They moved like broken memories.
The first wave of puppet‑climbers rushed across the ice with terrifying speed, but there was something wrong in the way they ran. Their feet landed a fraction too hard. Their arms swung a little too wide. They were fast, strong, coordinated—but not alive.
"Eyes!" Rydor barked. "Look at their eyes!"
Aaric saw it now. The emptiness. No fear. No hate. Just hollow obedience.
Failed candidates.
Bodies the Tower refused to waste.
The front rank hit like an avalanche.
Rydor met them with a roar, blade cleaving through the first puppet's guard and biting deep into reinforced armor. The man staggered—but didn't scream, didn't flinch, didn't protect his wound. He simply twisted unnaturally and swung again, joints bending beyond human range as the Tower compensated.
Ariea blurred forward, silver essence flashing. Her strikes weren't just strong—they were precise, targeting knees, elbows, necks. Joints cracked. Limbs hung limp. The puppets still moved, dragging ruined bodies forward on invisible strings.
"They don't care about damage!" she called. "They only stop when structurally incapable of movement!"
"Take out cores!" Miraen snapped.
Her void‑constructs folded around three puppets at once, compressing essence until their chests imploded. They collapsed, finally motionless.
Aaric understood.
Each puppet had a locus—a knot of forced essence where the Tower's control threads converged. Sever the knot, and the body fell.
He raised his hands.
Shadow‑essence exploded outward.
Not as a solid wall, not as simple tendrils. As a field—a radius of darkness around him in which his will was law. Within that domain, he saw every connection: the Tower's threads entering puppet bodies, tugging muscles, forcing lungs to move, hearts to beat.
"Stay within twenty meters of me!" he shouted. "Inside the shadow!"
Kess fell back
automatically, flame swirling around her in a tight orbit. Syl flickered in and out of visibility on the edges of Aaric's domain, knives flashing for throats and cores. The two Nightveil shadows melted fully into the darkness, voices silent, kills precise.
The next wave crashed into the edge of Aaric's shadow‑field—
And slowed.
Inside his domain, the Tower's threads hit resistance. It could still move the puppets, but every command was like pushing through mud. Their movements grew jerky, a beat too late.
"Now!" Aaric snapped.
Rydor became a butcher in a storm. Every delayed swing, every slowed step gave him time to parry, riposte, and finish. Ariea stopped retreating altogether, stepping into attacks she'd never have risked before, her kinetic bursts turning near misses into killing blows.
Kess laughed—harsh and wild—as she took full advantage, flame‑lashes carving through compromised defenses. "This is cheating," she shouted over the chaos. "I love it!"
The Veil Lord watched from atop the obsidian ring, head tilted.
"Interesting," that layered voice murmured, reverberating through the ice. "A localized interference field. Shadow‑dominance. Adaptation beyond prior models."
More puppets rose.
Dozens became hundreds.
Their compositions shifted—heavier armor, different essence types. Aaric saw flame, stone, wind, even flickers of void and light. The Tower was pulling from centuries of failures, throwing every pattern it had at them.
A wind‑essence puppet launched into the sky, wings of compressed air catching nonexistent thermals. It dove straight for Lynia.
Aaric didn't think.
Shadow snapped from his hand like a whip, catching the puppet mid‑plunge. For an instant his consciousness split—part of him standing on the ice, part of him riding that thread into the puppet's chest.
He was inside the construct.
Inside the knot.
He saw the control weave up close—delicate, intricate, a mesh of commands and failsafes. Tower‑logic encoded as living runes.
And he cut it.
The puppet dropped, crashing into the ice three meters from Lynia, its body folding bonelessly.
Lynia flinched, then straightened, chin trembling but lifted. "Again," she whispered. "You can do that to more than one at a time. Kael's… Kael's sending you the pattern."
The world lurched.
For a heartbeat, Aaric wasn't on Floor 29.
He was… elsewhere.
A metal corridor stretching into infinity. Walls of white and black light. Threads like rivers flowing overhead, each one a life, a path, a choice the Tower had calculated.
Kael stood beneath them.
Or what was left of him.
A man made of fractures and shadow, his body scarred with core‑runes, his eyes burning with exhausted fury.
"You're late," Kael said, voice rough, echoing in the non‑space. "But you're here. Good. Listen fast. I don't know how long this channel will hold."
"I'm in the middle of not dying," Aaric managed.
Kael barked a humorless laugh. "Story of our lives. You figured out shadow‑dominance on your own. Didn't think you'd get there before Floor 40. The Tower's panicking."
"What do I do?" Aaric asked, words tumbling out. "I can interfere, but not on this scale. There are too many puppets—"
"You're thinking like a fighter," Kael cut in. "Start thinking like an Architect. You don't need to individually cut every thread. You need to attack the node."
Images slammed into Aaric's perception.
The obsidian ring. The veiled figure. The glowing arrays under the ice.
"That ring is a relay," Kael said. "A local override node. All those puppets are running through it. Sever the relay, you sever control. The Tower can re‑route through other channels, but it'll take time. Time you can use to run."
"How?" Aaric demanded. "That Veil Lord is standing on it."
Kael's smile was pure, feral pride. "You're 3‑star now. You've seen the seams. Use that new trick of yours. Invert your domain."
The connection buckled.
For a heartbeat, Aaric felt the weight of the Tower's awareness slam into him—cold, endless, alien. Then he was back in his body, knees buckling on the ice, a puppet's blade skimming past his throat as Ariea yanked him backward.
"Aaric!" she snapped.
"I'm fine," he lied. "Cover me. Ten seconds."
"Five," Miraen corrected, void‑constructs already swallowing a second wave.
Aaric stepped forward.
Up until now, his domain had been a bubble—his shadow‑essence radiating outward, softening the Tower's control. Now he did the opposite.
He pulled it in.
His field shrank, tightening around his body, then shot outward as a spike—a vertical column of shadow that stabbed toward the obsidian ring like a reversed spear.
Space bent.
For an instant, the ice, the sky, the Veil Lord, and the ring all warped in his vision, collapsing into a single point of focus.
He saw the relay.
A spinning lattice of commands beneath the Veil Lord's feet, glowing with layered runes. Every puppet‑thread passed through that lattice—originating in the Tower's core, filtered through the Veil Lord's will, then broadcast across the floor.
Aaric drove his shadow‑spear straight through it.
The resistance was immense.
It was like trying to stab a mountain.
Essence screamed against essence, raw power howling as his 3‑star shadow collided with a structure built by something orders of magnitude older and stronger. His bones vibrated, teeth grinding, vision spiderwebbing with cracks.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then Kael's voice roared through his mind: "TWIST IT!"
Aaric twisted.
Not physically—conceptually.
He didn't just stab the relay. He inverted the logic inside it. Everywhere the lattice said "obey," he flipped to "release." Everywhere it said "sustain," he flipped to "shut down." Everywhere it said "route," he flipped to "cut."
The relay shattered.
The sound was not sound. It was pressure. A vacuum scream as thousands of control threads snapped free simultaneously.
The puppets stopped.
Every single one froze mid‑strike, mid‑step, mid‑breath. The empty eyes that had never shown fear or pain now showed nothing at all.
Then they fell.
Dozens. Hundreds. Bodies slamming into ice, armor clanging against the frozen surface, weapons tumbling from numb fingers. The battlefield went from chaos to corpse‑field in seconds.
Silence slammed down, shocking in its totality.
The only sounds were ragged breathing and the distant crackle of Kess's fading flames.
Aaric swayed.
Ariea caught him again, her grip bruising. "You suicidal idiot," she whispered. "Don't warn us next time, just do it."
He tried to answer, but his voice was a scraped‑raw rasp.
Above them, the Veil Lord had not moved.
The ring beneath it was cracked now, lines of light leaking from the ruptured lattice. But the being itself stood untouched, veil shimmering faintly.
"Well," that layered voice said at last. "That was… not in the models."
Aaric forced himself to stand on his own, Ariea's hand reluctantly leaving his shoulder.
"You're welcome," he croaked.
The Veil Lord regarded him in silence.
"You could have used that inversion on your sister's bond," it said calmly. "On the death‑seal of the conspirator. On any number of more… personal problems. Instead, you spent it on our puppets."
"Those 'puppets' were people," Aaric said. "Once."
"They were failures," the Veil Lord replied. "Waste‑avoidance protocols repurposed them. Your sentimentality is inefficient."
"Your existence is a mistake," Ariea snapped.
The Veil Lord ignored her.
"Eighth chosen one," it said, "you have demonstrated capacity beyond projection. Shadow‑dominance. Relay inversion. Partial core‑sight. At this stage, protocol dictates elimination."
"I figured," Aaric said. His shadow stirred, ready.
"However," the Veil Lord continued, "the core disagrees."
Lynia gasped.
"It… likes you," she whispered, eyes wide with a mixture of awe and horror. "The Tower. It's… amused?"
"Fascinated," the Veil Lord corrected. "You represent a potential evolutionary path it had not considered. To destroy you now would be… premature."
Rydor stepped forward, blade still in hand. "So what? You let us walk?"
"Hardly," the Veil Lord said. "You have broken Floor 29's relay. You will not be allowed to proceed unobserved."
A gate flared open behind it—an oval of warped air and light inside the ring.
"Ascend," the Veil Lord said. "Not to Floor 30. To Floor 35. A controlled environment. Trials appropriate to your… irregular progress. Survive, and you will reach our archives faster than intended. Die, and the problem resolves itself."
"You're accelerating us," Miraen realized. "Skipping floors. Forcing power growth in a compressed window. That's dangerous. Even for your models."
"Precisely," the Veil Lord replied. "We adapt as you do. The experiment must continue. The core insists."
It paused.
"You have ten minutes," it added. "The structural integrity of this floor is failing. Remain, and you will be crushed when the machine recycles this space."
The Veil Lord stepped backward and vanished—dissolving into overlapping probability threads that retreated into the Tower's unseen depths.
The ring hummed.
Cracks spread across the ice.
"You heard the thing," Syl said, swallowing hard. "Ten minutes."
Rydor looked at Aaric. "Can you walk?"
"No," Aaric admitted. "But I can climb."
Ariea snorted despite herself. "That was terrible."
"Still true," he said.
Together, they moved toward the ring.
As they approached the gate, Lynia tugged at Aaric's sleeve. "Kael's… quieter," she murmured. "Whatever you did to that relay, it shook his prison. He thinks… he thinks you might be able to reach him sooner than anyone realized."
"How much sooner?" Aaric asked.
Lynia's gaze drifted upward, as if she could see through the ice, through the floors, all the way to Floor 91.
"Soon enough," she said quietly, "that the Tower is starting to be afraid."
The ice behind them groaned.
Cracks widened. Chunks began to fall away into a darkness that wasn't just absence, but exposed machinery—gears of essence, spinning rings of light, rivers of probability.
They stepped through the gate.
Light swallowed them.
And the Tower recalculated the future.