According to every guild map and traveler's account Aaric had ever seen, it was meant to be a standard mid-tier floor: dense forest, scattered ruins, mid-level beasts, a place where 2–3‑star climbers honed their skills before daring the real dangers above.
Instead, they climbed out of the emergency shaft into a dead city.
The sky was a dull, bruised gray, the artificial sun reduced to a sickly smudge behind roiling clouds. Broken spires rose from the cracked earth like the bones of some long‑dead titan. Buildings leaned at impossible angles, held together by threads of shimmering essence instead of stone. The air tasted of metal and dust, laced with the faint burn of corrupted energy.
Aaric stepped forward, shadow‑sense flaring.
It wasn't a normal floor. The Tower had rewritten it.
"This isn't right," Syl muttered, eyes darting between ruined walls and hovering debris. "Floor 29 is supposed to be a jungle. Not… this."
"The Tower is improvising," Lynia whispered, hugging herself. Her eyes had that distant, layered look again. "It's rewriting floors in real time. Adjusting the environment to slow you down. To confuse you."
Rydor looked up at the dim sky, jaw tight. "Then we move faster. This is hostile territory now. Everyone: pairs. No one wanders alone. We stick to the direct route to the Floor 30 gate."
"Assuming the gate is still where it's supposed to be," Miraen added dryly, void‑essence pulsing faintly around her hands.
They advanced through the dead city.
The ground was wrong under Aaric's boots—too hollow, as if the entire floor were a shell over deeper mechanisms. His new 3‑star senses could feel the Tower humming beneath the surface, threads of power pulling reality taut in some places and letting it fray in others.
He saw more now.
Through the gray air and broken buildings, the Tower's architecture revealed itself—faint lines of force connecting pillars to floating debris, anchoring pocket‑spaces to the main floor, stitching fractures in reality with glowing seams.
"You're staring again," Ariea said quietly, walking at his side. Her silver eyes tracked his expression. "What do you see?"
"Everything," Aaric murmured. "The floor's been hollowed out. There are support threads running under the city, holding this whole region together. If the Tower cuts them, this entire place collapses like Floor 27 almost did."
"Can you stop it?" she asked.
"Not yet," he admitted. "Right now, all I can do is see how it's built. Cutting wrong threads here would kill us faster than any guardian."
They passed the remains of what had once been a plaza. A fountain stood at its center, frozen mid‑collapse—water hanging in the air, caught in a moment of time the Tower had refused to let finish. Bodies—that might once have been people, or something like people—sat on benches, unmoving, their outlines blurred, their features erased.
Lynia shuddered. "Echoes," she said. "The Tower replaying old data. Locations it used to have. People who used to live here. It's mixing past and present to confuse your sense of place."
"Kess, scouts?" Rydor called.
The flame‑essence warrior nodded and sent two climbers ahead—light‑footed 2‑stars specializing in reconnaissance. They vanished into the ruins, their auras muted.
Minutes stretched.
They did not return.
Aaric's shadow‑sense detected the change first.
Something moved beneath the cracked stone. Not a beast. Not a construct. A pulse of Tower‑essence, gathering, focusing, reaching toward them through the hidden machinery of the floor.
"Everyone back!" Aaric snapped. "Off the main road!"
They scattered a heartbeat before the ground exploded.
Stone shattered upward in a burst of force as a massive spike of obsidian essence burst from below—almost exactly where they'd been walking. The spike wasn't physical stone. It was hardened Tower‑essence, sharpened into a spear, humming with lethal intent.
"If we'd stayed in formation, that would've skewered half the group," Miraen observed coldly.
"It's targeting clusters," Aaric said, watching the spike dissolve back into mist. "The Tower's running predictive patterns on our movement. It's aiming where we're most likely to be, not where we are."
"So we move like we're not supposed to," Syl said. "Asymmetrical formation. Random spacing. No predictable rhythm."
"Unpredictable is exhausting," Rydor noted. "But so is being dead. Do it."
They moved again—this time in a staggered, seemingly chaotic pattern. Smaller groups, irregular distances, shifts in pace every few seconds. To anyone watching, it looked like a panicked retreat.
To the Tower, it looked like noise.
Spike after spike erupted from the ground, but none hit true. A few grazed, one tore through a man's leg, another clipped a shield, but the predicted kill‑zones missed.
The Tower adjusted.
Aaric felt it in the threads—the way its calculations shifted, the way its attack patterns changed. It began clustering spikes, turning single lethal attacks into wide‑area denial patterns, trying to herd them toward specific routes.
Routes Aaric could see clearly through his new vision.
"It's funneling us," he said, stumbling as a spike burst nearby, showering them with shards of stone. "It wants us to go east. Toward that tower."
He pointed.
Far ahead, beyond three blocks of ruins, a single intact structure rose—tall, thin, an obsidian spire that hadn't decayed. Threads of Tower‑essence converged there, thick and bright.
"Trap," Ariea said.
"Gate," Lynia countered. "The east spire is where the Floor 30 teleport node used to be. The Tower's rewritten it, but the anchor's still there."
"So it's both," Miraen concluded. "Trap and gate."
Rydor looked at Aaric. "Can you get us through?"
Aaric studied the converging threads.
The spire wasn't just a building. It was a node—a place where the Tower concentrated control systems, probability threads, and spatial anchors. It could kill them, trap them, or send them upward.
"I can try," he said. "But getting close enough to manipulate those threads means walking into whatever the Tower has waiting inside."
"Then we plan like we're going to war," Rydor said. "Because we are."
They pushed forward.
The dead city seemed to press in around them as they approached the spire. Echoes flickered in the corner of Aaric's vision—people walking streets that no longer existed, beasts moving through ruins before they were ruins. Glitches. Ghosts of archived data.
Lynia clung to his arm.
"It's louder here," she whispered. "The Tower's core. The Architects. The Veil Lords. They're all paying attention now. Watching through floor relay nodes."
"Let them watch," Aaric replied. "If they're afraid enough to rewrite floors, it means we're doing something right."
At the base of the spire, the air grew thick.
Essence was dense here. Heavy. Every breath tasted like raw power. The ground was inscribed with complex arrays—runes carved into stone, filled with liquid light, forming overlapping circles of control.
"It looks like a teleport gate," Syl murmured, crouching to study the arrays. "But… wrong. Overwritten. There's more than one destination encoded here. Multiple floors. Multiple possible outcomes."
"Because it's not just a gate," Aaric said, stepping into the outer circle. "It's a sorting mechanism. It's designed to send people where the Tower thinks they belong."
Rydor frowned. "Explain."
Aaric reached down with his shadow‑sense, letting it sink into the arrays.
He saw it then—branches. Paths. Each climber stepping into the spire would be evaluated by the Tower's systems and routed to one of several locations: the normal Floor 30, a holding floor, a combat trial floor, or—if flagged as a threat—a containment space.
"It's going to separate us," Aaric said. "Sort us based on power level, threat assessment, and usefulness. Hunters to hunter floors. Support to safe floors. Me…" He swallowed. "Me to a custom trial."
Silence fell.
"What happens if we refuse to use it?" Ariea asked.
"Then we stay on a collapsing experimental floor that the Tower controls completely," Miraen replied. "Long‑term, that's suicide. It can smother us eventually, one way or another."
"So we go in," Rydor decided. "But we don't go in blind." He looked at Aaric. "Can you override the sorting? Force a destination?"
Aaric focused.
The threads resisted him. The arrays were designed to be absolute. But he was different now—3‑star, shadow‑awakened, with Kael's knowledge whispering in the back of his mind. He pushed, not against the entire system, but at a specific point.
A small seam in the logic. A failsafe.
"Yes," he said slowly. "But only once. I can hijack the route for maybe ten people. After that, the system will adapt and lock me out."
"Ten," Rydor repeated. "Out of fifty‑two."
"You take your core," Miraen said. "Shadow, healer, command, disruption. Everyone else climbs by other routes. It's not ideal, but it's better than scattering completely randomly."
Aaric looked at them—faces smeared with dust, eyes burning with determination and fear.
He hated choosing.
He chose anyway.
"Core team goes with me," he said quietly. "Ariea, Rydor, Lynia, Syl, Kess, Miraen, two Nightveil shadows, and one healer. That's nine plus me."
"What about me?" one of the Stanners survivors demanded. "We signed up to fight with you, not watch from below."
"You won't be watching," Rydor said. "You'll be surviving. Climbing through normal routes. Spreading word. Building support. If we fall at Floor 50, you're the ones who'll carry the truth further."
There was anger. Hurt. But also understanding. They'd all spent too long in the Tower to expect fairness from ascent.
They stepped into the circle in order.
Aaric felt the Tower's attention sharpen like a blade as his core team entered the array with him. Threads tightened, calculations spun, probability matrices adjusted.
He reached into the mechanism and twisted.
For one heartbeat, he was everywhere—seeing Floor 30's proper layout, the holding floors, the death trials, the containment chambers. Threads converged on him, trying to mark him, tag him, route him.
He cut them.
The array flared.
Light swallowed them.
They emerged into snow.
Bitter cold stabbed Aaric's lungs as he staggered forward, boots sinking into knee‑deep white. The air was thin, the wind howling between jagged ice formations. Above, the sky was a hard, crystalline blue, cut by a ring of floating ice shards that formed a halo around a distant, blinding sun.
"This… isn't Floor 30," Syl coughed, wrapping her cloak tighter. "Floor 30 is supposed to be swampland. Mud, heat, insects. Not… Arctic hell."
"No," Aaric agreed, breath steaming in the air. "This is Floor 40‑plus weather. Maybe higher. The Tower jumped us."
"Or tried to," Miraen said, studying the horizon. "Look."
In the distance, a massive circular structure rose from the ice—a ring of obsidian and steel, etched with glowing lines. It wasn't a natural formation. It was a gate. A real one. Stable, maintained.
And above it, hanging in the air like a judgment, was a sigil Aaric had never seen before but recognized instantly—
Seven intersecting lines forming a veil‑like pattern.
The mark of the Veil Lords.
"Welcome," a voice echoed across the ice.
It didn't come from the ring. It came from everywhere—from the sky, the wind, the ground beneath their feet. A voice layered, harmonized, made from multiple speakers overlapping: male, female, inhuman.
"The eighth chosen one has arrived earlier than scheduled," the voice continued. "You are either more capable than projected… or more desperate."
A figure stepped onto the top of the obsidian ring.
He looked almost human—tall, robed in white and black, face partially obscured by a veil of shimmering light. But his essence dragged on the air like gravity. The space around him bent subtly.
"Veil Lord," Lynia whispered, clutching Aaric's arm. "One of the seven."
Ariea's hand was on her sword in an instant. "We're badly outmatched."
"No," Miraen said quietly. Even she sounded tense. "We're not matched at all. That thing is playing a different game."
The Veil Lord regarded Aaric with a curiosity that felt almost clinical.
"You were meant to reach our archives on Floor 50," it said. "To learn the truth there. To struggle. To doubt. To break or ascend according to models we spent centuries refining."
A faint smile touched the shadowed mouth.
"You have skipped steps," it continued. "Broken floors. Forced premature adaptation. That introduces variables we cannot tolerate."
Aaric forced his shadow‑essence to steady.
"You can't control me," he said, and his voice didn't quite shake. "Not like you did Kael. I can see your threads now. I can cut them."
"Yes," the Veil Lord said. "That is… novel." It tilted its head. "Which is why this conversation is occurring at all. You are a threat. Threats must be either eliminated… or integrated."
The ring flared beneath the Veil Lord's feet, lines of light racing outward across the ice, forming a vast circle around Aaric's group.
"It isn't here to kill us," Lynia whispered, horror dawning. "It's here to test you. To see if you're compatible."
The Veil Lord raised its hand.
Ice shattered.
From the frozen ground around them, figures rose—dozens, then hundreds. Climbers. Some wore ancient armor, others styles Aaric recognized from current floors. Their eyes were empty. Their essences were wrong—unfocused, hollow.
"Failed candidates," the Veil Lord said calmly. "Those who reached our thresholds and could not become Architects. Their bodies persist. Their wills do not."
Aaric felt bile rise in his throat.
"You're using them as puppets," he said. "As… training dummies."
"As data," the Veil Lord replied. "You want to break our machine, eighth chosen one? Then prove you can survive what it produces."
The puppet‑climbers moved.
Fast.
They converged like a wave of broken souls.
Rydor stepped forward, blade already drawing a defensive line. Ariea's silver essence flared, Kess's flame ignited, Miraen's void folded space, Syl vanished into the blind spots.
Aaric let the shadow rise.
The Tower had thrown its failures at him.
He would answer with his own refusal to fail.
And somewhere beneath the ice, in the humming machinery of the Tower, a new set of calculations began—tracking every movement, every deviation, every impossible choice being made on a floor that wasn't supposed to exist.
The test had begun.
Not the Tower's.
His.