, their roars forming a physical wave of sound that crashed against the stone. But Aaric barely heard it. His mind was still trapped in the safehouse, replaying Vex's confessions, wrestling with the weight of impossible truths.
The Tower was a machine. His entire existence had been engineered. His sister's suffering was weaponized leverage. And his only real choices were between different flavors of apocalypse.
"Focus," Ariea's voice cut through his spiraling thoughts.
She stood in the preparation chamber, her silver eyes holding his with an intensity that demanded presence. "Your opponent is Kess—a 2-star kinetic warrior from an independent faction. She's talented but not exceptional. You can beat her with half your power."
"But I shouldn't show half my power," Aaric replied quietly. "After round of thirty-two, the Sovereigns Circle will stop trying to extract me and start trying to eliminate me."
"Which is why we need you visible," Rydor said, stepping forward. His scarred face was carved from stone. "The tournament has rules. As long as you keep winning matches in front of thousands of witnesses, the Circle can't openly assassinate you without triggering a broader conflict."
"They already tried to," Aaric pointed out.
"And failed," Ariea replied. "Because we were prepared. This time, they know better. They'll use the tournament itself as cover."
The tournament was a perfect hunting ground. A place where combat was expected. Where injuries and deaths could be explained away as unfortunate accidents in high-level matches. Where the strongest didn't always survive—sometimes the most ruthless did.
The announcement bell rang.
Aaric climbed into the arena.
His opponent, the other Kess, was waiting. She was lean and muscled, her kinetic essence rippling around her like heat waves. She had the look of a climber who'd survived the lower floors through sheer determination and tactical brilliance. Unlike Torv or Kalei, this was someone who understood that strength alone wasn't enough.
They bowed to each other—standard tournament courtesy.
And then Kess moved.
She didn't charge. Instead, she began circling Aaric, her kinetic essence building pressure around her, making the air shimmer. Testing. Probing. Looking for weaknesses.
Aaric realized immediately that this would be different.
The first three opponents had come at him with recognizable patterns. Stone-essence relied on defense. Flame-essence relied on aggression. The previous kinetic fighter had relied on speed. But this Kess was doing something else. She was adapting.
She launched a strike—fast, precise, designed to test Aaric's shadow-defenses. He countered with a shadow-tendril. She dodged, anticipated, moved to a different angle. Each exchange, she was learning. Adjusting. Evolving her approach.
This was a climber at the peak of 2-star capability.
Aaric stopped holding back.
His shadow-essence surged outward, forming multiple constructs simultaneously—a tactic Kess had never taught him, something that came from deeper understanding of his power's nature. Three shadow-tendrils, woven together, moving in coordinated patterns.
Kess's eyes widened. She'd recognized the power level increase instantly.
"That's not 2-star," she breathed, dodging the first tendril. "You're already—"
"2.5-star," Aaric confirmed. "Close to the breakthrough."
Kess grinned—a wild, dangerous expression. "Then this is going to be interesting."
They clashed.
It wasn't a fight anymore. It was a performance—two climbers pushing each other toward their absolute limits, testing boundaries, exploring the edges of what their essences could accomplish. The crowd sensed it, felt the shift in intensity, and went absolutely silent.
Twenty thousand climbers watching two fighters dance the edge of breakthrough.
Aaric's shadow-constructs grew more sophisticated. He wasn't just forming tendrils anymore—he was weaving them into patterns, creating shapes that bent light and space. Kess's kinetic essence responded by accelerating her movements beyond normal 2-star capability, pushing herself toward breakthrough through sheer force of will.
They were both growing stronger in real-time.
By minute twelve, Aaric realized Kess was going to achieve breakthrough before him. Her kinetic essence was building toward a cascade—that moment when a climber accumulated enough essence that their body physically evolved to handle higher-tier power.
He had to end the match before she broke through.
It felt cowardly. It felt necessary.
Aaric gathered his shadow-essence and executed a technique Ariea had been teaching him—not a conventional attack, but a binding. Shadow-threads that moved faster than physical speed, that existed partially in the realm of essence rather than physical space.
The binding wrapped around Kess before she could react.
For a moment, they were frozen together—Aaric's shadows and Kess's kinetic energy locked in a stalemate. Then Aaric pushed, using his slightly higher power to force her to the ground.
Kess yielded immediately.
The crowd erupted, but the atmosphere was different now. Not celebration. Recognition. Respect. These climbers understood what they'd just witnessed—two competitors pushing each other toward transcendence and only tournament rules preventing them from tearing the arena apart in the process.
The announcer's voice seemed almost reverent: "Match winner: Shade Porter! Advance to the round of thirty-two!"
As Aaric exited the arena, he saw them.
Sovereigns Circle representatives in the upper stands, watching him with expressions of cold calculation. But they weren't looking at his power. They were looking at the crowd's reaction. At the way other climbers were now whispering about "Shade Porter." At the way independent factions were beginning to coalesce around the mystery of his identity.
Aaric Vale had stopped being a hidden threat.
He'd become a symbol.
And symbols were dangerous to established hierarchies.
That night, in a different safehouse, Miraen brought news that made everything worse.
"The Sovereigns Circle is moving up their timeline," the void-essence warrior reported, her dark eyes reflecting lamplight like a predator's. "They've decided the tournament is too public, too unpredictable. They're planning something for after the round of thirty-two matches."
"What kind of something?" Rydor demanded.
"They're going to trigger an 'accident,'" Miraen explained. "A structural collapse in the arena. Something catastrophic that would kill thousands of spectators but look like an unfortunate failure of the Tower's infrastructure. In the chaos, they'll extract you and disappear you into their private facilities before anyone realizes what happened."
Ariea's hand clenched into a fist. "They'd kill twenty thousand climbers just to capture one shadow-awakener?"
"Yes," Miraen replied. "Because you're not just a shadow-awakener. You're a symbol. And the Sovereigns Circle understands that symbols are worth the cost of entire populations if it preserves hierarchy."
Lynia stirred from where she'd been resting. Her psychic link to the Tower was growing stronger—or perhaps the Tower's influence over her was growing stronger. It was becoming harder to distinguish the two.
"The Tower will allow it," Lynia whispered. "The collapse, the deaths, all of it. Because chaos serves the Tower's purpose. Chaos feeds the machine. Chaos generates the desperation that drives climbers higher."
"Then we accelerate," Syl said calmly, already standing and preparing weapons. "We skip the tournament. We take Aaric straight to Floor 50 to find those archives."
"The tournament isn't the point anymore," Rydor said slowly. "The tournament was always just a stage. A way to gather allies, to build reputation, to move through Floors 15-30 without drawing immediate attention." He looked at Aaric. "We leave tonight. We gather our team—everyone who's sworn loyalty. And we climb."
"That's abandoning the tournament," Ariea protested. "It's forfeit. It announces to every faction that we're running."
"We're not running," Rydor replied. "We're ascending. There's a difference."
Aaric felt the weight of the decision settling on him. The safe path—continue winning matches, stay public, remain untouchable under tournament rules—or the dangerous path—abandon safety and climb toward answers.
"We climb," he said quietly. "Lynia's linked to Kael. Kael's on Floor 91. Every moment we delay, the Tower tightens its control over her."
Ariea's silver eyes met his, and he saw the resignation there. The moment she'd been dreading since the guild fractured was finally arriving. From this point forward, there was no going back to normalcy. There was only forward into the abyss.
"Gather everyone," Rydor commanded. "We move at dawn. We don't stop for safety. We don't stop for supplies. We climb."
The team assembled on the lower levels of the coliseum district.
Fifty-two climbers. The remnants of Stanners Guild, the disillusioned who'd been recruited through the tournament, Nightveil Alliance operatives, and scattered independents who'd heard of the shadow-awakener and wanted to be part of something larger than themselves.
Fifty-two against the entire established order of the Tower.
It should have felt impossible. It felt inevitable.
Rydor gathered them in a vast underground chamber—one of the ancient pre-Tower structures that riddled the lower levels. His scarred face was lit by essence-lanterns as he addressed them.
"We are no longer climbing for glory," he said, his voice carrying to the far walls. "We are climbing for truth. For freedom from a system that treats us as resources to be harvested." He paused. "Some of you will die. Most of you will experience pain beyond what you've known. All of you will be hunted by the most powerful forces in the Tower."
He looked at each of them in turn.
"But you will climb," he continued. "Not because I command it. Not because the Tower demands it. But because you choose to. Because somewhere in the depths of this machine, your brother is imprisoned. Your comrades are suffering. Your future is being written by forces that would reduce you to numbers in a system."
He turned toward Aaric.
"And this boy," Rydor said, "this weak porter from Floor 3 who awakened shadow-essence not through ambition but through desperation to protect his sister—he will climb with us. He will climb because he must. And he will discover, at the end of that climb, whether he is the Tower's puppet or its architect."
The crowd erupted in determined silence—the kind of quiet that precedes violence, the calm before ascension.
Aaric stepped forward and looked at the assembled climbers. At Ariea, whose silver essence rippled with barely contained power. At Syl, whose eyes held the cunning of someone who'd survived impossible odds. At Kess, whose flame-essence burned with righteous fury. At Miraen and her void-users, whose very existence was a rejection of the Tower's control.
At Lynia, small and frail, carrying the psychic link that bound her to a brother trapped in the machine's heart.
"We climb," Aaric said, his shadow-essence coiling around him like armor. "We climb toward Kael. We climb toward the truth. And we climb toward whatever choice waits for us at Floor 91."
The words hung in the air like a covenant.
Outside the underground chamber, the Tower hummed.
And somewhere in its highest reaches, the Veil Lords paused in their endless calculations.
Something unexpected was happening. Something the probability threads hadn't predicted. A variable the Tower's ancient design hadn't accounted for.
Not a chosen one climbing toward merger.
But a climber climbing toward rebellion.
The machine began to adjust its systems, recalculating possibilities, preparing counters.
The hunt had truly begun.